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

Last month you read about Beatrice DeMille who after her own successful writing career became a writer’s agent. Today we’re introducing you to one of her early clients: playwright, novelist and screenwriter Beulah Marie Dix.

Born on Christmas Day in 1876 in Massachusetts, Dix and her family lived in various cities around the historic state until she moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to study English and History at Radcliffe College. There she became the first female to be granted the Sohier Literary Prize, for the best thesis of a Harvard or Radcliffe student. From there it seemed a quick move into the world of writing.

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Dix began with books about her favorite subject – the history that surrounded her in Massachusetts. In 1899, at the age of 23, she published Soldier Rigdale: How He Sailed in the Mayflower and How He Served Miles Standish. Her first play, A Rose of Plymouth Town ran for a month in 1902, followed by The Road to Yesterday, which ran for 8 months in 1907. Altogether Dix wrote 18 books and 5 plays before moving into the new world of film.

In 1910 she married book importer Georg Heinrich Flebbe with whom she later had a daughter (more on her later). In 1916 Dix paid a visit to her literary agent, Beatrice DeMille, who had moved to Hollywood. The visit turned into a new career as DeMille arranged her a contract at the Jesse Lasky Feature Players Company, which would soon become Paramount Studios. Dix’s first film credit came from co-writing On Record, tells the story of a young rural woman moving to the city for a secretarial career and becoming caught up in illegal activities while falling in love with her employer’s son.

In those early days with the DeMilles, Dix worked alongside others in their orbit including Jeanie Macpherson and Clara Beranger. In that era, Dix wrote 9 more films in 1917 including Held by the Enemy (1920) set in the American Civil War, and several more each year through 1925. Much of her early work, as in her novels, involved characters from history, her favorite subject at Radcliffe. Later she moved into the crime/murder genre.

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Then Paramount, transitioning to sound, canceled many contracts of silent film writers, often mostly female writers, before they could prove how well they would adjust. Happily, playwrights were in demand for sound films, so Paramount’s loss was the DeMille Studios gain (yes, run by Beatrice’s sons) and Dix continued writing films through the start of World War II. Dix continued writing novels alongside her screenplay work, including ones for children like Merrylips (1933) the adventures a girl had while dressed as a boy. And after the war she took a chance on the newest storytelling medium – television.

All through her career Dix knew what she was worth. For example, when the Technicolor Corporation asked to buy the rights to her one-act Allison's Lad, Dix asked for $2,500.00, far more than Technicolor spent on any other film scenario, which killed the deal.

Dix died in 1970 leaving the legacy of her novels, plays, and films along with a daughter who also became a writer. Evelyn G. Flebbe Scott wrote several novels while working for several decades as a story editor at MGM.

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.