In the early days of film, screenwriting was an almost exclusively female domain, and Anita Loos was one of the most prolific and influential ‘script girls’—the women who wrote scenarios and intertitles for silent films. When she was 24 years old, she sold her first scenario to D.W. Griffith’s Biograph Studios for $25. The New York Hat went on to star Mary Pickford and Lionel Barrymore.
Over the years, Loos wrote nearly 140 films, several Broadway plays and novels (including Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, originally serialized in Harper’s Bazaar), and some of the first guides to screenwriting.
She died in 1981, at 93 years old.
Reghan Skerry 