Julie Crawford Ivers: From Rich Widow to Writer-Director

Born just 4 years after the end of the Civil War in Boonville, Missouri, the scripts Julie Crawford Ivers wrote (and sometimes directed) often tackled issues of prejudice. After the war, her family emigrated to Los Angeles. As with many female creatives in this era, Ivers used her screenplays to highlight women’s issues from forced marriage to domestic abuse to prejudice.

In 1900 Ivers married her second husband, oil industry magnate Oliver Ivers whose business partner Frank Garbutt soon recognized the profits to be made in motion pictures. Sadly, Oliver died in 1902, leaving his wife very rich. Garbutt formed Pallas Pictures in 1915 and Ivers joined him as a writer-director. After her first film, The Rug Maker’s Daughter for Pallas Pictures in collaboration with the Morosco Photoplay Company Ivers wrote over a dozen scenarios for both entities. The Reform Candidate (1915) covered political corruptions and He Fell in Love with His Wife (1916) focused on domestic abuse.

For one of her early adaptations, Ivers wrote (and likely directed – credits are a bit murky) The Call of the Cumberlands (1916). Based on the Charles Neville Buck book they filmed this Kentucky family feud saga on location in Appalachia. That same year Ivers took a movie crew to Pedro Blanco, Mexico for the filming of The Heart of Paula. In an example of how ahead of her time Ivers was, The Heart of Paula came with two endings so theatre managers could choose to turn the film into a comedy or a tragedy. An original story, Her Own People (1917) involved discrimination against an indigenous woman with the twist that she came from a wealthy family so that the ingrained prejudice hurt her suitors more than her.

Famous Players-Lasky purchased Pallas and Morosco in 1916. Paramount Pictures distributed their films (and would purchase Famous Players fully a few years later) which brought Ivers into their set of stock writers. In 1917 her family’s Missouri background likely helped make her the choice to adapt Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer. Meanwhile, her previous experience on location shoots made filming on the Sacramento River (as a stand-in for the Mississippi) possible, though the director was her friend William Desmond Taylor. A year later the same team returned to Sacramento to film Huck and Tom, the first time that sequel had been adapted to film.

In 1922 someone murdered Ivers friend and frequent collaborator, director William Desmond Taylor and a bit of that scandal stuck to her as she was among the possible suspects. Like many of his friends, she went to his apartment the morning the news hit about the murder and rumors abounded about her involvement. The police dismissed that idea quickly but previous scandals had hurt Hollywood’s reputation so it wobbled her career for a moment as she had worked with him on over 20 films.

A trip to Hawaii resulted in her writing and directing The White Flower, about an island romance. It was her penultimate film. In 1927 Ivers adapted a novel from famed dime-novelist Laura Jean Libbey into In a Moment of Temptation. Whether her career slowed due to the connection to the Taylor scandal or the fact that she had contracted the stomach cancer that would kill her, Ivers wrote nothing further. She died of cancer in 1930.

Related: Meet Beulah Marie Dix: Award-Winning Scholar and Anti-War Novelist Turned Screenwriter

On a fun side note, thanks to Ivers first husband, architect Franklin Sawyer Van Trees she had a son, James Van Trees. Born in 1890 he chose to follow in his mother’s creative footsteps, becoming a cinematographer. In a possible early example of nepotism (or merely proof of what a small-town Hollywood actually was) Van Trees began working for Oliver Morosco and even worked on several films written by his mother. In the early 1920s, Van Trees became president of the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) and his career continued into the mid-1940s. He, too, had a son who became a cinematographer so Julie Crawford Ivers influenced three generations of filmmakers.

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