Description: A screenwriter, novelist, labor leader, Hollywood insider, and feminist, Mary C. McCall Jr. was one of the film industry’s most powerful figures in the 1940s and early 1950s. She was elected the first woman president of the Screen Writers Guild after leading the fight to unionize the industry’s writers and secured the first contract guaranteeing…
J. E. Smyth
J. E. Smyth is a film critic, historian, and contributing writer at Cineaste . She has written and edited several books, including a new edition of Jane Allen’s controversial Hollywood novel, I Lost My Girlish Laughter (2019); Nobody’s Girl Friday (2018), a history of the many high-powered women who worked in the golden age of the Hollywood studio system; and the acclaimed historian’s approach to classical Hollywood auteur theory, Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance (2014).
She is the recipient of the Theatre Library Association ’s Special Jury Prize (2019), the International Association of Media Historians’ Michael Nelson Prize (2009), and the Association of American Publishers Award (2010). She was a Getty Research Institute scholar-in-residence (2011-12) and contributed to the award-winning PBS documentary, Children of Giant (2015). In 2021, she was named an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences film scholar for her latest project, a biography of Screen Writers Guild