History – Page 14 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

17 Spoilers…or not from Why Torchwood Still Matters (2021) with Dr. Rosanne Welch , San Diego Who Con 2021 [Video]

I recently presented a talk on Torchwood (Why Torchwood Still Matters) where I highlighted a few ways in which the show (airing from 2006 to 2011) came up with progressive and innovative ideas that are being used by other franchises today.

I always enjoy attending the SD (San Diego) WhoCon because the audiences are so well-informed on the Whoniverse and Whovians love Captain Jack and the crew that made this spinoff program so engaging.

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Transcript:

Rosanne: In terms of – I think again innovation – I think this was – I’ve not seen this in American show, right? This is not a thing. So I think it’s very cool that they got away with it twice and they get away with it because of being creative with their publicity and that the – I mean the UK is not that small but smaller than here – and the idea that they could go to the newspapers and say “Do us a favor don’t – you’re going to figure it out from the call sheets. You’re going to know these people don’t exist after a couple of episodes but let us do this. Let us have this surprise.” So both shows were put out with the extra character as if they’re a regular. This is the cast of this new show and you’re looking at it going well that makes perfect sense and even – especially the picture with The Doctor it’s like Oh you want to have the two flanking each side. It looks balanced. It looks perfect right and but they’re not. So they literally worked with the journalists and the people that they had to deal with which I think is cool. We don’t necessarily do that here. It’s all about breaking news. I just found out this character’s dying next week. Thank you for ruining it for everybody.

Audience: I don’t want spoilers.

Rosanne: Exactly. Exactly. I want a little book where they’re hidden in. Don’t tell me.

Audience: I don’t watch the social media at all because they ruin it.

Rosanne: Yeah. They totally do. I mean and I think that’s a problem. So it’s so interesting to me that the UK can sort of be tight enough that they’re all willing to get in on the act and I think they understand that’s what’s going to make the piece more popular. They want the piece to be more global and more people to pay attention. So this is a big deal. I can’t name an American show that got away with this right? So I think that’s pretty cool.

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07 Women Writing Westerns from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

Host: You mention the Silent Era being this
really open, Wild West period of film writing.

If we sort of sketch a line across the 20th Century and now into the 21st Century how

did women’s opportunities kind of wax and
wane in different periods?

What new opportunities opened up?

What things were foreclosed?

How did those kind of trends go across the
history of film?

Rosanne: Wonderful.

Well.

first of all, of course, in the Silent Era
it was – everybody going at it and having

fun until there was too much money in it and
then the women segued out.

Again, they went into novels and literature
although a few people survived that period,

but they weren’t writing westerns.

right?

Except – as you all know from the Autry
Museum – Betty Burabge was writing Gene

Autry movies, right?

So there were some women.

Leigh Brackett – again who is coming in
handy when we’re talking about “Star Wars”

was a western novelist and write western serialization
and things.

So we have some women but it becomes a dude
thing, right, and then this is a problem for

writers all the time.

You get pigeonholed just like actors do.

Oh you did that one movie and your brilliant
at it?

We want you to do fourteen on the same movie.

It’s very few people who get to be William Goldman and do a variety of different things. You have to really reach that peak. So women – it wanes in movies. Although B Serial have a little more opportunity for them and then, yes, TV is invented.

The Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting is building a relationship with the Autry Museum of the American West since both organizations are devoted to bringing out more diverse and untold stories. Last year we were able to take our cohort of graduating MFA candidates to the museum’s theatre for a showing of Michael Wilson’s Salt of the Earth and we had plans to present a film of our choice this year – but of course the pandemic changed all that. Instead, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis asked me if I would sit for an interview about female screenwriters in the western genre and so “When Women Wrote Westerns” came to be a part of their “What Is a Western? Interview Series”.

I had a great time discussing so many wonderful women writers – from Jeanne MacPherson to D.C. Fontana to Edna Ferber to Emily Andras. If you love westerns I suggest you watch Josh’s other interviews covering everything from the work of Native Americans in Western movies to films in the western-horror hybrid. —

What this entire presentation

As part of a series exploring the significance of the Western genre and the ways in which the movies shape our understanding of the American West, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis interviews Professor Rosanne Welch about the women screenwriters of Hollywood and their contributions to the Western genre.

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Powers Cameragraph projector, c. 1904-06, Hollywood Heritage Museum (Lasky-DeMille Barn) via Instagram [Photography]

From Curator, Richard Adkins…

“This is a Powers Cameragraph projector, c. 1904-06. It is without its original housing, which would have been a metal box not unlike the Powers projector that is on display to the right of this mechanism. It comes from the estate of Richard Nederhauser, a projectionist who later was in charge of all technical updates for the Metropolitan Theatre chain.”

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16 Joan Didion & John Gregory Dunne from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

Nearly two years ago I had the pleasure of being invited to join a panel at the then upcoming SCMS (Society of Cinema and Media Studies) conference set for Seattle. As you know that was canceled due to Covid with the hopes of reconvening in Colorado in 2021. That became a virtual conference but our group decided to reapply our panel and we four were able to ‘meet’ on Zoom on Sunday and present: Writing Between the Lines: Feminist Strategies for Historical Absences, Cliché, and the Unreliable Narrator.

Here you can watch a clip from my part of the presentation,

“When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues in Oral Histories”

Transcript:

Again, as I said, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne who wrote all these wonderful things together. John Gregory Dunne actually would have Joan go to meetings first because the men you work with in Hollywood, if you went to a meeting together would look at John while they talked. So, if they sent Joan alone and pretended John was sick one day the men got used to looking at her and then when they came together they looked at both of them. so, they were pretty brilliant about making sure she didn’t get forgotten in the writing process like that.

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Reading Leads to 6 Degree Games with Famous Names

Reading Leads to 6 Degree Games with Famous Names by Dr. Rosanne Welch

A funny thing happens when you read a lot of biographies – sometimes names you never heard of turn up in the lives of people who never met and you’re reminded that the 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon game could be played in generations in the past (with different names of course).

Rachel Carson By U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service – This image originates from the National Digital Library of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service at this page This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing. See Category:Images from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. http://training.fws.gov/history/carson/carson.html, Public Domain, Link

That’s what happened when I picked up William Souder’s biography of Rachel Carson On a Farther Shore. I had taught her book Silent Spring which reinvigorated the environmental movement in the 1960s so I wanted to know how she became a writer. As I was reading one of her influences was Hendrik Willem van Loon, a Dutch-American children’s book author, historian, and journalist (like Carson). He wrote The Story of Mankind in 1921 as a history of the world for children and won the first Newbery Medal in 1922. I’ve been reading Newberry Award winners all my life so it was fun to learn he won the first, but that’s not why I remembered his name.

Hendrik Willem van Loon By Underwood & Underwood – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3a02154. This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information., Public Domain, Link

That knowledge came from another biography I had delved into several years ago when I started teaching the History of Screenwriting. There I ‘met’ Frances Goodrich Hackett, co-screenwriter with her husband Albert of several classics including The Thin Man, Father of the Bride, It’s a Wonderful Life before winning both the Tony and Pulitzer Prize for the stage version of The Diary of Anne Frank. Then they adapted it into a film. Turns out Von Loon had been Goodrich’s second husband (Albert was her third and final since their marriage and writing partnership lasted over 50 years).

Frances Goodrich Hackett, By not known Fair use , Link

I love accidental finds like that. Carson was influenced by Von Loon to become a writer and Frances became one after she left him. Interesting that both of these women and their writings are now more well-known than he or his works when, at the time, he was the more famous.

Rosanne In Mr. DeMille’s Office , Hollywood Heritage Museum (Lasky-DeMille Barn) via Instagram [Photography]

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16 The “Bury Your Gays” Trope from Why Torchwood Still Matters (2021) with Dr. Rosanne Welch , San Diego Who Con 2021 [Video]

I always enjoy attending the SD (San Diego) WhoCon because the audiences are so well-informed on the Whoniverse and Whovians love Captain Jack and the crew that made this spinoff program so engaging.

RMW Rosanne Signature for Web

16 The

Transcript:

When I talk about Buffy The Vampire Slayer we get to the Tara/Willow relationship and that’s the first lesbian relationship on television and then – spoiler alert – Tara is killed and that is the beginning of the “Bury Your Gays” trope which went on for a few years, but then Emily Andras who does “Wynonna Earp” – if you haven’t seen that. it’s quite good, on SciFi and now it’s on Netflix – when she created her series she gave Wynonna a little sister named Waverly and she’s a lesbian who has a relationship with the local town sheriff and, the producer, Emily, promised to in the run of this show will either of those 2 women die. I will break this trope and, sure enough, you get to the end of the fourth season – the series finale – and it’s the ladies’ wedding. She’s gone all the way to that point. So, some people told her that’s a bad idea because we want the worry about our characters but because she promised they wouldn’t die she also got to be more innovative because she put them in some of the worst possible situations where you could never get out of and, as an audience member, you were like, ok, they can’t die. How – so you were equally involved. It wasn’t like well I know they can’t die. I don’t care. it was like, how are they going to get out of this? So the interactivity stayed. So, I would say that that is not – I don’t think that is “fridging.”

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06 More On Women and Westerns from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

Rosanne: Right. One of the great comparisons people will make – and I adore “Star Wars” and we’re going to talk about “Star Wars” and how that’s really a western –

Host: Okay.

Rosanne: I adore “Star Wars” but of course, that’s the lesson that you know young Luke Skywalker learns whereas you compare that to – and there’s a lovely Ted Talk that does this – “The Wizard of Oz”, which is a female heroine and what she does is she takes the group around her, empowers all of them to do their best, and as a team they succeed and those – that’s a different look at our West but we know the West did not survive because one or two men took on one or two other people. It survived because great communities of people came together right and did that and on the flip side –when we think about Native Americans – they all fought together as well. It wasn’t just the male warriors. The women were upholding all these things and they also took the brunt of the disease that was passed and all those things. So the community idea is really what – I think – we all succeed at and by not seeing that side of a story, we’re telling men they have too much work to do all by themselves and that’s not fair.

Host: that’s a great way to tell – I’ll teach my daughter that.

What this entire presentation

Find more information at the Autry Museum of the American West

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Vintage Film Makeup Kit, Hollywood Heritage Museum (Lasky-DeMille Barn) via Instagram [Photography]

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15 Nice Guys and Allies from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

Here you can watch a clip from my part of the presentation,

“When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues in Oral Histories”

Transcript:

I very briefly want to be fair to all the lovely nice men in the world because they are –they do exist and they do credit the women in their lives. These husbands all – from Garson Kanin to Albert Hackett to John Gregory Dunn all credited their wives with equal or more work on all the projects they did together and you’ll recognize of course Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon having done these films which won them all Academy Award nominations and Garson always talks about how much of a writer Ruth was even though we as a culture remember her as an actress but he does complain about the fact that they call it George Cukor’s “Adam’s Rib” when in fact much of the direction was written into the script by Garson and Ruth. Having been theater people they understood exactly where they wanted the camera to go, So they get erased by Cukor. Albert and Francis, of course, are brilliant. They wrote for almost 50 years in Hollywood but when you look at the posters of their work it’s the director Frank Capra who essentially erases them from the picture. Their names are down here very tiny and here’s the crazy thing about that. They also in their career are going to write “The Diary of Anne Frank” for which they’re going to get the Pulitzer Prize. Capra don’t have no Pulitzer Prize but it’s called Frank Capra’s “It’s A Wonderful Life” right? No thank you. They also wrote Nick and Nora Charles the real “The Thin Man” which is Nick and Nora Charles. I’m talking fast because I want to use up all my time. I’m sorry and that’s normally put off on Dashiell Hammett who wrote the novel but if you look at the movie the couple in the movie is actually Francis and Albert.

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