While many film historians and teachers still don’t know the name of many of these marvelous female screenwriters from Hollywood’s Golden era, research shows they existed. It’s the job of this generation of scholars to bring these names into the larger conversation.
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Transcript:
Of we move further, a lot of people know The Golden Girls, and hopefully, they know Maude and all these lovely shows. That’s who gave those shows to us. Susan Harris is my favorite TV writer. The longest TV running career. All of the stuff iconic. All of the stuff beloved and people don’t think about her name. She wrote the entire first 2 seasons of Soap herself — no staff. She wrote every episode for 2 seasons and that’s in the days of doing 35 episodes, not 23 or 22 or 12, which is the new reality, right? So Susan is pretty brilliant. Linda Bloodworth-Thomason created Designing Women which I also think is quite a brilliant show and she wrote the first full season of that herself. She’d won an Emmy nomination for her first freelance episode which was an episode of M*A*S*H and it was her and a partner and they were the first people to go into the M*AS*H writing offices –they were 2 women — and they said: “What happens to Hot Lips on the nights when Frank’s not around?” Because she was an officer, which means she couldn’t fraternize with all the other nurses because they were not officers. So she’s lonely in her place all night and it was a study of loneliness and how awful her life was because she could have no friends and she couldn’t share her story with anybody back home because she was having an affair with a married man. So they focused on that and they got an Emmy nomination for looking at the honest emotions of that previously comedic character. They gave her the fullness that made her become a lead on that show.
Dr. Rosanne Welch discusses the women in her new book “When Women Wrote Hollywood” which covers female screenwriters from the Silents through the early 1940s when women wrote over 50% of films and Frances Marion was the highest paid screenwriter (male or female) and the first to win 2 Oscars. Yet, she fails to appear in film history books, which continue to regurgitate the myth that male directors did it all – even though it’s been proven that the only profitable movies Cecil B. de Mille ever directed were all written by Jeannie Macpherson film ever won for Best Picture was written by Robert E. Sherwood (who people have heard of, mostly due to his connection to Dorothy Parker) and Joan Harrison.
* 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
Puritan nonconformist Anne Hutchinson was a wife, mother, and midwife who lived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and gained fame by challenging the colony’s leadership with her own interpretation of Puritan theology. She also threatened the social hierarchy by demonstrating her willingness and ability to operate outside traditional female cultural boundaries. Hutchinson’s actions not only gained her notoriety in her own lifetime but also helped to transform the “Puritan Way” in the American colonies.
Learn about more Women In History with these encyclopedia from Dr. Rosanne Welch and Dr. Peg Lamphier
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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
The widow of Revolutionary War hero Nathanael Greene, Catharine Littlefield Greene was also the forgotten co-inventor of the cotton gin. Known as ‘Caty’ to her friends, Greene demonstrated strength as a military wife, acumen as a businesswoman, and creativity as a contributor to invention of the cotton gin. She is notable as an early American woman active in science and innovation.
Learn about more Women In History with these encyclopedia from Dr. Rosanne Welch and Dr. Peg Lamphier
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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
Months of research went into the creation of the essays in “When Women Wrote Hollywood.” Here are some of the resources used to enlighten today’s film lovers to the female pioneers who helped create it.
THE GREAT DESIRE of individuals in every country of the world is for peace and security. We have discovered that the cessation of war does not automatically mean the establishment of peace.
Within a wide circle of acquaintances and friends, I have found that the only persons who have achieved true inner peace and serenity are those who believe in God and try to live according to the moral principles embodied in the Bible. They recognize the truth that peace begins at home. They know that in order to extend peace from the home to the world they must cultivate habits that create peace. At the same time they must free themselves from old habits that cause inharmony and dissension.
Because I believe that every one of us can and should be a link in the chain of world peace, I have attempted to set forth in these chapters certain common human faults and to present the spiritual means by which they can be changed to character traits conducive to individual and world well-being.
* 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
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This one allowed me to riff on some of my favorite female science fiction writers across time, whether they be novelists or television writers. It also opened up a good conversation on what art we support and include in our lives – and what that art says to us and about us. — Rosanne
Transcript:
We’ve moved to the world thankfully where now we’re gonna have female superheroes even and that’s the big deal. Likewise I love this meme. It’s been going around on Facebook but you probably saw it — makes a difference that little girls are now seeing women in charge and all these kinds of films makes a big difference. I like this one too. I’ve live long enough to see my child princesses become generals right? That’s Princess Buttercup — kicking some butt and what — exactly — in Wonder Woman. As you wish exactly. As I wish that someone take care. That’s pretty cool. and we’ve come to a place where there’s a new movie opening this weekend or next weekend that’s about an African-American girl who has superhero powers and so does her mother and her grandmother. It all comes through three generations of women who have to use those powers well and they have to deal with them and not cause violence and issues like that. So the fact that we’ve moved all the way here from Frankenstein is pretty amazing I think and I think we always have to go back to what Octavia Butler said, we have to think what we don’t see we assume we can’t be. So whatever that is, we need to see those depictions of all of our different selves because diversity isn’t about getting more money at the box office. Those make much richer, better stories because we are a hugely diverse world and it’s not just actually here in America. It’s all over the world. There’s all kinds of different people everywhere. We really need to think about all of them living on into the future. That makes the best science fiction, in my opinion. So there we have it. Thank you all for coming.
* 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!
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Transcript:
Lucille Kallen worked in a lot of those early sketch shows — Your Show Of Shows and things like that with Sid Caesar. She’s a really cool lady. I like this quote. She kind of falls out of the history but her work on that show plus this woman, Selma Diamond, who more people know as an actress from a show called Night Court, but Selma and Lucille were writers on Your Show Of Shows and when the writers created The Dick Van Dyke Show that’s who Sally Rogers is. She’s a composite of those two ladies right because they understood there was always one lady in those kinds of shows and she’s always a single lady who can’t find a guy and all that nonsense and that was true of both Lucille and Selma. They were unmarried. When Neil Simon wrote Laughter on the 23rd Floor which was the story of writing for the Sid Caesar show. This is what he had to say about Lucille — actually, Mel Tolkin said this. So she’s doing all the work but she’s not telling people about it. Women have to learn to tell their own stories so that we are remembered in history.
Dr. Rosanne Welch discusses the women in her new book “When Women Wrote Hollywood” which covers female screenwriters from the Silents through the early 1940s when women wrote over 50% of films and Frances Marion was the highest paid screenwriter (male or female) and the first to win 2 Oscars. Yet, she fails to appear in film history books, which continue to regurgitate the myth that male directors did it all – even though it’s been proven that the only profitable movies Cecil B. de Mille ever directed were all written by Jeannie Macpherson film ever won for Best Picture was written by Robert E. Sherwood (who people have heard of, mostly due to his connection to Dorothy Parker) and Joan Harrison.
* 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
Research for the book I’m in the middle of brought me to learn that the Whooping Cough was invented by two female former teachers.
Much as I love all Jonas Salk did for the world (and gave his patent away for free to help children), WHY wasn’t I ever taught about these women??? — Rosanne
As the Great Depression raged, scientists Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering developed the first effective pertussis vaccine on a shoestring budget.
After a long day in the laboratory in 1932, Pearl Kendrick and Grace Eldering walked out into the chilly Michigan evening with specially prepared petri dishes, called cough plates, in tow. The two scientists were on a mission to collect bacteria in the wild: one by one, they visited families ravaged by whooping cough, the deadliest childhood disease of their time. By the dim light of kerosene lamps they asked sick children to cough onto each plate, dimpling the agar gel with tiny specks of the bacteria Bordetella pertussis.
Wherever you go, you find Monkees fans and the Denver Popular Culture Con was no different. Amid rooms full of caped crusaders and cosplay creations, I was initially not sure how many folks would attend a talk on a TV show from the 1960s – but happily I was met by a nice, engaged audience for my talk on Why the Monkees Matter – and afterward they bought books! What more could an author ask for?
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Transcript
Fandom matters on The Monkees. Zilch is a podcast where every couple of weeks they put out a podcast. Lots of information about the show. Interviews with the guys. Updates on what’s happening with them. I do a thing called Monkees 101 with another woman who’s a Ph.D. — we’re both PhDs and we take one episode at a time and sort of pick it apart. Find all the stuff that’s in it. Talk about what was happening in history at that moment and in the music world at that moment and it’s really kind of fun. They do a lot of really cool stuff. 7000 or 8000 people follow that one podcast. Just because of this fandom and it’s international. As I said, they’re in New Zealand right now. They were going to Australia. They’ve in Japan. They’re everywhere. I’ve met them. Because fandom even means like people with Ph.Ds want to pay attention to them. This was on their last tour that Davy — uh, no, Peter — and Micky did together. And that’s how fast I talk. That’s how much I have to say. I have a lot more to say, but that’s the prepared stuff. I thought if people wanted to chat or perhaps had questions about stuff I would be glad to answer them. What interests people about why The Monkees are still famous?
A hit television show about a fictitious rock band, The Monkees (1966-1968) earned two Emmys–Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Comedy.
Capitalizing on the show’s success, the actual band formed by the actors, at their peak, sold more albums than The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined, and set the stage for other musical TV characters from The Partridge Family to Hannah Montana. In the late 1980s, the Monkees began a series of reunion tours that continued into their 50th anniversary.
This book tells the story of The Monkees and how the show changed television, introducing a new generation to the fourth-wall-breaking slapstick created by Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers.
Its creators contributed to the innovative film and television of 1970s with projects like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laugh-In and Welcome Back, Kotter. Immense profits from the show, its music and its merchandising funded the producers’ move into films such as Head, Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces.
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![40 Conclusion from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 42 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/scifi-rmw-cpp-40.jpeg)
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