I’ve always been pretty open about the idea that children in Hollywood should be forced to take a class taught by not just people like Kurt Russell and Jodie Foster but by, like, Jeff Cohen, better known as both Chunk from The Goonies and Ke Huy Quan’s entertainment lawyer. Now, Mary Mitchel technically would not qualify to teach that class, as she was twenty-one when she made her screen debut, but she did move on to one of the kind of behind-the-scenes jobs that I feel should be discussed more. Interestingly, she did so after going to UCLA with some guy named Coppola.
She has no Wikipedia page, so we’re kind of winging things here on what little is on her IMDb page. (Which doesn’t have a lot, as established, but does link to her brother, Tony Dingman, who was “poet in residence” on the set of The Rainmaker.) Despite the brevity of her acting career—1961 to 1967—I have actually seen several things she’s been in, and not just because of my obsession with Sammy, the Way-Out Seal. She was in two Perry Mason episodes. She was in two beach movies, once billed above Raquel Welch, and Panic in the Year Zero! Oddly, Frankie Avalon wasn’t in the beach movies but was in that one. She also did an impressive array of ‘60s sitcoms, appearing twice as Wally’s girlfriend.
No, I haven’t seen all of that, but I did see some of it. Based on her acting career, she might have been able to go on doing guest shots and bit roles the way a lot of other women have. I don’t know if it was a conscious decision to stop—again, our sources are sparse, here—but the fact that she met that Coppola guy is undeniable, since one of her acting credits was Dementia-13. She did keep acting after that; the only things I’m certain I’ve seen her in are from later. However, given how dismally incomplete certain categories are on IMDb, it seems not unlikely that the end of her acting career and the start of her later career overlapped.
Because script supervisor is one of those categories you just don’t have a full grasp on from IMDb. It’s frustrating, and not just because of the difficulties it produces in writing these columns. It’s one of those jobs that was originally filled predominantly by women, though I don’t think that’s why IMDb doesn’t list it. It’s because one of IMDb’s greatest failings is that jobs are incomplete if they aren’t flashy. Script supervision is important—there’s a lot of work to the job. But it isn’t something the average person thinks about and so credits aren’t as meticulous.
Actually, her son—born around the same time as she stopped acting and therefore likely part of the reason for her career change—is a property master, and therefore I assume his IMDb page is incomplete, too. Too few people care. They are both involved in fields that are vital to filmmaking yet are forgotten by the average person. It’s a decent choice for those former child stars who don’t go on to be adult stars but don’t want to leave show business behind. Heck, even Carrie Fisher worked as a script doctor, a place her IMDb page isn’t complete, either.
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