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
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
…And I speak fast so I apologize but I want to get through it and I’m sort of Italian not really in this country but in America I qualify as Italian. We should teach during writing because writer precedes director when describing a filmmaker skills and we allow people to forget that in class and I don’t like that. When you remember a film to your friends you do not speak of camera angles. You speak of dialogue you speak of the lines that you repeat with your friends so the writer is the person that we should credit I believe with most of the work and if you’re studying to be a screenwriter how can you forget the names of the people who write your films? I want to say or even don’t you to the auteur theory because I think it’s nonsense because it is not the director it is the writer who comes up with it and I want to get rid of disrespect to writers which has existed forever
* 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
So we’re here today to talk about why I created a history of screenwriting class not a history of film class and that’s my problem. This is quickly Who I am. I’ve been a screenwriter in Los Angeles. I’ve written on Touched By An Angel Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences and for ABC news…oh… too fast. I’ve also just come up with a book and I’ll tell you about that came out of my class so that’s part of why I love this class. It’s another set of books that I’ve done. I’m also the book review editor for Journal of Screenwriting which I mentioned the other day. So please offer to review books and I’m on the editorial board for Written By which I always recommend as part of a screenwriting class because it’s free online digitally. You can look it up as Written By magazine and you’ll have the digital copy every month we interview either a movie writer or a television writer and it’s quite good, Of course, it’s in English. My apologies and I work for Stephens College which is located in Columbia Missouri but we do a low residency program where the students come to Los Angeles and work at the Jim Henson studios…hence Kermit … and this is Charlie Chaplin’s original studio so it’s still designed the way it was when he set it up in 1917.
* 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