Anita Loos wrote for sixty eight years. Lasting is the craft.

Anita Loos sold her first scenario to Biograph for twenty five dollars. Her third one got made. It was called The New York Hat, D. W. Griffith directed it, and Mary Pickford and Lionel Barrymore starred in it. She was in her early twenties.

Then Griffith put her on staff, which made her the first woman staff screenwriter in Hollywood. That's 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 nearly every one of them got produced. Not optioned. Not developed. Produced. She wrote the intertitles for Intolerance. In 1925 she published Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which started as magazine sketches, became a surprise bestseller, and ended up in fourteen languages.

And then she kept going. She was still working in 1980. She died in 1981 at ninety three. Sixty eight years.

Being first is timing and somebody's open door. Lasting is the craft. Anybody can have one good year. She had seven decades of them, through silents, through sound, through the studio system rising and collapsing around her, writing novels and plays when the screenwriting work changed.

Women writers were told to be grateful. Loos walked through the door and outlasted everyone.

One more thing, and I'll let you decide what to do with it. In 1973, at eighty five, she told the London Observer: “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.”

You don't have to agree with her. I'm not sure I do. But that's a woman who'd been inside this business for sixty years, joking about power with her feet up, never once asking permission to be there.