Marion Fairfax Put Dinosaurs on Film Before Spielberg or Crichton Were Born

If you love seeing dinosaurs come to life on screen and you think they first appeared on screen in Jurassic Park, think again. In 1926 renowned screenwriter-director Marion Fairfax adapted Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World to the screen complete with the most advanced special effects of the time. It was an amazing feat for a filmmaker born in Richmond, Virginia, just ten years after the Civil War (October 24, 1875). While screenwriter Marion Fairfax lived into her 9th decade, seeing the administration of a second President Johnson, she only worked in Hollywood from the eras of Woodrow Wilson through Calvin Coolidge (1915-1926) despite being a powerhouse writer-director of her day.

As with so many female screenwriters of this early area Fairfax began on Broadway as an actress but quickly segued into writing plays after marrying fellow actor Tully Marshall Phillips who also ran his own theatrical production company. After a string of hits and flops the couple made the move to California so Fairfax could write scenarios for the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Co. in 1915. That same year three of her films made it to the screen. She became adept at adaptations of other writers and eventually at writing originals for the screen. Fairfax wrote in a variety of genres - including sport films, westerns, regular dramas and science fiction.

Fairfax also became adept at partnerships with other directors and producers who kept her work front and center for audiences. After three years with Lasky, she wrote nine films with William C. deMille and another nine with Marshall Neilan. In 1921 after creating successful film after successful film with others, she initiated her own production company. Marian Fairfax Productions. The company’s first film, The Lying Truth, starred Marshall and became a huge hit.

Across her career, many famous actors of the day were drawn to Fairfax’s writing including Jack Pickford in Freckles (1917), and matinee idols John Barrymore in The Lotus Eater (1921) and Sessue Hayakawa in Hashimura Togo (1917). In her Eastern-themed stories he played the hero, rather than the villain, against the trend that had arisen in the post-World-War-I years As the first actor of Asian descent to achieve stardom as a leading man in the Western world, Hayakawa appeared in several Fairfax films before leaving Hollywood in 1922 due to rising anti-Japanese sentiment.

In 1925 Fairfax both wrote – and then edited her dinosaur epic – The Lost World – which broke box office records for the time just as Jurassic Park broke records nearly 70 years later. Fairfax’s co-produced what would become her last film The Blonde Saint, with Sam E. Rork in 1926. Despite extensive research, history does not record why she left the daily work of screenwriting but began the column “Marionettes” for an earlier magazine that also went by the title Script.

Some claim a continuing illness for her ceasing film work and some blame the advent of the Talkies, though the latter seems less likely considering Fairfax wrote dialogue in all her plays so that transition should not have affected her output. Her active involvement in the Los Angeles Tuberculosis Association and the fact that she often delayed travel for health reasons may be a clue to the true cause.

For all the artists Fairfax collaborated with, her strongest connection seemed to have been with her husband. Marshall passed away in 1943. She never remarried so that when Fairfax died in 1970, she chose to be buried beside him in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Hollywood, California.

Research for this column comes from the book When Women Wrote Hollywood, edited by Rosanne Welch.

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