Research – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

Great Review of Rosanne’s Chapter in “Stories of the Holocaust: Art for Healing and Renewal, Volume II: On Screen and in the Gallery”

I was pleased to have been asked to contribute a chapter the Volume 2 of Stories of the Holocaust: Art for Healing and Renewal: On Screen and in the Gallery, edited by Karen Berman & Gail Humphries. It gave me a chance to celebrate the hard work and deep care taken by screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett (The Thin Man, It’s a Wonderful Life) when they were asked to adapt The Diary of Anne Frank first into the Pulitzer Prize and Tony-winning play, and then the Academy Award-winning film.

Then I was invited to present on my chapter at a museum exhibition in Jacksonville, Florida, which introduced me to several other chapter authors. Then I was invited to the book’s debut at the Embassy of the Czech Republic in Washington, D.C., where I met some of the international authors.

This week, this review of the books came out last week. I felt quite honored that out of over 20+ chapters, the Kirkus Reviewer chose to mention mine:

“Dr. Rosanne Welch, executive director of the MFA program at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri, offers a scholarly exploration of cinematic and theatrical representations of Anne Frank.”

Our MFA candidates and alums know that I have researched Goodrich and Hackett extensively, so this was a great example of how we can continue sharing the knowledge we have gained in our research. Being able to publish that research in this book series made me very proud and brought me many new colleagues, and that momentum continues!

Rosanne presents “Creative Play #8: Emotional Monologues Written By A Few Accomplished Female Television Writers” – Screenwriting Research Network [Video]

I was pleased to be asked to host a session of the Creative Play Working Group of the Screenwriting Research Network (SRN), chaired by Professor Chris Neilan of Edinburgh Napier University.

I had the chance to introduce the attendees to some wonderfully emotional monologues written by a few highly accomplished female television writers, from Susan Harris (on SOAP) to Linda Bloodworth Thomason (on Designing Women) to Maxine Alderton, who wrote a great monologue for the Jodie Whitaker Doctor in her episode “The Haunting of Villa Diadoti”. (Doing a bit of history by showing monologues from TV shows from the 1970s and 80s is one of my goals in our MFA – along with celebrating female screenwriters).

Then I introduced an exercise in writing monologues that involves Thornton Wilder’s Our Town as an inspiration. A few of the attendees shared what they wrote so we could all learn more about how the specificity we bring from our own lives makes our work more universal.

Thanks to Leslie Kreiner for inviting me to do a presentation on Monologues to a conference last year, which created the seed of this exercise. Thanks to Chris for the invitation to share it – and to all the attendees for… attending. Special thanks to those who shared what they wrote to help others see if this is an exercise they would like to incorporate into their teaching.

When Women Write What They Say, They Say So Much More: Powerful Actress-writer-producers Past, Present & Future with Dr. Rosanne Welch, SRN 2025, Adelaide, Australia [Video]

In another example of my love for a good, long, alliterative title, I name this year’s Screenwriting Research Network (SRN) presentation:

“When Women Write What They Say, They Say So Much More: Powerful Actress-writer-producers Past, Present & Future”.

It covers writers like Emma Thompson, who adapted Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, in which she starred as Eleanor, and Gertrude Berg, creator, writer, and star of The Goldbergs, and then everyone from Tina Fey to Issa Rae, to Mindy Kaling to Lena Waithe. This presentation discusses the way women writing their own characters, dialogue, and worlds into existence impacts the audience, the industry, and the way women are seen in society.

Running Down the Rabbit Hole of Research, Dr. Rosanne Welch

Running Down the Rabbit Hole of Research

It’s always fun to fall into the rabbit hole of research. It always teaches me new things about other eras, along with reminding me that one of the ways women disappear in history. They change their names, making it harder and harder to find them. I was reminded of this as I was writing a column on novelist turned silent screenwriter Beaulah Marie Dix. In one of many short bits about her online, I found mention of daughter Evelyn Flebbe Scott on the very helpful Women Film Pioneers Project. There, I also found that Evelyn had herself become “an industry writer” and had written a Hollywood memoir, Hollywood When Silents Were Golden (Internet Archive) that can also be ordered from the Los Angeles Public Library.

An online search for Evelyn Scott led to a southern novelist – Evelyn Scott (born Elsie Dunn) – so not the Evelyn Scott I was researching. Luckily, I had my Evelyn Scott’s father’s name, so I added the Flebbe to the search, and that’s when Evelyn Flebbe Scott came up on Goodreads as the author of 2 children’s books + the aforementioned memoir. It also gave the next tidbit, giving me her father’s profession: “was the daughter of screenwriter/author Beulah Marie Dix and book importer Georg Heinrich Flebbe” along with the explanation of where ‘Scott’ came from: “She married film editor David Scott in 1935” AND, the confirmation that “Evelyn F. Scott worked for decades in Hollywood as a story editor at MGM.”

Then, in looking up a tiny smidgen of a clue on IMDB – that she had a play that “the Technicolor Corporation to be adapted as one of their Great Events short color film series” I searched the play’s title Allison’s Lad in IBDB, the Internet Broadway Database – it wasn’t listed. So I broadened to a larger search and found it listed on a new fun site: The Unknown Playwrights site “Where unknown playwrights become known”.

There I learned that “Dix had a thing for history and wars” and the one-act “is set during the bloodletting known as The English Civil War” and “appears in a volume of one-acts set entirely during wartime.” Their Link Heaven took me to the Internet Archive where a printed copy of the play had been scanned.

Now I need to read some books on the MGM scenario department to see if Evelyn worked with Kate Corbaley, the famous head of the story department at MGM in the 1930s, who you can read more about here – How Kate Corbaley, Powerful Reader at MGM in the 1930s, Paved the Way for Today’s Hollywood Literary Scouts.

That’s a tiny example of the rabbit hole of research one can hop into and like Alice in Wonderland, find oneself racing through all sorts of interesting eras and fascinating lives.

Dr. Rosanne Welch Interview – She Served Too, KOPN FM, Columbia, Missouri [Audio]

Dr. Rosanne Welch Interview - She Served Too, KPON FM, Columbia, MIssouri [Audio] While I was on the Stephens College campus a couple of weeks ago for the Screenwriting Research Network conference I had the pleasure of appearing on the She Served, Too radio show hosted by Elizabeth Herrera.

A military veteran, Herrera also runs the Stephens College Mission Promise Kept program. Together we spoke about the many military women whose stories have yet to be told on the big (or small) screen including the Mercury 13. Herrera was kind enough to let me talk about the Screenwriting Research Network conference we were holding on the Stephens campus that week and, of course, about the many military women who have dome through our Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting and how telling our stories helps us heal – whether we turn them into scripts or not it’s the act of talking and being heard that heals.

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She Served Too
Every 3rd Tue at 5:00 PM With Elizabeth Herrera

Host Elizabeth Herrera has served in the United States Air Force, non-profits, and managing crisis care centers for women. On her show She Served Too, she discusses current issues from her unique perspective.

15 Conclusion From Jeanne to Suso to Julie to Spike: How Jeanne Macpherson’s Manual on Screenwriting Influenced Italian Realism which Influenced Black Independent Film in the U.S. [Video]

Transcript:

…and I think it takes it all back globally because, of course, he’s going to become the judge. He’s going to bring all his movies to Cannes and so he’s going to get international fame from doing this and of course then he’s going to become the first African-American judge in the Cannes Film Festival and I think just seeing that circle to me is – it fills in this whole global idea and while he’s judge, we’re going to see an award go to a Japanese film right? Something that had – I can’t even remember if that had happened in the past – and then to a female, only the second female to come up with a Palme D’Or and that’s because – partially because he was on the judging team and I think it’s important to think that Jeannie and Cecil and all these women in the past to be proud and look at the judging group that year. It’s split 50/50 women and men. So we’re getting to a place where we’re getting all the perspectives in the room. So I think that’s it. There you go. That’s it. Thank you. Thank you very much.

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At the recent Screenwriting Research Network conference in Vienna, I gave this talk titled “From Jeanne to Suso to Julie to Spike: How Jeanne Macpherson’s Manual on Screenwriting Influenced Italian Realism which Influenced Black Independent Film in the U.S.”

In the talk, I trace the ways a manual about screenwriting by silent film writer Jeanne Macpherson influenced Suso Cecchi d’Amici who began to utilize Macpherson’s ideas and became the queen of Italian neorealism screenwriting in Europe. Then those Italian neo-realist screenwriters in turn inspired the Los Angeles School of Black Independent Film Makers (the L.A. School). In turn, such as Charles Burnett, Billy Woodberry, Haile Gerima, and Julie Dash and their ideas fueled Spike Lee. Finally, when he became the first Black man to head the jury at the Cannes Film Festival (where Suso had once served) his choice of films influenced yet another generation of screenwriters.

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14 Julie Dash and Spike Lee From Jeanne to Suso to Julie to Spike: How Jeanne Macpherson’s Manual on Screenwriting Influenced Italian Realism which Influenced Black Independent Film in the U.S. [Video]

Transcript:

Then we get “Daughters of the Dust” by Julie Dash. So now a female coming into that rebellious you know LA rebellion was largely a male thing but now Julie Dash comes to it and tries to give the real story of the Gullah family – using their language and their conversation, which is really quite beautiful and we move over to Spike Lee. I would argue that “Do The Right Thing” is kind of the ultimate American – African-American – neo-realist film. Looking at the trouble in his area again due to poverty and then the heat and all of that that goes on and I think it’s important to look at Spike in the new Museum to the academy that they built in Los Angeles – which we finally got to visit after the pandemic – they have a room for directors and I would call this writer’s inspiration. I’m really tired when they call it director’s inspiration and he’s the director but you know what he got his only Oscar for – writing. Let’s just remember that. They gave a couple of writers writers yes writer/directors rooms to show their Inspirations and you’ll see right here “8 1/2” and “Rome Open City.” The man’s whole career is built around what he studied at New York Film Academy.

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13 Bless Their Little Hearts From Jeanne to Suso to Julie to Spike: How Jeanne Macpherson’s Manual on Screenwriting Influenced Italian Realism which Influenced Black Independent Film in the U.S. [Video]

Transcript:

Charles Burnett is then gonna write but not direct “Bless Their Little Hearts” and again – so his style I think is one of the most examples of that. Likewise, instead of the bombed-out cities due to war, he’s showing us the destructed cities where all the factories have died and the jobs have gone and now there’s nothing. So in a strange way again it’s a different kind of War that’s being imagined in his films. He also like “The Bicycle Thief” – his main character comes up with an idea about selling fish and making money out of the trunk of his car which is already a fail when you think of it but he’s trying so hard and he does fail because nobody wants to buy fish that hasn’t been on ice. So it’s exactly the same ending we get in “The Bicycle Thief”, that it’s this futility but yet he’s going to wake up tomorrow and try something else which I think is really cool.

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12 Martin Scorcese From Jeanne to Suso to Julie to Spike: How Jeanne Macpherson’s Manual on Screenwriting Influenced Italian Realism which Influenced Black Independent Film in the U.S. [Video]

Transcript:

…and then we get you know Marty gets into the Italian films and he starts kind of mimicking it but he never quite gets there I would say. I would say of all his films “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” gets there because it’s a bleak story about a woman who is hoping to be a singer and but as she’s driving across the country to get to her singing career she has no money. So she has to get a job as a waitress. Many people know there was a TV show in the 70s. It’s based on this film but it was much more comedic and didn’t go into the sort of sadness and essentially the melodrama of her life. In the end, she meets Kris Kristofferson. They fall in love. Do you give up your dream for the love because she has a son who needs a house and security and so she’s going to make a choice. I won’t tell you what. You have to see the movie but it has the bleakness to it. Again now we’re in the non-African-American world. So I think Marty’s doing that but it doesn’t happen. It doesn’t take off. There’s too many other styles in the quote-unquote, you know, white Cinema if you want to call it that.

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11 Charlie Burnett and “Killer of Sheep” From Jeanne to Suso to Julie to Spike: How Jeanne Macpherson’s Manual on Screenwriting Influenced Italian Realism which Influenced Black Independent Film in the U.S. [Video]

Transcript:

Charles Burnett who wrote”Killer of Sheep”. There you go and this is kind of an amazing really good example of taking neo-realism and bringing into the African-American storytelling. This is in many ways– people who now look at it say this is truly a perfect example of transmitting from one culture to another a style of film and you can see very similar not just – and this is in the scripts, by the way not just the visuals– Always written down but the idea of having children deal with the rubble. The trash The leftovers of society, not a beautiful lovely playground as we’ve seen walking through town here. So completely mimicking what we see in “Rome Open City” and also there’s this idea that there’s got to be some beauty in that. One of the things that is considered brought into black Cinema is that you still have to say that there’s struggle but you have to have hope. Otherwise, what’s the point of just showing the struggle. So I think it’s really beautiful. There are moments where the couple is dancing in their home. It’s a very barely furnished home but you can still see that there’s love involved. So that’s an element that black filmmaking brings into this neo-realistic feeling.

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