Part of the California State University, Fullerton Faculty Noon Time Talks at the Pollak Library.
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Transcript:
Really more interesting, I want to know more about Jennie Louise Toussaint Welcome. That is actually her full name, which is beautiful. She as well, she wrote a movie that was meant to be the answer to “Birth of a Nation”, right? She wrote a movie in defense of how badly African-Americans were treated in “Birth of a Nation”, that doesn’t exist anymore. Bits and pieces online you can find of “The Charge of the Colored Divisions”. She was covering the African-American men in World War I, right? So she did some work like that, both reality and fiction. I have to believe we’ll find some more work on her, because her brother was Booker T. Washington’s personal photographer during the Harlem Renaissance and her parents were the butler and maid to President Ulysses S. Grant, so there’s got to be somebody mentioning them somewhere. It’s just that nobody’s put all that together, but I really think we’re going to to get more about her pretty soon.
Dr. Rosanne Welch discusses the women in her new book “When Women Wrote Hollywood” which covers female screenwriters from the Silents through the early 1940s when women wrote over 50% of films and Frances Marion was the highest paid screenwriter (male or female) and the first to win 2 Oscars. Yet, she fails to appear in film history books, which continue to regurgitate the myth that male directors did it all – even though it’s been proven that the only profitable movies Cecil B. de Mille ever directed were all written by Jeannie Macpherson film ever won for Best Picture was written by Robert E. Sherwood (who people have heard of, mostly due to his connection to Dorothy Parker) and Joan Harrison.
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