I’m making this up as I go along, but here are a few suggestions:
There have been women screenwriters since the silent era, but the way writers were represented seemed to change in the 1950’s. Screenwriter (and playwright) came to be a kind of tough guy role, using actors like William Holden (Sunset Boulevard), Humphrey Bogart (In a Lonely Place — screenplay by two men but based on a novel by Dorothy B. Hughes), Dick Powell (The Bad and the Beautiful), Gary Merrill (All About Eve). The notion is that you have to be tough to make it in the movie business (male critics and reviewers, on the other hand, tend to be characterized as effeminate). Maybe this is a reaction to the WWII years when women had taken over traditional men’s roles.
In movies about Hollywood, women have always been allowed to be actresses (not directors, photographers, etc.). Maybe this is pandering to the stereotype of women as deceptive and men as forthright. What’s odd is that this skew doesn’t seem to be changing much in the last few decades, even though women are increasingly being portrayed as independent and autonomous (thanks largely to women writers and the pull of influential actresses who are tired of playing secondary or passive roles.
Still, there are some notable women journalists in film (Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, His Girl Friday, Woman of the Year).
Three side notes: (1) Two more movies with women writers (novelists): Theodora Goes Wild (screenplay by a man from a story by a woman); Peyton Place (screenplay by a man from a novel by a woman). The idea that it takes a man to adapt fiction by a woman seems pretty common — even today.
(2) Television has a few women writers: Murder She Wrote, The Dick van Dyke Show and probably more.
(3) Did you know that one of the writers on The Big Sleep, one of the writers for the western Rio Bravo, and one of the writers for The Empire Strikes Back was a woman — and the same person, Leigh Brackett, originally a science fiction novelist who may have eluded some of the discrimination against women writers because some people assumed from her first name that she was a man. My contribution to a mini-review: Brackett’s screenplay for The Long Goodbye is a brilliant (and deliberate) undercutting of the macho Hollywood private eye persona that The Big Sleep and other films from the 40’s and 50’s had constructed.
And a thank you. Your well-researched, impassioned article has encouraged me to look at a script I wrote about a woman screenwriter for signs of bias on my part.
A great job!
