Biography

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.

- IMDb mini biography by: Charles Perry