The Shocking Miss Pilgrim

June 7, 1999
"This is a story that will make you angry," warns Brownlow, a noted film historian. Maas, a screenwriter during the 1920s, '30s and '40s, delivers on that promise. In 1920, she answered a New York Times classified ad from Universal Pictures, becoming, at age 23, Universal's N.Y.C. story editor. In 1925, she arrived in Hollywood, turned down a screen test and instead scripted a Clara Bow vehicle, The Plastic Age. Installed in the MGM writers' bungalow, she tackled a rewrite of Dance Madness (1926) but proved so "ignorant of studio politics" that she was labeled a "troublemaker" by producer Harry Rapf. After her 1927 marriage to script writer and producer Ernest Maas, the couple survived the coming of sound films, the Depression and various earthquakes, but dry scripting spells and the constant theft of their ideas, stories and credits led them to quit the business. In 1950 she "bid farewell, without tears, to the Hollywood screen industry that had so entangled and entrapped me in its web of promises." Maas trashes Hollywood legends, recalling Louis B. Mayer as "a very fearful, insecure man"; Clara Bow dancing nude on a tabletop; Jeanne Eagels squatting to urinate in the midst of a film set; and Marion Davies commenting on her affair with Hearst: "I'm a slave, that's what. A toy poodle." In this memorable tell-all, rise-and-fall memoir, Maas brings the gimlet hindsight of Julia Phillips's You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again to early Hollywood, and the results are thoroughly captivating. Photos.

June 1, 1999
Film criticism has inspired curiosity about those "behind the screen" who shaped film history. In this spirit, Maas's chronicle of her writing career, which spanned over a quarter of a century, is a valuable contribution to the literature on women in Hollywood. Maas arrived at Universal in 1920 as a lowly story editor's assistant and worked her way up to screenwriter at MGM, enduring close encounters with megalomaniacal moguls. She quickly learned to forego integrity in the name of profits and was not above denigrating what serious reputation she might have cultivated by adapting vacuous star vehicles for the likes of Norma Shearer and Clara Bow. Her reward? The occasional credit, when the powers-that-be deigned to dole out accolades. Rejecting studio politics, Maas ultimately paid the price for playing maverick. Peppered with fascinating anecdotes from yesteryear, this account of the author's life bespeaks frustration with the vapidity of Hollywood: a fickle business world that relied on formula for its success. Things haven't changed much. Recommended.--Jayne Plymale, Univ. of Georgia, Athens

Copyright 1999 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.