On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch
Writing, Film, Television and More!
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Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture
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Complete video of this presentation is now available.
See all the photos from this presentation
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 and Campus Bookstore orders directly from McFarland
When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry
I’m so excited to see that we’re now publishing on this collection of essays written by the original cohort of students in our first Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting which I edited and for which author Cari Beauchamp wrote a wonderful forward covering the life and influence of Frances Marion.
These 23 essays cover a range of female screenwriters from the early years of film through the 1940s, women whose work helped create the unforgettable stories and characters beloved generations of audiences but whose names have been left out of most film histories. Not this one. This collection is dedicated to those women and written by a group of women grateful to stand on the shoulders of those who came before – as a beacon to those who will come after.
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Table Of Contents
Acknowledgments
Foreword: Finding Frances Marion
Cari Beauchamp
Introduction
Rosanne Welch 5
Adela Rogers St. Johns: Survival Of The Feisty
Sarah Amble Whorton
Jeanie Macpherson: A Life Unknown
Amelia Phillips
Anita Loos: A Girl Like Her
Toni Anita Hull
The Nature And Genius Of Alice Guy Blaché
Khanisha Foster
“You’d Better Learn To Hold Your Liquor”: Bess Meredyth And A Career In Early Hollywood
Sydney Haven
The Best Revenge Is Outliving Them All: The Life And Heartbreak Of Frederica Sagor Maas
Mikayla Daniels
Silent Screenwriter, Producer And Director: Marion Fairfax
Sarah Phillips
Smart Girl In Charge: Eve Unsell
Laura Kirk
The Glorious Ms. Glyn
Amy L. Banks
Fearless And Fierce: June Mathis
Lauren Elizabeth Smith
Writing Around Lois Weber
Chase Thompson
Gene Gauntier: Ascending By Drowning
Yasser Omar Shahin
Lorna Moon: A Woman Of A Certain Influence
Elizabeth Dwyer Sandlin
Clara Beranger: The Unseen Laborer
Amanda R. Stockwell
Ida May Park: Prolific Pioneer
Jackie Perez
Frances Goodrich And Albert Hackett: The Most Beloved Couple In Hollywood
Julie Berkobien
In Defense Of Lillian Hellman
Kelley C. Zinge
The Intimately Unknowable Dorothy Parker: A Study Of Her Life And Art
Elizabeth Dwyer Sandlin
Joan Harrison: Redefining Femininity In Film Noir And Hollywood
Chelsea Andes
The Six Degrees Of Sarah Y. Mason And Victor Heerman
Pamela L. Scott
Zoë Akins: A Quiet Rebellion
Sarah Amble Whorton
Marriage Of Words: Bella And Sam Spewack
Laura Kirk
The Forgettable Ms. Murfin
Amy L. Banks
A Team In Passionate Action: Ruth Gordon And Garson Kanin
Rosanne Welch
About The Contributors
Before my presentation on “How The Monkees Changed Television” at Cal Fullerton Lunchtime Lectures
Complete video of this presentation is now available at RosanneWelch.com
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Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture
McFarland (Direct from Publisher) | Amazon | Kindle Edition | Nook Edition
Monkees Research Materials and Memorabilia
“How The Monkees Changed Television” at Cal Fullerton Lunchtime Lectures
See all the photos from this presentation
Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture
McFarland (Direct from Publisher) | Amazon | Kindle Edition | Nook Edition
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.
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.
Monkees Research Materials and Memorabilia
“How The Monkees Changed Television” at Cal Fullerton Lunchtime Lectures
Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture
McFarland (Direct from Publisher) | Amazon | Kindle Edition | Nook Edition
Presenting on “How The Monkees Changed Television” at Cal Fullerton Lunchtime Lectures
More pictures and complete video coming soon!
Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture
McFarland (Direct from Publisher) | Amazon | Kindle Edition | Nook Edition
20 Where Did We Get Gidget Right? from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto with Dr. Rosanne Welch
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Transcript:
So, I really wanted to wrap up with the idea, so where did we get the Gidget book right? Was it in the movies or in the TV show? I’m going to guess, just because I’m pushy and that’s what I pushed on you, it is, in fact, the TV show and I’m going to say that’s because TV is where meat-and-potatoes stories can be told. We have a hundred or 200 hours to tell you the story of one character. They can’t be weak and superficial or you won’t come back. We need to really get into their hearts and hear about them and that’s the beauty of television as opposed to bubblegum in films and also TV has often been — and I’m not saying Gidget is part of the golden age of television — but when we discuss the Golden Age of Television we discuss it like Dickensian novels, that every month, every week, you get another section of the story and that’s the power of television. We can expand on a character because you’ve come to love them and you’ll watch them go through two or three or seven years of their lives and that’s much more in-depth than you can get into a film which is where Gidget falls apart if you ask me.
At this year’s 10th Annual Screenwriting Research Network Conference at Otago University in Dunedin, New Zealand I presented…
“How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto by Accident (and How We Can Get Her Out of it): Demoting Gidget: The Little Girl with Big Ideas from Edgy Coming of Age Novel to Babe on the Beach Genre Film via Choices made in the Adaptation Process.”
It’ a long title, as I joke up front, but covers the process of adapting the true life story of Kathy Kohner (nicknamed ‘Gidget’ by the group of male surfers who she spent the summers with in Malibu in the 1950s) into the film and television series that are better remembered than the novel. The novel had been well-received upon publication, even compared to A Catcher in the Rye, but has mistakenly been relegated to the ‘girl ghetto’ of films. Some of the adaptations turned the focus away from the coming of age story of a young woman who gained respect for her talent at a male craft – surfing – and instead turned the focus far too much on Kathy being boy crazy.
Along the way I found interesting comparisons between how female writers treated the main character while adapting the novel and how male writers treated the character.
Dr. Rosanne Welch
Dr. Rosanne Welch teaches the History of Screenwriting and One-Hour Drama for the Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting.
Writing/producing credits include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, ABCNEWS: Nightline and Touched by an Angel. In 2016 she published the book Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop; co-edited Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia; and placed “Transmitting Culture Transnationally Via the Characterization of Parents in Police Procedurals” in the New Review of Film and Television Studies. Essays appear in Torchwood Declassified: Investigating Mainstream Cult Television and Doctor Who and Race: An Anthology. Welch serves as Book Reviews editor for Journal of Screenwriting and on the Editorial Advisory Board for Written By magazine, the magazine of the Writers Guild.
Watch Dr. Welch’s talk “The Importance of Having a Female Voice in the Room” at the 2016 TEDxCPP.
The Screenwriting Research Network is a research group consisting of scholars, reflective practitioners and practice-based researchers interested in research on screenwriting. The aim is to rethink the screenplay in relation to its histories, theories, values and creative practices.
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19 Dorothy Cooper Foote and Gidget from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto with Dr. Rosanne Welch
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Then you flip over her to Dorothy Cooper Foote who was one of the freelance writers on the show. Gidget has a crush on an older man. That’s Daniel Travanti who will show up in Hill Street Blues as a grown man. He’s a photographer. He’s a war veteran from the Vietnam (Korean) War, although that war is unmentioned, but he’s a war veteran and he’s taking pictures of her for a magazine. She falls in love with him. She discovers he actually has a fiance. He didn’t realize she had a crush on him because he didn’t consider a younger girl as someone that he would go after and her and her Dad had this lovely moment because he says “(Your) always going to hurt a little.” and he knows because his wife has passed away and he’s a widow. So they make this connection on having experienced loss together. Which is a very mature thing for a young girl to be able to discuss and to share and again that mature attitude toward her comes from a female writer.
At this year’s 10th Annual Screenwriting Research Network Conference at Otago University in Dunedin, New Zealand I presented…
“How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto by Accident (and How We Can Get Her Out of it): Demoting Gidget: The Little Girl with Big Ideas from Edgy Coming of Age Novel to Babe on the Beach Genre Film via Choices made in the Adaptation Process.”
It’ a long title, as I joke up front, but covers the process of adapting the true life story of Kathy Kohner (nicknamed ‘Gidget’ by the group of male surfers who she spent the summers with in Malibu in the 1950s) into the film and television series that are better remembered than the novel. The novel had been well-received upon publication, even compared to A Catcher in the Rye, but has mistakenly been relegated to the ‘girl ghetto’ of films. Some of the adaptations turned the focus away from the coming of age story of a young woman who gained respect for her talent at a male craft – surfing – and instead turned the focus far too much on Kathy being boy crazy.
Along the way I found interesting comparisons between how female writers treated the main character while adapting the novel and how male writers treated the character.
Dr. Rosanne Welch
Dr. Rosanne Welch teaches the History of Screenwriting and One-Hour Drama for the Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting.
Writing/producing credits include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, ABCNEWS: Nightline and Touched by an Angel. In 2016 she published the book Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop; co-edited Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia; and placed “Transmitting Culture Transnationally Via the Characterization of Parents in Police Procedurals” in the New Review of Film and Television Studies. Essays appear in Torchwood Declassified: Investigating Mainstream Cult Television and Doctor Who and Race: An Anthology. Welch serves as Book Reviews editor for Journal of Screenwriting and on the Editorial Advisory Board for Written By magazine, the magazine of the Writers Guild.
Watch Dr. Welch’s talk “The Importance of Having a Female Voice in the Room” at the 2016 TEDxCPP.
The Screenwriting Research Network is a research group consisting of scholars, reflective practitioners and practice-based researchers interested in research on screenwriting. The aim is to rethink the screenplay in relation to its histories, theories, values and creative practices.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
