16 A Few Good Stories from In Conversation with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

Transcript:

Host: I mean you seem to be such a knowledgeable person who comes to film history, do you have any favorite stories or have you met any maniacs, you know? Have you met any of these great the great directors of the great auteurs or have you had any experiences worth sharing.

Rosanne: I have – gosh – there’s so many stories. I worked in television for 20 years so there are good and bad stories. I don’t need to recount the bad ones but one survives all those and moves forward. That’s what you want to do and it’s been interesting to study the greats and introduce them to students and see how they respond. It’s so interesting because yes we teach Preston Sturges of course because he comes from the screenwriting world. There was a new book a couple years ago based on Charlie Bracket’s diaries and Charlie Brackett wrote with Preston but also wrote with Billy Wilder and that was a big you know. That’s a really interesting pair to piece up because Billy Wilder came to this country and didn’t speak English yet and Charlie Brackett had gone to some Ivy League college so of course he did and yet you know you got the ideas from one and the sort of quippy dialogue from the other until the one caught up to the – you know language is different in every country even between the states and the UK right we have different phraseology. So it was important to catch up to that and then Billy Wilder could go off and write on his own but then Charlie Bracket gets forgot sort of in history but he got an Oscar for writing the “Titanic” that happened in the 1950s with Barbara Stanwick which is a really great version of Titanic.