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Elsie Jane Van Name (1890-November 4, 1934) was an American screenwriter and actress active during Hollywood's silent era.
Elsie Van Name was born in January 1886 in Staten Island, New York, USA. She was a writer and actress, known for The Mystery Ship (1917), The Mystery of 13 (1919) and The Silent Mystery (1918). She was married to Francis Ford. She died on 4 November 1934 in Los Angeles, California, USA.
- Writer, Actress
- November 4, 1934
- Elsie Van Name
Elsie Van Name was born in January 1886 in Staten Island, New York, USA. She was a writer and actress, known for The Mystery Ship (1917), The Mystery of 13 (1919) and The Silent Mystery (1918). She was married to Francis Ford.
- Us Companies Outside Hollywood: 1915–1935
- Regional Producing and Directing: Before and Never Hollywood
- New York, California Before Hollywood, and Hollywood: 1907–1923
- Domestic Relations
- Whose Work: Credits and Uncredited Work
- The Star Name Company
- Motion Picture Distribution: 1910–1923
- Scenario Writer to Screenwriter
- Names and Pseudonyms
- “Networking,” Mentoring, and Friendships
It is now well established that the phasing out of women paralleled the development of the motion picture business into the corporate studio system, in place by the mid-1920s. Yet the exceptions to the “over by 1925” rule are important.6 Many writers and most editors continued to work within the studio system, and a few companies started by Hollywo...
Women’s productions were fostered by the distance from bottom line-oriented major production centers, and the number of locations they used suggest that they discovered more possibilities in region-centered filmmaking. In the first decade, when film production sprouted around New York before the exodus to the West Coast, however, there was no major...
Women’s Work before It Was “Women’s Work”
Work on the early motion picture set was relatively flexible, and in 1908 acting and directing were jobs like any other, on a par with lab work (Jacobs 1975, 59).9 Gene Gauntier describes the Kalem Company ensemble work from 1907 to 1912 as a scramble in which she did almost every job (Gauntier 1928). Actress Florence Turner even did the accounting at the Vitagraph Company studio in Brooklyn, New York, according to Stuart Blackton’s memoirs. At the Famous Players-Lasky Company in California,...
The Family System of Production
Boundaries between family and business were often blurred, best exemplified by the position of Gertrude Thanhouser, listed on articles of company incorporation as primary company stockholder,who acted, wrote, and served as a Thanhouser Film Company executive. Lloyd Lonergan, Edwin Thanhouser’s brother-in-law, wrote roughly nine hundred Thanhouser scenarios, and his sister Elizabeth Lonergan wrote for the Biograph and Kalem companies (Azlant 1997, 241).11 The DeMille dynasty that begins with m...
Fan magazine writers liked to point out exceptions to the rule that creative teams were husband-wife teams. Motion Picture Magazine had to tell readers that Francis Ford was not married to Grace Cunard, but that he had a “real wife,” as they put it—Mrs Elsie Van Name Ford—who wrote the stories he used in the independent productions he made after le...
Male-female working partnerships raise the difficult question as to whether the female contribution was submerged or whether joint authorship had its own assumed standard. Collaboration was the norm in the first decade at the start of which all creative workers were uncredited. One early film historian would thus describe the development of the mot...
Film studies scholarship on the US star system has been particularly strong on the commodification of the star actress as a modern form of public personhood.27 In this scholarship, female stars such as Marlene Dietrich have been understood as taking symbolic control of their on-screen images.28 Until recently, however, the idea that women in the si...
Independent companies were formed when economic factors favored their chances of securing commercial distribution. The fortunes of women who worked as producers and directors were tied to the corporate struggles to control the domestic motion picture market, the wars to line up production with exhibition and distribution. One approach to the indust...
The first scenarios, if they existed at all, were as Gene Gauntier describes the process she observed when she arrived at the Kalem Company, six scenes sketched out on the back of a used business envelope (Gauntier Oct. 1928, 181). Writers, she says, were even for a few years paid twice as much as directors, evidence of the value of the story durin...
Males assumed female and females, male names. Bertha Muzzy Sinclair was B. M. Bower; Eve Unsell was E. M. Unsell or Oliver W. Geoffreys; Clara S. Beranger became Charles S. Beranger. When she wrote with Jane Cowell, Jane Murfin and Cowell became together Allan Langdon Martin. Alla Nazimova was either Peter M. Winters or took the name of former husb...
Another age is interested in what is now called “networking” and one might assume from the photo of eight former Vitagraph players that Norma Talmadge has thrown an all-female party to facilitate professional connections. But in 1926, the six of these women who had started star name companies no longer had them, so not one was in a position to give...
Elsie Van Name is known as an Actor, Writer, Story, and Screenplay. Some of her work includes The Mystery Of 13, Berlin Via America, and The Silent Mystery.
Elsie Jane Van Name. Screenwriter and Actress. Met actor, Francis Ford on the set of a play. They married in 1909 and had two children. The marriage lasted until her death in 1934.
Elsie Van Name was born on 31 December, 1885 in Staten Island, New York, USA, is a Writer, Actress. Discover Elsie Van Name's Biography, Age, Height, Physical Stats, Dating/Affairs, Family and career updates.
