June Mathis: The Rise and Fall of a Silent Film Visionary

Debut author Slater spotlights an influential talent of the silent film era with this insightful biography of screenwriter and producer June Mathis, a former child actor who began writing scenarios (the era’s term for screenplays) in 1914, eventually becoming chief scenario writer for MGM’s predecessor, Metro Pictures, in 1917. With a tireless work ethic and prodigious output—she wrote 19 films in 1917 alone—Mathis benefited from the industry’s insatiable need for talent, which allowed women to take various roles in film production. Slater examines the details of Mathis’s extant scripts, showing how she infused a recognizable spiritual perspective into her work, which championed an unseen feminine world of emotion over the masculine materialism of the modern age. While Mathis’s great triumph came with 1921’s The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, in which she cast the then little-known Rudolph Valentino, Slater details how Mathis’s career took a downward turn as the male-dominated studio system led to a fragmentation of filmmaking duties and the ouster of women from positions of influence.