Highly decorated member of the Navy Nurse Corps Laura Mae Cobb served as a military nurse for almost thirty years. She is best known for her leadership of the nurses, immortalized as the “Angels of Bataan,” who were held captive in the Philippines by the Japanese from just after Pearl Harbor until their liberation in February 1945. Throughout her time as a prisoner of war, Cobb and other Navy and Army nurses tended to those needing care while subtly resisting their captors, even mislabeling bottles to prevent looting. Under Cobb’s leadership, the nurses performed heroically and exemplarily, for which they were eventually recognized. Finally, on February 23, 1945, after four years in captivity and with almost all the nurses bordering on starvation, an American rescue team liberated them.
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Transcript:
Thank you all very much. I apologize that I will speak in English because we do very bad in teaching languages in the United States. So this is the best that I can do, but I appreciate very much the translator who will help us all this evening. So thank you all for coming. We are here to talk about why researching screenwriters is important and I think it’s a very important thing. I’ve been teaching it for a while and I was, in fact, a screenwriter myself for a while. As a writer in Hollywood, I wrote for these television shows. You can see me in the little corner picture there quite a few years ago on “Touched by an Angel”, “Beverly Hills 90210”. These are the kind of programs from the United States that get traveled around the world and I teach my students now how important it is that they are finally being able to take in the stories from other countries and we’ll talk about the importance of streaming media and how that has allowed for that to happen as we move on.
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.
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Distinguished Chinese American experimental physi- cist and the “First Lady of Physics,” Chien-Shiung Wu is best known for the Wu experiment, which proved that the law of conservation of parity does not hold for weak subatomic interactions. Dr. Wu was an expert in the subject of beta decay and played an important role in the Manhattan Project.
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The tiny, brown-eyed redhead known to her many fans simply as “Lotta” was one of the most successful entertainers of the 19th century. Her family moved to California after the 1849 gold rush, when Crabtree was six, settling in Grass Valley. There, Crabtree reportedly befriended a neighbor, the notorious actress, dancer and courtesan, Lola Montez, who gave Lotta dancing lessons. Lotta appeared in light melodramas that showcased her talents as a banjo player, clog dancer and mimic. Crabtree began performing in the mining camps and small town variety theatres, singing ballads and clog dancing. The miners were said to have showered her with coins and gold nuggets, which her mother collected. When she retired at 45 she was one of the richest women in America.
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The religious passion and antiwoman sentiment of 17th-century colonial North America reached its apogee in Salem, Massachusetts, during the infamous Salem Witch Trials. One victim of the trials, Bridget Playfer Waselby Oliver Bishop, was accused three times of being a witch and was hanged in 1692, the first victim of the Salem hysteria. The vast majority of people executed for witchcraft were women. Eighteen others followed Bishop to the hangman’s noose before the governor put a stop to it a few months later.
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Harriet Ann Jacobs was a fugitive slave and abolitionist whose 1861 autobiographical Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published under the name Linda Brent, provided American readers with a rare inside look at the physical and sexual abuse suffered by female slaves. Primarily focused on Jacobs’ journey to freedom and her struggles to obtain that same freedom for her children, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl details the structure of slavery from the rape of female slaves to the institution of the Fugitive Slave Law and its devastating effect on black families even in free states. Her work stands as crucial evidence against the horrors of American slavery.
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* 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
Every Monday we will be profiling a member of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting 2020 graduating class. This exciting, fresh crop of writers are the future of the industry and are going on to do BIG things, so get to know them now!
Emma Jeszke is a dramedy writer, with a focus on coming-of-age stories that challenge and expand typical narratives about girlhood, young adulthood, and motherhood. She has a special talent for keeping you laughing till you’re crying.
Her television pilot Postpartum, about the joys and struggles of being a new mom, was a top-ten finalist in the Women Writing Competition at Series Fest. She is the author of the feature screenplays Wildflower, a forbidden love story about a soldier and an antiwar activist set in 2004, and Bobbi Malone, which follows a thirty-something as she reconnects with her estranged grandmother through a theater troupe. She’s also the author of several stage plays, and the creator of the forthcoming web series Holly & Gem, about two sisters who reconnect after one escapes a cult.
Her plays have been performed regionally in places such as the Finger Lakes Musical Theatre Festival and the Blank Theatre in Los Angeles. She is a book editor at Theatre Communications Group, the foremost publisher of theatrical literature, where she’s spent eight years working with world-renowned playwrights. She’s currently finishing her MFA in TV & Screenwriting at Stephens College.
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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —
“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”
I presented this holiday lecture “When Women Write Horror” on Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. Researching the many, many women who have written horror stories – in novels, films and television – brought new names to my attention who I am excited to start reading. I hope you will be, too!
Transcript:
The best horror — and I’m gonna come to some examples as we travel through — is stuff that involves social commentary along with the scare because that’s the stuff that sticks with us. So I think Mary is very important. I made a point to mention I think it’s useful we think about women writing. Back in the day, it wasn’t acceptable for women to READ novels because it would rot their brains. So they certainly couldn’t write them. So you’ll notice when the book was first came out there was no author on the book. Nobody bothered to wonder how come there’s no writer there. It was because she could not admit that she had written it and then when it came so ridiculously famous and so profitable then she was able to say “well I’m cool enough that’s fine I’ll take the ding for doing this,” right? So I think it’s really important to think about what women had to go through just to be writers right?
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Most famous for being the author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Anita Loos was also a prolific screenwriter, playwright, and memoirist, chronicling the early days of Hollywood.
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Julie Hébert started her creative life as a theater director and playwright (Ruby’s Bucket of Blood). She’s written and directed for the Magic Theater, Steppenwolf, Victory Gardens, LaMaMa, The Women’s Project, Cornerstone and many more. Her plays were honored twice with the Pen Award for Drama. Moving into television, Julie has written and directed for some of the most respected shows in television including American Crime, The Good Wife, Boss, Numb3rs and The West Wing. Her films have been praised as “intriguingly complex” (Variety) and “pulsing with veracity” (LA Times), with “a raw power that is impossible to dismiss” (Roger Ebert). She blogs occasionally at JulieHébert.com.
“I honor the depth inside and the stories that really want to be told because often in television you can get away with topline chatter, but to really hit on something that has meaning for you, that will have meaning for someone hearing the story, it has to come from a deeper place.”-Julie Hébert
![01 Introduction from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/rmw-sao-paolo-01.png)
![02 Women and Horror Writing from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (45 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/rmw-cpp-horror-02.jpeg)
