A Great Lady: A Life of the Screenwriter Sonya Levien

by Larry Ceplair

Overview

Sonya Levien was among the most successful and respected screenwriters in Hollywood. During her career from 1919 to 1960, Levien worked on well over one hundred screen stories and scripts for both silent and sound pictures. She wrote comedies, melodramas, epics, and musicals. A Great Lady details the course of this exceptional career at Fox and M-G-M and her most interesting projects and colleagues. It examines her relationship to the important political and labor movements affecting the motion picture industry and her change from her socially and politically radical younger years as an anarchist, socialist, and suffragist to a highly successful, moderately conservative screenwriter. Includes a detailed filmography.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780810830929
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	06/04/1996
Series:	The Scarecrow Filmmakers Series , #50
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	6.46(w) x 8.52(h) x 0.62(d)

About the Author

Larry Ceplair is Professor of History at Santa Monica College. He is also the interviewer for the UCLA Oral History project on the motion picture blacklist.

Editorial Reviews

Most notable for her screen adaptions of Oklahoma! and Ziegfeld Girl, Levien's career in Hollywood spanned four decades from 1919 to 1960 and resulted in over 100 scripts. Her biography documents her rise from an immigrant factory girl on the Lower East Side of New York to one of Hollywood's most respected writers, and her life reveals the high prices women paid for success in the business (and still do), and the temperamental politics of the times. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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