On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch
Writing, Film, Television and More!
From The Research Vault: Factory – 1960s Magazine Articles
Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture
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A fun site to check out is the Writers Guild Foundation Blog where they highlight some of the wonderful scripts in their catalog.
The link below takes you to a fun post about writers who created great chemistry on the page where the blogger excerpts a few pages from 1949’s Adams’s Rib, written by husband-and-wife writing team Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin.
Gorden and Kanin appear in an essay of mine, published in our new book, When Women Wrote Hollywood.
…And after that great post, check out this one, on Norma Rae.
This Week’s Script Cavalcade: Adam’s Rib from the Writers Guild Foundation Blog
Lauren Bacall gives Humphrey Bogart some side eye and he grins. Billy Crystal and Meg Ryanargue about orgasms at Katz’s deli. Yammering Paul Newman talks a mostly silent Robert Redford’s ear off in the wild west in the late 1800s. Basically, two characters come together as partners on screen and if we’re lucky, their interactions and friction produce this happy spellbinding effect.
We call it chemistry, but often in the business of creating movies and television we treat it like it’s magic… as if it’s elusive and very difficult to conjure and we shouldn’t talk about it too loudly because we don’t want to squelch the enchantment.
Here’s a question for you.
What if we treated chemistry as what it is?
That is to say, a science.
Click for larger images
When Women Wrote Hollywood – 5 in a series – The New York Hat (1912), Wr: Anita Loos, Dirs: D. W. Griffith
The New York Hat (1912) is a short silent film directed by D. W. Griffith from a screenplay by Anita Loos, and starring Mary Pickford, Lionel Barrymore, and Lillian Gish.
The New York Hat is one of the most notable of the Biograph Studios short films and is perhaps the best known example of Pickford’s early work, and an example of Anita Loos’s witty writing. The film was made by Biograph when it and many other early U.S. movie studios were based in Fort Lee, New Jersey at the beginning of the 20th century.[1][2][3]
Mollie Goodhue leads a cheerless, impoverished life, largely because of her stern, miserly father. Mrs. Goodhue is mortally ill, but before dying, she gives the minister, Preacher Bolton, some money with which to buy her daughter the “finery” her father always forbade her.
Mollie is delighted when the minister presents her with a fashionable New York hat she has been longing for, but village gossips misinterpret the minister’s intentions and spread malicious rumors. Mollie becomes a social pariah, and her father tears up the beloved hat in a rage.
All ends well, however, after the minister produces a letter from Mollie’s mother about the money she left the minister to spend on Mollie. Soon afterwards, he proposes to Mollie, who accepts his offer of marriage.— Wikipedia
Watch ‘The New York Hat”
More about Anita Loos
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* 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 from the LA Public Library
Rosanne Welch, PhD, Author of Why The Monkees Matter, presents “How The Monkees Changed Television” at a Cal State Fullerton Lunch Lecture on May 8, 2018.
In this talk, she shows how The Monkees, and specifically their presence on television, set the stage for large changes to come in the late 1960s.
Transcript
In the book world, not only have I don the Monkees book, but I’ve done — in our library here — the Women in American History. It’s a four-volume encyclopedia series — I think they have an ebook version of it here — that I just put out last year, as well, which is really interesting because we cover women in history and popular culture and often you don’t blend those,. So our little tagline was you’ll meet Lady Bird Johnson and Lady Gaga all in the same book. So That;s Cool. My most recent one is a novel on Filippo Mazzei who was the man who owned the plantation next door to Thomas Jefferson. he was an Italian immigrant and he wrote the words “All Men Are Created Equal” in a pamphlet and Thomas Jefferson liked it and you know where it appeared later. He’s a pretty cool guy. I liked him. So that’s what I do. I’m also on the book review board for the Journal of Screenwriting and, as I just noted, Written By Magazine.
Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture
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About Rosanne Welch, PhD
Rosanne Welch, PhD is a writer, producer and university professor with credits that include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, Touched by an Angel and ABC NEWS/Nightline. Other books include Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture (McFarland, 2017) and Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia and Document Collection (ABC-CLIO, 2017), named to the 2018 Outstanding References Sources List, by the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA), a division of the American Library Association. Welch has also published chapters in Torchwood Declassified: Investigating Mainstream Cult Television (I.B.Tauris) and The American Civil War on Film and TV: Blue and Gray in Black and White and Color (Lexington Books, 2018) and essays in Doctor Who and Race: An Anthology and Outside In Makes it So, and Outside in Boldly Goes (both edited by Robert Smith). By day she teaches courses on the history of screenwriting and on television writing for the Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting programs. Her talk “The Importance of Having a Female Voice in the Room” at the 2016 TEDxCPP is available on YouTube.
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A letter arrived from Raimondo Cocchi, his oldest friend in the city. “I wanted to warn you that a letter against you has been filed here. It is alleged that you sent a large number of banned books on a ship bound for Genoa, Livorno, Civita, Vecchia, Naples and Messina, for the purpose of infecting all of Italy. The matter is one for the Inquisition and may cause you some trouble.
From America’s Forgotten Founding Father — Get Your Copy Today!
Print Edition | Kindle Edition | Apple iBooks Edition | Nook Edition
This series will focus on material I found while researching my book, America’s Forgotten Founding Father: A Novel Based on the Life of Filippo Mazzei.
While I only used a portion of my total research, there are a host of little tidbits of information on this amazing man which I wanted to share here. — Rosanne.
Filippo Mazzei: Italian of the Week via the Sons of Italy Blog
Filippo Mazzei was born in 1730 in Tuscany, Italy. He studied medicine in his home country, but soon moved to London to try his hand at being a wine merchant. Thanks to his business connections, he befriended Thomas Jefferson, the two exchanged letters for several years before actually meeting. In 1773, Filippo – who had at that time adopted the name Philip – moved to Virginia.
There he purchased some property and started his next phase in life as a farmer and revolutionary. During this time Filippo worked closely with Jefferson. The two would create and print various propaganda on independence and religious freedom, and he was among a select group who Jefferson asked to take a look at a draft of the Declaration of Independence.
Read the entire article: Filippo Mazzei: Italian of the Week via the Sons of Italy Blog
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More on the Monkees: Scenes from “Find Me The Monkees”
Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture
McFarland (Direct from Publisher) | Amazon | Kindle Edition | Nook Edition
Want to use “Why The Monkees Matter” in your classroom?
Order Examination Copies, Library and Campus Bookstore orders directly from McFarland
Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture
* 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 from the LA Public Library
When Women Wrote Hollywood – 5 in a series – Anita Loos
Anita Loos (April 26, 1889[1] – August 18, 1981) was an American screenwriter, playwright and author, best known for her blockbuster comic novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. She wrote film scripts from 1912, and became arguably the first-ever staff scriptwriter, when D.W. Griffith put her on the payroll at Triangle Film Corporation. She went on to write many of the Douglas Fairbanks films, as well as the stage adaptation of Colette’s Gigi.
Loos would continue writing, always a constant magazine contributor and appearing regularly in Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. Biographer Gary Carey notes: “She was a born storyteller and was always in peak form when reshaping a real-life encounter to make an amusing anecdote.”[4] Loos began a volume of memoirs, A Girl Like I, which would be published in September 1966. Her 1972 book, Twice Over Lightly: New York Then and Now, was written in collaboration with friend and actress Helen Hayes. Kiss Hollywood Good-by (1974) was another Hollywood memoir, this time about the MGM years and would be very successful. Her book The Talmadge Girls (1978) is about the actress sisters Constance Talmadge and Norma Talmadge.
Loos would become a virtual New York institution, an assiduous partygoer and diner-out, conspicuous at fashion shows, theatrical and movie events, balls and galas.[14] A celebrity anecdotalist, she was also never one to let facts spoil a good story: — Wikipedia
More about Anita Loos
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Free eBook Version of How To Write Photoplays by Anita Loos and John Emerson
* 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 from the LA Public Library
Rosanne Welch, PhD, Author of Why The Monkees Matter, presents “How The Monkees Changed Television” at a Cal State Fullerton Lunch Lecture on May 8, 2018.
In this talk, she shows how The Monkees, and specifically their presence on television, set the stage for large changes to come in the late 1960s.
Transcript
…and they won for Best Director who happened to be James Frawley who was a new young guy in town. He grew up to direct the original Muppets Movie and win several awards in his career. So this is how he got started and you’ll see some similarities between the four guys and The Muppets. They’re all just kind of characters having fun. So, just to let you know who I am as John was happy to say, I was television writer for many years. I wrote on Beverly Hills 90210, a show called Picket Fences which I adored but was canceled in its third season and I spent a long time on Touched By An Angel. I did a documentary for ABC News Nightline which was based on the American Legion Boys Nation group. There 50th anniversary year for 1963. They had all met President John F. Kennedy and 1993 Bill Clinton who was one of them was President of the United States and they had a reunion at The White House and so I got meet with them and interview them about their life and what they had lived through.
Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture
McFarland (Direct from Publisher) | Amazon | Kindle Edition | Nook Edition
Want to use “Why The Monkees Matter” in your classroom?
Order Examination Copies, Library and Campus Bookstore orders directly from McFarland
About Rosanne Welch, PhD
Rosanne Welch, PhD is a writer, producer and university professor with credits that include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, Touched by an Angel and ABC NEWS/Nightline. Other books include Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture (McFarland, 2017) and Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia and Document Collection (ABC-CLIO, 2017), named to the 2018 Outstanding References Sources List, by the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA), a division of the American Library Association. Welch has also published chapters in Torchwood Declassified: Investigating Mainstream Cult Television (I.B.Tauris) and The American Civil War on Film and TV: Blue and Gray in Black and White and Color (Lexington Books, 2018) and essays in Doctor Who and Race: An Anthology and Outside In Makes it So, and Outside in Boldly Goes (both edited by Robert Smith). By day she teaches courses on the history of screenwriting and on television writing for the Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting programs. Her talk “The Importance of Having a Female Voice in the Room” at the 2016 TEDxCPP is available on YouTube.
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