LA/Los Angeles – Page 19 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

04 Elizabeth Gaskell and the Salem Witch Trials from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 15 seconds)

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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

I presented this holiday lecture “When Women Write Horror” on Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. Researching the many, many women who have written horror stories – in novels, films and television – brought new names to my attention who I am excited to start reading. I hope you will be, too!

Transcript:

I think she’s really interesting because she brings the female gaze — the first female to write about the Salem witch trials right? We hear stories from the male perspective about these crazy bad women who were doing these witchy things and now we have a book from the female perspective. What was this really about and what is being a witch about? Is that about power and is that what scared all the men back in Salem that they didn’t want women to have power right and when we look into the history of the Salem witch trials we know that there are many possibilities for why those women were chosen? Among them, several of them were land-owning women and back of the day women weren’t supposed to own land. Only men were but if your husband died and you had no male kids you inherited it and the funny thing about Salem was the men who sat on the council in the city who decided if you were a witch or not when you were convicted and your land went up for public sale the men on the council got to buy any public sale land first shot half price. Just by accident, they were finding women guilty who happened to own land that was rather lovely for them to buy. So she’s looking at this period through this female gaze which we don’t teach in schools.

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#MeetTheGraduatesMonday: Haña Lucero-Colin – Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

Every Monday we will be profiling a member of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting 2020 graduating class. This exciting, fresh crop of writers are the future of the industry and are going on to do BIG things, so get to know them now!

Haña Lucero-Colin is a writer, musician, and artist based out of Los Angeles, CA. As a storyteller, she strives to shed light on previously unseen spaces with empathy and a sense of humor. In 2014 she was awarded the Gene Amole Scholarship for Humor and Integrity in Journalism from the Metropolitan State University of Denver. A former ArtLab intern, Haña contributed to a play titled “I.Am.Here.” about a group of mixed-income high school students giving voice to their own unique stories. She also composed original music for the piece, which was performed at the University of Denver Colorado. She is currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts in TV and Screenwriting through Stephens College. She is best known on screen as Shawn on The Fosters and MoCap Student #1 on ConMan. You may also recognize her concentrating face from a brief stint on ABC’s How to Get Away With Murder, but otherwise she was fairly blurry. Haña is mostly just happy to be here.

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03 Elizabeth Gaskell from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 3 seconds)

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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

Transcript:

In also just a little bit post her period when I was researching this I found it so interesting. There were not many women who we teach in our schools, but here they were living full, professional careers as writers in eras when we don’t even think about women having jobs at all, right? So Elizabeth Gaskell really interested me. I love the fact that you can see full shelves of books written by women and books based on horror stories which again, we don’t really relate to women. So what was that about and why were they getting away with that? I think she’s really cool because we mostly know these women for the drama novels they wrote. The things that were proper books. If you wrote a book at all it was about a proper society. So Cranford is what she’s mostly known for which was turned into a miniseries with some famous ladies who’ve you seen in other sorts of Harry Potter-like stories, but she really wrote all kinds of ghost stories and she began her career by being published by Charles Dickens. So Dickens was doing magazine publishing and he’s publishing a lot of women which I thought was very interesting. I had not equated that with him. So Elizabeth Gaskell is one of the names we should know more.

* 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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#MeetTheGraduatesMonday: CJ Ehrlich- Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

This week, Stephens College is proud to present: CJ Ehrlich #MeetTheGraduates

A Bostonian who resides in the wilds of NY, C.J. Ehrlich is an award-winning playwright, whose works have enjoyed over 200 productions around the world, and are published in numerous “Best of” anthologies (including The Best American Short Plays of 2015-16). Full-lengths include The Cupcake Conspiracy: Terrorism is Easy, Marriage is Complicated (with Philip J. Kaplan), the anti-romcom This Time We’ll Make It Work, and scifi comedy Zane to Gate 69. While in the MFA program, C.J. has written a full-length horror screenplay, Graduation, and is developing the comedy Stupid Voices from the Future, as well as pilots for a supernatural, teen-oriented thriller, and a comedy about a team of reality TV losers. She also spent a wonderful semester living amongst the female screenwriters of the silent era, and has mixed feelings about Al Jolson.

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#MeetTheGraduatesMonday: Emma Jeszke – Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

#MeetTheGraduatesMonday: Emma Jeszke

Emma Jeszke is a dramedy writer, with a focus on coming-of-age stories that challenge and expand typical narratives about girlhood, young adulthood, and motherhood. She has a special talent for keeping you laughing till you’re crying.

Her television pilot Postpartum, about the joys and struggles of being a new mom, was a top-ten finalist in the Women Writing Competition at Series Fest. She is the author of the feature screenplays Wildflower, a forbidden love story about a soldier and an antiwar activist set in 2004, and Bobbi Malone, which follows a thirty-something as she reconnects with her estranged grandmother through a theater troupe. She’s also the author of several stage plays, and the creator of the forthcoming web series Holly & Gem, about two sisters who reconnect after one escapes a cult.

Her plays have been performed regionally in places such as the Finger Lakes Musical Theatre Festival and the Blank Theatre in Los Angeles. She is a book editor at Theatre Communications Group, the foremost publisher of theatrical literature, where she’s spent eight years working with world-renowned playwrights. She’s currently finishing her MFA in TV & Screenwriting at Stephens College.

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02 Women and Horror Writing from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (45 seconds)

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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

Transcript:

The best horror — and I’m gonna come to some examples as we travel through — is stuff that involves social commentary along with the scare because that’s the stuff that sticks with us. So I think Mary is very important. I made a point to mention I think it’s useful we think about women writing. Back in the day, it wasn’t acceptable for women to READ novels because it would rot their brains. So they certainly couldn’t write them. So you’ll notice when the book was first came out there was no author on the book. Nobody bothered to wonder how come there’s no writer there. It was because she could not admit that she had written it and then when it came so ridiculously famous and so profitable then she was able to say “well I’m cool enough that’s fine I’ll take the ding for doing this,” right? So I think it’s really important to think about what women had to go through just to be writers right?

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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!
† Available from the LA Public Library

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Listen to the latest “How I Wrote That” Podcast with Screenwriter Julie Hébert from ‘American Crime’ and ‘Man in the High Castle’

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Julie Hébert started her creative life as a theater director and playwright (Ruby’s Bucket of Blood). She’s written and directed for the Magic Theater, Steppenwolf, Victory Gardens, LaMaMa, The Women’s Project, Cornerstone and many more. Her plays were honored twice with the Pen Award for Drama. Moving into television, Julie has written and directed for some of the most respected shows in television including American Crime, The Good Wife, Boss, Numb3rs and The West Wing. Her films have been praised as “intriguingly complex” (Variety) and “pulsing with veracity” (LA Times), with “a raw power that is impossible to dismiss” (Roger Ebert). She blogs occasionally at JulieHébert.com.

“I honor the depth inside and the stories that really want to be told because often in television you can get away with topline chatter, but to really hit on something that has meaning for you, that will have meaning for someone hearing the story, it has to come from a deeper place.” -Julie Hébert

Presented by Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

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#FacultyFriday: Phillip LaZebnik – Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

The Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting would like to celebrate one of our mentors Philip LaZebnik, whose musical THE PRINCE OF EGYPT just opened on the West End! Congratulations Philip! #FacultyFriday

Philip Lazebnik has written numerous television episodes and motion picture screenplays in Los Angeles and Europe. His screenwriting credits include Disney’s Pocahontas and Mulan, and DreamWorks’ Prince of Egypt and The Legend of El Dorado. For the past several years, LaZebnik has lived in Denmark, where he has written movies and television shows throughout Europe and the U.S. His produced movies include the three Treasure of the Templar Knights movies in Denmark and The Three Investigators: The Secret of Skeleton Island and The Three Investigators: The Mystery of Terror Castle for Studio Hamburg; the Danish film Emma and Santa Claus; the English screenplay for Asterix and the Vikings and Asterix and the Domain of the Gods. He also wrote the TV mini-series Hindenburg in Germany, the Christmas TV series Ludvig and Santa Claus for TV2 in Denmark, and the book for Fairytale, a theatrical musical about H.C. Andersen with songs by Stephen Schwartz. Most recently he wrote the book for the musical theatrical version of Prince of Egypt with Stephen Schwartz, which opens in London’s West End on February 25, 2020.

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01 Introduction from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 18 seconds)

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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

Transcript:

Alright, so welcome everybody. Today because we’re just two days outside of Halloween, we want to talk about horror but we want to talk about women in horror because you don’t get a lot of that right? When we think about horror we think about a lot of famous male authors. Now we do think about some of the women — both writers and we’re gonna think about some stories that are famous stories that are female focused and how that affects us as we watch these types of things right? What they make us think about. What we should be thinking about? So when I think about horror, I think about this lady first, Guesses? Mary Shelley. Mary Shelley. When we think about Mary Shelley we think about what book she wrote? Frankenstein. Right? Frankenstein does double duty. It’s kind of a double genre piece. It’s science fiction but it’s also horror. When we think about Frankenstein, we think about the monster and the movies that we’ve seen. The costumes people wear for Halloween. A lot of people — until they read Frankenstein — don’t understand that’s not the name of the monster. That’s name of Dr. Frankenstein who made the monster right? So this was all concocted in the brain of a 19 year old young woman and that’s how important her work was. We’re still reading it to this day right and we’re still thinking about what does it mean.

* 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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Found Treasure – Some Of The Women Who Wrote Hollywood – Screenland Magazine, 1931

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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* 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