Frances Harmer

Frances Harmer (1858 – January 1927) was an English-born writer of short stories and a screenwriter in Hollywood, known as the "Little Mother of the Movies".

[2] Published short stories by Harmer included "The Cheat" (1907), "Losing to Win" (1908),[3] "Counting Love's Toll" (1908), "When Love is Lord", "A Newport Nobody",[1] "The Test", "The Wooing of Sheilah", "Hidden Gold" (1910), "The Helping Hand" (1913), "Both Fair and Good" (1913),[4] "The Lame Boy's Gift" (1914),[5] "The Transient" (1914),[6] "The Gift of Speech" (1914),[7] "The Painting of Perdita" (1915), "A Pair of Pink Shoes" (1915), "While His Mother Was Away" (1916),[8] "The Girl He Left Behind Him" (serialized, 1917),[9] "The Honorable Roy Carteret" (1917), "Managing Miriam" (1917), "The Portrait" (1917), "Peggy Steals a Week" (1917), "The Mentor and the Maid" (1918), "The Backward Path" (1918),[10] and "Pretty Plaything" (1922).

[11] A story by Harmer was the basis for the Bebe Daniels film One Wild Week (1921, now lost).

[15] She described the challenges of reading scripts in the silent era in a 1922 essay: "Too few writers, whose laurels are yet to be won, are able to visualize – to look at a blank wall and see thereon the figures of their characters in Moving Action.

"[17] In 1922 she wrote an open letter in the aftermath of William Desmond Taylor's murder, insisting that "Hollywood is not a hotbed of iniquity or a 'Sodom and Gomorrah,' nor at all worse than any other city.