Review: When Women Wrote Hollywood via Offscreen

Another wonderful and well-detailed review of When Women Wrote Hollywood came out today, written by film historian Elaine Lennon and appearing in Offscreen, the longest running monthly online film journal.

Check it out!

Review: When Women Wrote Hollywood
Offscreen

This new collection of 24 essays on women screenwriters offers fascinating insights into early Hollywood and beyond. Editor Rosanne Welch (herself a screenwriter) set her Stephens College MFA History of Screenwriting students a task: to outline the achievements of those screenwriters who have been systematically erased from the majority of film studies. The foreword by film historian Cari Beauchamp sets the tone in the first sentence, reminding us that “almost half of all films made before 1925 were written by women” (1). This volume is a sparky assemblage which not only acts as a corrective to conventional screenwriting historiography, it highlights careers which were multi-faceted, wide-ranging and virtually Renaissance in their scope.

Read the entire review

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

Press: The Mentoris Project: The Lives of Filippo Mazzei and Louis Palma di Cesnola: Learning about two key Italian-Americans in American History

All kudos to the library staff at Chapman University for posting this lovely article about the presentations my colleague and fellow writer Peg and I made on our individual books for the Mentoris Project.  Publisher Robert Barbera sponsored the event – and donated the set of books to the university library – and we enjoyed speaking to the Italian Studies students who gathered that evening about Filippo Mazzei and Louis Palma de Cesnola. — Rosanne

The Mentoris Project: The Lives of Filippo Mazzei and Louis Palma di CesnolaLearning about two key Italian-Americans in American History

The Mentoris Project: The Lives of Filippo Mazzei and Louis Palma di Cesnola: Learning about two key Italian-Americans in American History
December 4, 2018

When Robert J. Barbera founded The Mentoris Project as a part of The Barbera Foundation, his goal was to add to the canon of names most U.S. students learn over and over again from fifth grade through high school. He remembered hearing the names of people like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln repeated from year to year, but realized that two very important populations were missing from the standard U.S. history books and narratives: Italians and Italian-Americans. With that in mind, he started The Mentoris Project, which publishes biographies and novels based on the lives of prominent Italians and Italian-Americans, specifically those who can be considered as mentors. In the words of The Mentoris Project, these books are intended “to inspire the reader in a very tangible way: To finish the book saying, ‘I can do something great, too.’” The books published by The Mentoris Project are written by a variety of scholars and authors, and cover subjects from Christopher Columbus to Enrico Fermi.

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Read the entire article – The Mentoris Project: The Lives of Filippo Mazzei and Louis Palma di Cesnola: Learning about two key Italian-Americans in American History


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Also from the Mentoris Project

Want to use these books in your classroom? Contact the Mentoris Project!`

Tom Stempel Reviews “When Women Wrote Hollywood” In Script Magazine

Tom Stempel Reviews

Script Magazine publishes the “Understanding Screenwriting” column by historian Tom Stempel (author of Framework: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film). In this post Mr. Stempel reviews our book “When Women Wrote Hollywood.”

The review is the last thing in the column, so you will have to scroll down to it – but it’s well worth it – as it is well worth reading his reviews of the several films he writes about in the front matter of the article. — Rosanne

When Women Wrote Hollywood (2018. Book edited by Rosanne Welch. McFarland [McFarlandBooks.com]. 221 pages)

Rosanne Welch is a television writer who also teaches screenwriting at a variety of places. One of her gigs is handling the Los Angeles residency for screenwriting courses offered at Stephens College in Missouri. The students come out to L.A. a couple of times a year, where they get lectures from people connected to the business. One assignment that Welch has her students do is research papers on screenwriters of the past. This book is a collection of those papers, 23 by her students and one by Welch.

Stephens used to be an all-women’s college, but it now takes male students. The preponderance of its students are female, so all of the essays, including two by male students, are about women screenwriters in the early days of Hollywood. Some writers, like Anita Loos, you have probably heard of. Many of them you probably have not.

I was particularly taken by Amelia Phillips’s piece on Jeanie Macpherson. I wrote briefly about Macpherson in my book FrameWork: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film(1988), but one reviewer gave me a hard time for not mentioning that she was Cecil B. De Mille’s mistress. He seemed to think that disqualified her as a writer. Phillips starts out in the first paragraph by noting that Macpherson was only one of De Mille’s three long-time mistresses and has credits on a lot more than just De Mille’s films.

Several of the pieces, such as the ones on Zoe Atkins and Bella Spewack, note that they worked in both the theatre and film, which was a lot more common than is generally assumed about the early days of movies.

Welch takes her students to the Margaret Herrick Library of the Motion Picture Academy and some get into the archives in depth. Others, such as the people writing on Anita Loos and Dorothy Parker, depend mostly on memoirs and biographies. Then there is Pamela Scott, who found very little material on Sarah Y. Mason, the wife and co-writer of Victor Heerman, but was able to follow her connections with other people to give a nice little view of Mason’s career.

Like virtually every other book that is a collection of essays by different writers, the quality varies a lot, but there is enough good stuff to make it worth your while.


When Women Wrote Hollywood Book Reading and Signing, Skylark Bookshop, Columbia, Missouri

On Saturday, November 3rd, 2018 several of the contributors to When Women Wrote Hollywood gathered at the Skylark Bookshop in Columbia, Missouri for a signing and launch party that functioned like a mini-reunion of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting Class of 2017.

Many thanks to all who came to hear them each speak with passion about the research subjects who became whole chapters in this book of essays on female screenwriters from the Silent Era into the 1940s.

Check it out!

Video: When Women Wrote Hollywood Book Reading and Signing, Skylark Bookshop, Columbia, Missouri

 

Buy a signed copy of when Women Wrote Hollywood

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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

Dr. Rosanne Welch is interviewed by MUTV23, on “When Women Wrote Hollywood” [Video] (1:21)

Dr. Rosanne Welch is interviewed by MUTV23, on “When Women Wrote Hollywood”

Dr. Rosanne Welch is interviewed by MUTV23, on

Transcript:

The goal of our program and the goal of the book in general is to remind people that there was a time in Hollywood when 50% of the writers and producers were women and that was in the silent and the early Hollywood era and then they were all sort of wiped away and what happened was now we think oh can women do that? women did it in droves just a hundred years ago .It was a lot of research for all the different contributors many of who came from Columbia Missouri and it was because a lot of these women don’t have books written about them. They had to look through newspaper archives.They had to look through the Library of Congress. They — you know we could check the internet but the Internet’s not your perfect source for anything. It took a lot of time about six months for everyone to get enough research to be able to write and then the book itself took two years to go through the editing production and then produced available today. I have been a fan of very famous women from the past and Anita Loos, Adela Rodgers St. John. I’ve read their books. I’d seen them on television when I was a child doing talk shows and I thought how fascinating their lives had been and yet I never saw them in the history books that I was given about Hollywood. They always talked about the men. They never talked about the women who done that work and I wanted to create a program and a course that would allow other women to learn how many women had come before them.

When Women Wrote Hollywood Book Reading and Signing, Skylark Bookshop, Columbia, Missouri

On Saturday, November 3rd, 2018 several of the contributors to When Women Wrote Hollywood gathered at the Skylark Bookshop in Columbia, Missouri for a signing and launch party that functioned like a mini-reunion of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting Class of 2017.

Many thanks to all who came to hear them each speak with passion about the research subjects who became whole chapters in this book of essays on female screenwriters from the Silent Era into the 1940s.

Check it out the entire book reading!

 

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

News about Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia and Document Collection

More news on Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia and Document Collection

Women in American History
A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia and Document Collection

Peg A. Lamphier and Rosanne Welch, Editors

2017 Award Winner in the “Women’s Issues” Category
— Best Book Awards, American Book Fest

2018 Outstanding Reference Source
— Reference and User Services Association [RUSA]

“This four-volume set does more than simply provide biographical information on influential American women. . . . Care was taken to include women of color and LGBTQ women. . . . With applications for history, gender studies, political science, sociology, and more, this would be a useful addition to high school and undergraduate libraries.”—Booklist

* 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

New Journal of Screenwriting Arrives With Lots of Information!

New Journal of Screenwriting Arrives With Lots of Information!

Jos new zealand

It’s always fun when a new issue of the Journal of Screenwriting arrives in my mailbox, but this one’s pleasing on several fronts.

First, in my capacity as Book Reviews Editor, I’m able to publish several of my now-graduated students, often for the first time. 

In this issue I am also the co-author of an article extolling the marvelously successful conference held at Otago University in 2017.  

Also, two of the articles come from that conference – one by  my friend Carmen Sofia Brenes (Chairperson, full professor of poetics and screenwriting at the School of Communication of Universidad de los Andes) is about the 2016 film Jackie, about the life of American icon Jackie Kennedy, written by an American, Noah Oppenheim, and directed by Chilean Pablo Lorrain.

The second article is (not so jokingly) “10 Ways to f#ck up Your Female Characters” by two New Zealand female producers, Fiona Samuel and Kathryn Burnett. I’ve already talked about that one with many an MFA student. 

Ask your local university library to carry a subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting so you can read all the issues when they come out quarterly!

Citizen Jane Film Festival Information and a Mention of “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Book Signing During the Festival

The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Book Signing gets a quick mention this video from the Columbia Missouri Office of Cultural Affairs. They speak with Citizen Film Festival Director Barbie Banks about the festival and what is expected this year.

As in past years, my Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting students will presenting on important women screenwriters during the festival, too. — Rosanne

Get more Book Signing Event info and RSVP

“When Women Wrote Hollywood” Book Signing at the Citizen Jane Film Festival

Just booked my tickets for Citizen Jane – so excited to see students do their Research Paper presentations, to experience the whole festival (Agnes Varda’s ‘Faces/Places’ was my fav film last year) and, of course, to attend the Columbia launch of our book!

 

New Essay in Outside In: OUTSIDE IN TAKES A STAB: 139 New Perspectives on 139 Buffy Stories by 139 Writers – Pre-Order – Available Nov 2, 2018

I was given the grand job of writing about HUSH for this collection – so I published my Buffy 4-act structure lecture, which they found unique and which I continue to use as an opening lecture to each of my one-hour drama classes every semester. — Rosanne


Outside In Stab CoverOUTSIDE IN TAKES A STAB: 139 New Perspectives on 139 Buffy Stories by 139 Writers

This item will be released on November 2, 2018.Celebrating over 25 years of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, OUTSIDE IN TAKES A STAB is a collection of 139 reviews, one for every story of the television series, plus the movie and a couple extras. Featuring contributions from Susanne Lambdin, Jill Sherwin, Rosanne Welch, Keith R.A. DeCandido, Robert Greenberger, Rich Handley, David A. McIntee, and over a hundred more!

Pre-order Today!

“When Women Wrote Hollywood” is at the Citizen Jane Film Festival – November 1-4, 2018, Columbia, Missouri

When Women Wrote Hollywood is a collection of 23 essays focused on the lives of female screenwriters of Golden Age Hollywood.

Celebrate the work of these female screenwriters by meeting the authors!

Buy the book, listen to the authors share about their subjects, and get your book signed!

* Citizen Jane Film Festival Badge Not Required – This is a FREE Event!

Join the “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Facebook Event


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