Jeanie Macpherson herself repeatedly notes in press releases and interviews that Cecil B. DeMille was notoriously hard to please, requesting endless drafts of scripts, but that, “He will take advice from anyone – if it’s right. He won’t take it from anyone if it’s wrong.” Over the years, Macpherson was one of the few people who was able to appease “Mr. Hard to Please.”
Jeanie Macpherson: A Life Unknown by Amelia Phillips
* 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
The Write Or Die Chicks, founded by 3 of my former MFA alums from Cal State Fullerton (Deanna Gomez, Mercedes Milner, and Angela Thomas) were kind enough recently to name me on their Writer Crush Wednesday post which made my day.
After their graduation a year ago May, they came out of the dust of the classroom (CP 126) where they spent so much time for two years ready to take over the town with their writing and their energy.
wish them all the luck they’ll need (because they already have all the talent required). Starting such a writers group is always a great way to continue creating new material with caring collaborators.
Dr. Rosanne Welch, PhD is this week’s #WriterCrushWednesday We thank her for being an inspiring and influential Screenwriter, Author, Professor and Mentor from her work on #TouchedByAnAngel to her lectures at CSUF and every publication in between.
Now that the heat wave has passed — for now — I took to my outdoors “desk” to work my on Fact Checking Hollywood book coming next year.
My schedule seems to include at least one book a year, along with several articles, so taking some sustained, dedicated time to write is always good — especially when it so nice outdoors!
This one allowed me to riff on some of my favorite female science fiction writers across time, whether they be novelists or television writers. It also opened up a good conversation on what art we support and include in our lives – and what that art says to us and about us. — Rosanne
Transcript:
…and she came up with Frankenstein which is pretty crazy because we all think of Frankenstein. It’s like the bedrock of… it’s been around forever because it has, but she just made it up. Which i think is fascinating and there’s a lot of themes to it that if you take a class — some classes discuss Frankenstein — very interesting what’s going on in her world there. She had had a miscarriage and she had a lot of thoughts about loss and about parenthood and in many ways when you think about Frankenstein it’s crazy because it’s the story of a bad father right? Who creates a child and then lets it go running loose and doesn’t teach or care for it. She’s really thinking about the obligations and all of that.
* 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!
Learn more about the American Revolution through the eyes of an important, Italian Immigrant, Filippo Mazzei. Read his story today!
“To refute a book that encompassed seven volumes, Filippo required a four-volume set, so many were the misrepresentations he found. When the book Historical and Political Research on the United States of North America went to the press for the long process of being typeset and printed, he had time to entertain friends in either his residence or at the ambassador’s residence if Jefferson wanted to make their deeper acquaintance as well.”
A hit television show about a fictitious rock band, The Monkees (1966-1968) earned two Emmys–Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Directorial Acheivement in Comedy.
Capitalizing on the show’s success, the actual band formed by the actors, at their peak, sold more albums than The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined, and set the stage for other musical TV characters from The Partridge Family to Hannah Montana. In the late 1980s, the Monkees began a series of reunion tours that continued into their 50th anniversary.
This book tells the story of The Monkees and how the show changed television, introducing a new generation to the fourth-wall-breaking slapstick created by Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers.
Its creators contributed to the innovative film and television of 1970s with projects like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laugh-In and Welcome Back, Kotter. Immense profits from the show, its music and its merchandising funded the producers’ move into films such as Head, Easy Riderand Five Easy Pieces.
In fact, John Steinbeck who was writing about how his movie was adapted, wrote that not only Johnson the man who did it did better than his own novel. So the man who wrote Grapes of Wrath was crediting the man who adapted it and yet our own way of doing news and writing about films always privileges the director. Which makes me crazy I don’t believe in that. It’s also sad and easy for men to dismiss women in their memoirs. We all know the picture of this guy. He is very famous for being a director. People think about his films. He admits in his memoirs that he learned everything he knows from some middle-aged American woman whose name was Eve Unsell she was a producer for Universal Studios the first woman to have her own production company they sent her to England to fix their production company in England and she trained him. Could he at least mention her name in the memoir? Right? And people researching her might find her mentioned and be able to do more work on her. So it’s very easy to dismiss people.
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.
* 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
This is an excellent example of one television show promoting another… and note that Dick Clark has no attitude in his voice when he lists The Monkees among that pretty hallowed hall of 60s hit makers. — Rosanne
Michael Lynch shared a link to the group: Zilch! A Monkees Podcast!May 25 at 8:06 AM
Monkee business on ‘American Bandstand.’ Dubbed audio, but still, a nice peek of people digging the Monkees when they were still a relatively new “thing.”
Airdate: October 8, 1966
Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart wrote “Last Train..” as a subtle protest of Vietnam as the man catching the train is going off to an army base in the fictitious town of Clarksville and he doesn’t know if he’s ”ever coming home”. This, the very first song by The Monkees (Mickey Dolenz with Boyce & Hart’s band The Candy Store Prophets), is at #6 today and will peak at #1 next month. “The Monkees” TV series premiered last month on Sept. 12 on NBC.
Depending on when this episode was actually taped, it’s just possible that this is the first time some of these kids had ever heard a Monkees song. Dancers today include Toni Kashinoff (1:15), Theodosia Dayton (wearing glasses at 1:20), Laura Bravo (1:30), Lauren Montgomery (2:00) Marcia Silverman (3:03), and Martha Sedaris (3:14).
A hit television show about a fictitious rock band, The Monkees (1966-1968) earned two Emmys–Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Directorial Acheivement in Comedy.
Capitalizing on the show’s success, the actual band formed by the actors, at their peak, sold more albums than The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined, and set the stage for other musical TV characters from The Partridge Family to Hannah Montana. In the late 1980s, the Monkees began a series of reunion tours that continued into their 50th anniversary.
This book tells the story of The Monkees and how the show changed television, introducing a new generation to the fourth-wall-breaking slapstick created by Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers.
Its creators contributed to the innovative film and television of 1970s with projects like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laugh-In and Welcome Back, Kotter. Immense profits from the show, its music and its merchandising funded the producers’ move into films such as Head, Easy Riderand Five Easy Pieces.
On Saturday June 1, 2019 from 12:30 pm to 1:20 pm I had the great joy of hosting a panel at the Denver Popular Culture Con celebrating the work of 4 of the alumni of our Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting – Sydney Haven, Amy Banks, Mikayla Daniels, Kelley Zinge – who themselves were celebrating the female screenwriters they each researched and wrote about in our book “When Women Wrote Hollywood”.
The audience enjoyed the comfortable style of our panel along with the stories they had to tell of women who ran their own studios, wrote/produced/directed and often starred in their own films which all came under the banner of the Con’s “Reel Heroes” track. Women such as Bess Meredyth, Fredericka Sagor Mass, Jane Murfin, and Lillian Hellman are heroes to the many female artists doing that same work today against the ridiculous comments about whether or not studios can risk loaning so much production monies to ‘untried’ talents. We need to tell these stories over and over so that those comments can be relegated to the historical trash heap on which they belong.
So enjoy listening to these newly-minted scholars and remember their names – along with the names of the women they honored with their writing. And many thanks to Sydney Haven for suggesting we submit a panel proposal! It was a great weekend!
* 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
I met up for dinner with several @mfascreenwriter alums and authors from “When Women Wrote Hollywood” before our presentation at @denverpopculturecon last week.
Always great seeing familiar faces and catching up their lives and careers.
A Denver local recommend @osteriamarcodenver and it was tasty!
![04 Mary Shelley and The Monster from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (38 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/scifi-rmw-cpp-04.jpeg)
![06 Forgotten Women from “When Women Wrote Hollywood” with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/csuf-rmw-w3h-06.jpeg)
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