Press – Page 6 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

Angelus Review of “America’s Forgotten Founding Father”

What a treat – reading the review of my book America’s Forgotten Founding Father in Angelus, the weekly Catholic magazine of Los Angeles. I enjoyed the way the magazine’s reviewer, Robert Brennan, compared Mazzei to Forest Gump in that he met so many other, far more well known Founding Fathers. Since it is a novel, Mr. Brennan had called me to ask about the historical accuracy of some of those meetings and I was happy to have been able to say that Mazzei led such an interesting life I didn’t need to make any of that up – even much of his dialogue comes from his own prolific correspondence with everyone from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams.

My favorite part of the review is the ending when Brennan shows how history teaches us how to handle our current lives.

“Although men like Jefferson, Washington and Adams represented a homogeneous group of white, English, Protestant, landed gentry, they all welcomed a new immigrant from a non-English speaking, predominantly Catholic country. And Filippo Mazzei showed that a Catholic could, in good conscience, be fully integrated into that great American experiment at its birth, and help christen it with a little holy water.”

Read the entire review – Not born of the 4th of July — but should have been by Robert Brennan

Order an autographed copy of America’s Forgotten Founding Father

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Also from the Mentoris Project

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

Kirkus Review – America’s Forgotten Founding Father by Rosanne Welch

I’m happy to share this review for my book on Filippo Mazzei, America’s Forgotten Founding Father, from the Kirkus Review website.

I imagine all authors are nervous when hearing there is a professional review of their work available to view. But I fell in love with Filippo while researching this novel and figured other folks would, too.

I’m especially happy they noted all the “intriguing historical tidbits” as those were so much fun to include. It fuels my desire to get as many of those ‘intriguing historical tidbits’ into my new book on Garibaldi – but I admit that’s harder as these facts aren’t on the tip of my tongue the way American history is (after teaching it for the last 10 years) so the digging has taken me much longer.

Read the review yourself! And then (hopefully) order the book. Filippo did so much for our country, the least we can do is know his story.

Read the Kirkus Review – America’s Forgotten Founding Father

Order an autographed copy of America’s Forgotten Founding Father

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Want to use this book in your classroom? Contact the Mentoris Project!

My Next WGA Foundation Panel Discussion: It’s a Funny Story: A Conversation with Women TV Comedy Writers, August 10, 2018

I am very excited to be moderating another panel at the Writers Guild Foundation on…

“It’s a Funny Story: A Conversation with Women TV Comedy Writers” on Friday, August 10, 2018

with these fascinating female writer-creator-artists:

Njeri Brown from black-ish and Dear White People
Natasha Leggero and Riki Lindhome from Another Period
Christine Zander from Loosely Exactly Nicole, Kevin From Work, 3rd Rock from the Sun,and Saturday Night Live
Gail Parent from The Golden Girls, and The Carol Burnett Show AND author of one of those books I was forbidden from reading when I was in middle school, but read anyway: Sheila Levine is Dead and Living in New York.
Moderated by Dr. Rosanne Welch (Touched By An Angel, Picket Fences, Beverly Hills, 90210)

This is going to be FUN! Hope you can join us!

Get Tickets

From the Writers Guild Foundation

“We could all use a good laugh. Fortunately, we can all unwind with an abundance of outstanding television comedy shows that are available at the click of a button. But comedy isn’t just for the jokes anymore: an increasing number of shows tackle universal problems and surprisingly navigate us through our challenging world. And as writers rooms continue investing in diverse talent, the voices you hear from your television take on fresh perspectives.

Join The Writers Guild Foundation in partnership with Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting for a discussion surrounding how women television comedy writers got their start, how they use their experiences to inform their work, and the challenges they face in the writers room.”

Paperback LA is Reprinting The Monkees Article that Started it All!

I was so proud to receive a request from Susan La Tempa, editor of the new Paperback L.A about reprinting my first article, Hey, Hey, They Wrote The Monkees!, on the writers of The Monkees, which I had done for Written By magazine in 2012.

Her new anthology covers life in LA and she found both the lives of writers AND, of course, the existence of The Monkees to be iconic to Los Angeles.

Check out her first book in the series: Book 1, A Casual Anthology: Clothes. Coffee. Crushes. Crimes

And look out for the announcement when the issue containing “Hey, Hey, They Wrote The Monkees!” publishes!

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

McFarland (Direct from Publisher) | Amazon | Kindle Edition | Nook Edition

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“When Women Wrote Hollywood” In The News: Uncovering the secret history of women in Hollywood, University of Kansas

What a great read!

Check out this profile of professor Laura Kirk, who contributed 2 chapters to When Women Wrote Hollywood, published by the University of Kansas where she teaches film acting for the Department of Film & Media Studies.

Her chapters involve Silent Era writer Eve Unsell and musical scenario writer Bella Spewack.

Read more about these – and all the great early female screenwriters in the book!

Rosanne Welch

When Women Wrote Hollywood In The News: Uncovering the secret history of women in Hollywood, University of Kansas

LAWRENCE — After working for many years as an actor and producer, Laura Kirk returned to her native Kansas in 2012 and joined the University of Kansas Department of Film & Media Studies as a lecturer, teaching film acting.

Now, in her first big work of academic scholarship, Kirk has contributed two chapters to “When Women Wrote Hollywood” (McFarland), a new book aimed at bringing the secret female history of Hollywood to light.

Kirk wrote about Kansan Eve Unsell, a screenwriter whose career spanned the silent and talkie era, and Bella Spewack, the journalist, author and screenwriter best known for “Kiss Me Kate.”

“When this industry started, women wrote 50 percent of the screenplays,” Kirk said. “And yet Eve Unsell was not in the index of any history book. Many of the women who have chapters in this book have not been written about in any real way.”

Unsell, for instance, got a two-line obituary in the Los Angeles Times when she died in 1937 at age 50. She was born in Chicago and grew up in Caldwell, a small Kansas town in Sumner County.

“She has 96 credits on IMDb,” the Internet Movie Database, Kirk said. “She was credited with training Alfred Hitchcock. She ran the Paramount studio in England. … I talk about how she was one of the first people to settle in Malibu when it was wild and natural and scenic.”

Read this entire article – Uncovering the secret history of women in Hollywood, University of Kansas

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Cal State Fullerton expert finds the Monkees were a steppin’ stone to cultural change — Rosanne in The Orange County Register

When two Monkees fans get together, magic always happens, as you’ll see when you read what Wendy Fawthrop of the Orange County Register thought of my last Monkees lecture, which was open to the public. — Rosanne

Cal State Fullerton expert finds the Monkees were a steppin’ stone to cultural change — Rosanne in The Orange County Register

She’s a believer.

And after Rosanne Welch spoke recently to a gathering of Cal State Fullerton students and faculty, many of them were left also believing that the Monkees, the 1960s boy band, had a greater impact on television, music and pop culture than they had thought.

Illustrated with slides of the Monkees with Paul McCartney and Janis Joplin, on cereal boxes and in pop culture references long after their heyday, Welch’s talk laid out evidence that the group’s TV show made strong feminist statements and advanced such TV practices as characters addressing the audience, used today on such shows as “Modern Family” and “House of Cards.”

“They influenced so many of today’s modern-day performers and yet people keep forgetting about that,” said Welch.

Read this entire article — Cal State Fullerton expert finds the Monkees were a steppin’ stone to cultural change

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

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

When Women Wrote Hollywood Heads To The Printer Today – Available for Pre-Order Today with a July 31, 2018 Publication Date

When Women Wrote Hollywood went to the printer today!

We are on schedule for our planned publication date of July 31st AND here’s the first time an ad for the book appears alongside some other fun McFarland titles in Classic Images: The Newspaper of Film Fandom.

Available for Print Pre-Order Now. Electronic Editions Coming Soon!

Use “When Women Wrote Hollywood” in your classroom!

Contact McFarland directly for instructor copies, library and bookstore purchases.

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Today I Became a Citation: Little Women, Feminism and Me!

I usually use Google Alerts to find mentions of The Monkees but this weekend something interesting happened. Google Alerts found my name in an essay on the JSTOR Daily about the new BBC miniseries version of Little Women, adapted by Heidi Thomas of “Call the Midwife”) from a novel by a female writer (Louisa May Alcott, as if you didn’t know) and directed by a woman (Vanessa Caswill).

My Summer of Watching Little Women by Benjamin Winterhalter

The writer of the essay was a male, JSTOR Daily’s features editor Benjamin Winterhalter and he was reminiscing about a summer in his elementary years when his mother and friends dissected all the filmed adaptations of the novel in preparation for writing an article — “A Feminist Romance: Adapting Little Women to the Screen” for Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature.

Read the Journal Article

Winterhalter’s article came up because along his research way he came across an Op-Ed I had written for the Los Angeles Times, “What ‘Little Women’ Is Really About” about the 1995 Robin Schiff adaptation (starring Winona Ryder) which I had framed as both a more deeply feminist interpretation but, more importantly, accessible to all as the story of a writer finding their voice.

How fun to be reminded of that Op-Ed and to see how accessible my earlier work can be with archives going digital. It’s also good timing as I often recommend to screenwriting students that they write for various local publications in order to get their names out there and to fill out their writing CVs. Here’s an example of a piece I wrote when I had a passionate idea ( the one about how this is more the story of a writer finding their voice than merely a bunch of sisters surviving the Civil War). Since I did not see that idea represented in the mainstream press, I brought it to their attention and they noticed it and presented it to their readers.