Maas first began working on silent films in 1920, when he created the scenario for Uncle Sam of Freedom Ridge. After settling in Hollywood, he would continue to make live in Los Angeles his whole life.
It was not until 1926 when Maas would write the entire script, beginning to end, for a movie, The Country Beyond. In 1927 he worked on the successful movie The Way of All Flesh, but it went uncredited.
In Hollywood, he also married fellow screenwriter Frederica Sagor Maas, who became a famous Silent-era writer and Hollywood personality. The last film he wrote was with his wife, the 1947 landmark The Shocking Miss Pilgrim. Being uninterested in adapting to talking pictures, Maas never made or contributed to a film again. The couple lived together until his death in Los Angeles.
But what makes this autobiography by Frederica Sagor Maas, screenwriter of Clara Bow’s film The Plastic Age (1925), so intriguing is her revealing portrait of herself and her writer husband, ErnestMaas, as industry workers struggling to make the Hollywood system acknowledge their efforts to create successful and creatively satisfying motion pictures.
The second half of the book follows the lives of ErnestMaas and Frederica Sagor Maas, from Ernest’s childhood through their married years together.
Detailed are their on-again-off-again dalliances in motion pictures (producing “swell fish”), years of lean times, and a successful reconcilation with Hollywood in the 1940s.
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