Video of this panel coming soon
Category: Film
#FemaleFilmmakerFriday 01: Ava DuVernay
Its #femalefilmmakerfriday and this week we’re featuring a writer, producer, director who embodies all the values of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting program: Ava DuVernay! (IMDB)
DuVernay is a writer, producer, director and distributor of independent film.
Winner of the Emmy, BAFTA and Peabody Awards, Academy award nominee Ava DuVernay is a writer, director, producer and film distributor. Her directorial work includes the historical drama SELMA, the criminal justice documentary 13TH and Disney’s A WRINKLE IN TIME, which made her the highest grossing black woman director in American box office history. Based on the infamous case of The Central Park Five, her next project is entitled WHEN THEY SEE US and will be released worldwide on Netflix in May 2019. Currently, she is overseeing production on her critically-acclaimed TV series QUEEN SUGAR, her new CBS limited series THE RED LINE and her upcoming OWN series CHERISH THE DAY. Winner of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival’s Best Director Prize for her micro-budget film MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, DuVernay amplifies the work of people of color and women of all kinds through her non-profit film collective ARRAY, named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies. DuVernay sits on the advisory board of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and chairs the Prada Diversity Council. She is based in Los Angeles, California.
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#MentorMonday 4 – Maria Escobedo – Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting
Applications for the 2020 Class of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting are now OPEN!
Deadline March 2020
Another #mentormonday, another Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting incredible mentor! This week we want to highlight Maria Escobedo (IMDB)!
Maria Escobedo is a film and television writer with credits including Grey’s Anatomy, Hulu’s East Los High and the indie film Rum and Coke, which she wrote and directed. She’s developed movies and pilots for Lifetime, Disney Channel, and Nickelodeon. She also has written for animated kids’ TV, including Dora the Explorer, Go Diego Go, Elena of Avalor, Special Agent Oso and Nina’s World, which earned her a Humanitas Award nomination. Escobedo is currently writing for Amazon’s If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, Netflix’s What-To-Doodles and Nickelodeon’s Santiago of the Seas. She also has developed original pilots for Amazon Kids. Escobedo served as chair of the Latino Writers Committee at the Writers Guild of America West for five years, and teaches writing at University of Southern California and California State University, Los Angeles.
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From The Journal Of Screenwriting 6: Kurosawa to Kasdan: Storytelling influences
Highlighting the articles in the latest edition of the Journal of Screenwriting, of which I am the Book Reviews Editor. Hopefully these abstracts will entice you to did a little deeper into the history and future of screenwriting. — Rosanne
Kurosawa to Kasdan: Storytelling influences
Brett Davies
Lawrence Kasdan is one of the most commercially successful screenwriters of the past forty years. In addition to writing Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and four episodes of the Star Wars saga, Kasdan has gained critical acclaim as the writer-director of seminal 1980s ‘baby-boomer’ films, such as The Big Chill (1983) and The Accidental Tourist (1988). Known for ‘genre-hopping’, it is perhaps Kasdan’s very versatility that has led to a marked lack of academic discourse on his work, as his eclectic canon – including westerns, neo-noir, sci-fi horror, comedy and romantic thriller – makes it problematic for scholars to establish prevalent patterns in his output. This article argues that one influence has remained constant throughout Kasdan’s career: the work of Akira Kurosawa. Examining three screenwriting elements – dialogue, protagonists, themes – the article will demonstrate how Kurosawa’s storytelling style has repeatedly informed Kasdan’s work, from his earliest screenplays (Kasdan said that ‘there’s a lot of Kurosawa in Raiders’) to his most recent, as The Force Awakens (2015) and Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) showed stylistic connections with Kurosawa’s films, beyond those already established by George Lucas’s original Star Wars (1977).
The Journal of Screenwriting is an international double-blind peer-reviewed journal that is published three times a year. The journal highlights current academic and professional thinking about the screenplay and intends to promote, stimulate and bring together current research and contemporary debates around the screenplay whilst encouraging groundbreaking research in an international arena. The journal is discursive, critical, rigorous and engages with issues in a dynamic and developing field, linking academic theory to screenwriting practice.
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After the DTLA Film Festival Panel via Instagram
After the DTLA Film Festival Panel
Moderating panels at local film festivals is a good way to highlight the great work of mentors like Maria Escobedo and to meet new possible mentors for MFA program like Peruvian filmmaker Donna Bonilla Wheeler. Here we are chatting after a panel on how Writers Can avoid implicit bias in their work at the DTLA film Festival in Los Angeles.
Ran into a student (Elaina Redmond) from our first “Podcasting For Writers” class at the DTLA Film Festival via Instagram
DTLA Film Festival panel discussion, Privileged Characters: How to recognize and avoid implicit bias in your screenwriting. via Instagram
Quotes from When Women Wrote Hollywood – 50 and End in a series – “…her female-centric work failed to find acclaim with critics.”
Do you know about these women screenwriters? Many don’t. Learn more about them today!
Buy “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Today!
Zoë Akins is described as “a perplexing figure in the history of American theatre” by historian Yvonne Shafer (58). Akins was a poet, novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. Despite many successful publications, productions, films, and a Pulitzer Prize, she is not considered an obvious success. In creative fields dominated by the male perspective, her female-centric work failed to find acclaim with critics.
Zoë Akins: A Quiet Rebellion
by Sarah Whorton
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Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition
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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!
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Presenting “When Women Wrote Horror” at the Cal Poly Pomona University Library as a Halloween event
Presenting “When Women Wrote Horror” at the Cal Poly Pomona University Library as a Halloween event
Video of this talk is coming soon!
* 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!
