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It’s hard to imagine today that there was a time when almost half the films made were written by women, but this was true of Hollywood in the teens through the mid-1920s.

And no one was more in demand than Frances Marion, America’s highest-paid screenwriter, male or female, from 1915 to 1933 and winner of two Academy Awards. She wrote 200 films for stars so luminous we need only their last names to recognize them: Pickford, Harlow, Gish, Gable, Cooper, Valentino and Garbo. Yet Frances Marion’s name and those of her once-famous colleagues like Jane Murfin, Tess Slessinger, June Mathis, Anita Loos and Bess Meredyth have been so long forgotten that they don’t even have stars on Hollywood Boulevard.

Spotlighting the powerful role these writers played in Hollywood’s early years, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art has assembled 16 films from the period for a retrospective that runs from Friday to May 1 at the Bing Theater.

“We are pleased to have the opportunity to help reinstate them to their proper place in history,” says Ian Birnie, director of the film department at LACMA.

“Their incredible influence is seen in the fact that their work spans all genres,” Birnie adds. “Epics like ‘Ben-Hur,’ ‘Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,’ the definitive boxing film ‘The Champ’ and the groundbreaking prison drama ‘The Big House’ were all written or adapted by women. They were well-paid, participated in casting and were welcomed on the set and in the editing room.”

Women had long found refuge in writing. It required only a small investment in paper and pencils, was accomplished in private and provided a creative outlet when little else was expected or accepted of them. At the turn of the century, many of the popular novelists were women; later, Hollywood became a creative magnet of hurly-burly activity where few of the old rules applied.

Movies were an idea one week, in front of the cameras the next and in theaters within a month, and with very few people taking the business of movies seriously, the women were welcomed. Their names didn’t always appear on the screen, but Library of Congress copyright records reveal that women wrote close to half of all the silent films made.

They honed their skills during this era of phenomenal growth. So, when sound arrived, film costs soared and Wall Street seriously invested in the movie business in the late 1920s, they were the seasoned professionals.

Hollywood was a small company town, and many of the writers being recognized in the series were close friends as well as professional colleagues.

Marion said she found “it has always been my own sex who has given me a helping hand when I needed it,” and she found her greatest rewards, both professionally and personally, in her collaborations with actresses who were also her dearest friends, like Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish and Marie Dressler. After adapting the wildly successful “Poor Little Rich Girl” for Pickford, Marion was hired as her exclusive screenwriter in 1917 at the then-unprecedented salary of $50,000 a year, and together they turned out more than a dozen classics, including “The Little Princess,” “Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm” and “Pollyanna.”

Turner Classic Movies is planning a documentary on Marion, and actresses as diverse as Bette Midler, Julia Roberts and Winona Ryder have expressed interest in her story.

Two delightful and recently restored results of what director Clarence Brown called “the Pickford-Marion spontaneous combustion” will be screened April 23: “Amarilly of Clothesline Alley” and “Johanna Enlists.”

The series also offers surprising revelations, one of which is that Marion Davies was much more talented than the sad floozy depicted in the character Susan Alexander in “Citizen Kane.” Over the decades Orson Welles’ fabrication and W.R. Hearst’s real-life “constant companion” have become one and the same in peoples’ memory.

Two films by Marion, “Zander the Great” (1925) and “Blondie of the Follies” (1932), set the record straight. Davies’ bicycle-riding scene, which opens “Zander,” reveals a comedian worthy of Sennett or Chaplin (with whom Davies was reportedly enjoying a fling at the time).

While the focus is on the writers, one of the penumbral effects of this retrospective is the chance to see the stars of early Hollywood in films that in some cases have not been shown on the big screen for decades. If the Barbara Stanwyck version of “Stella Dallas” brought tears to your eyes, bring a box of Kleenex to see the original with Belle Bennett portraying the mother who loves her child so much she pretends to reject her. In begging Sam Goldwyn to cast Bennett, Marion entreated, “Belle Bennett is Stella Dallas,” for she was one of the few who knew that the teenage “younger brother” Belle nursed as he lay dying just before filming began was in actuality her son.

There are dozens of examples that reveal Marion’s unique ability to create three-dimensional characters in a matter of minutes of screen time. When Bennett’s Stella repositions herself on the sidewalk as she flirts with Ronald Colman so he won’t see her younger brothers raucously playing half-naked through the window of their ramshackle house, the audience laughs in sympathy, and yet her character’s background, her dreams and what she has to overcome are all stunningly illuminated.

Gish’s pure pantomime opening in “The Scarlet Letter,” all minutely charted in Marion’s script, immediately establishes Hester Prynne’s conflicts, priorities and character. And if you have never really understood the allure of Valentino--which created such chaos, schools closed for his funeral--you will after you see him dancing that tango in June Mathis’ “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” with live accompaniment provided by the Mont Alto Orchestra.

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The series is laced with little gems such as Hedda Hopper, long before she picked up her poison pen, as the dying mother in “Zander the Great,” Zasu Pitts as Marion Davies’ sister in “Blondie of the Follies,” and, in “Stella Dallas,” a Douglas Fairbanks Jr. so young that his mustache had to be penciled in. There is Lillian Gish as an extra outside the church in “The New York Hat,” Una Merkel deliciously feeding Jean Harlow straight lines in “Red-Headed Woman” and the drop-dead gorgeous but seldom seen Lila Lee and Bebe Daniels in “Male and Female.”

The entire series oozes with double entendres and luscious zingers so quick you’ll miss them if you blink. If there is one film singularly responsible for the restrictive Production Code of 1933, it is Anita Loos’ “Red-Headed Woman,” starring Jean Harlow. Yet it was also Loos’ versatile pen that George Cukor depended upon to keep in the vicious wit of Clare Boothe Luce’s play “The Women,” while phrasing it in a way that scooted around the censors. After writing the adaptation with Jane Murfin, Loos sat next to Cukor on the set, on call to turn the word “virgin” into “a frozen asset.”

It is particularly fitting that the Writers Guild of America is co-sponsoring the series because Marion put her career on the line in 1933 to serve as its vice president and only woman on its first board of directors. Nine years later, Mary McCall Jr. (writer of “Craig’s Wife”) was elected the WGA’s first female president.

By the early 1940s, filmmaking was firmly established as big business, and the resulting quantum growth of administrators and isolation of writers poisoned the waters for the women who were used to being valued collaborators at all levels of production. Marion said that screenwriting became “like writing on the sand with the wind blowing.”

For a while Marion, who by 1925 was making at least $3,000 a week, was able to console herself with her colleague Lenore Coffee’s lament on writing for the studios: “They pick your brains, break your heart, ruin your digestion and what do you get for it? Nothing but a lousy fortune.” Marion stayed at MGM through the end of World War II, when she, like Rosie the Riveter and many other working women, were swept out of their jobs as the men came marching home.

After almost 50 years of paucity, the number of female writers, directors and producers is once again nearing critical mass. Veteran screenwriter and director of “The Parent Trap” Nancy Meyers summarizes the current situation by saying, “‘While I have yet to be asked to adapt Elmore Leonard, the comfort level for women in Hollywood is definitely rising,” and she gives a large portion of the credit to the increase in supportive female studio executives.

Producer and author Lynda Obst proclaims Marion “our spiritual grandmother” and reports an “almost subversive thrill” on the revelation these women once walked the studio halls.

Actress and writer Beth Broderick says learning about her predecessors “is more than an inspiration, it is a lifeline.”

The LACMA film series is a reflection of the reemergence of awareness of women’s significant place in Hollywood’s history. They were directors and producers as well as actresses, but it was as writers that they flourished.