From Wikipedia
Eleanor Gates was born on 26 September 1875 in Shakopee,
Minnesota, southwest of Minneapolis. She later described her early life in her
novel The Biography of a Prairie Girl. Gates married another playwright,
Richard Walton Tully, in 1901 after they had both completed their studies at
the University of California, Berkeley. Gates had worked initially as a writer
for a newspaper in San Francisco, as well as writing novels. In 1907, one of
her novels was illustrated by Arthur Rackham. Her best known work was the play
The Poor Little Rich Girl, which was produced by her husband in 1913. Tully
divorced her in 1914 citing desertion, which Gates admitted.
Before Gates's divorce had been finalized, she married
another divorcé, Frederick Ferdinand Moore, in Paterson, New Jersey, in October
1914. In 1916, they separated when they both realized that they were not
legally married. At the time they both said they intended to remarry when it
could be arranged. Moore later created Book Dealers' Weekly (1925).
At the beginning of 1915, Gates founded the Liberty Feature
Film Company, which was said by Motion Picture News to be the only film company
to be owned and managed by women. The company was led by the wife of an Alaskan
businessman, Sadir Lindblom. In the year that it existed the company created
several two realer films.
The first film, produced in 1917, was The Poor Little Rich
Girl, which starred Mary Pickford. Shirley Temple starred in the 1936 remake of
the same name. The film story, created to cash in on the talents of the
eight-year-old Temple and the rights to the "changing places" story,
was obtained for $40,000 to Gates and an additional $20,000 to Mary Pickford's
company which had made the 1917 film. The new film had made two million dollars
by the end of 1939.
Gates died on 7 March 1951 in Los Angeles County General
Hospital.
