Category: Film

Transcript:

Host: Were there any – are there any current female and screenwriters that you would sort of recommend we go and check out is there anyone making interesting work other than yourself, of course.

Rosanne: I think the beautiful thing about now is there are many of them. There aren’t TOO many of them but there are many of them. So we’re beginning to see opportunities come to a lot more women. Again what’s interesting to me is I worked in television more than film and tv has always been a better writer’s medium. Writers and Executive Producers are in charge. The directors are the journeymen who come and go. So there’s more power there. So you’re still seeing more powerful women arrive in the television scene – obviously like Shonda Rhimes – to create your own production company and to create constantly these high-powered, very well-received pieces. That’s a place where women have more power. So something like Shonda Rhimes, of course, is someone you can’t help but look up to because she created her career, you know, properly one step at a time. This movie. That movie. This sequel. That sequel. The next thing you know I’m doing this and bam – Grey’s Anatomy, right? So and Grey’s Anatomy has been on 15 seasons? That doesn’t happen much these days either. It’s become that sort of comfort tv that I know when it went to Netflix it’s one of the highest viewed pieces on Netflix even though it’s a rerun. People love it right and she created that. She just understood the sensibility of the time and she was ahead of the game and the multicultural world we all live in. I mean you’re living in New York right and the great joke about Friends is how could it be that there were all those friends who sat in a coffee shop and there was no one of color whoever came by. So we’ve moved beyond that right but she was already like there 15 years ago.

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Host: What women in filmmaking inspired you as a practicing filmmaking screenwriter?

Rosanne: I was the kid who watched a lot of tv because I was an only child and I lived with my immigrant Sicilian grandparents and my mom, but she was at work all day, especially in the summer vacation and that was before parents arranged play dates and drove you to your friend’s houses for so many hours and whatnot. You were just on your own. So you went to the library. You found a bunch of books. So I read up a lot of the early female screenwriters. People like Anita Loos and Adele Rogers St. John and so I knew they existed and I was really interested in their work, but it wasn’t available to see right? Nobody was showing that sort of thing on television. So tv shows and tv writers in that period really struck me. I did a book on The Monkees a few years ago because Treva Silverman was the first female writer of a television show — a comedy writer — who didn’t have a male partner and she eventually went to the Mary Tyler Moore Show and she won a couple of Emmys. So she had quite a good career. So I started to realize there were women doing this writing thing and then I started to look into older films and find names in the past but there was this period in Hollywood where the Silent period and a little bit into the Talkies is very much — I saw another academic years ago at a conference say that early aviation and early film were back-to-back and that women were deeply involved in both and as soon as they became money-making franchises and men created studios and were the bosses, they offered women who had done the job before jobs — new contracts — as junior writers and they’re really big women like Anita Loos whatever — I’ll just go write novels. I don’t need you. Like this is — I don’t — I’m not a junior anything. So they disappeared from the sort of textbooks that started to appear in film studies and it was all these men, right? So you really had to start looking for them and of course, now there are better books out there. Cari Beauchamp has a wonderful book on Francis Marion who is the first woman to win two Oscars for writing and she was the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood.

Transcript:

I was at SCMS too, doing a paper and it was on Unreliable Narrators and a great example of that — this happens to many female writers — but also Nunnally Johnson wrote the adaptation of The Grapes Of Wrath which was filmed by John Ford and my example of — one of my examples is that obituaries are unreliable narrators because eventuallyNunnally Johnson married the actress Doris Bowden who played Rosa Sharon in the film. When she died just about five or six years ago you know in her 90s, her obituary said that she had starred in John Ford’s The Grapes Of Wrath and afterward married that film’s screenwriter. So her husband’s name didn’t appear in her obituary but the director of the film she made 50 years ago — his name appeared in her obituary. So i have to laugh at that because even John Ford — then I found some lovely quotes where he talked about how Nunnally Johnson directed on the page. He said you know this is the camera angle and this is what we need close up and this is all going to track and all those things and Ford said you know people are going to credit me with that and Nunnally Johnson said I don’t care who they credit. I know who did it. So it’s kind of a pity that people don’t recognize these names of the movies they love.

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So I mostly am interested in that and screenwriting because in Hollywood the issue has always been — we have that “Auteur Theory” which has been fought about and we’ve argued about. We’re getting there but you still read in the newspapers the review of a film and they’ll say it belongs to the director. They’ll name you know so and so such and such film and maybe four paragraphs in you’ll find oh that person also wrote it. So they’re a writer-director. Why didn’t you say that right or five paragraphs in they’ll now mention who wrote the thing and you’re like well that’s what I want to know. That’s where the idea came from. I get it. Directors do cool things and they run the set and whatever but the theme and the characters and the dialogue — which is what we quote all the time — came from the writer and that’s the person that I feel like we should be — I don’t say they have to be higher than the director. Let’s get equal again, right, which again we were in the Silent Era. So that stuff interests me a lot.