Part of the California State University, Fullerton Faculty Noon Time Talks at the Pollak Library.
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Transcript:
What’s interesting to me about A Star Is Born is that all of the three first original versions — next one being from the 70s — which is the Kris Kristofferson Barbra Streisand version — all of these had a female co-writer. This is Joan Didion. She and her husband John Gregory Dunn were novelists in New York who also wrote movies. They wrote the third adaptation of A Star Is Born so we have a female perspective in all these movies.
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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