June Mathis helped shape Hollywood's silent era through screenwriting power

June Mathis, screenwriter behind Valentino’s stardom, played a pivotal role in early Hollywood before being sidelined by studio politics.

Screenwriter June Mathis holds a feather fan. (c) John Springer/Corbis

By Anna Fadiah and Hayu Andini

In the formative years of Hollywood, women held an array of powerful positions in filmmaking—a contrast to the male-dominated industry that would emerge later. Among those early visionaries, one name stands out as both a creative force and a cautionary tale: June Mathis. A trailblazing screenwriter and executive, Mathis helped shape silent-era cinema and propelled actors like Rudolph Valentino to stardom. Her influence is the focus of June Mathis: The Forgotten Visionary, a compelling biography by Thomas Slater that shines a light on her remarkable, if underappreciated, legacy.

June Mathis helped shape Hollywood's silent era through screenwriting power, a fact that is especially apparent in her most famous works. As Slater outlines, she was the mastermind behind the scripts for The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and Blood and Sand (1922). These films did more than entertain—they cemented the star power of Valentino, whose onscreen presence electrified audiences. The tango sequence in The Four Horsemen, in particular, showcased Valentino in a scene both romantic and stylistically groundbreaking. It was Mathis, not the film’s director Rex Ingram, who insisted on the inclusion of the tango—a detail that elevated the entire picture.

By 1922, Mathis had risen even further, taking editorial control of Goldwyn Pictures. Her ascent was emblematic of a short-lived era when women could ascend to powerful studio roles, a reality that would change swiftly with the consolidation of Hollywood's major players. At Goldwyn, she began working with director Erich von Stroheim on Greed (1924), a dark, ambitious adaptation of Frank Norris’s McTeague. Though the film is now hailed as a masterpiece of early cinema, its financial failure and epic production problems reflected the tensions between commercial studios and visionary artists—tensions that Mathis had to navigate firsthand.

But no project tested Mathis more than Ben-Hur, a production beset by logistical nightmares and bloated costs. Hoping to bring authenticity to the Biblical epic, Mathis moved the shoot to Italy in 1923. The decision proved disastrous. Technical problems, escalating expenses, and subpar footage eventually forced the studio to intervene. In 1924, Goldwyn Pictures merged with Metro Pictures and Louis B. Mayer Productions to create Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), a corporate juggernaut that prioritized profit over experimentation. In the reshuffling, Mathis and the film’s original director were both dismissed. The film was recast, rescripted, and reshot in America. The resulting version, released in 1925, became a massive success—but without Mathis’s involvement.

After leaving Goldwyn, Mathis took a less public-facing role at First National Pictures, overseeing productions rather than writing them herself. Her diminished presence in the industry mirrored the broader decline of women’s influence in Hollywood as the studio system ossified. Tragically, Mathis died in 1927 at just 40 years old, leaving behind a legacy of innovation, elegance, and resilience.

Despite the brevity of her career, Mathis’s impact was profound. As Slater documents in his thoroughly researched biography, her role in shaping the silent film era was anything but incidental. She brought sophistication to screenwriting at a time when the craft was still emerging. Her understanding of character, tone, and visual storytelling made her a natural collaborator for directors, and her editorial instincts helped shepherd some of the era’s most enduring works to the screen.

One of the most poignant elements in Slater’s account is the debate over authorship between Mathis and Ingram for The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. While directors often received the lion’s share of credit for a film’s artistic achievements, Slater argues that Mathis’s contributions were vital, especially in orchestrating Valentino’s magnetic entrance. She had specified the tango and other details in her notes, setting the mood and atmosphere for one of silent cinema’s most iconic sequences.

Slater also emphasizes how rare it is to find detailed, focused studies on silent-era women filmmakers. In this sense, his book is not just a biography but a reclamation of history. At a time when women were allowed to lead creative departments, Mathis stood at the forefront—but her erasure from mainstream film history reflects the very gender biases that took root as the industry matured. Her story is both inspirational and sobering.

June Mathis helped shape Hollywood's silent era through screenwriting power resonates not just as a headline, but as an accurate distillation of her life’s work. She was more than just a writer; she was a storyteller, a strategist, and a survivor in a system that eventually turned against her. Her screenplays combined romanticism with emotional depth, and her editorial choices revealed a cinematic sensibility far ahead of her time.

While The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and Blood and Sand continue to be studied for their historical and artistic value, it is Mathis’s role in bringing them to life that deserves equal recognition. Her instincts—both creative and commercial—were sharp, and her legacy is long overdue for celebration. With Thomas Slater’s biography, that long-delayed recognition has begun.

In a film industry increasingly aware of its historical exclusions, revisiting the work of pioneers like Mathis is more important than ever. Her story reminds us that talent knows no gender—and that the erasure of women's contributions to cinema was neither inevitable nor justified. June Mathis helped shape Hollywood's silent era through screenwriting power, and now, nearly a century later, she is finally being acknowledged as one of its founding architects.