Kate Corbaley(1878-1938)
- Writer
Kate Alaska Hinckley Corbaley was born Sept. 1, 1878 at sea off the
coast of Mazatlan, Mexico, while her parents were on their way to
California. Because of a maritime tradition that the captain can name
any child born aboard his vessel, she was given the middle name
Alaska, after the name of the ship. She came from a well-to-do family
and became a screenwriter by necessity when her husband left her and
moved to China. She wrote some 20 silent films between 1916 and 1926,
several of them short domestic comedies for Mr. & Mrs. Sidney Drew. In
1917 her screenplay Real Folks won a Photoplay Magazine contest and was
produced by Triangle Films. As a successful screenwriter, she was for a
while the "principal" of the Palmer Photoplay Corporation, a
correspondence school for aspiring screenwriters which also acted as an
agency. A "graduation address" she wrote in this capacity, preserved at
the library of the Motion Picture Academy, shows a resolute commitment
to shaping a commercial property. In 1927 she joined the MGM script
department, where her job was to choose potential film projects. Studio
head Louis B. Mayer trusted her judgment and refused to have plot
summaries read to him by anyone else. She had an eye for successful
plots and would sometimes change a plot as she was reading it to make
it more commercial. A November 30, 1937 Los Angeles Times story
reported that she knew the plots of 5000 plays and novels. She died in
Los Angeles on September 15, 1938.
