TL;DR. Anita Loos sold her first scenario to Biograph for twenty-five dollars, and her third one got made: The New York Hat, directed by D. W. Griffith, starring Mary Pickford and Lionel Barrymore. In 1912 Griffith put her on the payroll, which is the fact everybody repeats, and it's the least interesting thing about her. Between 1912 and 1915 she wrote a hundred and five scripts and all but four of them were produced. She was still being interviewed about the work in 1980 and died in 1981 at ninety-three. Being first is timing and somebody's open door. Lasting is the craft, and she's the longest working example of it I can find.

What did the first few years actually look like?

Small, cheap and fast, which is why they worked.

The first sale was a scenario called He Was a College Boy, bought by the Biograph Company for twenty-five dollars. The third one got produced, and that was The New York Hat, with Griffith directing and Mary Pickford and Lionel Barrymore in it. She was in her early twenties. Griffith put her on the payroll in 1912 at seventy-five dollars a week plus a bonus for every script that got made, and the histories call her the first woman staff screenwriter in Hollywood.

Then the part that gets skipped. From 1912 to 1915 she wrote a hundred and five scripts and all but four of them were produced. Not optioned. Not developed. Produced. In 1916 she worked on the intertitles for Intolerance with Griffith and Frank E. Woods.

A hundred and one produced credits in four years is a volume no modern writer will match, and it's worth being clear about why. One-reelers were short, the studio needed a picture a week, and a scenario was a few pages. The thing to take from it isn't the number. It's that she was writing inside a system that shot what she handed in, and she used it to learn the job in public, at speed, with an audience.

How did she survive the thing that kills most screenwriters?

She didn't stay in one lane, and she kept the credit where she could.

She married John Emerson in 1919 and they worked as a team, including five pictures for Douglas Fairbanks. Famous Players-Lasky gave the two of them a four-picture deal in 1918. The scripts carried both their names, and by most accounts the work was largely hers. She later said Emerson took most of the money and the credit. That's her version, and her versions are worth holding at arm's length, which I'll come back to.

Then she changed form. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes started as sketches about Lorelei Lee in Harper's Bazaar, illustrated by Ralph Barton, and the magazine's circulation reportedly quadrupled. Boni and Liveright published it as a book in November 1925. The first printing sold out overnight, it became the surprise best-seller of the year, it went through three more printings before December and twenty more in its first decade, and it ended up in eighty-five editions and fourteen languages, including Chinese.

So by 1926 she had a second trade. When the screenwriting work changed, which it did twice in her lifetime, she had somewhere else to put the hours.

What did she do once the studios ran everything?

She wrote for the system that had replaced the one she grew up in, and she wrote well in it.

Irving Thalberg brought her to MGM. Her first picture there was Red-Headed Woman in 1932 with Jean Harlow, and it worked. San Francisco in 1936, written with Robert Hopkins, got an Academy Award nomination for original screenplay. The Women in 1939, which she worked on with Jane Murfin, is the one people still quote, and George Cukor loved her script before the censors made more than eighty changes to it.

Then Broadway, which is the third act nobody mentions. The Whole Town's Talking opened in 1923. The stage version of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes ran in 1926. Happy Birthday ran six hundred performances in 1946. The 1949 musical ran ninety weeks and made Carol Channing. She adapted Colette's Gigi in 1951, and Cheri in 1959, which only lasted two months. Lorelei came in 1974, when she was eighty-six.

Count the formats. Silent scenario, intertitle, talkie screenplay, novel, play, musical book, memoir. Every one of those was a different job, and she took each one when the last one stopped paying.

What should you not believe?

Her, mostly, and she'd probably enjoy that.

Loos was never one to let a fact spoil a story, and her accounts got more colorful the further she got from the events. In later interviews she was reported to have sold that first scenario at twelve, which isn't true. She's the primary source on a lot of her own life, and the primary source is a comic novelist.

I'm bringing that up because of what I wrote about checking quotes. The line of hers that gets passed around most is from a 1973 interview, when she was eighty-five. "I'm furious about the Women's Liberationists. They keep getting up on soapboxes and proclaiming that women are brighter than men. That's true, but it should be kept very quiet or it ruins the whole racket." Quotation references cite it to the London Observer of 30 December 1973. I could not get my hands on the original page, only the reference works, so I'm giving you the citation they give and telling you I stopped there.

You don't have to agree with the joke. I'm not sure I do. What I notice is the posture, which is a woman who'd been inside the business for six decades treating power as a subject she could be funny about, because she was no longer auditioning for permission to be in the room.

What actually transfers to now?

Four things, and none of them are the hundred and five scripts.

Volume while you're learning. She wrote more in four years than most people write in twenty, in a form short enough to finish, and she got to watch an audience react to almost all of it. The modern equivalent is whatever you can actually finish and put in front of somebody: shorts, pages, posts, anything that closes the loop between writing a thing and finding out whether it landed.

A second form before you need one. She had the magazine sketches going while she was still a screenwriter. That's what made the 1925 book possible, and the book is what carried her when the silent business ended.

Being in the room where the work is. She got the staff job because she was already selling scenarios to the people who needed them, not because she applied.

Outlasting. The silent system collapsed, sound arrived, the studio system rose and fell, and she kept finding the next form. Anybody can have one good year.

Before you count on being first at something, ask yourself this

What's the shortest complete thing I can finish this month, and will anybody react to it?

How many finished pieces do I have, and how many of them did somebody other than me read?

What's my second form, and have I put any real hours into it yet?

If the part of this business I write for stopped buying tomorrow, what would I write instead?

Whose name goes on the work I'm doing, and did I agree to that in writing?

Am I the primary source on my own story, and would it survive somebody checking?

What am I waiting for permission to do?

If I'm still working at eighty-five, what will I be working on?

Being the first woman on a staff got Anita Loos one paragraph in the histories, and the sixty-eight years after it got her everything else. Go count the finished pieces you have, and if the number is small, make the next one short enough to finish this week.

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Sources. Her birth on April 26, 1888 in Sisson, California and death on August 18, 1981 in New York at ninety-three, the twenty-five dollar Biograph sale of He Was a College Boy, The New York Hat as her third script and first produced one with Griffith directing and Pickford and Barrymore starring, the 1912 staff job at seventy-five dollars a week plus a per-script bonus, the hundred and five scripts between 1912 and 1915 with all but four produced, the Intolerance intertitles with Griffith and Frank E. Woods, the Lorelei sketches in Harper's Bazaar illustrated by Ralph Barton, the Boni and Liveright publication in November 1925 and its printing, edition and translation counts, the marriage to John Emerson and the Fairbanks pictures and the 1918 Famous Players-Lasky deal, Thalberg hiring her at MGM, Red-Headed Woman, the San Francisco screenplay nomination with Robert Hopkins, The Women with Jane Murfin and the censors' eighty changes, the Broadway runs from The Whole Town's Talking through Lorelei, the memoirs A Girl Like I and Kiss Hollywood Good-by, her 1980 interview for Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film, and the caution that her own accounts grew less reliable with age all come from the Anita Loos entry on Wikipedia. The 1973 quote is cited to the London Observer of 30 December 1973 by quotation reference works including WIST; I was not able to see the original page.