This is the “New Musical Express” chronicle of the rock ‘n’ roll generation. The book chronicles one of the major potent cultural forces of the 20th century. The lively, newsy text is drawn from “NME” archives and is illustrated with photographs from each era. Alongside these stories are reviews and chart information as well as other contemporary references to films, sex, TV, drugs, politics and many other items that have impinged on the culture. Such events as Live Aid and Woodstock are covered.
* 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 Shocking Miss Pilgrim is a 1947 American musical comedy film in Technicolor written and directed by George Seaton, and starring Betty Grable and Dick Haymes.
The screenplay, based on a story by Frederica Sagor Maas and Ernest Maas, focuses on a young typist who becomes involved in the Women’s Suffrage movement in 1874. The songs were composed by George and Ira Gershwin. Marilyn Monroe made her film debut as an uncredited voice as a telephone operator.
In 1941, husband-and-wife screenwriting team Ernest Maas and Frederica Sagor collaborated on Miss Pilgrim’s Progress, a story about a young woman who enters the business world by demonstrating the newly invented typewriter in the window of a Wall Street establishment. When she tries to fend off the unwanted advances of one of the firm’s clerks, her employer comes to her rescue but is killed when he falls down the stairs in the ensuing altercation. Abigail Pilgrim becomes the focus of a murder trial that attracts widespread coverage by the media and the attention of Susan B. Anthony when the concept of women working in offices comes under fire.[2] — 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
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.
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.
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
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
* 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
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!
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.”
Order your copy of When Women Wrote Hollywood Today
* 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
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.”
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
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
* 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
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.
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
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, 
![08 Television After 1968 from How The Monkees Changed Television [Video] (0:55)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/monkees-tv-08-after-1968.jpeg)
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