| Maurine Dallas Watkins Literary Overview |
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Maurine Dallas Watkins led a unique life in the American popular culture of the first half of the 20th century. Her fascination with crime, celebrity and image fabrication led to the primary theme of her major works, how the media can be manipulated to both create and destroy celebrity, a subject that remains highly relevant and contemporary. Joining the Chicago Tribune in her mid 20’s, Watkins became one of the first female crime reporters in the United States and used her talents to get the scoop on the infamous Leopold-Loeb murder case, one of the first cases to be labeled “Trial of the Century” and the source material of numerous film and stage adaptations. That same year, Watkins covered the sensational Chicago murder trials of Beulah Annan and Belva Gaertner. Her newspaper articles served as the basis for a play that she wrote three years later at Yale University’ renowned playwriting workshop as a class assignment. The play, initially entitled, A Brave Little Woman, then Play Ball, and finally, Chicago, was acquired by Sam H. Harris, a successful producer and former business partner of George M. Cohan. Harris, in turn, hired George Abbott to direct Chicago on Broadway, where it ran for 172 performances during the 1926-27 season and was named as one of the Top Ten plays by leading critic Burns Mantle. Watkins transformed Beulah Annan, the “beauty of the cell block” and Belva Gaertner, the “most stylish of Murderess’ Row” into the indelible characters of Roxie Hart and Velma Kelly. Covering the Annan and Gaertner murder cases from the moment they were reported by Chicago police three weeks apart, Watkins cleverly twinned the two murders together. Under a picture of the pair of the accused murderesses captioned “Killers of Men”, Watkins wrote that “as yet the two have not talked over their common interests. A man, a woman, liquor and a gun”. The supposed pregnancy used to speed up the trial, the sleek lawyer who helped define the media frenzy, and the acquittal of both women sounded like a page out of Hollywood, but were in fact real life incidents covered by Watkins as a young reporter. Thomas H. Pauly, in the introduction to his book Chicago (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1997) wrote, “Watkins’ play offers a bracing reminder that lurid crimes were as aggressively commercialized seventy years ago as they are today. Her comic depiction of a woman groping towards liberation and the future foregrounds pressures women still face, but it is downright uncanny in its anticipation of today’s news-as-entertainment culture.” Chicago went on to tour successfully for two years after its initial Broadway run and was adapted for feature film, first as a silent film, CHICAGO (1927), and then as ROXIE HART (1942), starring Ginger Rogers. After years of resistance during her lifetime, the Watkins’ family licensed the musical stage rights of Chicago to Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon, who teamed up with Fred Ebb and John Kander to produce the first stage musical adaptation of Chicago in 1975, which ran for 936 performances and received eleven Tony Award® nominations. In 1996, Chicago was revived on Broadway, winning six Tony Awards® and continues to run strongly in its 13th year (5,012 performances through December 14, 2008) and as a hugely successful touring show that has been staged in 16 countries, 250 cities and in 11 languages. The 2002 film musical adaptation starring Catherine Zeta-Jones, Reneé Zellweger and Richard Gere won six Oscar® Awards, including Best Picture, and grossed over $300 million worldwide. Subsequent to her success with Chicago, Watkins adapted the Samuel Hopkins Adams' book Revelry, a book about the Teapot Dome scandal that tainted the presidency of Warren G. Harding, into a stage play, also called Revelry. Watkins’ play lampooned the ethically-challenged administration of an incompetent, poker-playing and liquor-swilling president. The play touched a raw nerve; Revelry’s pre-Broadway, out-of-town run was forced to close down in Philadelphia on the charge of being “inimical to the interest of the United States Government” and its Broadway run, subject to similar political pressures, ended after 48 performances in the 1927-28 season. Another play, now probably lost, was a stage adaptation of Herbert Asbury’s Hatrack, an allegedly true story about a Midwestern town whose hypocritically religious citizenry regularly trysted with a prostitute in the local cemetery, who would then be shunned at church on Sundays. Asbury, best known for The Gangs of New York, published Hatrack in H.L. Mencken’s American Mercury literary magazine, which was promptly banned by the United State Post Office for printing and mailing obscene material. Watkins wrote short stories and a number of other plays, including Gesture, Tinsel Girl, So Help Me God, The Devil’s Diary, Grotesque and Against the Day, but sadly, other than Chicago and Revelry, none of her other plays received Broadway productions. Following in the footsteps of other playwrights and literary authors, Watkins made her way to Hollywood, where she became a successful scriptwriter for a number of film studios, including Fox, MGM and RKO. Among her 19 film credits, Watkins adapted her play Chicago for Fox’s ROXIE HART (1942) starring Ginger Rogers (no Velma Kelly in this version), and her play Tinsel Girl for First National’s THE STRANGE LOVE OF MOLLY LOUVAIN (1932). She also co-wrote the screenplay for an Oscar® nominated Best Picture, MGM’s LIBELED LADY (1936), with an all-star cast of Jean Harlow, Spencer Tracy, William Powell and Myrna Loy (remade ten years later for Lucille Ball as EASY TO WED), wrote the screenplay for the movie that was Humphrey Bogart’s film acting debut, Fox’s UP THE RIVER (1930) directed by John Ford, and won acclaim for her screwball comedy, RKO’s PROFESSIONAL SWEETHEART (1933), which again starred Ginger Rogers. Maurine Dallas Watkins’ plays include:
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