Part of the California State University, Fullerton Faculty Noon Time Talks at the Pollak Library.
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Transcript:
I love Joan because she also wrote some wonderful novels. This novel was written by her husband, John Gregory Dunn, Living Off The Big Screen. If you want to know anything about how a movie gets made. It took them eight years to make Up Close And Personal. How many rewrites? How many notes from the various Studios. That is the best — it’s a nice slim little book but it walks you through the process of everything that had to do until that movie was finally made. It started out as the story of a famous news anchor who had died of a heroin overdose and Disney wanted to make the movie and one of the notes they got was “Does she have to die in the end?” to which Joan Didion said “Well if she’s not named Jessica Savitch she doesn’t have to” and they changed it and they made it a love story. So there you go, but going through the the gyrations they went through is fascinating.
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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* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!
† Available from the LA Public Library
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