On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch
Writing, Film, Television and More!
Recording the Mentoris Podcast
Author Eric D. Martin and Host Rosanne Welch share a laugh while recording the podcast for his book, Saving the Republic: A Novel Based on the Life of Marcus Cicero at ReadyMixMusic @readymixmusic in North Hollywood, California.
Read Saving the Republic: A Novel Based on the Life of Marcus Cicero by Eric Martin
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A boy, weak of body, became a pillar of strength.
As the first century approached, a sickly boy was born while the Roman Republic was nearing its ultimate demise. The boy’s life and the country both hung in the balance.
But the strong and determined young man grew to be the Republic’s fiercest defender. With his dogged determination and towering intellect, Marcus Tullius Cicero became a famed statesman, celebrated orator, and an esteemed philosopher.
Surviving civil wars, political intrigues, and assassination attempts, Cicero pushed against the grain, standing steadfastly in support of the Republic, even when it threatened his career—or his life.
About the Author
Eric D. Martin is a novelist and screenwriter. He has a BA in film studies from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and an MFA in screen and television writing from Pepperdine University. While studying at Pepperdine, Martin served as president of the student film society, Courier 12, and was a semifinalist for the Academy of Arts and Sciences Nicholl Fellowship. Recently, Martin adapted the novel The Liar’s Chair for the screen and wrote the popular Lifetime thriller, The Other Mother. Currently, he is writing for the premium cable television drama Heels and for Starz, and developing the TV comedy King Elizabeth.
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Also from the Mentoris Project
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Part of the California State University, Fullerton Faculty Noon Time Talks at the Pollak Library.
Watch this entire presentation
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Transcript:
Moving through into the 50s, we come up with Harriet Frank Jr. — a woman going by Jr. because her mother was Harriet Frank and her mother was a reader at one of the studios which is how she got into the business of writing. She married Irving Ravetch and together they made several important films. To me, most important is Norma Rae. Again a very female based film which really falls into Harriet’s world and also Stanley and Iris and Murphy’s Romance are very female-focused stories. Harriet was a really strong woman — very involved in the Union which makes sense when you think about Norma Rae right? So again names people don’t really know because these are considered Martin Ritt films because he directed all four of them, because he was best friends with Frank and Ravetch. So they liked to hire directors they knew who wouldn’t muck up their work and I believe in those collaborations. I don’t — like I’m dissing directors. I don’t mean to. I like directors but there it’s an even collaboration and I think that’s what academia has to start referencing more than we do because that’s how writers get lost and if male writers are getting lost you know female writers getting even more lost right? So we need to keep thinking about it’s a — it’s a collaboration.
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.
Buy a signed copy of when Women Wrote Hollywood
Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition
* 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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Enjoy This Clip? Watch this entire presentation and Buy Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture
From Denver Pop Culture Con 2019.
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
In the 70s we’re gonna be on Laugh In. At this point, Peter has left the band. Once the show is off the air Peter leaves the band. So now they’re trying to do it as a threesome. So check us out. Look at how much more Seventy-fied, hippy-ied their stuff is right? So they’re still being talked about in the ’70s. In the 80s, we’re gonna have the MTV Marathon Pleasant Valley Sunday. So a 20th anniversary of the show all of a sudden a new generation of kids are introduced to it. I have a photo of Rachel Maddow because she interviewed Peter after the death of Davy Jones and she said to him as a child of the 80s I learned what it was like to be a kid in the 60s through watching reruns of your show. That’s how I learned what it was like. I thought how interesting with that as it’s going through the decades and of course the Monkees as they toured today. They’re in New Zealand this week actually. It’s just Mike and Micky now. They will say that they have grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and the gettin down to great-grandmothers pretty soon. They have a very wide fandom, which is a big deal.
Buy Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture
A hit television show about a fictitious rock band, The Monkees (1966-1968) earned two Emmys–Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Directorial Acheivement 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 Riderand Five Easy Pieces.
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
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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.
Algerian Village Erected for
“Desert Healer”
Marion Fairfax Productions in collabora-
tion with Sam E. Rork have had erected a
complete Algerian village for the company
producing “The Desert Healer” under the di-
rection of Maurice Tourneur. The principals
in the cast include Lewis Stone, Barbara
Bedford, Tully Marshall, Katherine MacDon-
ald, Walter Pidgeon, Ann Rork, Arthur
Rankin and Albert Conti.
Buy “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Today!
†
Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition
* 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
I’m excited to fly to Denver again this year (twice actually – once for the SCMS conference in April and once for SeriesFest in June – more about that in another post!).
For SCMS (Society for Cinema and Media Studies) I was invited to be part of a panel with 3 other fascinating female academics discussing How Unreliable Narrators harm giving women enough credit in historical research.
A great deal of women’s work has gone uncredited. Its documentation or evidence may not exist in predictable places. Conceiving of how this work was conducted, or had impact, or might be theorized often pose more questions than answers. Our panel is interesteded in meeting these challenges through new and alternative forms of storytelling. How might we identify creative or productive approaches to historical writing that address absences, gaps, rumors, contradictions, or suspect information?
This may involve examining how biography has informed the construction of a star image. Vicki Callahan confronts the inability to reconstruct Normand’s filmmaking career and piece together missing parts of her star biography due to a lack of documentation (in addition to the scandals that arise at pivotal moments). In contrast, Eartha Kitt made a concerted effort to represent herself through “self-narrativization,” according to Philana Payton (who will present “Eartha Kitt vs. Eartha Mae”). Kitt wrote multiple autobiographies, scrupulously examining her private identity versus her public self on stage and screen.
The notion of narrator–whether unreliable narrator, storyteller, cryptic voice–proves useful here. For example, Normand serves as an unreliable narrator, leading Callahan to place historical weight on her scripts and performances (and performativity). Kitt, on the other hand, asserted her authority (and made a bid for black feminist resistance) by claiming her narrator role.
Taking a long-range historical view, my presentation will consider how certain male filmmakers have been unreliable narrators in reference to their collaborations with women in the industry. They often fail to credit their female collaborators or mentors, especially in public. A similar dynamic occurred with Joan Harrison; many of her film and TV contributions have been obscured because of the bright spotlight on Hitchcock. For Christina Lane, this (along with major gaps in documentation) fed into the challenges of historicizing her life and career. Sources came from unexpected places—Harrison’s housekeepers and caretakers—which created an opportunity for alternative feminist writing strategies.
About SCMS
The Society for Cinema and Media Studies is the leading scholarly organization in the United States dedicated to promoting a broad understanding of film, television, and related media through research and teaching grounded in the contemporary humanities tradition.
SCMS encourages excellence in scholarship and pedagogy and fosters critical inquiry into the global, national, and local circulation of cinema, television, and other related media. SCMS scholars situate these media in various contexts, including historical, theoretical, cultural, industrial, social, artistic, and psychological.
SCMS seeks to further media study within higher education and the wider cultural sphere, and to serve as a resource for scholars, teachers, administrators, and the public. SCMS works to maintain productive relationships with organizations in other nations, disciplines, and areas of media study; to foster dialogue between media industries and scholars; and to promote the preservation of our film, television, and media heritage. We encourage membership and participation of scholars and those in related positions not only in the US but around the world.
I’m always happy to announce the latest issues of the Journal of Screenwriting and 10.3 — a Special Issue discussing ‘Historiographic Research in Screenwriting’ — is now available!
For me, as Book Reviews editor it’s especially nice to note that 2 alums of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting program, one current student and Friend of the Program Anna Weinstein are among the reviewers of books this month, with current MFA candidate CJ Ehrlich having reviewed a text used in our History of Screenwriting courses – Tom Stempel’s Framework.
Does your college library have a subscription? Order one today to read all these reviews PLUS the articles noted below:
Crash! Boom! Bang! How to Write Action Movies, Michael Lucker (2017)
JENNIFER ANNE MARTIN
Words in Action: Forms and Techniques of Film Dialogue, Paolo Braga (2015)
JACKIE PEREZ
ANNA WEINSTEIN
FrameWork: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film, 3rd ed., Tom Stempel (2000)
C. J. EHRLICH
For more information about the special issue and journal, click here >> https://www.intellectbooks.
Issue 10.3 Included:
STEVEN PRICE AND CLAUS TIEBER
Articles
JAN HENSCHEN
ALEXANDRA KSENOFONTOVA
Walter Reisch: The musical writer
CLAUS TIEBER
Network television writers and the ‘race problems’ of 1968
CARYN MURPHY
From dialogue writer to screenwriter: Pier Paolo Pasolini at work for Federico Fellini
CLAUDIA ROMANELLI
The Journal of Screenwriting is an international double-blind peer-reviewed journal that is published three times a year. The journal highlights current academic and professional thinking about the screenplay and intends to promote, stimulate and bring together current research and contemporary debates around the screenplay whilst encouraging groundbreaking research in an international arena. The journal is discursive, critical, rigorous and engages with issues in a dynamic and developing field, linking academic theory to screenwriting practice.
Get your copy and subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting Today!
Join me at the Screenwriting Research Network’s Annual Conference in Oxford, UK
* 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!
Part of the California State University, Fullerton Faculty Noon Time Talks at the Pollak Library.
Watch this entire presentation
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
Transcript:
Directors are lovely people but when you talk about a movie to your friends rarely do you discuss camera angles. You discuss dialogue and that’s what the writer wrote.It should be the writer’s movie or nobodies. I have a big fight with publishers now. I refuse to do things like Spielberg’s Lincoln. No. Tony Kushner wrote Lincoln and he’s got a Pulitzer Prize. it’s either his movie or it’s just Lincoln. Let’s leave it at that all right? It does not belong to Steven Spielberg cuz he didn’t write any of it but these guys are wonderful. Their work was great. They were invited — they did Thin Man. They did It’s A Wonderful LIfe — they were invited to work on the play the Diary of Anne Frank. A couple other people were offered at first. This was at a time when everything was crazy after the war. There were some thoughts that maybe it was a fake diary right but these guys believed in i.t They met Otto Frank — Anne’s father — and worked with him and created the play which won them a Pulitzer Prize and then they adapted their own play into a film. So Francis and Albert Hackett — they were considered the most beloved couple in Hollywood. They were friends with Dorothy and Alan and all these other couples that work together and they were apparently the nicest people you could ever meet, right?
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.
Buy a signed copy of when Women Wrote Hollywood
Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition
* 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
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Enjoy This Clip? Watch this entire presentation and Buy Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture
From Denver Pop Culture Con 2019.
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?
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
Transcript
Their popular culture travels through the decades. This is where people start going “why is anyone still talking about them. The show is canceled? The show is over. It’s done” but it’s not, right? In the seventies, the show was rerun on Saturday mornings so a lot of another level of fandom came to them as children watching the Saturday morning TV. So, of course, Davy is still a big name. So he comes on to The Brady Bunch because Marcia has written a letter asking him to come and perform at her prom and he doesn’t get it on time. He doesn’t get it fast enough and eventually, he gets told about it and then he decides to be her date which is adorable and is apparently the most has been rerun more than any other. Which means — which means that Davy was also then voted the number one teen idol of all time at a certain point, so that’s a big deal.
Buy Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture
A hit television show about a fictitious rock band, The Monkees (1966-1968) earned two Emmys–Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Directorial Acheivement 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 Riderand Five Easy Pieces.
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
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
Part of the California State University, Fullerton Faculty Noon Time Talks at the Pollak Library.
Watch this entire presentation
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
Transcript:
These guys are somebody that everybody should know and, of course, each of these people that I’m talking about now, they have a chapter in this book which is what the books all about. Francis and Albert Hackett. They were married for 54 years and wrote films together for about 50 of those. They started in New York as playwrights they came out here and again you’ve probably never heard their names but you have seen these movies, have you not? Every year how many times do we watch It’s a Wonderful Life and what does everybody tell you whose movie is that? Frank Capra’s movie because Frank Capra forced himself on the writing credits. He wrote some scenes and had his name added to the writing credits and when they edited the movie they cut out all the scenes he wrote. The movie is Francis and Albert Hackett’s script. He kept adding more to prove he was a writer and none of it was any good. So it kills me that we call that Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life.
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.
Buy a signed copy of when Women Wrote Hollywood
Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition
* 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
