--- title: 'Josephine Lovett Wrote the Flapper Into American Film. The Academy Nominated Her for It' type: 'blog post' section: 'Away From Set' standfirst: 'She was born in San Francisco in 1877, died at Rancho Santa Fe in 1958, and in between she wrote Joan Crawford''s breakthrough and got an Academy Award nomination for it. Eighteen of her thirty-three credits were directed by her husband, which is the fact her biography usually leads with and the least interesting thing about her.' author: 'CinePixo' published: '2026-08-20' updated: '2026-08-20' about_people: - 'Josephine Lovett' - 'John S. Robertson' - 'Joan Crawford' - 'Harry Beaumont' - 'Hunt Stromberg' - 'George Barnes' - 'Hanns Kräly' - 'Bess Meredyth' - 'Johnny Mack Brown' - 'Shirley Temple' about_films: - 'Our Dancing Daughters (1928)' - 'Our Modern Maidens (1929)' - 'The Single Standard (1929)' - 'Madame Butterfly (1932)' - 'Hot Saturday (1932)' - 'Jennie Gerhardt (1933)' - 'Two Alone (1934)' - 'The Enchanted Cottage (1924)' - 'Love''s Boomerang (1922)' - 'Away Goes Prudence (1920)' - 'The Road to Romance (1927)' - 'Our Little Girl (1935)' tags: - 'Josephine Lovett screenwriter' - 'Our Dancing Daughters 1928' - 'Joan Crawford breakthrough Dangerous Diana' - 'women screenwriters silent era' - '2nd Academy Awards writing nominees' - 'John S. Robertson director' sources: - 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephine_Lovett' - 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Dancing_Daughters' - 'https://www.oscars.org/oscars/ceremonies/1930' - 'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2nd_Academy_Awards' canonical: 'https://cinepixo.com/blog/josephine-lovett-wrote-the-flapper-into-american-film-the-academy-nominated-her-for-it' publisher: 'CinePixo' --- # Josephine Lovett Wrote the Flapper Into American Film. The Academy Nominated Her for It *She was born in San Francisco in 1877, died at Rancho Santa Fe in 1958, and in between she wrote Joan Crawford's breakthrough and got an Academy Award nomination for it. Eighteen of her thirty-three credits were directed by her husband, which is the fact her biography usually leads with and the least interesting thing about her.* By CinePixo, 2026-08-20 · Away From Set ![A lobby card for Our Dancing Daughters, the 1928 MGM picture Lovett wrote.](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/2f7c8d56-ed42-43a8-905a-7547d64143be.webp) *Photo: Cosmopolitan Productions / Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) · Public domain · [source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Our_Dancing_Daughters_lobby_card.jpg)* ## The woman who wrote Dangerous Diana Josephine Lovett was born on 21 October 1877 in San Francisco and died on 17 September 1958 at Rancho Santa Fe, California, aged eighty. Between those dates she worked as a Broadway actress, and then wrote for the movies from 1916 to 1935 — as a scenario writer, an adapter, a screenwriter, and briefly on screen herself. The credit she is remembered by is *Our Dancing Daughters*, from 1928. It is the film that made Joan Crawford. Crawford plays Diana Medford, called Dangerous Diana, who is flamboyant in public and, as the film is careful to establish, principled in private; her friend Ann chases men for their money. Both want Ben Blaine. Ann lies about herself and gets him. That structure is the whole of Lovett's method. She wrote heroines who were, in the summary her biographers keep reaching for, economically and sexually independent — and then gave them the moral high ground, so that the independence read as character rather than as warning. ## What the censors complained about The complaints about *Our Dancing Daughters* are a better description of the film than any synopsis. Reviewers objected to the sight of "undies and much stocking". One wrote that "cocktails, flasks and mad dancing appear in quite a number of episodes" and that "it is quite unnecessary to depict an intoxicated girl, as is done for a considerable length of this film". What is being described there is a picture that put a specific kind of young woman on screen and declined to punish her for it. Lovett had a reputation for exactly this: writing material that was sexually suggestive and stayed just inside what the censors would pass. She was, the accounts agree, one of the most prominent women writing in Hollywood at the time, and part of a generation of women screenwriters who moved American film out of its Victorian settings and into the flapper's. The technical footnote is worth keeping too. *Our Dancing Daughters* has no audible dialogue, but MGM released it with a synchronised score and sound effects, on disc and on film. It is a silent picture that arrived with a soundtrack, in the year the industry was deciding what sound was for. ![Joan Crawford photographed by George Hurrell in 1936, eight years after Our Dancing Daughters made her a star.](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/cb971a49-e718-4a03-9ca7-d9a2200d72b5.webp) *Photo: George Hurrell · Public domain · [source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Joan_Crawford_-_1936_-_Hurrell.JPG)* ## The nomination, and who won The Academy's own records for the ceremony held in 1930 list *Our Dancing Daughters* with two nominations: George Barnes for cinematography, and Josephine Lovett for writing. That year the writing categories for adaptation and original story had been merged into a single award, which put everyone in one room. The award went to Hanns Kräly for *The Patriot*. The other nominees were Tom Barry for *In Old Arizona*, Kräly again for *The Last of Mrs. Cheyney*, Bess Meredyth twice over, and Elliott Clawson three times in the same category. So Lovett lost a merged award in a field where two men held six of the nominations between them. It is a small piece of arithmetic and it says more about the shape of the industry in 1929 than a paragraph of argument would. ![The director John S. Robertson, Lovett's husband, who directed eighteen of her thirty-three credits.](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/ae8bd5a8-0a1d-4498-aaee-c5554922994c.webp) *Photo: Unknown photographer · Public domain · [source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:John_S_Robertson.jpg)* ## Eighteen of thirty-three Her biography is usually organised around her marriage. She was married to the Canadian-born director John S. Robertson, and eighteen of her thirty-three film credits between 1916 and 1935 were on his pictures. The accounts note that she frequently helped him visualise scenes. Read one way, that is a story about a wife assisting a husband. Read against the filmography, it is a writer who spent half her working life with a director who trusted her on the floor as well as on the page — and who also wrote *Our Dancing Daughters*, *Our Modern Maidens*, *The Single Standard*, *Madame Butterfly*, *Hot Saturday*, *Jennie Gerhardt* and *Two Alone*, none of which he directed. The Robertson collaboration is the fact that survived. The independent half is the one with the Academy nomination in it. ![Shirley Temple, who starred in Our Little Girl — the film Robertson retired on in 1935.](https://pokemon-dive.us-lax-4.linodeobjects.com/cinepixo/posts/2026/08/1e5eeda8-e855-424d-bdef-80d10fbbf281.webp) *Photo: Unknown author · Public domain · [source](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Shirleytemple.jpg)* ## Rancho Santa Fe Lovett's last screenplay was *Captain Hurricane* in 1935, for RKO, about a Cape Cod fisherman, and Robertson directed it. He finished his own career the same year with *Our Little Girl*, a Shirley Temple picture, and they both stopped. They retired to Rancho Santa Fe, where in 1945 she helped him set up the Rancho Riding Club. She died there in 1958. He outlived her by six years, and they are buried together at Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Ontario. The three queries that bring people to her page here are all versions of the same question — when was she born, when did she die, where. The answers are 1877, 1958, and a village north of San Diego. The part worth knowing is what she did between those two dates: she wrote a young woman who drank, danced and was right, and the Academy put her name on the list for it. ## In this piece - [Josephine Lovett](https://cinepixo.com/people/josephine-lovett) - [John S. Robertson](https://cinepixo.com/people/john-s-robertson) - [Joan Crawford](https://cinepixo.com/people/joan-crawford) - [Harry Beaumont](https://cinepixo.com/people/harry-beaumont) - [Hunt Stromberg](https://cinepixo.com/people/hunt-stromberg) - [George Barnes](https://cinepixo.com/people/george-barnes) - [Hanns Kräly](https://cinepixo.com/people/hanns-kraly) - [Bess Meredyth](https://cinepixo.com/people/bess-meredyth) - [Johnny Mack Brown](https://cinepixo.com/people/johnny-mack-brown) - [Shirley Temple](https://cinepixo.com/people/shirley-temple) - 1928 · [Our Dancing Daughters](https://cinepixo.com/movies/our-dancing-daughters-1928) - 1929 · [Our Modern Maidens](https://cinepixo.com/movies/our-modern-maidens-1929) - 1929 · [The Single Standard](https://cinepixo.com/movies/the-single-standard-1929) - 1932 · [Madame Butterfly](https://cinepixo.com/movies/madame-butterfly-1932) - 1932 · [Hot Saturday](https://cinepixo.com/movies/hot-saturday-1932) - 1933 · [Jennie Gerhardt](https://cinepixo.com/movies/jennie-gerhardt-1933) - 1934 · [Two Alone](https://cinepixo.com/movies/two-alone-1934) - 1924 · [The Enchanted Cottage](https://cinepixo.com/movies/the-enchanted-cottage-1924) - 1922 · [Love's Boomerang](https://cinepixo.com/movies/loves-boomerang-1922) - 1920 · [Away Goes Prudence](https://cinepixo.com/movies/away-goes-prudence-1920) - 1927 · [The Road to Romance](https://cinepixo.com/movies/the-road-to-romance-1927) - 1935 · [Our Little Girl](https://cinepixo.com/movies/our-little-girl-1935) ## Sources - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephine_Lovett - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Dancing_Daughters - https://www.oscars.org/oscars/ceremonies/1930 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2nd_Academy_Awards Every factual claim above is drawn from these. The reading of them is ours. Source: https://cinepixo.com/blog/josephine-lovett-wrote-the-flapper-into-american-film-the-academy-nominated-her-for-it Written for CinePixo. Nothing on this page is imported prose.