Frank Beddor
Liz Cavalier and Frank Beddor crowded into a doorway, both in black coats and black hats, leaning their heads together and smiling at the camera.

The collection

Liz Cavalier Collection

Three decades of collaboration, and the stories that came out of it. Some she wrote alone, some she and Frank built together — all of them still waiting to be made.

Who Liz Was

Liz Cavalier and Frank Beddor wrote together for the better part of thirty years, until her death in 2016. They met through a producer friend in Los Angeles. The first thing Frank read of hers was Helmet Head Girl Hero, a script about a precocious girl who spies on her neighbours through binoculars — which was, more or less, Liz’s own childhood in upstate New York. She had been told for years that nobody made films with girls at the centre of them. She wrote one anyway.

What followed was a working life conducted almost entirely in coffee shops. She wrote the Hatter M graphic novels with Frank, and the characters readers remember from them are hers: Realm, the Shaman of the White Flower Tribe; Jet Seer; Nekko, the Zen guide who spends Zen of Wonder telling Hatter to stop being so rational. She also built the Hatter M Institute for Paranormal Travel, the conceit that Hatter’s thirteen years on Earth were real and under investigation — and then never once broke character about it, at a convention, in a school, or in an interview.

She was ahead of her time in the ordinary, unglamorous way that only shows up later: writing women leads a decade before the industry wanted them, taking cold showers, reading the people everyone else would get to in ten years. She worked fast and in forms that finish — scripts and graphic novels, not novels, because she wanted to see a thing made and put in front of readers.

“I see how much of herself was in the characters she created. That’s where the best writing comes from.”

Frank Beddor

The Collection

  • Liz Cavalier’s title treatment for Helmet Head: the words set large in red italic capitals, with her name beneath them, over a collage of 1960s spy paperbacks and television stills. A black-and-white cutout of a bob-haired child in a checked shirt stands in front of them, looking straight out.

    Available

    Helmet Head Girl Hero

    Screenplay

    Beverly is nine, keeps binoculars in a tree, and knows more about her street than anyone should. Liz’s breakout script, written straight out of her own childhood, and the one that brought her and Frank together in the first place.

  • Key art for Helmet Head Goes to the Moon! — a 1950s illustration of a suburban street of ranch houses and lawns, a woman in a pink dress by a station wagon and a man pushing a mower. The title is set across it in large red capitals, and a torn paper circle pasted over the sky shows a rocket climbing towards a full moon.

    Available

    Helmet Head Goes to the Moon!

    Screenplay

    The same girl and the same binoculars, on a scale that needs a studio: what Beverly finds on her street turns out to be a genuine Russian conspiracy.

  • Four Women Airforce Service Pilots in flight jackets and boots walking towards the camera with their parachutes, a B-17 Flying Fortress behind them. United States Army Air Forces photograph, 1944.

    Available

    Sis Kipling

    World War II romantic adventure

    A Women Airforce Service Pilot who can fly better than any man on the field and is not allowed to prove it.

  • Three children in winter coats and knitted hats standing on a snowy slope, a grey wolf-like dog in front of them and a snow-covered peak rising behind. One of them carries a long wooden handle over his shoulder.

    Available

    Eating Avalanches

    Family adventure

    A dog, a mountain above Telluride, and the old mine shafts underneath it — a treasure hunt in the Goonies line.

  • A man in striped hospital pyjamas and a cowboy hat walks barefoot away down a dirt road towards a low red sun. A derelict ranch house, a windmill and a long flat mesa stand in the haze ahead of him.

    Available

    Where the Sun Goes

    Romantic, surreal modern Western

    Spinner Kipling escapes a psychiatric hospital for New Mexico and the cowboy life he has always wanted. What he finds is a troubled ranch owner, and a bond unlikely enough to let them both claim a life outside other people’s definitions of sane and free.

  • A painted illustration of a girl with a black bob and goggles pushed up on her forehead, looking up with wide eyes. Behind her a tiled stairwell spirals away into the distance in teal and orange, small robots climbing down its steps towards a glowing light at the centre.

    Available

    Hazel Loo

    Science-fiction novel for young readers

    Hazel Loo is twelve, lives in a city of bullet trains and robot housekeepers, and is one bad report away from Tech Academy, where they knock the imagination out of you. Then something she dreamed turns out to be real — and it is loose in her building.

Remembering Liz

Liz Cavalier in a kitchen doorway in a white apron over a checked shirt, both fists raised and grinning at the camera. Liz Cavalier at an exhibitor table on a convention floor, pulling a face as she folds a red foil card sleeve. Her badge reads Liz Cavalier, Automatic Pictures, Exhibitor.
Frank Beddor and Liz Cavalier behind a convention booth, a Princess Alyss Heart banner standing behind them and the hall crowded in the background. A dozen people crowded together for a photograph in an office after a script reading. Frank Beddor is at the front in a pale sweater; Liz Cavalier stands beside him in a green sweater, chin on her hand.

In Her Own Circle

Frank and Gary Murakami, Liz’s partner of thirty years, spent an episode of All Things Alice on her — the scripts, the characters, the practical jokes, the thirty years.