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Cari Beauchamp, a political adviser turned historian who documented the overlooked story of women in early Hollywood, when the film industry\u2019s chaotic beginnings allowed them to assert a surprising amount of power, died on Thursday in Los Angeles. She was 74.<\/p>\n
Her son Jake Flynn confirmed the death, in a hospital, but did not specify the cause.<\/p>\n
Beginning with her 1998 book, \u201cWithout Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood,\u201d Ms. Beauchamp (pronounced BEE-cham) set out to recover a lost part of film history, when women stood alongside men as some of the most prolific and influential figures in the industry.<\/p>\n
By combing through the Library of Congress archives, Ms. Beauchamp discovered that about half of all copyrighted films between 1911 and 1925 were written by women, and that they produced and directed movies seen by millions of people worldwide.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Yet aside from a few names, like that of the actor and United Artists co-founder Mary Pickford<\/a>, most of these women and their accomplishments were erased by the male-dominated studio system that solidified control over Hollywood in the 1930s.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Ms. Beauchamp\u2019s avenue through the story is the life of Frances Marion, a screenwriter with more than 200 scripts to her name, two of which \u2014 \u201cThe Big House\u201d (1930) and \u201cThe Champ\u201d (1931) \u2014 won Oscars.<\/p>\n Between the mid-1910s and the mid-1930s Ms. Marion was the highest-paid writer in Hollywood, man or woman. And yet, until Ms. Beauchamp came along, no one had written her biography.<\/p>\n \u201cWomen are always in the footnotes,\u201d Ms. Beauchamp told The Christian Science Monitor in 1997. Changing gender mores and the concentration of power in Hollywood by the end of World War II, she went on, made studio lots a man\u2019s world.<\/p>\n \u201cRosie the Riveter went home,\u201d she said, referring to the countless women who worked in factories during the war, \u201cand so did women working in the studios.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Aspects of Ms. Marion\u2019s life paralleled those of Ms. Beauchamp. Both were well known and liked around Hollywood in their respective times; both were outspoken women\u2019s rights advocates; and both raised two sons, largely on their own.<\/p>\n They slipped in easily among the rich and famous; Ms. Marion brushed shoulders with the actor Douglas Fairbanks and the press baron William Randolph Hearst, while Ms. Beauchamp chummed it up with the novelist Harold Robbins<\/a> and the actress Judy Balaban. And Ms. Beauchamp seemed to take to heart one of Ms. Marion\u2019s most famous lines: When asked why she wasn\u2019t married, she replied that she was \u201csearching for a man to look up to without lying down.\u201d<\/p>\n Carol Ann Beauchamp was born on Sept. 12, 1949, in Berkeley, Calif. Her father, Blake, a police officer, moved the family to nearby Stockton when she was 6, and he later worked in insurance. Her mother, Catherine (Crisp) Beauchamp, was an administrator at the University of the Pacific, in Stockton.<\/p>\n She attended Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, Calif., then transferred to San Jose State University, where she studied political science and American history and graduated in 1972.<\/p>\n Ms. Beauchamp spent six years working as an investigator for the Legal Aid Society of Santa Clara County while also becoming active in local and state politics.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n She rallied for the Equal Rights Amendment; she was the first president of the National Women\u2019s Political Caucus of California, an advocacy group; and in 1975 she helped run the winning campaign of Janet Gray Hayes<\/a>, the first woman to be elected mayor of San Jose.<\/p>\n