Described as the story of “an adorable tow truck driver who really digs Kelli, a fellow North Carolinian, when he meets her as he changes her dead car battery. But Joe’s interest takes a sharp right turn when he learns that Kelli is a Muslim” the film raised questions of identity, representation and religious freedom.
For the panel, Executive Director Rosanne Welch and mentor/instructor Dawn Comer Jefferson provided a breakdown of the script followed by moderating questions from the audience. Guests included Nicole Ballivian (writer-director), Deonna Kelli Sayed, from whose blog post the script was adapted, and actors Jill Galbraith and Travis Lincoln Cox. — Rosanne
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Transcript:
I read once that Tennessee Williams, who’s a famous playwright in the United States, had said that most writers work from the emotions of the first six years of their life and some people laughed at that and I laughed at that and then I realized that in many episodes that I had written, a recurring theme that I tend to go to is that — to be a father is the most important job in your life and you should take it seriously. My father left when I was six years old. Until looking backward at things that I had written I did not notice the repetition of that theme. Clearly, it means something to me. Everybody doesn’t have that experience but everybody has been abandoned in some way or another. We recognize that emotion of loss and that’s what we sell
Watch this entire presentation
A Note About This Presentation
A clip from my keynote speech at the 10th Screenwriters´(hi)Stories Seminar for the interdisciplinary Graduation Program in “Education, Art, and History of Culture”, in Mackenzie Presbyterian University, at São Paulo, SP, Brazil, focused on the topic “Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered.” I was especially pleased with the passion these young scholars have toward screenwriting and it’s importance in transmitting culture across the man-made borders of our world.
To understand the world we have to understand its stories and to understand the world’s stories we must understand the world’s storytellers. A century ago and longer those people would have been the novelists of any particular country but since the invention of film, the storytellers who reach the most people with their ideas and their lessons have been the screenwriters. My teaching philosophy is that: Words matter, Writers matter, and Women writers matte, r so women writers are my focus because they have been the far less researched and yet they are over half the population. We cannot tell the stories of the people until we know what stories the mothers have passed down to their children. Those are the stories that last. Now is the time to research screenwriters of all cultures and the stories they tell because people are finally recognizing the work of writers and appreciating how their favorite stories took shape on the page long before they were cast, or filmed, or edited. But also because streaming services make the stories of many cultures now available to a much wider world than ever before.
Many thanks to Glaucia Davino for the invitation.
* 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
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
Transcript:
When I teach my students about writing, there’s the quote “you should write what you know” and sometimes people think that means if you come from a family where your father’s a policeman you should write about policemen. If you yourself were a high school teacher you should write about teachers. It doesn’t mean, to me, you should write your experiences only. It means you should write the emotions that you know because the emotions are what are universal and that’s what sells to other people.
Watch this entire presentation
A Note About This Presentation
A clip from my keynote speech at the 10th Screenwriters´(hi)Stories Seminar for the interdisciplinary Graduation Program in “Education, Art, and History of Culture”, in Mackenzie Presbyterian University, at São Paulo, SP, Brazil, focused on the topic “Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered.” I was especially pleased with the passion these young scholars have toward screenwriting and it’s importance in transmitting culture across the man-made borders of our world.
To understand the world we have to understand its stories and to understand the world’s stories we must understand the world’s storytellers. A century ago and longer those people would have been the novelists of any particular country but since the invention of film, the storytellers who reach the most people with their ideas and their lessons have been the screenwriters. My teaching philosophy is that: Words matter, Writers matter, and Women writers matte, r so women writers are my focus because they have been the far less researched and yet they are over half the population. We cannot tell the stories of the people until we know what stories the mothers have passed down to their children. Those are the stories that last. Now is the time to research screenwriters of all cultures and the stories they tell because people are finally recognizing the work of writers and appreciating how their favorite stories took shape on the page long before they were cast, or filmed, or edited. But also because streaming services make the stories of many cultures now available to a much wider world than ever before.
Many thanks to Glaucia Davino for the invitation.
* 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
As the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting is one of the sponsors of the Reel Sisters of the Diaspora Film Festival I’ll be hosting (along with MFA mentor Dawn Comer Jefferson) a free script breakdown and Q & A with Nicole Ballivian (writer-director) for her 10 minute short Joe and the Shawl described as the story of “an adorable tow truck driver who really digs Kelli, a fellow North Carolinian, when he meets her as he changes her dead car battery. But Joe’s interest takes a sharp right turn when he learns that Kelli is a Muslim.”
If you’d like to virtually attend the event, register and join us
Sunday, October 25th 1pm-2:30pm (Pacific Time) FREE Register Here
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
Transcript:
If you censor the storytellers you’re going to censor the stories and that’s why we get such a small block of stories that are repeated over and over and over again, right, and this makes me crazy. Stories equal culture. So if we censor the stories, we are censoring these moments of culture. We’re not allowing people to learn about these other people and their struggles, which is what art has always been about, right, about highlighting these ideas. Now, this is where we come to streaming because streaming services are finally our chance to show all the many cultures of the world to each other, right? You can’t really block them, which I think is fascinating.
Watch this entire presentation
A Note About This Presentation
A clip from my keynote speech at the 10th Screenwriters´(hi)Stories Seminar for the interdisciplinary Graduation Program in “Education, Art, and History of Culture”, in Mackenzie Presbyterian University, at São Paulo, SP, Brazil, focused on the topic “Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered.” I was especially pleased with the passion these young scholars have toward screenwriting and it’s importance in transmitting culture across the man-made borders of our world.
To understand the world we have to understand its stories and to understand the world’s stories we must understand the world’s storytellers. A century ago and longer those people would have been the novelists of any particular country but since the invention of film, the storytellers who reach the most people with their ideas and their lessons have been the screenwriters. My teaching philosophy is that: Words matter, Writers matter, and Women writers matte, r so women writers are my focus because they have been the far less researched and yet they are over half the population. We cannot tell the stories of the people until we know what stories the mothers have passed down to their children. Those are the stories that last. Now is the time to research screenwriters of all cultures and the stories they tell because people are finally recognizing the work of writers and appreciating how their favorite stories took shape on the page long before they were cast, or filmed, or edited. But also because streaming services make the stories of many cultures now available to a much wider world than ever before.
Many thanks to Glaucia Davino for the invitation.
* 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
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
Transcript:
In this time period this gentleman, Michael Wilson was completely censored. His movies were put out without his name on them at all. The movies were released and there was no written by credit at all because the studio refused to recognize him because he was marked as a communist.Both of these movies are anti-war films The first one Friendly Persuasion is about our Civil War and Salt of the Earth is actually a union movie. Iit’s about a union of miners, New Mexican miners who are on strike and the women who support them and nobody wanted to support those ideas so his he just disappeared right?
A Note About This Presentation
A clip from my keynote speech at the 10th Screenwriters´(hi)Stories Seminar for the interdisciplinary Graduation Program in “Education, Art, and History of Culture”, in Mackenzie Presbyterian University, at São Paulo, SP, Brazil, focused on the topic “Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered.” I was especially pleased with the passion these young scholars have toward screenwriting and it’s importance in transmitting culture across the man-made borders of our world.
To understand the world we have to understand its stories and to understand the world’s stories we must understand the world’s storytellers. A century ago and longer those people would have been the novelists of any particular country but since the invention of film, the storytellers who reach the most people with their ideas and their lessons have been the screenwriters. My teaching philosophy is that: Words matter, Writers matter, and Women writers matte, r so women writers are my focus because they have been the far less researched and yet they are over half the population. We cannot tell the stories of the people until we know what stories the mothers have passed down to their children. Those are the stories that last. Now is the time to research screenwriters of all cultures and the stories they tell because people are finally recognizing the work of writers and appreciating how their favorite stories took shape on the page long before they were cast, or filmed, or edited. But also because streaming services make the stories of many cultures now available to a much wider world than ever before.
Many thanks to Glaucia Davino for the invitation.
* 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
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
Transcript:
But we always knew that writers were important — if not the most important — because, if the directors were so important — when we had the Blacklist, 9 out of 10 of those people were writers. It wasn’t the director’s philosophy that we were afraid of showing the world. It was the writer’s philosophy. It was their ideas about poverty and what it was like in America and how we needed to fix it. That’s what scared the big guys and that’s why they all went to prison, right? They aren’t directors. They’re writers. Yeah, they all went to prison for about 10 months because they wouldn’t give names of fellow communists and it didn’t even matter that nobody cared. Half of them weren’t — some were communists and it’s legal for them to be a communist in the United States, but they were mostly all writers. So we know that writers are deeply important because it’s the stories that matter because those were the things that changed people, right? That’s what fascinates me.
A Note About This Presentation
A clip from my keynote speech at the 10th Screenwriters´(hi)Stories Seminar for the interdisciplinary Graduation Program in “Education, Art, and History of Culture”, in Mackenzie Presbyterian University, at São Paulo, SP, Brazil, focused on the topic “Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered.” I was especially pleased with the passion these young scholars have toward screenwriting and it’s importance in transmitting culture across the man-made borders of our world.
To understand the world we have to understand its stories and to understand the world’s stories we must understand the world’s storytellers. A century ago and longer those people would have been the novelists of any particular country but since the invention of film, the storytellers who reach the most people with their ideas and their lessons have been the screenwriters. My teaching philosophy is that: Words matter, Writers matter, and Women writers matte, r so women writers are my focus because they have been the far less researched and yet they are over half the population. We cannot tell the stories of the people until we know what stories the mothers have passed down to their children. Those are the stories that last. Now is the time to research screenwriters of all cultures and the stories they tell because people are finally recognizing the work of writers and appreciating how their favorite stories took shape on the page long before they were cast, or filmed, or edited. But also because streaming services make the stories of many cultures now available to a much wider world than ever before.
Many thanks to Glaucia Davino for the invitation.
* 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
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
Transcript:
So all of that unequal credit leads us not to be paying attention enough to writers as we should. Which is why they need to be studied more now. Also, I think education which was supposed to help us didn’t in the very beginning right? The earliest film school was a Moscow Film School but these guys immediately started to teach the history of film as if it was the history of directors which made it the history again of great men and that way of teaching has gone down and to when I studied this for my Ph.D. I didn’t learn about any of these women. I knew about them from my childhood because I’d read their memoirs and I knew they existed but none of my textbooks mentioned any of them. So I began to unearth their names and have my students research them so that we could eventually build a library of works about them right? So schools weren’t helping until now you can see this little turn you know more and more people are doing that.
A Note About This Presentation
A clip from my keynote speech at the 10th Screenwriters´(hi)Stories Seminar for the interdisciplinary Graduation Program in “Education, Art, and History of Culture”, in Mackenzie Presbyterian University, at São Paulo, SP, Brazil, focused on the topic “Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered.” I was especially pleased with the passion these young scholars have toward screenwriting and it’s importance in transmitting culture across the man-made borders of our world.
To understand the world we have to understand its stories and to understand the world’s stories we must understand the world’s storytellers. A century ago and longer those people would have been the novelists of any particular country but since the invention of film, the storytellers who reach the most people with their ideas and their lessons have been the screenwriters. My teaching philosophy is that: Words matter, Writers matter, and Women writers matte, r so women writers are my focus because they have been the far less researched and yet they are over half the population. We cannot tell the stories of the people until we know what stories the mothers have passed down to their children. Those are the stories that last. Now is the time to research screenwriters of all cultures and the stories they tell because people are finally recognizing the work of writers and appreciating how their favorite stories took shape on the page long before they were cast, or filmed, or edited. But also because streaming services make the stories of many cultures now available to a much wider world than ever before.
Many thanks to Glaucia Davino for the invitation.
* 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
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
Transcript:
Because what the writers learned was that everyone took a pay cut except IATSE — is the union for the people who work on the set– and that had come from Broadway and they did not take a pay cut because they had a 3-year union contract and it couldn’t be taken away and that’s when the writers said Yeah, we need a union. That’s a great idea. Let’s start a union and they started a couple of versions and it wasn’t until the 1950’s when the current union — the one that does that magazine I mentioned — existed and it had existed since then and that’s protected writers by making sure that credits match on the screen. In the early days, a producer could put the credit for the film to his girlfriend simply because he wanted to make some money. You had no right to credit on your own film. So the Guild, that was one of the major things they did as well as pensions, benefits, and things like that.
A Note About This Presentation
A clip from my keynote speech at the 10th Screenwriters´(hi)Stories Seminar for the interdisciplinary Graduation Program in “Education, Art, and History of Culture”, in Mackenzie Presbyterian University, at São Paulo, SP, Brazil, focused on the topic “Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered.” I was especially pleased with the passion these young scholars have toward screenwriting and it’s importance in transmitting culture across the man-made borders of our world.
To understand the world we have to understand its stories and to understand the world’s stories we must understand the world’s storytellers. A century ago and longer those people would have been the novelists of any particular country but since the invention of film, the storytellers who reach the most people with their ideas and their lessons have been the screenwriters. My teaching philosophy is that: Words matter, Writers matter, and Women writers matte, r so women writers are my focus because they have been the far less researched and yet they are over half the population. We cannot tell the stories of the people until we know what stories the mothers have passed down to their children. Those are the stories that last. Now is the time to research screenwriters of all cultures and the stories they tell because people are finally recognizing the work of writers and appreciating how their favorite stories took shape on the page long before they were cast, or filmed, or edited. But also because streaming services make the stories of many cultures now available to a much wider world than ever before.
Many thanks to Glaucia Davino for the invitation.
* 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
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
Transcript:
…and then what happened is we had a really famous stock market crash and The Depression began and these men, particularly Louis B. Mayer, went to all the employees at their studio and said “We can’ pay you the money paid you last year. We need everyone to take at 50% pay cut and we’re in charge. We’re your employers so you have to do it or you can’t work,” and many of the writers and actors figured out there’s a problem here. Lionel Barrymore was a famous actor and he said to Louis B. Mayer, “You’re acting like a man on his way to the guillotine wanting to stop for a manicure.” I clearly don’t believe what you are saying to me, but I don’t have any power not to take a pay cut because you’re my employer and likewise, my favorites, the Hacketts said, “That day he created more communists than Karl Marx.”
A Note About This Presentation
A clip from my keynote speech at the 10th Screenwriters´(hi)Stories Seminar for the interdisciplinary Graduation Program in “Education, Art, and History of Culture”, in Mackenzie Presbyterian University, at São Paulo, SP, Brazil, focused on the topic “Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered.” I was especially pleased with the passion these young scholars have toward screenwriting and it’s importance in transmitting culture across the man-made borders of our world.
To understand the world we have to understand its stories and to understand the world’s stories we must understand the world’s storytellers. A century ago and longer those people would have been the novelists of any particular country but since the invention of film, the storytellers who reach the most people with their ideas and their lessons have been the screenwriters. My teaching philosophy is that: Words matter, Writers matter, and Women writers matte, r so women writers are my focus because they have been the far less researched and yet they are over half the population. We cannot tell the stories of the people until we know what stories the mothers have passed down to their children. Those are the stories that last. Now is the time to research screenwriters of all cultures and the stories they tell because people are finally recognizing the work of writers and appreciating how their favorite stories took shape on the page long before they were cast, or filmed, or edited. But also because streaming services make the stories of many cultures now available to a much wider world than ever before.
Many thanks to Glaucia Davino for the invitation.
* 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
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