Film – Page 85 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

01 Introduction from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto – Dr. Rosanne Welch – SRN Conference 2017 [Video]

01 Introduction from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto – Dr. Rosanne Welch – SRN Conference 2017

Transcript:

Hi everybody! It’s so wonderful to have you here. I’m going to be talking about a book and a film and a television series and I think the trajectory from serious to bubblegum back to slightly serious is what’s interesting to me and it’s all about the adaptation of something and how the true person’s story can get lost along the way and I believe TV allows a chance to tell longer stories — you can tell a hundred hours in the life of a person instead of two hours and so I think we’re going to end up discovering that TV was the better place for this story to house itself.

At this year’s 10th Annual Screenwriting Research Network Conference at Otago University in Dunedin, New Zealand I presented…

“How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto by Accident (and How We Can Get Her Out of it): Demoting Gidget: The Little Girl with Big Ideas from Edgy Coming of Age Novel to Babe on the Beach Genre Film via Choices made in the Adaptation Process.”

It’ a long title, as I joke up front, but covers the process of adapting the true life story of Kathy Kohner (nicknamed ‘Gidget’ by the group of male surfers who she spent the summers with in Malibu in the 1950s) into the film and television series that are better remembered than the novel. The novel had been well-received upon publication, even compared to A Catcher in the Rye, but has mistakenly been relegated to the ‘girl ghetto’ of films. Some of the adaptations turned the focus away from the coming of age story of a young woman who gained respect for her talent at a male craft – surfing – and instead turned the focus far too much on Kathy being boy crazy.

Along the way I found interesting comparisons between how female writers treated the main character while adapting the novel and how male writers treated the character.

Gidget

Dr. Rosanne Welch

Dr. Rosanne Welch teaches the History of Screenwriting and One-Hour Drama for the Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting.

Writing/producing credits include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, ABCNEWS: Nightline and Touched by an Angel. In 2016 she published the book Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop; co-edited Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia; and placed “Transmitting Culture Transnationally Via the Characterization of Parents in Police Procedurals” in the New Review of Film and Television Studies. Essays appear in Torchwood Declassified: Investigating Mainstream Cult Television and Doctor Who and Race: An Anthology. Welch serves as Book Reviews editor for Journal of Screenwriting and on the Editorial Advisory Board for Written By magazine, the magazine of the Writers Guild.

Watch Dr. Welch’s talk “The Importance of Having a Female Voice in the Room” at the 2016 TEDxCPP.

The Screenwriting Research Network is a research group consisting of scholars, reflective practitioners and practice-based researchers interested in research on screenwriting. The aim is to rethink the screenplay in relation to its histories, theories, values and creative practices.

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America’s Never-ending Conversation About Race: Telecasting The Civil Rights Movement by Rosanne Welch, Written By, January 2018

America’s Never-ending Conversation About Race: Telecasting The Civil Rights Movement by Rosanne Welch
Written By Magazine, January 2018

I have an article about how the Civil Rights Movement was reflected on the TV shows of the 1960s and 70s – “America’s Neverending Conversation” in the current issue (January 2018) of Written By which is out today with revolving covers (like TV Guide does with special issues) featuring Lena Waite and/or Jordan Peele.

I had the wonderful experience of interviewing Jim Brooks about Room 222, a show I watched incessantly in my childhood before I knew what an ‘ideology’ was and that I was being offered one – and I spoke at length with Nancy Miller at length about Any Day Now – a show that relished highlighting the brave men and women who worked in the Civil Rights Movement – and still do.

You can read the whole issue digitally at this link.

By 1968, the Civil Rights Movement had celebrated many accomplishments, among them the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas ruling in 1954, the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955-1956, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Those milestones were discussed often on the evening news then and are common topics in history classrooms today.

Less common was mention of the movement or evidence of its existence on fictional television shows. While big movies such as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (1967, written by William Rose) appeared at the height of the movement, in many cases they were preaching to the choir since audiences had to choose to pay to see the films.

That left the small screen to bring the conversation about civil rights into American living rooms—in places where the message might not be wanted…often without warning. This made the exposure to the message that much more potent. Viewers could be confronted with issues they’d otherwise avoided in their daily lives. Unlike today, with social media’s virulent “fake news” and insular websites bolstering extremist interpretations, there was no sane way to deny documented reality other than turning off the set—then, as now, a difficult choice for most people.

Read the entire article — America’s Never-ending Conversation About Race: Telecasting The Civil Rights Movement by Rosanne Welch

A History of Screenwriting 48 – The Engagement Ring – Mabel Normand – 1912

Alice has two persistent suitors, one rich, one poor. Each buys her an engagement ring; the rich man pays cash, but the poor man must pay on installments. He has trouble making the payments, but then he’s injured in an auto accident and the settlement allows him to pay off the ring and propose to Alice.

Learn More About Mabel Normand with these books †

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Writers in Hollywood, 1915-1951 Hardcover by Ian Hamilton | Gifts for the Screenwriter #7

I found Ian Hamilton’s book long before I had any inkling that I would ever be involved in creating a course on The History of Screenwriting (as opposed to History of Film, which always means History of Directors). I enjoyed his look into the personalities that made up the earlier eras of the screenwriting colony here in Los Angeles, many of them transplanted New Yorkers from the journalism or playwright world drawn to the other coast for the fast money – and sometimes faster lifestyles – Hollywood was known for back then. Hamilton’s coverage of the era from 1915-1951 is both entertaining and educational. – Rosanne

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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!

Writing the Pilot by William Rabkin | Gifts for the Screenwriter #6

Bill Rabkin understands what makes writing a pilots different from writing regular episodes of a continuing series and explains that all in this clear, concise book. Having worked in television for a solid couple of decades on many fan favorites, Rabkin should know. – Rosanne

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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!

A History of Screenwriting – 47 in a series – City Lights – Charlie Chaplin (1931)

Link

City Lights is a 1931 American pre-Code silent romantic comedy film written, produced, directed by and starring Charlie Chaplin. The story follows the misadventures of Chaplin’s Tramp as he falls in love with a blind girl (Virginia Cherrill) and develops a turbulent friendship with an alcoholic millionaire (Harry Myers).

Although sound films were on the rise when Chaplin started developing the script in 1928, he decided to continue working with silent productions. Filming started in December 1928 and ended in September 1930. City Lights marked the first time Chaplin composed the film score to one of his productions and it was written in six weeks with Arthur Johnston. The main theme, used as a leitmotif for the blind flower girl, is the song “La Violetera” (“Who’ll Buy my Violets”) from Spanish composer José Padilla. Chaplin lost a lawsuit to Padilla for not crediting him.

City Lights was immediately successful upon release on January 30, 1931 with positive reviews and box office receipts of $5 million. Today, many critics consider it not only the highest accomplishment of Chaplin’s career, but one of the greatest films of all time. In 1991, the Library of Congress selected City Lights for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked it 11th on its list of the best American films ever made. In 1949, the critic James Agee called the film’s final scene “the greatest single piece of acting ever committed to celluloid”.[2] — Wikipedia

Learn More About Charlie Chaplin with these books

††

* 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 at the LA Public Library

Screenplay: Building Story Through Character | Gifts for the Screenwriter #5

Screenwriter Jule Selbo created Building Story Through Character after years of writing on successful television shows and films and then creating the MFA in Screenwriting at California State University, Fullerton where she teaches those skills to up and coming writers. Her focus on character and her 11 Steps of Story Structure streamlines ideas from other screenwriting gurus whose lists are longer and (to my mind) more contrived. You can take Selbo’s 11 Steps and apply them to stories as old as Gilgamesh and as modern as Wonder Woman – as she does in the book so that the reader can see the pattern repeat itself over and over again.- Rosanne

Sense and Sensibility: The Screenplay and Diaries | Gifts for the Screenwriter #3

For me this on set diary by a writer who also starred in the film and had to make script changes in the evenings after a full day of filming is a wonderful look at the real life of working writer/performer. The bonus fact iis that it is written by Emma Thompson about her work on Sense and Sensibility – a most marvelous movie to view and study.

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Final Draft 10 Software | Gifts for the Screenwriter #2

Whether your are a screenwriter, or know an aspiring one, Final Draft is one of the standard pieces of software for planning, writing and formatting your script properly. Make the best impression possible.

Know a screenwriting student? You might be able to save a significant amount using the Educational version.

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs

Without Lying Down by Cari Beauchamp | Gifts for the Screenwriter #1

One of the best biographies of a writer – and a female writer at that – Without Lying Down tells the story of Frances Marion, the highest paid screenwriter and a double Oscar winner whose career spanned the Silent Era and transformed into Talkies quite well (judging by the Oscars). Since she surrounded herself with a cadre of other female screenwriters at the time, the book is a marvelous introduction to a time when women ran Hollywood. — Rosanne

* 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!