From Silent Murder Mysteries to Andy Hardy’s Americana, Agnes Christine Johnston Wrote it All

With 88 IMDb writing credits to her name Agnes Christine Johnston’s career stretched from 1915 through 1948, largely due to her ability to write in a diversity of genres. Born in Pennsylvania on January 11, 1896, Johnston first entered the new and exciting moving picture industry as a stenographer for the Vitagraph company. That meant she met and worked with Marguerite Bertsch, who had risen to head the Vitagraph scenario department. One can assume that Johnston availed herself of Bertsch’s manual “How to Write for Moving Pictures; A Manual of Instruction and Information”.

In 1915 Johnston sold Ancestry, a drama involving a duchess grieving the loss of a daughter who mistakes someone else for the child. She wrote two more films that year and then in 1916 her original screenplay for Tried for His Own Murder became a film, telling the story of a blind girl falling in love with a man accused of murder. That year she completed 11 films including Prudence, the Pirate about a rich, young society woman who leaves it all behind to become (as the title suggests) a pirate, paying a crew to travel the seas under her command. (Oddly reminiscent of the recent Our Flag Means Death, created by David Jenkins).

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Clearly, Johnston succeeded in offering female fans the sort of female-focused stories that drew them into the new nickelodeons even as those establishments grew larger and more elegant. She also found herself working with more of the big names emerging just as she was. In 1918 she wrote The Great Adventure which was directed by Alice Guy Blaché, now known as the first person, man or woman, to create narrative stories for films, rather than the documentary-style works of Edison and Leon Gaumont in France.

A year later she wrote Daddy-Long-Legs for Mary Pickford, emerging as a force in the industry from becoming the highest-paid actress to eventually co-owning her own studio. The plot involved an orphan with an unknown benefactor who offers to pay for her tuition to attend college, a new adventure for women of the era. The film also helped solidify Pickford’s persona as the poor girl with the beautiful curls, something that would later be enhanced by the work of Frances Marion (look for her story in a future column).

College had come to the front of Johnston’s mind as she herself attended a playwriting course at Harvard College. Those lessons on top of Bertsch’s manual and mentorship moved Johnston’s career forward. By the 1920s Johnston's prolific output of such films brought her a contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer where famed director King Vidor and producer William Randolph Hearst requested her for two films starring Marion Davies. The Patsy and Show People, both came out in 1928.

Around 1920 Johnston had begun co-writing some films with Frank Mitchell Dazey. Eventually, they married though no date has been discovered, and continued writing together through Nobody’s Fool in 1936. By then Johnston had become attached to the Andy Hardy series, starring Micky Rooney where she wrote a total of 6 of the franchise. Her final two films before she retired appeared in 1948. Johnston died on July 19, 1978 at the age of 82, having retired to San Diego, California. Her papers can be studied among the Agnes Christine Johnston and Frank Dazey papers, 1914–1968, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Margaret Herrick Library.

If you’d like to learn more about the history of women in screenwriting, and about the craft of screenwriting while earning your MFA, our low residency Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting is currently accepting applications.