Category: Research

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Rosanne: I love introducing students to classic films they’ve never seen and they think they know the whole story because so they saw they saw the one James Cameron directed and gee-whiz nobody knows about who wrote the thing and I can’t even quote that off the top of my head because I don’t actually like that movie so… yes but i know the 1920s the Cameron one? Did he write it?

Host: Yeah. I think he may have done. I think I would like to fact check someone fact-check us out but I’m not a big fan of that movie and but the one with Barbara Stanwyck is really cool.

Rosanne: Yeah that’s a really good version of that and Brackett got the Oscar for that so there’s reason for the Oscar and also it was one of the early movies of a young Robert Wagner and I was a big Robert Wagner fan when I was a kid watching his tv shows and whatnot. So seeing him as like a 19-year-old. I loved old movies for that reason. You’d see all these actors, in fact, I was kind of the geeky kid at my all-girl Catholic school and there was a kid who always liked to beat up on me – like verbally not physically – and I remember one time she asked me on the bus going to school who my favorite actor was and without thinking that it would be stupid I said Jimmy Cagney and like half the bus didn’t know who he was and half that did were like oh what’s wrong with you. He’s 85 and I was like I mean from the movies I’ve seen. He’s like really 30 and never mind yeah.

Host: Brilliant. I love Jimmy Cagney. I like the fact that he was able to do those gangster roles and then musicals and then come back later in life and be like a really gnarly gangster again.

Rosanne: When he had done he had done dancing with his sister on broadway so he was really a dancer and that kind of works in the gangster world because there’s that bouncy like you’re always a boxer and dancers and boxers have a lot in common.

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Host: I mean you seem to be such a knowledgeable person who comes to film history, do you have any favorite stories or have you met any maniacs, you know? Have you met any of these great the great directors of the great auteurs or have you had any experiences worth sharing.

Rosanne: I have – gosh – there’s so many stories. I worked in television for 20 years so there are good and bad stories. I don’t need to recount the bad ones but one survives all those and moves forward. That’s what you want to do and it’s been interesting to study the greats and introduce them to students and see how they respond. It’s so interesting because yes we teach Preston Sturges of course because he comes from the screenwriting world. There was a new book a couple years ago based on Charlie Bracket’s diaries and Charlie Brackett wrote with Preston but also wrote with Billy Wilder and that was a big you know. That’s a really interesting pair to piece up because Billy Wilder came to this country and didn’t speak English yet and Charlie Brackett had gone to some Ivy League college so of course he did and yet you know you got the ideas from one and the sort of quippy dialogue from the other until the one caught up to the – you know language is different in every country even between the states and the UK right we have different phraseology. So it was important to catch up to that and then Billy Wilder could go off and write on his own but then Charlie Bracket gets forgot sort of in history but he got an Oscar for writing the “Titanic” that happened in the 1950s with Barbara Stanwick which is a really great version of Titanic.

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So there’s a ton of those kinds of books. I like any writer’s biography because you want to learn from that. One of the things I always recommend –– I should have a copy sitting in front of me but it’s on my bedside table –– is “Monster: Living life off the big screen.” It was written by John Gregory Dunn who together with Joan Didion wrote several films including the 1976 Barbra Streisand, Kris Kristofferson “A Star Is Born” and “Monster” is a book where they got an assignment from the Disney company to write a movie based on the life of Jessica Savitch who was a TV anchorwoman who died badly. She was a cocaine addict and things like that. They got assigned to write this movie and the book is the story of the nine years it took to get the movie made in which they quit and they were fired and they came back and eventually the movie was made as “Up Close and Personal” with Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer and it is the best look at the ins and outs of a writer’s life and here were the notes we got. Here’s how we answered them and here’s you know the argument we came into and then they hired a new writer and then they didn’t like that draft and they came back and they begged us. So we got a higher fee because we didn’t want to but you know just the negotiations and then dealing with the actors. Finally, the actors signed on to the script – one of the, you know, 27th version of the script, and then the studio thought they needed a polish. So they hired someone else and then the actor said that’s not the script I said yes to. So what are we going to do? We’ll leave the production and so they went back. It’s a great look at the life of a writer and it’s a very thin little book. So it’s fun it’s a fun read.

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…and there were some older books they argue about. So I won’t say that. I don’t want to put anybody down but we notice in some later texts they’re still not mentioning women enough and so that’s a big deal. That’s something – there’s no one who’s written that history of screenwriting that has the balance that without having to bring in two other books to teach you everything and then there is a great book called Anita Loos Rediscovered where they found a bunch of her written screenplays which were more or less short stories right back in the silent era but you can see the germs of who she was and how her voice came through those stories and much of her stuff has been preserved. So you can then go watch the silent film on youtube because it does still exist. So that’s a lovely way to see the growth of a writer. I like those kinds of books that – so, of course, any biography of a writer. There’s a new one on Salka Viertel that just came out and she wrote for Greta Garbo and then she also hosted salons that had most of the German refugees that moved to Hollywood. So she was sort of giving them a place to be together while they sort of found their legs in this new city.

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Host: What are these books that they couldn’t teach without? The people you know were interested in screenwriting or studying screenwriting maybe go check out or it could be film theory in general.

Rosanne: Right. Well, I definitely like Carrie Beauchamp’s book “Without Lying Down” which is the story of Francis Marion and all the other women who worked at the same time. She was a sort of a salon kind of person, lots of female friends and they helped each other. So that’s a great book. I used Tom Stemple’s “Framework” which is older now. It’s one of the first textbooks of screenwriters, not directors. He was a student at UCLA and he wrote that he was assigned to cover the –– to create the oral history for Nunnally Johnson and in getting to know the man I think he did 11 hours of tapes and so then he wrote the first biography of Nunnally Johnson. One of the earliest biographies of a writer and then we’re going to get the biographies of Dalton Trumbo coming from other people. So he sort of started this niche –– what is the history of screenwriting? Then Horton and Hockster have a really good book on screenwriting which is more modern which is good but it’s been out for about eight or nine years now and my students tend to like that.

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I started a column called the classic I couldn’t teach without because there are a lot of older books that people don’t know about and I thought well let’s highlight those right? Even though they’re not brand new and you know maybe the publishing company isn’t that excited about it. If it can stay in the canon and be reused by class after class I think that’s really useful. So like I could put in Carrie’s book on Francis Marion and other people. So yeah that was kind of a fun thing to be able to invent and then I have my students read those books in class. So then I could pick out the best of those and maybe use that in the journal. So it gave them a stepping you know stepping stone into their academic publishing.

Host: Two birds with one stone there. That’s a really good tactic and I just think that’s something that I hope people are paying attention to – this idea of you know the forgotten classics again.

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Host: When I’m trying to give people some tips on how they can maybe get their first article published and I often say to people that they should approach the book review editor and see if there’s anything that needs reviewing or of course go to the books review editor with like some really cool exhibition or something very recently seen and write book reviews because it’s a fast track way of getting yourself published and then, of course, people like you know that the person can be trusted to follow guidance and to submit to a deadline but do you have as a books review editor or just as an editor, in general, do you have any top tips for people looking to publish their first articles or…

Rosanne: Well you just gave the best one which is exactly how I got involved in the journal. I was invited to do a book review. A friend had written a book and she was like will you write a review of it. I was like oh, of course, that sounds fun. So yes then the editors got to know my name. I did a few more of those. I then published an article which was in fact about Dorothy Parker and then the book review editor was stepping down. He was changing universities and was going to get busy and so they invited me to do that and I was interested. So I started doing that and of course, then I’ve been able to help my MFA students by giving them assignments to write book reviews.

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Because I’m in the States I made sure we had an article on a show in Canada because in the States everyone kind of erases Canada just like you know northern states but obviously not right? They have beautiful tv productions and the shows they put out are very multicultural in fact and that’s part of their mandate from the government. Basically, you need to make sure that we’re seeing the whole of Canada. So it was really interesting. It was like okay we got all this – we got probably 120 abstracts – people were very anxious to be in this issue and we could only use eight or nine of them. So I’m really proud of that fact and I think that that’s something that you know if I was well I do teach classes but other people who do I would hope that they would find articles in there that they could use in their class to highlight these female screenwriters from all over. So that’s the goal and then on a regular basis, I edit the book reviews. So I’m always like someone wants to write a book review or they have a new book they want to tell me about I would gladly – I need more information. So that’s our process.