Academic – Page 181 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

A History of Screenwriting – 10 in a series – Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze (1894)

I teach several classes for the Stephens College Low-Residency MFA in Screenwriting, including History of Screenwriting. In fact, I created the curriculum for that course from scratch and customized it to this particular MFA in that it covers ‘Screenwriting’ (not directors) and even more specifically, the class has a female-centric focus. As part History of Screenwriting I, the first course in the four-class series, we focus on the early women screenwriters of the silent film era who male historians have, for the most part, quietly forgotten in their books. In this series, I share with you some of the screenwriters and films that should be part of any screenwriters education. I believe that in order to become a great screenwriter, you need to understand the deep history of screenwriting and the amazing people who created the career. — Dr. Rosanne Welch

Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze (1894)

The earliest surviving copyrighted motion picture, the Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze is a short film made by W. K. L. Dickson in January 1894 for advertising purposes. Often referred to as “Fred Ott’s Sneeze,” this is is one of the world’s earliest motion pictures and America’s best known early film production. The star is Fred Ott, an Edison employee known to his fellow workers in the laboratory for his comic sneezing and other gags. This item was received in the Library of Congress on January 9, 1894, as a copyright deposit from Dickson.

Two other Edison experimental films on the Library’s YouTube site – DICKSON GREETING (May 1891) and NEWARK ATHLETE (May or June 1891), predate The Sneeze. The Sneeze was submitted for copyright as 45 frames from the motion picture printed as positive prints on paper rather than as a reel of film. The prints were mounted on cardboard and submitted to the Copyright Office in this form. The video of the Sneeze on loc.gov and YouTube was later rephotographed and turned into a moving image from these mounted frames.

SUMMARY
Film made for publicity purposes, as a series of still photographs to accompany an article in Harper’s weekly.

OTHER TITLES
Sneeze
Fred Ott’s sneeze

CREATED/PUBLISHED
United States : Edison Manufacturing Co., 1894.

NOTES
Copyright: W. K. L. Dickson; 9Jan1894; 2887.

Performer: Fred Ott.

Camera, William Heise.

Filmed ca. January 2-7, 1894, in Edison’s Black Maria studio.

SUBJECTS
Sneezing.
Publicity.
Motion picture industry–Public relations–United States.
Actuality

RELATED NAMES
Dickson, W. K.-L. (William Kennedy-Laurie), 1860-1935, production.
Ott, Frederic P., performer.
Heise, William, camera.
Thomas A. Edison, Inc.
Hendricks (Gordon) Collection (Library of Congress)
Paper Print Collection (Library of Congress)

DIGITAL ID
edmp.0026A http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mbrsmi/edmp.0026A

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Wrapping Up The Monkees from 1960’s TV Censorship and The Monkees [Video] (1:26)

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“1960s TV Censorship and The Monkees” gives a brief overview of where censorship standards were in the era – and how The Monkees pushed the envelope with its mentions of the Vietnam War – and Sunset Strip riots – and even with the outrageous storytelling behind “Frodis Caper”, the episode that celebrated the saving of an alien plant that very closely resembled a marijuana plant…

Writer Treva Silverman said the staff got away with such jokes because the network executives were just old enough not to understand any of the references.
Presented at Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting classes on Friday, August 5, 2016

Transcript:

They had a couple of other big names come in. And then this was Treva’s explanation to me about why they got away with it. Network guys thought they were hip and cool, but they had no idea what was going on. And these guys knew it. She defined herself as a hippy as did Peter Meyerson like I said and she said she started smoking pot during the course of working on the show and when she went home to New York to visit her relatives they were like, ahhh…scandalized. She said, “Well, that’s just what everyone is doing.” So, I wanted to mention that we’re not done with censorship on television briefly. If you know Amy Schumer recently had this sketch canceled from her show. It was censored. She wasn’t to air it and it was anti-gun thing based on all the mass shootings. We still obviously knew about the “wardrobe malfunction” and what can and can’t be shown of a woman on television and of course, George Carlin went to court over The 7 Dirty Words You Can’t Say on Television. Dexter, of course, think how violent that is. We worry so much about what sex we show on TV but look how much violence we show and I think Gilda Radner, who I love dearly, is pretty brilliant because she talked about the violence on television back in the day. So we’re still not done with that. If you’re interested in censorship on TV, these are some books that are fun to look at that talk about this period of time. And so, if you want to look into that, that’s what they are. And that’s the flat out presentation.

Buy “Why The Monkees Matter” Today!

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

McFarland (Direct from Publisher) | Amazon | Kindle Edition | Nook Edition

Other books/DVDs mentioned in this clip

About Dr. Rosanne Welch

Dr. Rosanne Welch is a professor in the Low Residency MFA in Screenwriting Program from Stephens College, California State University, Fullerton, Mount San Antonio Community College and Cal Poly Pomona. In 2007, she graduated with her Ph.D. in 20th Century U.S./Film History from Claremont Graduate University. She graduated with her M.A. in 20th Century United States History from California State University, Northridge in 2004.

Welch is also a television writer/producer with credits for Beverly Hills 90210 , CBS’s Emmy winning Picket Fences and Touched By An Angel . She also writes and hosts her own podcasts on 3rdPass.media, her first one titled “Mindful(I) Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch.”

Three Ring Circus: How Real Couples Balance Marriage, Work and Kids and The Encyclopedia of Women in Aviation and Space are two books she has written. Los Angeles Times and the Journal of Screenwriting hold some of her published articles.

Dr. Rosanne Welch Web Site and Blog

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Adapting Tolkien from A History of the Art of Adaptation [Video] (1:02)

You Can Please Some of the People Some of the Time… None of the People All of the Time: A History of the Art of Adaptation in Movies like Dune, The Godfather, Harry Potter and More!

Dr. Rosanne Welch speaks on A History of the Art of Adaptation in Movies like Dune, The Godfather, Harry Potter and More! at the California State University, Fullerton Library

Part of the program series for Dune by Frank Herbert: A 50th Anniversary Celebration.

Watch this entire presentation

Transcript:

Of course, we all know, gee whiz, the biggest adaptation of the last ten years has been the whole set of Tolkien books. I’m just going to look at The Hobbit for a minute because when it became a movie they invented an entire character who doesn’t appear in the book at all. Just made her up, because there weren’t enough chicks involved in this story, right? They thought “Oh no, we need to do something about that.” So Tauriel doesn’t exist in the books, but they wanted to have a little bit of a love story. They wanted to have a female character largely because one of the more popular female characters in The Lord of The Rings adaptation is Eowyn, right? Everybody — well that’s Tauriel. Excuse me. She’s so important she got on one of the posters. It’s Eowyn, right? And she stood out in the whole Lord of the Rings saga because of what line? (Laughs) “I am no man!” Wham. What a great moment, right? That’a a moment everybody…so, they knew in making The Hobbit a film, they had to have some sort of female character who could bring that to the new production.

About this talk

Dr. Rosanne Welch (RTVF) speaks on the craft of history of film adaptations from the controversy of the silent film Birth of a Nation (protested by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1915) to Breakfast at Tiffany’s (to which author Truman Capote famously said, “The only thing left from the book is the title”) to The Godfather . Naturally, the behemoth in adaptation – Harry Potter (which depended on the relationship created by adapter Steve Kloves and author J.K. Rowling) will be discussed, as will the subject of this month’s celebration: Dune.

Date: Wednesday, October 14, 2015 Time: 1:00pm – 2:00pm

About Dr. Rosanne Welch

Her upcoming book, “Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture” will be published in Fall 2016

Dr. Rosanne Welch Web Site and Blog

Follow Dr. Welch on Twitter

Dr. Rosanne Welch on YouTube

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A History of Screenwriting – 9 in a series – Men Boxing, William K. L. Dickson, William Heise – Edison Manufacturing Company, 1891

Men Boxing, William K. L. Dickson, William Heise – Edison Manufacturing Company, 1891

Men Boxing is an 1891 American short black-and-white silent actuality film, produced and directed by William K.L. Dickson and William Heise for the Edison Manufacturing Company, featuring two Edison employees with boxing gloves, pretending to spar in a boxing ring. The 12 feet of film was shot between May and June 1891 at the Edison Laboratory Photographic Building in West Orange, New Jersey, on the Edison-Dickson-Heise experimental horizontal-feed kinetograph camera and viewer, through a round aperture on 3/4 inch (19mm) wide film with a single edge row of sprocket perforations, as an experimental demonstration and was never publicly shown. A print has been preserved in the US Library of Congress film archive as part of the Gordon Hendricks collection.^[1]^[2]— Wikipedia

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Sunset Strip Riots and The Monkees from 1960’s TV Censorship and The Monkees [Video] (1:09)

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Transcript:

And this is the Sunset Strip Riots which had to do with Pandora’s Box which was a club down in Hollywood and the curfew was that kids under 21 had to go home by 10 o’clock and so there were marches and protests and stuff and these guys were part of that. But they had been told when they went to press events they weren’t allowed to talk about any of this stuff. And they didn’t, at the press events, but they did in the show all the time. Which I think is hilarious. Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart wrote most of the songs for the first 2 years of the show and I love this, in the early 70’s they started this protest, Let Us Vote, the L.U.V. protest and it contributed obviously to lowering the voting age from 21 to 18. I think that’s really cool. And Peter Tork said, probably, one of the most intelligent things “the show probably garnered a larger audience for their point of view than The Beatles did” because TV comes into your house for free. You had to buy The Beatles albums. You had to pay to go to a concert. TV came into your house whether your parents allowed it or not and the parents just thought these were just a bunch of goofy guys and, by the way, who’s he sitting with at the Monterey Pop Festival? Janis Joplin. She was going to guest on the show in the 3rd season but it was cancelled.

Buy “Why The Monkees Matter” Today!

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

McFarland (Direct from Publisher) | Amazon | Kindle Edition | Nook Edition

About Dr. Rosanne Welch

Dr. Rosanne Welch Web Site and Blog

Follow Dr. Welch on Twitter

Dr. Rosanne Welch on YouTube

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Some Final Words on Argo from A History of the Art of Adaptation [Video] (0:53)

You Can Please Some of the People Some of the Time… None of the People All of the Time: A History of the Art of Adaptation in Movies like Dune, The Godfather, Harry Potter and More!

Dr. Rosanne Welch speaks on A History of the Art of Adaptation in Movies like Dune, The Godfather, Harry Potter and More! at the California State University, Fullerton Library

Part of the program series for Dune by Frank Herbert: A 50th Anniversary Celebration.

Watch this entire presentation

Transcript:

So they invented this huge chase on the tarmac where the cars come chasing after the plane, but we all know the cars will never catch the plane. It’s stupid, but in their defense, it provided the audience with that last minute feeling of tension that was true to the feelings that the hostages had even on the plane — until they took off and were in the air, they still felt it was possible that they might be captured — re-captured. So, I think that’s an interesting choice. They, of course, knew it was the big, climactic moment in the movie. They needed a big visual. What’s better than a car chase on a tarmac. So, people have to read the book to understand what was — and wasn’t — part of this operation. There’s so much inside the book as well. He talks about previous affairs that he was involved in. It’s fascinating what this man could do and to not go and get that extra information is a loss because this movie opens up a story that it can’t possibly give us the rest of.

About this talk

Date: Wednesday, October 14, 2015 Time: 1:00pm – 2:00pm

About Dr. Rosanne Welch

Her upcoming book, “Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture” will be published in Fall 2016

Dr. Rosanne Welch Web Site and Blog

Follow Dr. Welch on Twitter

Dr. Rosanne Welch on YouTube

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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A History of Screenwriting – 8 in a series – Leaving Jerusalem by Railway (Auguste and Louis Lumiére, France, 1896)

Leaving Jerusalem by Railway (Auguste and Louis Lumiére, France, 1896)

Départ de Jérusalem en chemin de fer (translated into English as Leaving Jerusalem by Railway) is an 1897 film directed by Alexandre Promio and released by the Lumière brothers. Lasting for roughly 50 seconds, it shows the goodbyes of many passersby – first Europeans, then Palestinian Arabs, then Palestinian Jews – as a train leaves Jerusalem.

Leaving Jerusalem by Railway contains what is possibly the first depiction of camera movement in the history of film. Some instead credit The Haverstraw Tunnel with this innovation,^[1] but only the year of release is available for the two; therefore it is unknown which came first. — Wikipedia

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Real Life and The Monkees from 1960’s TV Censorship and The Monkees [Video] (0:47)

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Transcript:

The other thing they did that was fascinating was that at the end of several episodes they would take the last minute and interview the actual actors, “hey, what’s going on in your life? How are things?” And the actors talked about being part of demonstrations, going to anti-war events. They talked about what it was like to be a hippy, do be disrespected. How men with long hair were treated badly and not respected in public and how they felt about that. Going to restaurants which wouldn’t let them in. I mean look at Peter Tork’s hair. Nowadays that doesn’t look that long at all, but in the time this was really, really…So this ending episode interview was a fascinating thing they got away with doing. They talked about a lot of stuff — the Sunset Curfew Riots — I’m going to show you a clip from that. And they would just sit on the back lot like that — the back set — and have these little interviews. And they got away with it.

Buy “Why The Monkees Matter” Today!

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

McFarland (Direct from Publisher) | Amazon | Kindle Edition | Nook Edition

About Dr. Rosanne Welch

Dr. Rosanne Welch Web Site and Blog

Follow Dr. Welch on Twitter

Dr. Rosanne Welch on YouTube

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Adapting Argo for the Sake of Action from A History of the Art of Adaptation [Video] (1:14)

You Can Please Some of the People Some of the Time… None of the People All of the Time: A History of the Art of Adaptation in Movies like Dune, The Godfather, Harry Potter and More!

Dr. Rosanne Welch speaks on A History of the Art of Adaptation in Movies like Dune, The Godfather, Harry Potter and More! at the California State University, Fullerton Library

Part of the program series for Dune by Frank Herbert: A 50th Anniversary Celebration.

Watch this entire presentation

Transcript:

Another change, having to do with the script, if you’ve seen the movie, of course, it’s about saving these American embassy officials who are hiding out in the Canadian Embassy during the Iranian hostage crisis. He creates this lovely — and it’s all true. He made them up to be a film crew from Canada. They were going to walk right to the airport, get on a plane and go home. In the real world, the tension that happened at the very end of the story happened inside the airport and it was because all of these embassy officials were made up to be stereotypical Hollywood people. So, the man who was one of the leading officials — who is a very straight-laced guy — who would always show up in a suit and a tie and all that, he was doing the Hollywood director bling thing with the chest hair and the gold necklace and he’s sitting at this airport. A women from another embassy, who recognized him, because she’d worked with him previously begins to approach him at the airport to say “hi” and of course she’s got this look on her face like “Why is he dressed up like this strange man? What is this Halloween or what?” And he’s sitting across [whispering] because they were afraid people would see who he was. So the women didn’t approach him. They all got on the plane and they all were safe. That moment of tension is what the screenwriter and what Affleck wanted to capture, but that is not very engaging — walking across an airport looking at a guy in an outfit. That’s not going to work.

About this talk

Date: Wednesday, October 14, 2015 Time: 1:00pm – 2:00pm

About Dr. Rosanne Welch

Her upcoming book, “Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture” will be published in Fall 2016

Dr. Rosanne Welch Web Site and Blog

Follow Dr. Welch on Twitter

Dr. Rosanne Welch on YouTube

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Rosanne quoted in Titan: The Magazine of California State University, Fullerton, Winter/Spring 2017

“FOR SCREENWRITER Rosanne Welch, the ripple effect of being the woman in the room begins like this: “The doctor walks in …” All I have to do is write She says… and they have to hire a female. That’s how power-ful it is to have a female voice in a room,” says the lecturer of cinema and television arts. Female leaders are trending — on TV. And, much like in real life, it’s taken decades to rewrite the script, says Welch. We need more women writers in the room and more female role models at the helm, at the corporate table, in the judge’s chair, in political office — and not just on TV, she says. “We do know that it’s highly influential,” she says of TV. “We need to kind of know something’s real and then we highlight those existences in TV, and the public sees it more often, and then it becomes more real.”

Read the entire article