“From the start Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin had a writing career like few other writers in the hollywood of the 1940s and 1950s. Their career earned them praise as ‘probably the greatest pure screenwriting collaboration in all Tollywood history'”
A Team in Passionate Action: Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin Rosanne Welch
* 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
To highlight the wonderful yet largely forgotten work of a collection of female screenwriters from the early years of Hollywood (and as a companion to the book, When Women Wrote Hollywood) we will be posting quick bits about the many films they wrote along with links to further information and clips from their works which are still accessible online. Take a few moments once or twice a week to become familiar with their names and their stories. I think you’ll be surprised at how much bold material these writers tackled at the birth of this new medium. — Rosanne Welch
The Women is a 1939 American comedy-drama film directed by George Cukor. The film is based on Clare Boothe Luce’s play of the same name, and was adapted for the screen by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin, who had to make the film acceptable for the Production Code for it to be released.
The film stars Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard, Joan Fontaine, Lucile Watson, Mary Boland, Florence Nash, and Virginia Grey, as well as Marjorie Main and Phyllis Povah, the last two of whom reprised their stage roles from the play. Ruth Hussey, Virginia Weidler, Butterfly McQueen, and Hedda Hopperalso appeared in smaller roles. Fontaine was the last surviving actress with a credited role in the film; she died in 2013.
The film continued the play’s all-female tradition—the entire cast of more than 130 speaking roles was female. Set in the glamorous Manhattan apartments of high society evoked by Cedric Gibbons, and in Reno, Nevada, where they obtain their divorces, it presents an acidic commentary on the pampered lives and power struggles of various rich, bored wives and other women they come into contact with. — Wikipedia
* 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
You’ll notice in this particular poster it’s Frank Capra’s film and we have to really down here to see who wrote the movie right? Who broke the movie is this marvelous couple Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, a married couple who wrote for 50 years together. They wrote the play and the film version of The Diary of Anne Frank. They won a Pulitzer Prize for that. Capra never won a Pulitzer Prize. Why is that Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life? Explain that to me. I don’t like that. They also adapted the Thin Man films which were highly successful and there’s a book about them which is lovely but much less read than the biography of Frank Capra. There is a Capra story that I tell my students it may be anecdotal but Robert Riskin — who wrote many of Capra’s best films and won Academy Awards in his life — was said to have heard often Frank Capra say “I have the Capra touch”. It makes the movies beautiful and one day Riskin handed in 200 blank pages said put your fucking touch on that! Excuse the Americanism but seriously Riskin in the man who made all those films. Why is it we are not talking about him?
* 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
On Saturday, November 3rd, 2018 several of the contributors to When Women Wrote Hollywood gathered at the Skylark Bookshop in Columbia, Missouri for a signing and launch party that functioned like a mini-reunion of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting Class of 2017.
Many thanks to all who came to hear them each speak with passion about the research subjects who became whole chapters in this book of essays on female screenwriters from the Silent Era into the 1940s.
* 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
Watching several current and alumni students of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting who shared their research on female screenwriters with professional presentations at the Citizen Jane Film Festival in a panel titled: Frank and Funny Female Screenwriters Who Should Be More Famous”. @citizenjanefilmfestival
Rosanne Welch, PhD, Author of Why The Monkees Matter, presents “How The Monkees Changed Television” at a Cal State Fullerton Lunch Lecture on May 8, 2018.
In this talk, she shows how The Monkees, and specifically their presence on television, set the stage for large changes to come in the late 1960s.
Transcript
They also had their own comic book and comic books are cool. We always love a comic book. So that means you’re you’ve seeped into the culture at the moment. Peter Tork was at the Monterey Pop Festival and at one point they asked him to quiet the crowd down because a rumor came that the Beatles were there and they weren’t and people were getting agitated that they’d been lied to and they asked Peter Tork to stand up while the Grateful Dead were performing, interrupt the show, and say I just need for you all to calm down and they listened to Peter. He was that important that he could shut the crowd up at a rock festival right an early version of Coachella. So I think that’s pretty cool. Hirschfeld if you know anything about Broadway musicals and Broadway performance Al Hirschfeld does drawings of all the famous people in New York. For TV Guide he did this drawing of the Monkees in 1966. So they were important enough for Hirschfeld to do a drawing of them which is pretty cool.
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.
To highlight the wonderful yet largely forgotten work of a collection of female screenwriters from the early years of Hollywood (and as a companion to the book, When Women Wrote Hollywood) we will be posting quick bits about the many films they wrote along with links to further information and clips from their works which are still accessible online. Take a few moments once or twice a week to become familiar with their names and their stories. I think you’ll be surprised at how much bold material these writers tackled at the birth of this new medium. — Rosanne Welch
Jane Murfin (October 27, 1884 – August 10, 1955) was an American playwright and screenwriter. The author of several successful plays, she wrote some of them with actress Jane Cowl—most notably Smilin’ Through (1919), a sentimental fantasy that was adapted three times for motion pictures. In Hollywood Murfin became a popular screenwriter whose credits include What Price Hollywood? (1932), for which she received an Academy Award nomination. In the 1920s she wrote and produced films for her dog Strongheart, the first major canine star. — Wikipedia
* 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
On Saturday, November 3rd, 2018 several of the contributors to When Women Wrote Hollywood gathered at the Skylark Bookshop in Columbia, Missouri for a signing and launch party that functioned like a mini-reunion of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting Class of 2017.
Many thanks to all who came to hear them each speak with passion about the research subjects who became whole chapters in this book of essays on female screenwriters from the Silent Era into the 1940s.
* 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
Learn more about the American Revolution through the eyes of an important, Italian Immigrant, Filippo Mazzei. Read his story today!
““Just the other day General Washington sent a letter to General Howe,” Filippo began. “demanding respectable treatment for our Colonel or we’d do the same by their Brigadier-General, man by the name of Prescott.”
“Washington’d prefer trading ‘em to having to keep ‘em,” clearly the barkeep also liked being the most informed man in the room, and didn’t like the idea that Filippo bested him with the most current news.”
Once again I’m honored to be included in one of ATB Publishing’s pop culture collections, this one focused on perhaps my favorite TV series to teach: Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Among the 139 essays covering all 139 episodes included in Outside In Takes a Stab you’ll find my essay on the Emmy-nominated episode “Hush”. It’s called “As Silent as ABC” as it offers a scene by scene breakdown, illustrating how this episode offers the perfect template to A, B, and C storylines for new writers of one-hour dramas. So it’s for Buffy geeks AND TV writing geeks. One cool fact is that Editor Robert Smith? donates 50% of the proceeds of all sales to Avert, a UK-based HIV/AIDS charity. Another cool fact is that my Stephens MFA student Mary Gwen Scott (who wrote her graduate thesis on the enduring influence of Buffy and Harry Potter on the generations that have followed them) will have an essay in their upcoming volume on the Buffy spinoff Angel.
Put ten Buffy fans in a room, and you’ll wind up with eleven opinions, fourteen heated debates about the nature of the soul and somebody cosplaying Mirror Willow as an Initiative-produced demon hybrid with a stake in her arm. That’s because Buffy fans are gloriously weird, uniquely different and sometimes entirely outlandish. And so is this book.
Celebrating over 25 years of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, OUTSIDE IN TAKES A STAB is a collection of 139 reviews, one for every story of the television series, plus the movie and a couple extras. Well, we say “reviews”, but we mean that loosely: within these pages, you’ll find mix tapes, mazes, recipes, speeches, games, songs, crosswords, plays, policy documents, D&D manuals, documentaries, term papers and a Turing machine. Not to mention insightful and thoughtful articles, examining the world of Sunnydale from just about every aspect imaginable… and then some!
Provocative, engrossing, hilarious and utterly gonzo. These aren’t your mother’s reviews.
Featuring contributions from Susanne Lambdin, Jill Sherwin, Rosanne Welch, Keith R.A. DeCandido, Robert Greenberger, Rich Handley, David A. McIntee, and over a hundred more!
As with all previous OUTSIDE IN volumes, 5% of the full retail price of all sales of this book will be donated to Avert, a UK-based HIV/AIDS charity.
![04 The “A Film By” Problem from Why I Created a History of Screenwriting Course [Video] (0:52)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/srn-rmw-2018-04.jpeg)
and Follow![28 Comics and Festivals from How the Monkees Changed Television [Video] (1:00)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/monkees-tv-28.jpeg)
![My essay, “As Silent as ABC” appears in New Collection on Buffy The Vampire Slayer [Writing]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/outside-in-buffy-cover.jpg)
