Academic – Page 157 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

Event: Monkeemania in Australia: Celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Monkees Australian Tour in 1968, August 1, 2018, Melbourne

If you’re in Melbourne – or have friends and family there – check out the invitation and GO to this exhibit centered solely on The Monkees in honor of the 50th anniversary of their Australian tour.

In another wonderful example of how The Monkees bring people together I’m happy to help announce an exhibit open to all our Australian Monkees fans. I met Derham Groves, professor architecture at the Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne because he wrote a review of Why The Monkees Matter for The Journal of American Culture and was kind enough to send me a link. Then he happened to be in Los Angeles for a conference so we met for a marvelous dinner of pasta and Monkees conversation in Hollywood.

Derham’s special interest is the influence of popular culture on architecture and design, but he’s written quite a lot about the history of television in Australia, including a book called TV Houses: Television’s Influence on the Australian Home (2004). Last year he curated an exhibition at the Baillieu Library to celebrate the 60th anniversary of television in Australia.

For fun – here are some great clips on Youtube – their arrival and conference:

And the newsreel (though the footage jumps a lot) about their arrival with the funny line “the only thing to rival man’s descent from the apes is their descent from an airplane”:

It’s certainly an event worth celebrating!

Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture

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08 Television After 1968 from How The Monkees Changed Television [Video] (0:55)

What this entire presentation — How The Monkees Changed Television with Rosanne Welch, PhD (Complete Presentation and Q&A) [Video] (45:06)

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

Back in the day — I just mentioned the war — they did have many moments where they referenced the war — the war on poverty — and President Lyndon Johnson and they mentioned particularly — there was a great episode where they were playing dominoes and they dropped all the dominoes and then Davy Jones said to Peter Tork “what do you call this game?” and Peter Tork said “Southeast Asia” and nobody cut that, right, because nobody who is a censor at the network understood what it meant which is pretty shocking if you ask me.

This is Dr. Timothy Leary who was famous back in the day for dropping LSD and whatnot and taking experiments with the psyche and he was watching the program and defining it and recognizing that it was far deeper than anyone else had given it the thought before. So already in the 60s people in the know knew that this was something different and worth paying attention to.

Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture

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About Rosanne Welch, PhD

Rosanne Welch, PhD is a writer, producer and university professor with credits that include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, Touched by an Angel and ABC NEWS/Nightline. Other books include Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture (McFarland, 2017) and Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia and Document Collection (ABC-CLIO, 2017), named to the 2018 Outstanding References Sources List, by the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA), a division of the American Library Association. Welch has also published chapters in Torchwood Declassified: Investigating Mainstream Cult Television (I.B.Tauris) and The American Civil War on Film and TV: Blue and Gray in Black and White and Color (Lexington Books, 2018) and essays in Doctor Who and Race: An Anthology and Outside In Makes it So, and Outside in Boldly Goes (both edited by Robert Smith). By day she teaches courses on the history of screenwriting and on television writing for the Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting programs. Her talk “The Importance of Having a Female Voice in the Room” at the 2016 TEDxCPP is available on YouTube.

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Working hard every day on my book on Giuseppe Garibaldi — “In Search of Unity” — for the Mentoris Project.

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When Women Wrote Hollywood – 10 in a series – Frederica Sagor Maas

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

When Women Wrote Hollywood – 10 in a series – Frederica Sagor Maas

Frederica Alexandrina Sagor Maas (/ˌfɹɛdəˈɹikə səˈgɔɹ mæs/; July 6, 1900 – January 5, 2012) was an American dramatist and playwright, screenwriter, memoirist, and author,[1] the youngest daughter of Russian immigrants. As an essayist, Maas was best known for a detailed, tell-all memoir of her time spent in early Hollywood.[2] She was one of the oldest surviving entertainers from the silent film era.[3]

Once in Hollywood, Maas negotiated a contract with Preferred Pictures to adapt Percy Marks’s novel The Plastic Age for film. Based on this, she was signed to a three-year contract with MGM for $350 per week, though in her words: “I had the peculiar feeling that wily Louis B. [Mayer] was less interested in my writing ability than in signing someone who had worked for Ben Schulberg and Al Lichtman.”[5] It was in this period that she wrote the screenplays for silent films Dance Madnessand The Waning Sex. — Wikipedia

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“When Women Wrote Hollywood” In The News: Uncovering the secret history of women in Hollywood, University of Kansas

What a great read!

Check out this profile of professor Laura Kirk, who contributed 2 chapters to When Women Wrote Hollywood, published by the University of Kansas where she teaches film acting for the Department of Film & Media Studies.

Her chapters involve Silent Era writer Eve Unsell and musical scenario writer Bella Spewack.

Read more about these – and all the great early female screenwriters in the book!

Rosanne Welch

When Women Wrote Hollywood In The News: Uncovering the secret history of women in Hollywood, University of Kansas

LAWRENCE — After working for many years as an actor and producer, Laura Kirk returned to her native Kansas in 2012 and joined the University of Kansas Department of Film & Media Studies as a lecturer, teaching film acting.

Now, in her first big work of academic scholarship, Kirk has contributed two chapters to “When Women Wrote Hollywood” (McFarland), a new book aimed at bringing the secret female history of Hollywood to light.

Kirk wrote about Kansan Eve Unsell, a screenwriter whose career spanned the silent and talkie era, and Bella Spewack, the journalist, author and screenwriter best known for “Kiss Me Kate.”

“When this industry started, women wrote 50 percent of the screenplays,” Kirk said. “And yet Eve Unsell was not in the index of any history book. Many of the women who have chapters in this book have not been written about in any real way.”

Unsell, for instance, got a two-line obituary in the Los Angeles Times when she died in 1937 at age 50. She was born in Chicago and grew up in Caldwell, a small Kansas town in Sumner County.

“She has 96 credits on IMDb,” the Internet Movie Database, Kirk said. “She was credited with training Alfred Hitchcock. She ran the Paramount studio in England. … I talk about how she was one of the first people to settle in Malibu when it was wild and natural and scenic.”

Read this entire article – Uncovering the secret history of women in Hollywood, University of Kansas

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Quote from “America’s Forgotten Founding Father” by Dr. Rosanne Welch – 19 in a series – Mr. Thomas Adams…of Virginia

Through Franklin Filippo met Thomas Adams of Virginia, another colonist living and doing business in London. “No relation to that other Adams family, the one from New England,” Adams said when Franklin introduced them at a salon one night. “While John and Samuel carry my surname they are no relation to me, yet they are making Adams a name that causes eyebrows to raise and certain doors to be closed to me.”

From America’s Forgotten Founding Father — Get Your Copy Today!

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More on When Women Wrote Hollywood – Adela Rogers St. Johns – Yesterday’s Children: A Cosmopolitan Book-Length Complete Novel

More on When Women Wrote Hollywood – Adela Rogers St. Johns – Yesterday’s Children: A Cosmopolitan Book-Length Complete Novel

Adela Rogers St. Johns was a prolific writer in many different formats besides screenwriting. This novel was published in the June 1939 issue of Cosmopolitan

More information on Adela Rogers St. Johns

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More on Mazzei: Filippo Mazzei; Passionate grape grower, liberal thinker, and “citizen of the world”. Best represents the innovative, visionary, and entrepreneurial spirit that has always…

This series will focus on material I found while researching my book, America’s Forgotten Founding Father: A Novel Based on the Life of Filippo Mazzei.

While I only used a portion of my total research, there are a host of little tidbits of information on this amazing man which I wanted to share here. — Rosanne.

Passionate grape grower, liberal thinker, and “citizen of the world”. Best represents the innovative, visionary, and entrepreneurial spirit that has always — A Presentation on Fillipo Mazzei and introducing a new wine in his name

2 Passionate grape grower, liberal thinker, and “citizen of the world”. Best represents the innovative, visionary, and entrepreneurial spirit that has always characterized the Mazzei family. (1730-1816)

3 Through Philip Mazzei, the family claims a very strong and special link to the history of the United States

4 Borne and brought up in the liberal Grand Duchy of Tuscany, Philip moved to Virginia in 1773, spurred by his curiosity to explore the New World There he strengthened his friendship with Jefferson, Washington, Franklin and Adams, with whom he shared his modern, progressive ideals He was the first to introduce in the colony vines from Tuscany and other regions of Europe The vines were planted on Thomas Jefferson’s property at Monticello

See the entire slide show presentation

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From The Research Vault: The face on the lunch box: television’s construction of the teen idol by Gael Sweeney (1994)

ALL MY MONKEES ALBUMS ARE STILL LINED up next to the old stereo in my room in my mother’s house; my friend Claire still has the ticket stubs and souvenir program from a Bobby Sherman concert; my sister keeps her David Cassidy memorabilia in an old “Partridge Family” lunch box at the back of her closet. We each quickly abandoned our idols after a short time. They hardly seem part of our past, but some fantasy we can barely remember makes us cling to those scraps.

I have turned to the study of teen idols because it combines two areas on which much recent feminist film theory has focused: the representation of masculinity and female spectatorship in popular culture. Idols are uniquely positioned at the intersection of these two fields of study. The idol is especially relevant to feminist theory because he represents a specific kind of masculine image that is often at odds with the dominant version of the masculine in society while allying itself with the feminine. I would argue that there is the male star, such as John Wayne, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, or Clint Eastwood, whose masculinity is secure and untroubled and whose image in culture is straightforward and sexually unambiguous. These stars generally play heroes, cowboys, soldiers, cops, and working men in mainstream, dramatic films. Their fans tend to be “average” moviegoers but skewed towards heterosexual white males, much like the characters they portray. The male viewers of these stars find their masculinity and power reflected back at them, confirming their status and superiority in patriarchal society. Stars depend on the gaze of other men for validation; although they accept the looks of others (such as women, gay men, or minorities), they need the authority of the dominant masculine paradigm to confirm their power as stars.

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Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture

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When Women Wrote Hollywood – 9 in a series – A Woman of Affairs (1928), Wr: Michael Arlen and Bess Meredyth, Dir: Clarence Brown

When Women Wrote Hollywood – 9 in a series – A Woman of Affairs (1928), Wr: Michael Arlen and Bess Meredyth, Dir: Clarence Brown

A Woman of Affairs is a 1928 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer drama film directed by Clarence Brown and starring Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, Douglas Fairbanks Jr.and Lewis Stone. The film, released with a synchronized score and sound effects, was based on a 1924 best-selling novel by Michael Arlen, The Green Hat, which he adapted as a four-act stage play in 1925. The Green Hat was considered so daring in the United States that the movie did not allow any associations with it and was renamed A Woman of Affairs, with the characters also renamed to mollify the censors.[2] In particular the film script eliminated all references to heroin use, homosexuality and syphilis that were at the core of the tragedies involved.

The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Writing, for Michael Arlen and Bess Meredyth’s script. — Wikipedia

A Clip from A Woman of Affairs

More about Bess Meredyth and A Woman of Affairs

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