Hollywood author and historian dies at 74 – The Hollywood Reporter

Carrie Beauchamp, a respected film historian who brought readers and viewers intimately into contact with the early days of Hollywood through her painstaking research as an author, editor and documentary filmmaker, died Thursday. She was 74 years old.

Her son, Jake Flynn, said Beauchamp died of natural causes at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Hollywood Reporter.

She was unable to attend an event on October 28 at the TCL Chinese Theater in which the famous authors performed THR The “100 Greatest Movie Books of All Time” were recently revealed.

Beauchamp is on the exclusive list thanks Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and Powerful Women in Early Hollywood. First published in 1997, it focuses on Marion, who had become the highest-paid screenwriter, man or woman, in Hollywood by 1917 before receiving Academy Awards for his best films. the big house (1930) and Hero (1931).

Beauchamp then wrote and produced a 2001 TCM documentary based on the book, earning a WGA nomination along the way. (The title came from Marion’s lifelong search “for a man to look up to without lying down.”)

Beauchamp edited and annotated a 2003 book about another pioneering writer, Anita Loos, who wrote the 1925 novel Gentlemen prefer blondes; He contributed to the scripts of historical films such as Red-headed woman (1932), San Francisco (1939) and Women (1939); And he wrote GG By Audrey Hepburn on Broadway.

She also drew from letters, speeches, oral histories, memoirs, and biographies from actors, directors, screenwriters, editors, and cinematographers for another enlightening book, 2020 My first time in Hollywood.

Her other books included 1992 Hollywood on the Riviera: The inside story of the Cannes Film Festival; 2006 The Adventures of a Hollywood Secretary: Her Private Letters from Inside the Studios of the 1920s; And 2009 Presented by Joseph B. Kennedy: His Hollywood Years.

“Carrie Beauchamp was a dear friend and role model to me and to many who write about Hollywood.” THR said executive editor Scott Feinberg. “As was evident both on and off the page, she was intensely intelligent, fiercely stubborn, and endlessly curious.

“Few people, if any, knew as much — or wrote as profusely and beautifully — about the work as she did. Her passing is a loss not only to the family and friends she loved and who loved her, but to anyone who loved movies.”

Beauchamp was born on September 12, 1949 in Berkeley, California. Her father, Blake, was an insurance man, and her mother, Catherine, worked at the University of the Pacific in Stockton for 20 years. She attended Lincoln High School, Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, and San Jose State University.

After leaving college with a bachelor’s degree in political science and American history, Beauchamp spent a few years as a private investigator and discovered that “the information was out there. “You just have to dig,” she once said. Vanity gallerywhere she was a shareholder.

She served as the first president of the National Women’s Political Caucus of California in 1973 and campaign manager for Janet Gray Hayes, mayor of San Jose elected in 1976. From 1979 to 1982, she was press secretary for California Governor Jerry Brown during his term. His second term, when she said she wrote about 300 press releases a year.

I started writing full-time in 1990 and moved to Los Angeles in 1999.

Beauchamp was an expert in documentaries about Marion Davies, Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo, Irving Thalberg and others. It offered insight into traditional Chinese medicine Mughals and Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood And Mark Cousins ​​expanded the story of the movie He has been a welcome interviewer and presenter at the TCM Classic Film Festival over the years.

She is a resident scholar at the Mary Pickford Foundation and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts – twice – and has been a featured speaker at Cannes, the British Film Institute, the Museum of Modern Art, the Edinburgh Film Festival, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

She also wrote the 2003 Emmy Award-nominated PBS documentary The day my Lord diedFilmed in Nepal and India, it revolves around girls sold into sexual slavery and those who hope to rescue them.

In addition to Vanity gallery — who co-authored a fascinating article with Judy Balaban on LSD use in Hollywood in the 1960s — Beauchamp contributed THR, IndieWire, diverse, New York timesthe Los Angeles Times And many other publications.

On her page X (formerly Twitter), she described herself as a “happy feminist who often finds herself angry.”

Survivors include her sons, Jake and Teo;

Beauchamp certainly loved the movie. “When I go and watch a movie, I sit down and I know the screen is going to light up and take me somewhere I’ve never been,” she said in a 2015 interview. “It brings the world to you.

“That’s part of what the Silent Era did. People who didn’t come five miles from where they were born, suddenly the whole world was available to them for a nickel.