Eleanore Griffin, the Oscar-winning screenwriter who won her Academy
Award along with co-writer Dore Schary for
Teufelskerle (1938), was born on April 29,
1904, in St. Paul, Minnesota. Griffin began writing screenplays at
Universal in 1937, being credited for the comedies
When Love Is Young (1937)
(directed by Hal Mohr) and
Love in a Bungalow (1937)
(directed by Ray McCarey, the younger
brother of famed director Leo McCarey).
Moving over to MGM, she penned the
Mickey Rooney /
Judy Garland musical
Thoroughbreds Don't Cry (1937)
for Maurice Rapf's production unit. It was
there she hit paydirt with the script based on the true story of the
priest who launched Boys Town in 1917, a reformatory for wayward boys.
Directed by Norman Taurog, "Boys Town" was
nominated for Five Academy Awards, bringing Oscars for Best Actor to
'Spencer Tracy (I)' (v) and for Best Original Story to Griffin and
Dore Schary.
It also made Edward Flanagan famous and
spawned a sequel,
Das sind Kerle (1941).
Griffin worked as a screenwriter for almost 30 years, but ironically,
"Boys Town" - which came very early in her career - would remain the
summit of her achievement. Part of this was due to the exigencies of
studio production, in which even a highly paid screenwriter would win
an Oscar one year and be penning B-picture potboilers the next.
However, it was the vertical integration of the studios, which was
complete by the time she established herself in Hollywood in the late
1930s, that likely limited her career, as it did all women from the
mid-1930s to the turn of the century.
Women had been a major force in the film industry during the silent
era, particularly in the area of screenwriting (since dialogue wasn't
needed, and inter-titles were a separate discipline, screenplays were
called "scenarios", with the concept of "play" devolving onto the movie
itself, which commonly was called a "photoplay" in the first
generations of cinema). June Mathis, who
helped make Rudolph Valentino a
superstar, wrote the scenarios and screenplays for over over 100 films,
and also as an "editorial director" on others, from the mid-Teens until
1930.
Women directors were not uncommon during the silent era (in fact, the
first "feature" film was directed by a woman, back in 1896), but with
the vertical integration of the movie industry in the 1930s women were
squeezed out after the advent of the Talkies. It is a truism of
organizational theory that the more complex the structure, the more
control is exerted over all aspects of the organization, and the more
conformity is demanded from organizational players. The corporate
hierarchies were dominated by men, and the pressure for conformity made
the vertical, publicly traded studios inhospitable to women, who by
their very gender, could not conform to the dominant corporate
paradigm.
After the early Talkie period, it was unusual for there to be powerful
women, i.e., directors or producers, and conformity was demanded even
the writers (a craft with decidedly little power due to the industrial
mode of production used by the vertically integrated studios, in which
piece-work was the dominant paradigm). Only
Frances Marion, a double Oscar winner
able to write across genres, survived and it is significant that her
two Oscars came during the early talkie period, in 1930 for Best
Writing Achievement for the prison picture
Hölle hinter Gittern (1930) and in 1932
for the Best Original Story for
Der Champ (1931). Though she worked
on such prestigious pictures as
Die Kameliendame (1936) at MGM, the most powerful
of Hollywood studios, she only received one more Oscar nod, in 1934,
for Best Writing, Original Story for
Männer um eine Frau (1933).
By 1937, the year Griffin got her start at Univesal, the career of
Hollywood's greatest woman screenwriter was virtually over.
After Griffin's Oscar victory at MGM, she moved over to Paramount for
the musical-comedy
St. Louis Blues (1939), directed
by Raoul Walsh. At Columbia she contributed
to the treatment of Howard Hawks' classic
SOS Feuer an Bord (1939),
the screenplay of which was written by
Jules Furthman. She also contributed the
story for Mitchell Leisen's Army Air
Crops melodrama
I Wanted Wings (1941).
During World War II her career lost its momentum, despite the legions
of male screenwriters who went to war. At Columbia she wrote the story
for the B-movie series entry
Blondie in Society (1941), as
well as the stories for the comedy
Hi, Beautiful (1944) starring
'Noah Beery' Jr.' and
Hattie McDaniel at Universal and for
Henry Hathaway's melodrama
Nob Hill (1945) starring
George Raft at Fox. Back at MGM she
contributed the story for
George Sidney's The Harvey Girls
(1946)_ and wrote the screenplay for the
'Margaret O'Brien' vehicle Tenth Avenue Angel (1948).
Most writers in Hollywood during the sound era made their living
rewriting, polishing or adding to scripts. Griffin's next major
credited spurt of activity came in the mid-1950s, when she wrote two
Henry Koster films, the religious drama
Ein Mann namens Peter (1955) and
Good Morning, Miss Dove
(1954)_ starring 'Jennifer Jones' in the
title role.
Her contribution to Universal's 1959 remake Solange es Menschen gibt (1959),
Fannie Hurst's novel, was largely
forgotten due to the film being almost wholly attributed to
Douglas Sirk, a main beneficiary of the
auteur theory that elevated the director to the status of a film's sole
author (which is rather ridiculous within the industrial paradigm of
Hollywood film, particularly in a factory such as Universal, which
ground out product for the Big and little screens like so much
sausage). For "Life" producer
Ross Hunter she adapted another of
Hurst's novels into a film,
Endstation Paris (1961), which starred
Susan Hayward and
John Gavin.
Her last credited film was an adaptation of
Norman Vincent Peale's
autobiography "Minister To Millions", produced by
Frank Ross as
One Man's Way (1964).
Eleanore Griffin died on July 25, 1995, in the Woodland Hills
neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. She was 91 years old.
