Why The Monkees Matter Book Signing, St. Louis, Missouri, Saturday, November 5, 2016

A couple of photographs from my “Why The Monkees Matter” book signing in St. Louis today. It has been a busy week as I was at the Citizen Jane Film Festival in Columbia, MO where my Stephen College MFA in Screenwriting students were presenting a panel of papers on historic women screenwriters. it was well received and one of the most well-attended of all the panels. I look forward to doing this in future years, too.

Rmw citizen jane 1

After that, and a series of meetings with Stephens College folk, it was time to head off to St. Louis for a 1 pm signing of “Why the Monkees Matter” at a local Barnes and Noble. I worked hard to set up this signing when I heard that the Monkees would be performing in St. Louis tonight.

Why The Monkees Matter Book Signing, St. Louis, Missouri, Saturday, November 5, 2016

After meeting some great people at the signing it was time for some dinner with a collection of fans from the Zilch Podcast, where I’ve been interviewed about the book, and then off to the concert.

Why The Monkees Matter Book Signing, St. Louis, Missouri, Saturday, November 5, 2016

After this whirlwind, I’ll be heading back to work in California on Sunday.

Thanks for all who turned out and bough the book at Barnes and Noble and elsewhere. It is great to be able to share my feelings on The Monkees and find the others are just as interested — if not more so — than I am.

Dr. Rosanne Welch speaks on Doctor Who at the 2016 Pomona Reads: A Celebration of Books – October 15, 2016

I’m going to be part of the great project in Pomona where I will be speaking on “How Doctor Who Redefined Masculinity: A Study of the Doctors and their Male Companions.” If you’re in the area, please stop by, say “Hi!” and check out all the other great activities, panels and authors!

Pomona reads 2017

Pomona Reads: A Celebration of Books

Saturday, October 15, 2016 @ Noon

Pomona Civic Center

Don’t miss Dr. Rosanne Welch on Dr. Who!Dr. Rosanne Welch is a writer and university professor who teaches Humanities courses in the (IGE) Department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; and screenwriting for two MFA in Screenwriting programs (Cal State, Fullerton and Stephens College).

Her current book, “Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture” is available from McFarland Publishing.

In the Who-vian world she has published a chapter in “Torchwood Declassified: Investigating Mainstream Cult Television” (I.B.Tauris) an essay in “Doctor Who and Race: An Anthology.”

In January 2017 “Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia and Document Collection,” which she co-edited with her CalPoly Pomona colleague, Dr. Peg Lamphier, will be published by ABC-CLIO. In her previous life, Welch was a television writer/producer with credits that include “Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences and Touched by an Angel” and ABC NEWS/Nightline.

Book Reading: Why The Monkees Matter with Dr. Rosanne Welch – Book Soup, Hollywood, Mon, Sept 19, 2016, 7pm

Join me for a reading from my latest book, “Why The Monkees Matter” at Book Soup on the beautiful Sunset Strip in Hollywood.

Date:

Monday, September 19, 2016 – 7pm

Location:

Book Soup
818 Sunset Boulevard
West Hollywood, CA 90069

Book Reading: Why The Monkees Matter with Dr. Rosanne Welch - Book Soup, Hollywood, Mon, Sept 19, 2016, 7pm

Rmw book soup

The Monkee’s 50th Anniversary – Selected Stories from Around the World

Leave it to the English (the BBC World Service to be precise) to host an interview with one of The Monkees (Micky) that takes things seriously and asks interesting questions – beginning with “What was the music played in your childhood home?” I’m particularly pleased that Cerys Matthews mentions the show right up front as a ‘true cultural phenomenon’ – because it was!

Cerys Matthews with Micky Dolenz (BBC World Service)

Cerys Matthews with Micky Dolenz (BBC World Service)

Born in Los Angeles in 1945, George Michael Dolenz, Jr. became famous at the age of 10 with his own TV show. He has since established himself as an actor on television, film, and musical theatre, and directed a number of movies and music videos. He will always be best known, though, as the drummer and lead singer of the pop-rock band The Monkees.

Dolenz described the Monkees as initially being “a TV show about an imaginary band…that wanted to be the Beatles, that was never successful”. The four actor-musicians, however, soon became a real band, going on to sell more than 75 million records worldwide. At their peak in 1967 they outsold The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined.

Dolenz reflects in his outrageously successful career with Cerys, and spins some of the tunes that have defined his life.

Ann Moses played a huge part in establishing the public persona of each of the actors on The Monkees – I discuss the difference between their many personas in the chapter on Identity Construction (named whimsically for the song A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You). The Monkees was a rare show in which the characters used the names of the actual actors – which begged the question “Where did the actors end and the characters begin in the audience’s mind?”

Dolenz boyce

50 years less one day ago, I met the Monkees for the first time. I was on the “Last Train to Clarksville” – a promotional trip the day before their show aired in 1966. I met all four boys – and while I knew they would be a huge hit, I had no idea of the rousing years ahead, going on tour with them, trips every week to their indoor and outdoor sets as they filmed their magical show. It’s been a great experience and I can’t wait for my reunion with Peter and Micky this Thursday. 50 years later I’ll be doing video interviews with them – no tape recorders, no transcribing, no waiting 1-2 months before the story is in print. It’s definitely has been a wild ride!

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In today’s radio interview on Mornings with Nicole Dyer from Brisbane, Australia we can hear the wonderful happiness in her voice as she introduces her interview with Micky. It was great to hear that their radio station has been playing several tracks from Good Times – unlike American radio stations which seem so stuck in pre-planned song lists that we’re lucky to hear “Last Train to Clarksville”. Granted, she speaks more about the new album than the show (my focus in the book) but I appreciated that she clearly knew – and loved – the Monkees.

Dolenz abc

Micky Dolenz on 50 years of ‘The Monkees’

On September 8, 1965, an ad appeared in the entertainment trade magazine ‘The Hollywood Reporter’ seeking ‘Folk & Rock musicians, singers, for acting roles in new TV series, running parts for 4 insane boys, Age 17-21″. Over 400 young men applied – but for the four who were chosen, it would change their life.This week marks 50 years since we first heard the Monkees theme song, and this year, the Monkees released an album of new material. And 2 of the Monkees, Peter Tork and Mickey Dolenz, are heading to Australia as a part of their 50th anniversary tour, and they’re playing on the Gold Coast in December. Nicole Dyer spoke to Micky Dolenz…

 

Everyone should watch “Friendly Persuasion” [Film History]

In the course of writing a chapter surveying the portrayal of women in Civil War films (for a book called Blue And Gray In Black And White And Color) I’ve had the fascinating opportunity to watch two films I had never seen – one brilliant, one awful. Funny how that goes.

Friendly persuasion

 

The brilliant one is so good I may add it to my film list for next year’s History of Screenwriting III (from 1950-1980) because of how well done it is and because it was written by Michael Wilson, one of the lesser known, blacklisted writers of the era though he also wrote The Bridge on the River Kwai, A Place in the Sun and Planet of the Apes (not a bad CV for a screenwriter).

In fact, the Wilson film that I loved didn’t even have his name – or the name of any screenwriter – or the Screenplay By credit on the opening credits at all. Because the studio wouldn’t put out a film by a blacklisted writer, director William Wyler wanted to put his brother’s name on the film – but the WGA said no. And Wilson didn’t want to use a pseudonym, so the film has no screenwriting credit. What it does have, that was built into the structure by the author of the novel on which it is based, Jessamyn West, is a wonderful chance for all the major and minor characters to do the most dramatic thing of all – to choose how to behave when the world’s activity doesn’t match your personal beliefs.

The film (and novel) is Friendly Persuasion, about an Indiana Quaker family in the path of Morgan’s Raiders during the Civil War. The mother is the local Quaker minister, her husband supports her to the best of his ability (though he’d like to buy an organ for their home because he doesn’t understand why music is wrong), and her son (played by Anthony Perkins in an Oscar nominated role) is the one who struggles with whether or not to pick up a guy and fight the Confederates as they have begun burning the barns on their friends’ local farms. It’s such a beautiful piece of drama because every character has to make a decision – and a tough one – about what they believe in – and then live with the consequences of that decision. While the opening of the film was a bit slow (as films from the 1950s tended to be – they gave you time to know the ‘world’ of the film that was about to be overturned by the events of the story) it all culminated beautifully.

On the other hand, for this research, I also watched a 1971 gothic horror film (also written by a formerly blacklisted writer, Albert Maltz) and also based on a novel (written by Thomas P. Cullinan) called The Beguiled. A lousier, more annoying piece of claptrap I have never watched. I wanted to turn it off several times but since I was studying how Civil War women were portrayed in films, I couldn’t, since the story is of a wounded Union soldier being cared for by the residents of a Southern girls boarding school. I get that gothic plus horror doesn’t equal true – and yet, horror is all the more horrific if it is based in some, small reality. This film is nothing more than a collection of sex kittens clamoring to lose their virginity to this representative of the enemy, the guy who was shooting at their loved ones yesterday is not my idea of the perfect man and yet these women fall into awful displays of coquettishness which I could never bring myself to believe.

I’ve read that Sofia Coppola is writing a remake. Part of me considers seeing it in hopes that she will find the reality that will make the story more palatable – but the other part of me never wants to wallow in that stupidity again. Despite how nice Clint Eastwood looked with his shirt off in those days, watching 12 year old girls try to have sex with him was far too icky for me. Then, again, perhaps that’s what classified the film as a horror film in the first place?

So if you want to take my advice, never rent The Beguiled but do make time in your viewing life for Friendly Persuasion.

From The Research Vault: Micky and Peter on Nightwatch, 1986 [Video]

Considering the current tour is being mounted by Micky and Peter it’s interesting to watch this 1986 interview the two of them had with Charlie Rose when he was hosting Nightwatch.  They attempt to analyze the success of the 20th reunion tour – it’s obvious that even they were still in shock at how much they are loved. Micky continues to credit the quality of the writing – as Charlie Rose says, in the way a television producer would speak.  

Rose also asks how it feels ‘at their ages’ (in their mid 40s for gosh sakes) to be on stage in front of so many adoring fans. 🙂 

Micky peter nightwatch

It’s charming to hear them discuss “What happens next?” when no one knew Good Times was in the future. It’s also great to hear an interviewer who actually researched them before forming his questions.  When he asks Peter why he quit, Peter admits he was too tied to the idea of an organic rock band – which is very reminiscent of Peter’s recent comments in the “The Monkees: Our Life in 15 Songs”  when he said one of the reasons the Good Times album works is that it “also comes down to the ethos that a pop-rock group needs to write all its own material has faded enormously.” 

Get “Good Times” directly from Amazon.com


Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture

Order Your Copy Now!

Previously in Out of Research Vault:

Psychobabble reviews “Why The Monkees Matter”

As an author, it is both exciting and frightening to begin reading the review of a book you have spent several years of your life researching and writing. But you also appreciate when a reviewer sees both the good and the perhaps not so perfect points of your work. That’s how I feel about Mike Segretto’s coverage. He doesn’t completely agree with my feminist bent on the show, but does agree with my glass-half-empty/glass-half-full take on the way the show handled ethnicity in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement. I smiled when he rated the book “a fine piece of cultural analysis” and an “atypically readable and fun one”. That was my goal all along – to make some cultural points about The Monkees and their impact while entertaining the fans who have known they mattered all these years. — Rosanne

Review: ‘Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television, and American Pop Culture’
by Mike Segretto from Psychobabble, July 17, 2016


The question of whether or not some artifact of the twentieth century still “matters” has become a trendy question among pop-culture writers. The annoying implication is that the writer’s judgment holds some sort of weight, and if it is decided that, say, The Beatles get the thumbs down, they no longer “matter”—whatever that means. Instead of asking questions, Rosanne Welch’s new book Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television, and American Pop Culture makes an emphatic statement, and unlike a lot of these other “does this matter?” pieces, there is a special point behind her statement since The Monkees spent so much of their fifty-year career having critics tell them they most certainly do not matter.

As Welch points out, that attitude really began to change in the wake of Davy Jones’s death in 2012, as critical consensus started moving toward the judgment that The Monkees were actually really great. The point of Why The Monkees Matter is to articulate that judgment, and she does so by focusing exclusively on their TV show, which she notes was artistically, narratively, and politically progressive.

Welch organizes her book as a series of stand-alone topical essays. She deals with the state of the teenager on American TV prior to The Monkees arrival; how The Monkees contemporized depictions of young people by voicing anti-war, anti-consumerist philosophies (some scripted, some not); the radical inventiveness of the series’ design and writing (“The Monkees” was that rare sixties show that went out of its way to hire young writers); it’s pop-cultural legacy; etc.

Welch also deals with how women and non-American ethnicities were handled on the show. This is where “The Monkees” didn’t always live up to its Aquarian ideals, though the author cuts the series a lot of slack regarding its treatment of women. Yes, we do see an unusual number of female characters in respectable positions on the show—judges, royalty, PH.D. students, rock musicians—but some of Welch’s arguments that the series was generally feminist are weak. She contends that Davy’s weekly girlfriends weren’t sex objects because they never actually spend the night at The Monkees’ pad. Well, how many women on sixties sitcoms spent the night at a man’s pad? Zero? She suggests that Micky values intelligence more than sexuality because he describes Brenda from “99 ½ Pound Weakling” as “brilliant and intelligent” when this is clearly a joke on her stoned inarticulateness. While Welch notes the demotion of the all-female band The Westminster Abbeys to go-go dancers at the end of “Some Like It Lukewarm”, she unconvincingly suggests that other elements in the episode balance out the sexist way the writers chose to end it.

Welch is less forgiving when analyzing how non-American ethnicities are handled on “The Monkees”, focusing on how Asians, Italians, Gypsies, and Russians are stereotyped on the series. She misses a great opportunity to discuss the character of Thursday in “Monkees Marooned”, who very effectively sends up the “black native” stereotype with his eloquence, intelligence, ability to take control of situations, and hipness.

Aside from the weaknesses in these two chapters, Why The Monkees Matter is not only a fine piece of cultural analysis overall but also an atypically readable and fun one. It’s filled with historical tidbits about the series’ filming and writing and Mike, Micky, Davy, and Peter, so even if you need no convincing that The Monkees matter, you may still find much to interest you on its pages.

 

Presenting “Why The Monkees Matter” to Micky Dolenz and Dave Evans, Writer of many Monkees episodes [Photos]

Last night I attended American Cinematheque’s “50th Anniversary of the Monkees” event at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood and had the opportunity to present copies of “Why The Monkees Matter” to writer, Dave Evans and Micky Dolenz. This is the culmination of a long path in writing the book and I was very happy that I could put a copy directly into the hands of 2 people who played such a fundamental role in the creation of “The Monkees” television show — and therefore, my book.

Wmm dolenz

Presenting “Why The Monkees Matter” to Micky Dolenz

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Presenting “Why The Monkees Matter” to writer, Dave Evans

 Presenting

Women Who Run the Room: A Conversation with Showrunners at the WGAw and co-sponsored by the Stephens MFA in Screenwriting Program [Photo]

Women Who Run the Room: A Conversation with Showrunners at the WGAw and co-sponsored by the Stephens MFA in Screenwriting Program [Photo]

Women Who Run the Room: A Conversation with Showrunners at the WGAw and co-sponsored by the Stephens MFA in Screenwriting Program. 

Photos of the panel and the full house/sold out audience from Women Who Run the Room: A Conversation with Showrunners. The Stephens MFA in Screenwriting co-sponsored this event with the Writers Guild Foundation. (from left to right: Dr. Rosanne Welch, moderator; Alexa Junge from Grace and Frankie; Dee Johnson from Nashville; Laurie McCarthy from Reign; Lizzy Weiss from Switched at Birth; SJ Hodges from Guidance)


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Listen Now: “Why The Monkees Matter” on Conversations Live with Cyrus Webb – Recorded Episode

Listen to the recorded episode using the links below

cyrus-webb

Host Cyrus Webb welcomes author Rosanne Welch to #ConversationsLIVE to discuss her new book WHY THE MONKEES MATTER: Teenagers, Television and America Pop Culture.

Listen to the recorded show