Married at age nineteen and together until Sam’s death, their marriage fed the comedic portrayals of the mishaps of women and men as they fall head over heels for each other and rage against the other. More of a writing partnership than romantic in some ways, as a team the Spewacks conquered Hollywood during a turbulent time when their peers were being sacrificed by producers to a government blacklist fueled by fear of Communism.
Marriage of Words: Bella And Sam Spewack
by Laura Kirk
* 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
“So that’s when I realized as a kid, “Oh, when they take a book or a play and make a movie out of it, they don’t actually just copy what was already done. Oh. That’s kind of annoying , but now it means I really have to focus on the actual piece of literature first.”
Thanks to Karen Lindell for attending my library lecture on When Women Wrote Hollywood at the Pollak Library on the campus of California State University, Fullerton. Her article tries to make sense of the many subjects that have populated my books, and she rightly deduces that it is highlighting the work of women writers that is my main mission. Even in my book on The Monkees I made sure to fully cover the career of Treva Silverman, who by writing on that show became one of the first women to write for television without a male partner.
Video of “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Coming Soon!
As a young girl in Ohio, Rosanne Welch was a regular at her local library, pouring over autobiographies and memoirs of screenwriters from Hollywood’s early years. By the age of 10, she knew that she wanted to have a career in television or film.
Welch, lecturer in screenwriting at Cal State Fullerton, did make it to Hollywood, where she wrote for television shows “Beverly Hills 90210,” “Picket Fences,” ABC’s “Nightline” and “Touched by an Angel.”
But a funny thing happened on the way to the studio … as Welch prepared for her career, she was surprised to find that the female screenwriters she had read about as a child weren’t mentioned in her screenwriting courses.
This piqued her curiosity. Upon researching the matter, she found several reasons why these women had been sidelined in history.
* 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
Learn more about the American Revolution through the eyes of an important, Italian Immigrant, Filippo Mazzei.
Read his story today!
“From his correspondence with Jefferson, Filippo could not discuss business or politics at all on the event that the letters were opened by the English, so they discussed their first love, agriculture. There the good news involved Filippo sending Jefferson a shipment of choice Italian varieties of peaches and giving him permission to take cuttings of other exotic fruits he had sent back to Colle.”
We also bring in guest lecturers like my friend Paolo who I met coming to an SRN. So he came to town for a week and we did some story work with our students. This is our first class. You can hear about it a little more in a minute. So this was great. He came to lecture about the Global Neorealism because we wanted an Italian expert so there you go. I’m also very fond of the idea that I’ve learned a lot from doing this with my students because I planned the whole thing focusing on women only to realize that I’ve left behind minorities. There were African American filmmakers in the silent era. Oscar Micheaux is one of them. Very famous. Much of their work has been lost so it’s difficult to teach them or to offer students the chance to study them or analyze their work but he has a lot of work out there. So I’ve had to find texts that cover the gaze the focus of African Americans in the film in America through the years. So this one– it turned out it’s mostly about actors — but it gives you a sense and then also my LGBTQ students want to see where they fit in the picture and this is an excellent book on the history of LGBTQ people in Los Angeles — screenwriters, actors, directors — the whole thing. So by them asking me what they want or where they don’t see themselves in the picture, it’s forced me to go outside of my own background and give them more.
* 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 Zoë Akins attempted to prove the legitimacy of her work, the need for commercial success could not be ignored. Like her characters, Akins had to secure her own economic future. While her parents lived a comfortable life, they did not support her fiscally. Such restraints meant setting aside the high-minded rebellion of Papa. She needed to fill theatre seats, so she had to fulfill specific story requirements. Akins wrote, “…I longed for the freedom which money alone could buy” (OTM 127). She used that declaration as the foundation for her next work.”
* 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
Kevin Willmott is located at Kansas University, much farther than Los Angeles and he’s come in through Skype. Where he’s not gonna fly up to LA. So we can get guest speakers who are current working writers. We need to do more of that. in the second year, we go into looking at screenplays right — so William Goldman is the head guy there and I’m happy to use books that I found out about from my coming to these conferences and also I wanted to expand their studies so — because I’m — my grandparents were Italian so that’s how come I get to call myself Italian, so I said “Oooo let’s do some Italian films. What’s my excuse? Global neo-realism affected American film so let’s study that!” So this turned out to you great piece because there are essays by followers in many countries so it’s also pretty international which is also something made for me to bring to the Americans. We aren’t the only ones who do movies. Sometimes we pretend we are but we should not think that way and we learn a lot from international films. So I do that.
* 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
Dr. Rosanne Welch receives her award at the Cal Poly Pomona 2019 Faculty and Staff Appreciation Night during the Women Bronco’s Game in Kellog Arena.
Rosanne was nominated for the award by Rebecca Islas. player on the Women’s Broncos Basketball Team who said…
“Her great energy and always being positive coming into class in a great mood. Always so eager to teach. Pushing me out of my comfort zone.
This was the first time she taught a course like this and she did a great job at it. I liked her very much as a person. She is caring and very understanding.”
But the beauty of both my books (I hope) is the fact that they bring much needed attention to writers and performers who weren’t necessarily lauded in their own time. —Rosanne
You know how you are going to lecture on topics from your new book and then something happens in the big old world that touches on your previous book?
Such is happening to Rosanne Welch, who is a writer and adjunct professor at Cal State Fullerton, Cal Poly Pomona, Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut and Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri.
She is scheduled to give one of the Faculty Noon Time Talks in CSUF’s Pollock Library from noon to 1 p.m. Tuesday, March 5. These events are based on faculty research, which in Welch’s case is partly encapsulated in her most recent book, When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry (McFarland & Co., 2018).
However, on Feb. 21, actor/composer/musician Peter Tork, who is best known as the bass player/keyboardist with the Monkees, passed away, which prompted the re-release of something Welch had said 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
“The lesson learned by this emerging scholar is that researching with the goal of establishing factual history of who, what, when, where, and why is a serious responsibility and details cannot be taken for granted.
The longer litany of errors begins at the end, with one of Heerman’s obituaries, published by Variety November 7, 1977. Film Pioneer Victor Heerman Dies reads, “His wife, the former Sarah Mason, shared his Little Women writing chores and the Oscar.”
The Six Degrees of Sarah Y. Mason and Victor Heerman by Pamela L. Scott
* 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
†
†
†
![13 More Guest Speakers and Diversity from Why (and How) I Created a History of Screenwriting Course [Video] (1 minute 18 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/srn-rmw-2018-13.jpeg)
![12 More Guest Speakers from Why (and How) I Created a History of Screenwriting Course [Video] (58 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/srn-rmw-2018-12.jpeg)
![Dr. Rosanne Welch receives her award at the 2019 Faculty & Staff Appreciation Night, Cal Poly Pomona [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/cpp-appreciation-night-2019.jpeg)
![Dr. Rosanne Welch receives her award at the 2019 Faculty & Staff Appreciation Night, Cal Poly Pomona [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/cpp-award.jpg)
