Frederica Sagor Maas - Hollywood Years

Hollywood Years

Once in Hollywood, Maas negotiated a contract with Preferred Pictures to adapt Percy Marks's novel The Plastic Age for film. Based on this, she was signed to a three-year contract with MGM for $350 per week, though in her words: "I had the peculiar feeling that wily Louis B. was less interested in my writing ability than in signing someone who had worked for Ben Schulberg and Al Lichtman." It was in this period that she wrote Dance Madness and The Waning Sex.

Her recollections of that period:

Thus Maas' introduction to studio politics did not go well and her MGM contract was not renewed. During 1925–1926 she wrote treatments and screenplays for Tiffany Productions, including the well-received flapper comedies That Model from Paris and The First Night.

Already before she married Ernest Maas, a producer at Fox Studios, on August 5, 1927, they sold story ideas such as Silk Legs to studios. Many of these would never get produced; "swell fish" was their term for scripts that never saw the light of day. During 1927, Schulberg, this time with Paramount Pictures, contracted Sagor for a year and she says she worked uncredited on scripts such as Clara Bow's It, Red Hair and Hula; and credited for writing the story for Louise Brooks' lost film Rolled Stockings. Regarding It, which was produced between October 7 and November 6, 1926, i.e. before Sagor signed up for Paramount, her claim is conflicting.

An unusually long European vacation in the summer of 1928 made finding steady studio work difficult upon her return. Ernest remained with Paramount Short Subjects division in New York. When a story by the Maas couple was misappropriated and filmed as The Way of All Flesh he left the studio; their original script had been called Beefsteak Joe. The couple returned to unsteady work on the west coast in October 1929. According to her memoirs, "y the fall of 1934, it was plain that we were not a success in Hollywood. In these five years we only found work doing short studio assignments – cleaning up other people's scripts – and had failed to sell our own stories."

The couple had lost $10,000 in the stock market crash and moved back to New York. From 1934 to 1937, they reviewed plays for the Hollywood Reporter. Another relocation back to Hollywood had Maas representing writers and selling story material for the Edward Small Agency; Maas plied every studio every day with her wares. After a year as an agent, the Maas couple secured writing contracts at Paramount to cull previously purchased material.