“The Girls in the Picture” by Melanie Benjamin – An Alliance of Legends

Melanie Benjamin has shown a remarkable penchant for writing detailed and profound historical fiction novels, and with The Girls in the Picture she further reinforces this notion.

Starting by following Frances Marion as she tries to find her calling in the fledgling silent movie industry, we see her become friends with Mary Pickford (who had the title of “America's Sweetheart”), and the two trudge onward to realize their grand ambitions in uncharted territory.

Melanie Benjamin Enters the Silent Screen Era

With just how enormous the movie industry has gotten in the past few decades it's all too easy to forget it's all barely a century old. Only a hundred years ago people were just beginning to learn about the wondrous silent moving pictures playing at the theaters, sparking a fire which caught on across the world and never died off.

While those early days might be in the rear-view mirror for society as a whole, they were certainly filled with their own drama, heroes and villains, as we get to see in Melanie Benjamin's The Girls in the Picture.

The story opens in 1914 as we are introduced to Frances Marion, twenty-five years of age and recently divorced from her second husband, on the way to the exciting lights of Los Angeles.

She wants to make a living as an independent artist, but all she keeps hearing about lately are “flickers”, the silent moving pictures playing all around town. Seeing an opportunity where she didn't really expect it, Marion finds a little place in the world for herself, writing the stories for the booming silent movies.

At the same time, Marion also makes the acquaintance of “America's Sweetheart” at the time, actress Mary Pickford who has captured the attention and imagination of the entire nation. Together, the two young women form a bond which would end up lasting for decades, and dive in headfirst into an unfamiliar life of glory and fame under the bright lights.

Their ambitions are constantly challenged though, and the prices for their life choices might be higher than they anticipated. Can they even hope to find love in a world of intense dramatic clashes and profound betrayals?

An Ode to Friendship from The Girls in the Picture

Though I can personally say I've always been into cinema and older movies, I must confess I didn't know much at all about either Pickford or Marion before picking up this book. I think the author anticipated the readers to be more or less in my shoes, which is why she doesn't skimp on the information she reveals about her two protagonists.

I can't begin to imagine how many hours of research have gone into their depictions, but I have no doubt Benjamin left no stone unturned in her quest to portray them as realistically as possible.

The chapters are structured quite simply as they keep alternating between the two women's perspectives, with France's chapters being told in the first person while Mary's are narrated in the third. This gives us a chance to focus on the individual lives both of these pioneers led, and their evolving friendship through Frances' meditations. We see their relationship grow from Frances simply being thankful to be in the same circle as Mary, to them becoming each other's confidantes and best friends.

I was happy to see the author always kept focus on moving the story forward, even while going through the various moments of budding friendship between the two women. There is always a clear destination in sight for our heroines, and Benjamin is quite good in choosing the important aspects to focus on in their friendship.

While we are given a good amount of information about their lives, it's all carefully curated to be useful stuff we would be interested to know about and paced in an agreeable manner. Ultimately, I found Benjamin did a remarkable job at truly demonstrating just how powerfully these two women managed to captivate America back in their days.

Rise of the Hollywood Giant

As we follow the story of these two women, we are also presented to a sort of expose about the rise of Hollywood in its earliest days. Once again, I must remark on the amount of research done on the subject by Benjamin; it's evident, if nothing else, she is truly passionate about this topic and wants to share it with the world.

I was honestly surprised by the amount of curious and fascinating details she managed to dig up about the people in the industry, whom include Charlie Chaplin, Buddy Rogers, Owen Moore and Douglas Fairbanks, just to name a few.

In a sort of symbiotic relationship, as we learn more and more about the industry and how it operated, we also obtain an increasing amount of context for understanding the scope and importance of the work Mary and Frances did back in their days.

The more we realize just how much of a cutthroat business it was, the more we are impressed with their timeless accomplishments, with Mary being pretty much the first real movie star and Frances the highest paid screenwriter for a long time.

As you might imagine, in an industry such as this one where passions always flare high gives rise to a good bit of drama, an important aspect of the book which I believe helped to heighten the entertainment factor by a fair bit.

While it is nice to learn about the early days of Hollywood and all of its people, we are, after all, reading a historical fiction novel, and to a certain extent we want to be entertained... and the author understood this without a shadow of a doubt.

There are always some interesting interpersonal developments for us to pay attention to along the way, and in my opinion they played their role to perfection in preventing the nearly five-hundred page read from ever becoming stale.

The Final Verdict

The Girls in the Picture by Melanie Benjamin is simultaneously a powerful, educative and entertaining novel of historical fiction about the earliest days of Hollywood and its first stars. The author not only put in a great amount of research, but she was also very deliberate and understanding in choosing which bits and pieces of information to include, all while never forgetting about our need for entertainment.

If you are interested in the movie industry and its early days, then I can definitely recommend you give this novel a read.

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Melanie Benjamin (Hauser) Personal site Melanie Benjamin is the pen name of Melanie Hauser, an American writer from Indianapolis. She has published numerous short stories in the In Posse Review and The Adirondack Review, and now she has taken to writing historical fiction. Alice I have Been is probably her most famous novel at this point, reaching the heights of an international bestseller upon its release.