She had strong opinions about which films were better than others and fancied that she could make a fair fist of writing movies herself.Īged 24, she posted a short film scenario she had written to DW Griffith’s Biograph studio in New York. As a young woman in California, Loos was an avid moviegoer, long before a trip to the nickelodeon was considered a cultural event. Photograph: Rex/Shutterstockīut Loos’s Hollywood story began more than a decade before Lorelei first shimmied on to the pages of Harper’s magazine, where her novel was originally serialised. Brooks is said to have given a joyless performance in her screen test (“I stunk”), and Loos dismissed her, with an offensive turn of phrase that was, sadly, characteristic, saying: “If I ever write a part for a cigar-store Indian, you will get it.” The film was something of a flop, and we may never get to judge it for ourselves as it has long been considered lost.Īnita Loos and John Emerson reviewing an intertitle in 1919, the year they married.

Alice White picked up the part of sidekick Dorothy after Loos nixed the studio’s original, and intriguing, choice of Louise Brooks. The 1928 Gentlemen Prefer Blondes had impeccable comic credentials, being directed by Keystone alumnus Mal St Clair, and starring two more former employees of Mack Sennett: Ruth Taylor and Ford Sterling. Loos, by then a fixture at Paramount, wrote the screenplay (with her husband, John Emerson) and the intertitles (with Herman Mankiewicz, who would go on to write Citizen Kane). Gentlemen Prefer Blondes had been filmed before the musical, in 1928, when its roaring 20s satire would have been even more pointed. For many, this breathless novel epitomises the highs and the lows of the jazz age, though it’s now most famous in its 1953 musical film incarnation starring Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. Loos is best known today for her wickedly funny novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, written during her Hollywood years, which follows the escapades of gold-digging, flaxen-haired showgirl Lorelei Lee and her man-mad brunette chum Dorothy. Loos may not have been the most successful screenwriter during Hollywood’s silent years (that honour falls to Frances Marion), but she was one of its greatest wits, most popular characters and one of its key storytellers. Scriptwriting, Loos’s forte, was the most feminine department: a “manless Eden” of female screenplay writers, scenario authors, story editors, intertitle artists and “script girls”. “That’s true, but it should be kept very quiet or it ruins the whole racket.” Loos was a veteran of silent-era Hollywood, when women worked at all levels of the film industry – directing, editing, producing and designing. “They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming that women are brighter than men,” she said. Anita Loos, the screenwriter and author, claimed – in typically waggish style – to be furious at the women’s lib movement.

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