Cari Beauchamp, the respected film historian who put readers and viewers in close touch with the early days of Hollywood through her painstaking research as an author, editor and documentary filmmaker, died Thursday. She was 74.
Beauchamp died of natural causes at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, her son Jake Flynn told The Hollywood Reporter.
She was unable to attend an Oct. 28 event at the TCL Chinese Theatre that celebrated authors represented on THR’s recent unveiling of “The 100 Greatest Film Books of All Time.”
Beauchamp is on the exclusive list thanks to Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood. First published in 1997, it centers on Marion, who became the highest-paid screenwriter, man or woman, in Hollywood by 1917 before receiving Oscars for The Big House (1930) and The Champ (1931).
Beauchamp then wrote and produced for TCM a 2001 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 female writer, Anita Loos, who authored the 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; contributed to the scripts for such landmark films as Red-Headed Woman (1932), San Francisco (1939) and The Women (1939); and wrote Gigi for Audrey Hepburn on Broadway.
She also drew from letters, speeches, oral histories, memoirs and autobiographies from actors, directors, screenwriters, editors and cinematographers for another enlightening book, 2020’s My First Time in Hollywood.
Her other books included 1992’s Hollywood on the Riviera: The Inside Story of the Cannes Film Festival; 2006’s Adventures of a Hollywood Secretary: Her Private Letters From Inside the Studios of the 1920s; and 2009’s Joseph P. Kennedy Presents: His Hollywood Years.
“Cari Beauchamp was a dear friend and role model to me and to many others who write about Hollywood,” THR executive editor Scott Feinberg said. “As was evident on and off the page, she was whip smart, fiercely opinionated and endlessly curious.
“Few people, if any, have ever known as much — or written as prolifically and beautifully — about the business as she did. Her passing is a loss not just for the family and friends whom she loved and who loved her back, but for anyone who loves movies.”
Beauchamp was born on Sept. 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 is out there. You just gotta dig,” she once told Vanity Fair, where she was a contributor.
She served as the first president of the National Women’s Political Caucus of California in 1973 and as a campaign manager for Janet Gray Hayes, elected mayor of San Jose in 1976. And from 1979-82, she was California Gov. Jerry Brown’s press secretary during his second term, when she said she wrote about 300 press releases a year.
Cari Beauchamp was California Gov. Jerry Brown’s press secretary from 1979-82.
Courtesy of Beauchamp family
She started writing on a full-time basis in 1990 and moved to Los Angeles in 1999.
Beauchamp was a go-to expert for documentaries on Marion Davies, Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo, Irving Thalberg and others. She offered insight to TCM’s Moguls and Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood and Mark Cousins’ expansive The Story of Film and was a welcomed interviewer and presenter at the TCM Classic Film Festival over the years.
A resident scholar of the Mary Pickford Foundation and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts — twice — she was 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-nominated PBS documentary The Day My God Died, which was filmed in Nepal and India and revolved around girls sold into sexual slavery and those hoping to save them.
In addition to Vanity Fair — for whom she co-authored a great piece with Judy Balaban about LSD use in Hollywood in the 1960s — Beauchamp contributed to THR, IndieWire, Variety, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and many other publications.
On her X (formerly Twitter) page, she described herself as “a joyous feminist who often finds herself pissed off.”
Survivors include her sons, Jake and Teo.
Beauchamp certainly loved film. “When I go and see a movie, I sit down and know the screen’s gonna light up and take me someplace I haven’t been,” she said in a 2015 interview. “It brings the world to you.
“That’s part of what the silent era did. People who never went five miles from where they were born, all of a sudden the whole world’s available to them for a nickel.”
