I spent a lovely and engaging morning in the company of several international screenwriting academics discussing teaching online thanks to being invited to this virtual Bucharest Symposium in Screenwriting and Literature by Tudor Voican, PhD, WallachiaIFF Jury President.
The invitation arrived in my email inbox and almost looked like a fake – until I saw the names of the other participants and knew them to be pretty stellar in their fields. So I said yes. We’ll meet online each Sunday for 3 Sundays to make 20 minute presentations to each other and share our knowledge.
Though I would have loved to actually fly to what Tudor calls “the legendary land of Principe Vlad III Drăculea aka Vlad the Impaler, Voivode of Wallachia” but for now I am outside on the patio using our built-in Zoom background.
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
Transcript:
This is the two men. Also now Charlie Brackett working with Billy Wilder. Also a man who’s more famous because he became a director as well. Together they wrote Sunset Boulevard. If you look at this poster, you can see Billy Wilder’s name on the bottom in the middle — very big letters. You can’t see Charles Brackett’s name. He’s not part of that poster, even though he co-wrote this very important film and then also in his diary he had this funny line about how he noticed when his own daughter eloped, he thought the trade papers would say that Billy Wilder was upset because his collaborator’s daughter had disappeared. He already knew that they weren’t going to remember his name. Which is terrible because he had an Oscar for writing the very first version of Titanic. Not the James Cameron one that most people know of today, but the very first. So the man was an Oscar-winning screenplay writer and yet does not appear in too many histories because the directors he co-wrote with overtook that fame.
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
Laura Brennan’s eclectic writing career includes television, film, theater, web series, fiction and news. Behind the scenes, she has helped production companies develop movies, TV pilots and limited series. She has taught pitching workshops to executives at Netflix and Film Victoria, as well as MFA programs and undergraduate classes at universities including Stephens College, University of California, Los Angeles, University of Southern California, Boston University and National University.A graduate of Yale University, Brennan has won awards for journalism, television writing and fiction. Her children’s book, Nana Speaks Nanese, tackles the confusing changes brought on by dementia in a reassuring and straightforward way. She hopes it will help families facing a diagnosis of dementia open up a conversation with their young children. Her web series Faux Baby is also for parents, but it is definitely not for children—or even safe for work.
“You are not everything to everyone. And you shouldn’t try to be. You should figure out what you do best and double down on it. Learn the stuff that you’re not great at so that you are comfortable and confident but narrow down what it is you really bring to the table ” -Laura Brennan
I gave the opening lecture entitled, “Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered” which appears here in English, though the rest of the papers (naturally) are in Portuguese. It was an honor to be asked to do the lecture and privilege to spend time with Professor Glaucia Davino and her students who made me feel very welcome in their city.
Words matter. Writers matter and women writers matter in this world. It is important to consider writers because the word writer comes before the word director when you describe a filmmaker who can do two things. They are writer-directors, they are not director-writers. That tells us something. The vision of a movie cannot exist without the screenplay. A director cannot direct nothing. There must be an idea. There must be a philosophy. There must be a theme. There must be a story. This proves that the writer is of equal importance. We must remember writers have to be equal partners and I think we realize that without realizing it. When people talk about movies to their friends they don’t say “I loved the camera angle in scene 7.” They quote dialogue from their favorite movies whether they are from a Pixar film or a Disney one, they quote the dialogue and that is the work of the writer. That’s the person who should be given credit, yet often at the start a class I ask students to list their two or three favorite films, who directed those films and who wrote that film. They very often cannot name the person who wrote the film they claim to adore. How can you study to be a writer if you don’t remember writers yourself? Hence the reason to study Screenwriting. Hence researching screenwriters has always mattered.
When actors Frances McDormand won her Oscar for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri she said of the screenwriter Martin McDonagh, “He did not sketch a blueprint. That’s an insult to a screenplay. He didn’t string together a few words. He wrote, meticulously crafted, a tsunami, and then he allowed his troupe of actors to surf it into the shore.” (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/sag-awards-three-billboards-takes-top-honors-at-a-show-women-took-center-stage-1076726) She credited the writer in a way that many people do not.
Stories – and therefore screenplays and therefore screenwriters — are important because they transmit culture around the world. The United States has had a corner on that market for far too many years but now we’re beginning to see other stories permeate our culture, a good and beneficial thing for a country made of immigrants and the ancestors of immigrants. Stories have always transmitted culture far back to the cave paintings of many ancient cultures, through Gilgamesh, and the griots of Africa. Humans have used stories to move culture forward. Movies are the most current version of doing that so why do we forget to study the storytellers? Now is the time to fix this glaring omission both in casual discussions of films and in academia.
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
Transcript:
Another answer for why we don’t credit writers is that we never really credited them equally. In the very early days of Hollywood, you can see on the bottom of this poster, it says it was written and directed by Preston Sturgis, a very famous director of the 30s and 40s and 50s however, it was co-written by two men. The other man’s name doesn’t appear on the poster because he didn’t also direct it yet he co-wrote the movie and in fact his name was Charlie Brackett and he put out – his family put – out his diary the diaries he kept. They published a couple of years ago and in those diaries he wrote things about how he saw himself being written out of Hollywood and he didn’t know what to do about it right? So, in this case, he’s talking about the poster I just had where it says it’s written and directed by Preston Sturgis and he says “evidently he took out every comma as I expected he would do”, right? So he knew he was being erased.
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:
Historiography. Who got to tell the history matters. Hamilton is a very famous play in the United States right now and there’s a whole song about the idea that who lives and who dies makes a difference in who gets to tell your story. So you need to be better about keeping your records and making sure that they are passed down to someone’s when you’re studying a writer you need to be looking into many other things than just what a couple of people said about them. So this is one of the things I teach my students.
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:
There are a lot of people out in the world. Now, in this case, actors can be unreliable narrators because again they have an ego. They have a persona they have to put out into the world and as much as I love Marlon Brando — and I am quite a fan of The Godfather because my family is Italian so that was quite the movie to know. An academic recently went through all his papers and the notes he made on scripts and, in her mind, he wrote some fo the best dialogue in his films, and in her book, she credits Marlon Brando,. In fact, in In The Waterfront, the very famous line is “I could have had class. I could have been someone. I could have been a contender.” She says Marlon Brando wrote that line because in his own papers he says he wrote it but if you go back to the very first script which was written by Budd Schulberg his wife showed it to the academic, that line appeared in the very first draft of the very first script ever. How we credited Marlon Brando I don’t know, but that’s the newest thing now. So it amazes me how many unreliable narrators are out in the world.
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:
Marion Wong was a Chinese-American woman who made films in the early era in San Francisco. You won’t see her in many books. These ladies were also writers in the early days and I think that we’ll find out more about them in the future because they were connected to other important United States people like President Ulysses S. Grant but no one’s done a lot of research on them. No one has found that of interest yet. It’s just becoming a new thing for us.
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
![15 More On Charlie Brackett from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (57 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/rmw-sao-paolo-15.jpeg)
![Listen to the latest “How I Wrote That” Podcast with Screenwriter Laura Brennan from Most Likely to Die, and Faux Baby. [Audio]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/hiwt-stephens-logo-1-1.png){kind=logo}
![2020 Jan Marino Scholarship to Stephens MFA in TV and Screenwriting Announced at SeriesFest [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/seriesfest-jan-marino.jpeg)
![14 Charlie Brackett from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (54 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/rmw-sao-paolo-14.jpeg)
![13 Who Tells Your Story from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (28 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/rmw-sao-paolo-13.jpeg)
![12 Who Wrote What? from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (1 minute 9 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/rmw-sao-paolo-12.jpeg)
![11 Marion E. Wong & Jennie Louise Toussaint from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (27 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/rmw-sao-paolo-11.jpeg)