Film – Page 96 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

More On Adapting The Prince of Tides from A History of the Art of Adaptation [Video] (1:00)

You Can Please Some of the People Some of the Time… None of the People All of the Time: A History of the Art of Adaptation in Movies like Dune, The Godfather, Harry Potter and More!

Dr. Rosanne Welch speaks on A History of the Art of Adaptation in Movies like Dune, The Godfather, Harry Potter and More! at the California State University, Fullerton Library

Part of the program series for Dune by Frank Herbert: A 50th Anniversary Celebration.

Watch this entire presentation

Transcript:

It all takes place in New York City, because that’s where the therapist lives and where the girl has gone. When we turn it into a movie Barbra Streisand and the staff completely took out the second brother. He’s already dead when the book starts. Instead of flashbacking to him, she just said “Nevermind. We don’t care” and the title of book “Prince of Tides” is Luke Wingo. by kicking him out of the story she turns that into being Tom, the main character. So many people who adored the book and adored this character Luke were angry because not only did she erase him, but they reconfigured where his nickname went. That’s a huge change from the original mention in the book, but it tightened the movie, because the movie, in the end, is a love story between the guy and the therapist. That is part of the novel, but not the focus of the novel. So, her she’s going to star in the thing. She’s going to play the therapist. Guess who’s going to be the more important character? Sorry. You want Barbra Streisand to make your move, that’s what you are going to get.

About this talk

Dr. Rosanne Welch (RTVF) speaks on the craft of history of film adaptations from the controversy of the silent film Birth of a Nation (protested by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1915) to Breakfast at Tiffany’s (to which author Truman Capote famously said, “The only thing left from the book is the title”) to The Godfather . Naturally, the behemoth in adaptation – Harry Potter (which depended on the relationship created by adapter Steve Kloves and author J.K. Rowling) will be discussed, as will the subject of this month’s celebration: Dune.

Date: Wednesday, October 14, 2015 Time: 1:00pm – 2:00pm

About Dr. Rosanne Welch

Dr. Rosanne Welch is a professor in the Low Residency MFA in Screenwriting Program from Stephens College, California State University, Fullerton, Mount San Antonio Community College and Cal Poly Pomona. In 2007, she graduated with her Ph.D. in 20th Century U.S./Film History from Claremont Graduate University. She graduated with her M.A. in 20th Century United States History from California State University, Northridge in 2004.

Welch is also a television writer/producer with credits for Beverly Hills 90210 , CBS’s Emmy winning Picket Fences and Touched By An Angel . She also writes and hosts her own podcasts on 3rdPass.media, her first one titled “Mindful(I) Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch.”

Her upcoming book, “Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture” will be published in Fall 2016

Three Ring Circus: How Real Couples Balance Marriage, Work and Kids and The Encyclopedia of Women in Aviation and Space are two books she has written. Los Angeles Times and the Journal of Screenwriting hold some of her published articles.

Dr. Rosanne Welch Web Site and Blog

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Dr. Rosanne Welch on YouTube

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A History of Screenwriting – 2 in a series – The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ (1906)

I teach several classes for the Stephens College Low-Residency MFA in Screenwriting, including History of Screenwriting. In fact, I created the curriculum for that course from scratch and customized it to this particular MFA in that it covers ‘Screenwriting’ (not directors) and even more specifically, the class has a female-centric focus. As part History of Screenwriting I, the first course in the four-class series, we focus on the early women screenwriters of the silent film era who male historians have, for the most part, quietly forgotten in their books. In this series, I share with you some of the screenwriters and films that should be part of any screenwriters education. I believe that in order to become a great screenwriter, you need to understand the deep history of screenwriting and the amazing people who created the career. — Dr. Rosanne Welch

The Birth, the Life and the Death of Christ (1906) – Alice Guy Blaché

Alice Guy Blaché on Wikipedia

Learn more about Alice Guy Blaché

Books on Alice Guy Blaché

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

Adapting The Prince of Tides from A History of the Art of Adaptation [Video] (1:03)

You Can Please Some of the People Some of the Time… None of the People All of the Time: A History of the Art of Adaptation in Movies like Dune, The Godfather, Harry Potter and More!

Dr. Rosanne Welch speaks on A History of the Art of Adaptation in Movies like Dune, The Godfather, Harry Potter and More! at the California State University, Fullerton Library

Part of the program series for Dune by Frank Herbert: A 50th Anniversary Celebration.

Watch this entire presentation

Transcript:

Here’s one of the most controversial adaptations over the last 15 years. Pat Conroy and The Prince of Tides which was purchased by Barbra Streisand’s company to be turned into a film. People who read Conroy’s stuff — and particularly this novel — they were so in love with this book and I must say, I read it after I saw the movie, so it was a very unique experience. Had I read it first, I might have been on their side and angry with how the movie came out, but I didn’t. So, I didn’t understand and the movies, I thought, was quite well done. It got many Oscar nominations and whatnot. The story here is about a southern family — Tome Wingo is our lead character — the sister, Savannah, the brother Luke — who has committed suicide in the course of the novel and this therapist, Susan Lowenstein, who is played by Barbra Streisand who also directed the film. So, in the book, we have the family and the therapist and the therapist is working with the girl, Savannah, because she has tried to commit suicide and so we have to understand that it all traces back to this dark day in the family where this awful thing happened and the mother covered it up.

About this talk

Date: Wednesday, October 14, 2015 Time: 1:00pm – 2:00pm

About Dr. Rosanne Welch

Her upcoming book, “Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture” will be published in Fall 2016

Dr. Rosanne Welch Web Site and Blog

Follow Dr. Welch on Twitter

Dr. Rosanne Welch on YouTube

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

A History of Screenwriting – 1 in a series – The Cabbage Fairy (La Fée aux Choux)

The Cabbage Dairy (La Fée aux Choux) – Alice Guy Blaché

Alice Guy Blaché on Wikipedia

“Alice Guy’s first film, and arguably the world’s first narrative film, was called La Fée aux Choux (The Cabbage Fairy) in 1896. It is a humorous story of a woman growing children in a cabbage patch. There is speculation surrounding the actual date of the film and different historians have argued about the dating and the labeling of it as ‘the first narrative film’ because of its extremely close release to another catalogued Gaumont film and other narrative-esque films from Méliès.^[8]— Wikipedia

Books on Alice Guy Blaché

* 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!

Event: Dr. Rosanne Welch Moderates “Women Write Now: Breaking Barriers In Film, Tv And The Web” – Tue, November 29, 2016 – Writers Guild

From Rosanne…

I’ll be moderating this panel at the Writers Guild. Hope to see you there!

Women Write Now: Breaking Barriers In Film, Tv And The Web

As the landscape of storytelling on film, television and the web evolves and changes, more women are leading the charge in breaking down gender walls in the industry. Each has her own story and a perspective about the challenges that women face as writers and creators in the field.

The Writers Guild Foundation and Stage 32 are partnering on this special event, which invites writers to discuss their careers and their experiences working as a woman in the industry, from where they started and how they got their material noticed to what the future for women in media looks like and what inspires them to write every day.

Panelists:

Lauren Schuker Blum (ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK)
Jessica Mecklenburg (STRANGER THINGS, BEING MARY JANE)
Deborah Schoeneman (HAND OF GOD, GIRLS, THE NEWSROOM)
Kirsten Smith (10 THINGS I HATE ABOUT YOU, LEGALLY BLONDE)
More panelists to be announced. Stay tuned!

Doors open at 7pm. Event starts at 7:30pm. A networking reception will follow directly after the panel from 9pm to 10pm.

Stage 32 is dedicated to educating and empowering creatives from all walks of life, and as a continued commitment, we will provide every attendee with a free Stage 32 Next Level webinar (a $49 value), to help sharpen your skills and pave your trail in the industry.

About Stage 32:

“Stage 32 is LinkedIn meets Lynda for film and TV creatives” – Forbes Magazine

Stage 32 is the online platform connecting and educating film and TV creatives worldwide. Stage 32 provides over 1,000 hours of online education taught by some of the industry’s most prominent development, executives, managers, agents and producers.

All events advertised on our “Events” page are open to anyone who wants to buy a ticket – not just WGA members!

Proceeds benefit the Foundation’s library and archive and other outreach programs

Everyone should watch “Friendly Persuasion” [Film History]

In the course of writing a chapter surveying the portrayal of women in Civil War films (for a book called Blue And Gray In Black And White And Color) I’ve had the fascinating opportunity to watch two films I had never seen – one brilliant, one awful. Funny how that goes.

The brilliant one is so good I may add it to my film list for next year’s History of Screenwriting III (from 1950-1980) because of how well done it is and because it was written by Michael Wilson, one of the lesser known, blacklisted writers of the era though he also wrote The Bridge on the River Kwai, A Place in the Sun and Planet of the Apes (not a bad CV for a screenwriter).

In fact, the Wilson film that I loved didn’t even have his name – or the name of any screenwriter – or the Screenplay By credit on the opening credits at all. Because the studio wouldn’t put out a film by a blacklisted writer, director William Wyler wanted to put his brother’s name on the film – but the WGA said no. And Wilson didn’t want to use a pseudonym, so the film has no screenwriting credit. What it does have, that was built into the structure by the author of the novel on which it is based, Jessamyn West, is a wonderful chance for all the major and minor characters to do the most dramatic thing of all – to choose how to behave when the world’s activity doesn’t match your personal beliefs.

The film (and novel) is Friendly Persuasion, about an Indiana Quaker family in the path of Morgan’s Raiders during the Civil War. The mother is the local Quaker minister, her husband supports her to the best of his ability (though he’d like to buy an organ for their home because he doesn’t understand why music is wrong), and her son (played by Anthony Perkins in an Oscar nominated role) is the one who struggles with whether or not to pick up a guy and fight the Confederates as they have begun burning the barns on their friends’ local farms. It’s such a beautiful piece of drama because every character has to make a decision – and a tough one – about what they believe in – and then live with the consequences of that decision. While the opening of the film was a bit slow (as films from the 1950s tended to be – they gave you time to know the ‘world’ of the film that was about to be overturned by the events of the story) it all culminated beautifully.

On the other hand, for this research, I also watched a 1971 gothic horror film (also written by a formerly blacklisted writer, Albert Maltz) and also based on a novel (written by Thomas P. Cullinan) called The Beguiled. A lousier, more annoying piece of claptrap I have never watched. I wanted to turn it off several times but since I was studying how Civil War women were portrayed in films, I couldn’t, since the story is of a wounded Union soldier being cared for by the residents of a Southern girls boarding school. I get that gothic plus horror doesn’t equal true – and yet, horror is all the more horrific if it is based in some, small reality. This film is nothing more than a collection of sex kittens clamoring to lose their virginity to this representative of the enemy, the guy who was shooting at their loved ones yesterday is not my idea of the perfect man and yet these women fall into awful displays of coquettishness which I could never bring myself to believe.

I’ve read that Sofia Coppola is writing a remake. Part of me considers seeing it in hopes that she will find the reality that will make the story more palatable – but the other part of me never wants to wallow in that stupidity again. Despite how nice Clint Eastwood looked with his shirt off in those days, watching 12 year old girls try to have sex with him was far too icky for me. Then, again, perhaps that’s what classified the film as a horror film in the first place?

So if you want to take my advice, never rent The Beguiled but do make time in your viewing life for Friendly Persuasion.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory from A History of the Art of Adaptation [Video] (0:54)

You Can Please Some of the People Some of the Time… None of the People All of the Time: A History of the Art of Adaptation in Movies like Dune, The Godfather, Harry Potter and More!

Dr. Rosanne Welch speaks on A History of the Art of Adaptation in Movies like Dune, The Godfather, Harry Potter and More! at the California State University, Fullerton Library

Part of the program series for Dune by Frank Herbert: A 50th Anniversary Celebration.

Watch this entire presentation

Transcript:

What I love about using Patricia Neal, is that she leads us into Roald Dahl, because she’s married to him. Most people, not everybody knows she was married to Roald Dahl, who gave us — Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Which some people did read as children or perhaps they didn’t read it, they instead saw — from the book — Willy Wonka. And noticed how that changed. It’s “Charlie and The Chocolate Factory”. The movie is “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.” We’ve entirely changed the focus of who’s the important character in this book and — if you saw this as a child, — you will remember that we fell in love with Gene Wilder. This book — who’s read this book? Not a soft fuzzy little children’s book at all, because that’s not what Roald Dahl did. At the time this movie was made, the early 70’s, that’s what we’re looking for. Nice families. Good kids. Everything is safe. It’s all going to be fine in the end.

About this talk

Date: Wednesday, October 14, 2015 Time: 1:00pm – 2:00pm

About Dr. Rosanne Welch

Her upcoming book, “Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture” will be published in Fall 2016

Dr. Rosanne Welch Web Site and Blog

Follow Dr. Welch on Twitter

Dr. Rosanne Welch on YouTube

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

A Lesson in the Power of One Line – Leigh Brackett [Essay]

Watching a rerun of The Rockford Files the other day I noted 2 interesting things – things that came up in conversations with writers, producers and development execs who gave guest lectures at our Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting over our last workshop session. Particularly, what came up was the idea of what execs and showrunners look for when they read a spec script. Several producers and show runners said they look for solid scenes and one or two spectacular lines of dialogue – lines that stood out as well-written and never strayed away from character.

So watching a first season Rockford episode called “The Four Pound Brick” I noted a line of dialogue that stuck with me over a few days. An older woman was walking away from the cemetery plot for her 26 year old son. She was commenting on the (then new) policy of not allowing headstones in favor of flat stones that allowed lawnmowers to ride over and therefore keep the whole area neater. She said, “I think cemeteries ought to be a bit messy. Like lives.” A very nice line that struck me as something that would make me want to read more of that writer.

Then I used IMDB to get the writer’s name: Leigh Brackett. You might (or so I say you should) recognize her name from a number of successful hard-boiled, manly-man detective and western films such as The Big Sleep, El Dorado, and Rio Bravo. She also wrote a slew of science-fiction/fantasy books and often collaborated with Ray Bradbury.

I don’t like the fact that this is a compliment, but it was then and still is: Director Howard Hawks thought Leigh Brackett was a good writer because – according to him – she wrote “like a man”.

For my fellow Star Wars fans, you will recognize Brackett for her co-screenwriting credit (shared with Lawrence Kasdan) for Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. Long-time fan of her writing, George Lucas, wanted her and only her to write the sequel to his blockbuster film once he’d figured out he liked directing and world-building more than the nuts and bolts of executing those big dreams on the big screen. He wanted Han Solo to be a combination of Humphrey Bogart and John Wayne – a manly man with a sensitive side – and hired the woman who could do that. But she died of cancer after writing the first version of the script so Lucas did some work on her draft before asking Lawrence Kasdan to finish the screenplay. Both men respected and admired Brackett so much – and kept so much of her characterizations and structure – that her name remains on the final script. Apparently, there was only one copy of her version at an archive but eventually it made its way onto the internet where you can read it:

The Empire Strikes Back – Brackett Draft (PDF)

I like Han Solo’s line about Hoth: “I doubt if God even remembers where he hung this star.” I wonder how many rewrite drafts it survived until either Lucas or Kasdan decided not to mention gods of any kind in their alternate universe…

But it was interesting to see that the advice of current showrunners helped me pick out a quality writer in the midst of her career. I haven’t researched how she came to write a Rockford episode but many screenwriters of the 40s and 50s turned to television for a while since it was such a lucrative market.

As a final note, the IMDB trivia page tells us that the character “Sheriff Leigh Brackett” in John Carpenter’s independent horror film Halloween (1978) was named after her. It’s a nice tribute, but a nicer one would be that more of us recognize her name more often.

Leigh Brackett on Wikipedia

Leigh Brackett on IMDB

Books by Leigh Brackett at Amazon.com

From Breakfast at Tiffany’s to In Cold Blood from A History of the Art of Adaptation [Video] (0:26)

You Can Please Some of the People Some of the Time… None of the People All of the Time: A History of the Art of Adaptation in Movies like Dune, The Godfather, Harry Potter and More!

Dr. Rosanne Welch speaks on A History of the Art of Adaptation in Movies like Dune, The Godfather, Harry Potter and More! at the California State University, Fullerton Library

Part of the program series for Dune by Frank Herbert: A 50th Anniversary Celebration.

Watch this entire presentation

Transcript:

the one they adapted much better is “In Cold Blood” which is one of those books that if I start reading the first page I have to shut up and go read the rest of the book. It’s quite a brilliant book and this one they followed almost to the letter. Obviously you can’t include everything in an adaptation, but they didn’t make any real changes because the story was so well known and it was based on a true serial murder. So, he (Capote) was happy with that and he actually got very involved with the actors in that. He hated this movie (Breakfast at Tiffany’s).

About this talk

Date: Wednesday, October 14, 2015 Time: 1:00pm – 2:00pm

About Dr. Rosanne Welch

Her upcoming book, “Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture” will be published in Fall 2016

Dr. Rosanne Welch Web Site and Blog

Follow Dr. Welch on Twitter

Dr. Rosanne Welch on YouTube

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Gay, but not gay, in Breakfast at Tiffany’s from A History of the Art of Adaptation [Video] (1 min)

You Can Please Some of the People Some of the Time… None of the People All of the Time: A History of the Art of Adaptation in Movies like Dune, The Godfather, Harry Potter and More!

Dr. Rosanne Welch speaks on A History of the Art of Adaptation in Movies like Dune, The Godfather, Harry Potter and More! at the California State University, Fullerton Library

Part of the program series for Dune by Frank Herbert: A 50th Anniversary Celebration.

Watch this entire presentation

Transcript:

The characters exist, right? They are true. However, in real life George Peppard’s character, Turman Capote, in the book, the character’s gay. That’s why the 2 of them never end up together. It’s not a love tory. It’s a friendship. It’s a buddy story between a gay man and a woman. This is “Will & Grace” before there was “Will & Grace.” The problem is, you couldn’t do that onscreen. So, how can we show he’s doing something wrong sexually that isn’t being a homosexual. Oh! He’s a gigolo. Just like she makes her money from rich men, he makes his money from a rich woman who “keeps” him and buys him suits and that’s the perversion that he’s allowed to have onscreen and it’s with Patricia Neal, a famous actress back in the day. And I always thought that was so sad because they make her out to be this little old lady. She’s not that much older than he is actually at this moment. So, that’s kind of funny. So, that’s a huge change and to Truman Capote a huge loss in his particular story.

About this talk

Date: Wednesday, October 14, 2015 Time: 1:00pm – 2:00pm

About Dr. Rosanne Welch

Her upcoming book, “Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture” will be published in Fall 2016