Category: Film

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Now the special issue we just did, I co-edited with Rose Farrell who’s at Edith Cowan University in Australia, and what I love about – we all come from this group called the Screenwriting Research Network, which meets internationally once a year, although not this year because of COVID. We were supposed to be in Oxford and we didn’t get to go but through that, we were just sitting around having a chat one day with the editor Craig Batty and I teased him because there’s always a special issue. There’s an issue on animation. There’s an issue in children’s films. I said why didn’t we ever do an issue on women and he stopped and he went, you could do it if you want. It’s like more work right but you want to see something done. Sometimes you just have to do it yourself. So then I was very smart because I knew how much work it would be and I called Rose and I said Rose do you want to do this with me and she was like oh what a great idea. So we did internationally this work you know going through zoom and going through our email and whatnot but she was the voice that said not only should this be about women but this should be about international women. We have published much about films in the UK and in the United States. What else can we find? So I’m really proud of the fact that you’ll find articles in there – a female writer from Syria – a female writer from Zimbabwe. We’ve got writers from Israel. We’ve got stories from Brazil. Peru. Argentina.

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So she was writing what she knew, right? So, I think you can look into every version of that movie – and there have been four now – including the most recent, right, and see the ghost of her voice existing because the raw honesty of that experience – of feeling like how can I be with a man who the world was making feel less than me when I feel like we are equals but it’s going to eventually erode this relationship. That’s just really – and there are some lines from the first film – from 1937 – it was remade with Judy Garland in 1954 by Moss Hart who’s a famous Broadway playwright – but he, in his memoirs says that he used a lot of scenes verbatim because they were just so good there was no point to rewrite them. So, it’s wonderful to look for that sort of thing. So, if I was going to write about that movie, I don’t care that George Cukor directed the Judy Garland version. I care what voice – what writer’s voice do I see trace through that.

Transcript:

Host: Why don’t you tell us more about the Journal of Screenwriting in general and then your special issue specifically.

Rosanne: Sure. Well, obviously it’s in the title. It’s about Screenwriting. So, anyone who sends some material in, we don’t want to hear about how the director affected the movie. We want to hear about what research you’ve done to prove deeper things. Like, for instance, I’m doing a presentation tomorrow on A Star Is Born. The original A Star is Born. That was written – people largely don’t know – by Dorothy Parker – who they do know as a famous female from New York who wrote essays and poetry and her husband, Alan Campbell and you don’t know his name, do you? No one’s ever heard of Alan Campbell. They got married when she was already famous. He was an actor on Broadway. He wanted to work in Hollywood. So that’s why they moved here. She didn’t want to come to LA. There was that whole New York is better than LA kind of feeling,. but they wrote this movie and I would contend that it’s her voice in this movie because they lived a life where she was always more famous than her husband and it destroyed their marriage. They ended up getting divorced. Later on, he died of a drug overdose.