Category: Screenwriting Research Network

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Host: Let’s hear a few of your other favorite movies in general but let’s do it from a screenwriter’s perspective. What other movies do you think have been the best written?

Rosanne: Well you have to credit this although it is both the author and the writer/director. “The Godfather.” In the movie – if it comes on tv I can’t wherever it is when I flip to that channel although no one flips anymore, but you know, I can’t – I have to keep watching. Everything about that movie to me is perfect. Now the novel is quite perfect but there’s much in the novel that didn’t make it into the film, which i miss, but you only know that if you know the book but it’s so tight and it’s so beautifully – the story of a family and one of the things that I teach my students is that drama is about making decisions and “The Godfather” is entirely about one man who made one decision. I’m not going to follow my father and life won’t let him do that. So then he doubles down and makes the other decision that if I’m going to then I’m going to be the most powerful one and I’m going to save his empire instead of leave it.

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Host: Is that your is that your favorite period of filmmaking or are you you know are you all over the place with what you watch when it comes to cinema.

Rosanne: I am all over the place because it depends on the story and and the stories that stick with me you know. I love that movie. I love a lot of movies from that period but I also love a lot of movies like “Bonnie and Clyde.” How could you not love “Bonnie and Clyde?” Warren Beatty films are wonderful and but on the – and there I am two gangster movies – but I also love “Heaven Can Wait” another Warren Beatty. Written by Elaine May who’s wonderful and gets lost in the history books but yeah that’s a beautiful film. So I like that period. You know it’s funny.

Host: Is that the new Hollywood period kind of thing?

Rosanne: The New Hollywood Period but also the movies that then I grew up with when they were new. I mean I think when you think about scripts “Back to the Future” is the absolute most tightest best-written movie I can think of. You can watch that movie in every single bit. There’s a great bit in the beginning you know he’s got to have that piece of paper that tells him that when the clock is going to strike – when the lightning’s gonna strike and it’s because his girlfriend comes to him – he gets the paper from a lady. Just oh we’re saving the clock tower you know here’s a fundraising flyer but a teenage boy would throw that away. So you know they had to sit there and go why would he keep it? Well, his girlfriend comes up and says I’m staying at my grandmother’s house this weekend. Here’s her number so you can call me. so it’s his girlfriend’s phone number that’s important and of course, you couldn’t do that in the modern day because he’d have a smartphone and he wouldn’t need the piece of paper but just every detail is so perfectly covered in that movie that you cannot love it.

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Host: What are your what’s your favorite Jimmy Cagney movie if you have one?

Rosanne: Oh gosh I like angels and actually have my students watch “Angels With Dirty Faces” because it’s such a very perfect movie from that period right? It’s him and Pat O’Brien. He’s the gangster who’s about to go to the death you know to to to be executed and Pat O’Brien is a priest and the beginning of that movie is their two little boys – two young boys – who are robbing a train like you know stealing pencils or something and they the cops see him and they start running and the cops catch Jimmy Cagney but they don’t catch Pat O’Brien’s character and of course the concept is he goes to juvenile hall he learns how to be a bigger criminal whereas the other guy gets to go and become a priest and so it’s the perfect like I mean it’s funny because it seems cheesy but in fact it’s really about the fact that it’s about nurturing right and and how we should take children and give them better things so they want to be they can be better in life and then there’s a great ending that no one’s ever sure and it’s wonderful when the ending makes the audience think because the priest goes to his friend on the eve of his execution because there’s a bunch of boys in the neighborhood who think he’s cool and the priest is like oh no they’ll grow up to be like him and not like me. So it goes to his friend and he says you gotta do something that keeps them from making a martyr out of you and he’s like I’m never gonna do that. I’m strong and brave and everything and then they come to take him to the electric chair and he falls apart and you never know is he really just not he’s a coward he’s scared to death of dying or is he doing his priest friend a favor.

Host: Yeah i think it’s a very powerful movie.

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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.