Dr. Lisa Mertz

Mary Croxton, Fredonia Shakespeare Club president, welcomed 15 members to the third virtual meeting of the Fredonia Shakespeare Club’s 2020-21 year.

Following a brief business meeting, Croxton introduced Dr. Lisa Mertz’ multi-media presentation on Anita Loos, an American screenwriter, playwright and author. In 1912, she became the first-ever female staff scriptwriter in Hollywood.

Loos said she wrote 200 scripts in her 30 years as a Hollywood screenwriter. She was a major influence on the film industry’s early years and beyond. Throughout the silent film era, Loos was best known for elevating intertitles to a humorous art form. She was also a prolific literary author.

In 1925, she published the book Edith Wharton declared to the “Great American Novel,” Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Loos brought her sharp wit and shameless humor to the main character Lorelei Lee, a gold-digging flapper who appears to be a “dumb blonde,” but as it turns out the real fools in the story are the men who become entranced by her allure.

Wildly popular, Blondes was performed on the stage in 1926, then adapted to film in 1928 and again in 1953 with Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell, and turned into a Broadway musical in 1949 with Carol Channing, and in 1962 it was performed in London’s West End. Proving its indefatigability, it was revived on Broadway in 1995.

Loos’ other well-known works include the 1939 film The Women for which she wrote the screenplay based on the play by Clare Boothe Luce. She adapted Gigi, the novella by Collette, for the stage in 1951 and for the screen in 1958.

Anita Loos had a long career writing scripts, screenplays, magazine essays, short stories, memoirs, and books, including novels and tell-all books about Hollywood. Loos’s works are embedded deeply enough in movies and literature that even if one doesn’t know her name, they may have been enjoying Loos’s humor for years.

The Fredonia Shakespeare Club was established in 1885.