Supporting the Writers Strike with a Look at the First Vice President of the Screen Writers Guild

Known colloquially as the Grande Dame of Scenarists, Mary Hamilton O’Connor came from a family of artists and writers. Born in 1872 in St. Paul, Minnesota to Bridget Nash O’Connor who served as a dramatic critic for newspapers in local Portland, Oregon. Eventually, Mary’s older sister Loyola O’Connor-Johnson became a stage actress in Portland and then moved to Santa Monica to appear in several Vitagraph films.

As with many early screenwriters, O’Connor came to screenwriting from a career in journalism that took her from San Francisco, where she wrote features for the San Francisco Examiner, to New York, where she worked as a beat reporter for various local newspapers, and, finally, Los Angeles. At the same time, women’s magazines such as Trained Motherhood and Good Housekeeping provided her with a solid living. Like Adela Rogers St. Johns. O’Connor interchanged writing films with writing for movie trade magazines like Motion Picture Magazine.

Her first film credits came for Story, which was typical in the Silent Era, but she began earning full Writer credits with Back to Eden in 1913 which poked fun at city women buying a farm in the country with no background in things like butter-churning. After a string of films with similarly sweet of setups, her final film in 1921 took a darker turn. Based on E. Phillips Oppenheim’s story “Twice Wed”, Dangerous Lies involved a widow's husband who returns after her second marriage and dies assaulting her. Film historians also consider O’Connor one of the many uncredited writers on Intolerance, D.W. Griffith’s supposed apology for Birth of a Nation, alongside such writers as Anita Loos and Hettie Grey Baker

Though the Gish sisters and the Talmadge sisters may be more well known today, the O’Connor sisters also worked together on several projects including Nina, the Flower Girl, and Cheerful Givers, both made in 1917. In that year O’Connor was named the first woman to head a scenario department, at Famous Players Lasky, which would become Paramount Studios. She also wrote the film A Girl of the Timber Claims, starring Constance Talmadge, based on a novel she had written a few years earlier, The Girl Homesteader.

In 1920 O’Connor was voted in as the First Vice President of the Screen Writers Guild, the nascent union that would become the Writers Guild of America, West. While few of her film titles became classics studied in film courses today, O’Connor stands as a solid example of the many writers walking picket lines today -- a writer's writer whose name isn’t recognized by the general public but who, by putting her stories on paper, gave work to hundreds of actors, directors, and tech crews across a decade. Then O’Connor went to work for writers by helping found their union.

Hamilton died on September 3, 1959 in Los Angeles, California.

Research for this column comes from the book When Women Wrote Hollywood, edited by Rosanne Welch. For this particular article, the author would like to thank the Classic Film Aficionados website.

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