05 Comparisons to Catcher in the Rye from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto – Dr. Rosanne Welch – SRN Conference

05 Comparisons to Catcher in the Rye from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto – Dr. Rosanne Welch – SRN Conference

05 Comparisons to Catcher in the Rye from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto - Dr. Rosanne Welch - SRN Conference

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Transcript:

So, we’ll start with the real woman. This is the real woman in the modern day. She’s still alive. She works in — she works as a Maitre D of a restaurant in Malibu and she’s still known as the “Real Gidget.” That’s kind of her — everyone in Hollywood is a bit of a celebrity so you can go that restaurant and meet the “Real Gidget” and have dinner. It is pretty funny. She also did a documentary a few years ago about her life that traveled the festival circuit. She’s trying to bring back the real story out of all the Hollywood glitz and glamour. So that’s Kathy Kohner and this was said about the book in the introduction and which I found very interesting. This is what connected me to it, that when it came out there was a thought that this was essentially a female Catcher in the Rye. Catcher in the Rye being the JD Salinger book that every high school student in America is still made to read and I don’t understand. It’s about a kid who decided whether or not to go to a hooker and I’m not really sure why that’s the most important book for teenagers to read.

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.

Gidget


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.


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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.

The “A Film By” Credit and Writers from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

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The “A Film By” Credit and Writers from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

The

 

A recording of my presentation at this year’s University Film and Video Association (UFVA) 2017 conference.

Transcript:

The other thing we argue about at the Writers Guild all the time is that we have this business where we have a credit that’s always “A Film By” the director. If he is a writer/director, fine. Ok, but if there’s nothing of that than why does he get this credit and why don’t the writers get that credit and we can’t get rid of that because the Director Guild will not get rid of it. Makes me nuts. Makes me nuts. Makes me nuts. But it’s true.

So this perpetually puts it in the audience’s and the student’s mind that this is the person to credit for that movie and it is not true. Same thing, obviously we know all these wonderful movies by Spike Lee. In the beginning, yes, he did write and direct “She’s Gotta Have It” but he did Malcolm X with Arnold Pearl. We don’t remember Arnold Pearl and he did Chi-Raq with Kevin Willmott and of course, he adapted that from Aristophanes and Lysistrata. So, let’s remember that there were other writers involve but they’re still only A Spike Lee Joint. That’s the only credit that’s given above the title and that’s something that we’re fighting against in our classes.

Books Mentioned In This Presentation

Follow Dr. Rosanne Welch

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A History of Screenwriting 52 – It starring Clara Bow – Written by Hope Loring, Louis D. Lighton and George Marion Jr. – 1927

A History of Screenwriting 52 – It starring Clara Bow – Written by Hope Loring, Louis D. Lighton and George Marion Jr. – 1927

A History of Screenwriting 52 - It starring Clara Bow - Written by Hope Loring, Louis D. Lighton and George Marion Jr. - 1927

“It” is a 1927 silent romantic comedy film that tells the story of a shop girl who sets her sights on the handsome, wealthy boss of the department store where she works. It is based on a novella by Elinor Glyn that was originally serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine.

This film turned actress Clara Bow into a major star, and led people to label her the It girl.

The film had its world premiere in Los Angeles on January 14, 1927, followed by a New York showing on February 5, 1927. “It” was released to the general public on February 19, 1927.

The picture was considered lost for many years, but a Nitrate-copy was found in Prague in the 1960s.[1] In 2001, “It” was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. — Wikipedia


Learn More About Clara Bow with these books

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!
† Available at the LA Public Library

04 The Real Gidget from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto – Dr. Rosanne Welch – SRN Conference 2017

04 The Real Gidget from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto – Dr. Rosanne Welch – SRN Conference 2017

04 The Real Gidget from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto - Dr. Rosanne Welch - SRN Conference 2017

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Transcript:

Now, this piece of dialog really made me really made me cringe. Oooh, why would a girl ever say that about her own life and yet this is the line given to Gidget by the male writers. So this is something that I found along the way.

As far as the adaptation of Gidget, it all started again with an actual real girl and her real words. Kathy Kohner was a Jewish young girl and her father was a television writer. She lived in Beverly Hills and one summer in her year between 16 and 17 she went to the beach every day and discovered this community of surfing males — no girls allowed — and she didn’t fall in love with the boys. She fell in love with the sport and what really bothered me was that is what her book is about. How hard she tried to be such a good surfer the men would take her seriously.

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.

Gidget


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.


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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.

More on Goodrich and Hackett from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

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More on Goodrich and Hackett from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

More on Goodrich and Hackett from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

 

A recording of my presentation at this year’s University Film and Video Association (UFVA) 2017 conference.

Transcript:

Also, if you look at the differences between the novel and the movie, in the novel, they’re kind of flighty and silly. In the movie, they love each other. They’re adorable to each other. This is the marriage of Frances and Albert Hackett. This is not Dashiell Hammett and Lillian Hellman because they were never actually married, because, as we know, Hammett never left his wife. So that wasn’t a marriage and that wasn’t two people who understood a marriage. They had a relationship that was entirely different than the one that appears on the screen. That comes from the writers who adapted the movie who don’t get any credit which makes me nuts. So, why do we study screenwriting history? Because we need to know these stories and we need to pass those stories on to our students so they pay attention to who wrote the movie because that’s the person who’s message you’re accepting into your life when you see that movie.

Books Mentioned In This Presentation

Follow Dr. Rosanne Welch

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Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drrosannewelch/

A History of Screenwriting 51 – Wings starring Clara Bow by Julian Johnson – 1927

A History of Screenwriting 51 – Wings starring Clara Bow by Julian Johnson – 1927

A History of Screenwriting 50 - Wings starring Clara Bow by Julian Johnson - 1927 

Wings is a 1927 American silent war film set during the First World War produced by Lucien Hubbard, directed by William A. Wellman and released by Paramount Pictures. It stars Clara BowCharles “Buddy” Rogers, and Richard ArlenGary Cooper appears in a small role which helped launch his career in Hollywood.

The film, a romantic action-war picture, was rewritten by scriptwriters Hope Loring and Louis D. Lighton from a story by John Monk Saunders to accommodate Bow, Paramount’s biggest star at the time. Wellman was hired as he was the only director in Hollywood at the time who had World War I combat pilot experience, although Richard Arlen and John Monk Saunders had also served in the war as military aviators. The film was shot on location on a budget of $2 million at Kelly Field in San Antonio, Texas between September 7, 1926 and April 7, 1927. Hundreds of extras and some 300 pilots were involved in the filming, including pilots and planes of the United States Army Air Corps which were brought in for the filming and to provide assistance and supervision. Wellman extensively rehearsed the scenes for the Battle of Saint-Mihiel over ten days with some 3500 infantrymen on a battlefield made for the production on location. Although the cast and crew had much spare time during the filming because of weather delays, shooting conditions were intense, and Wellman frequently conflicted with the military officers brought in to supervise the picture.

Acclaimed for its technical prowess and realism upon release, the film became the yardstick against which future aviation films were measured, mainly because of its realistic air-combat sequences. It went on to win the first Academy Award for Best Picture at the first annual Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences award ceremony in 1929,[5] the only fully silent film to do so.[b] It also won the Academy Award for Best Engineering Effects (Roy Pomeroy). Wings was one of the first to show two men kissing, and also one of the first widely released films to show nudity. In 1997, Wings was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”, and the film was re-released to Cinemark theaters to coincide with the 85th Anniversary for a limited run in May 2012. The film was rereleased again for it’s 90th anniversary in 2017. The Academy Film Archive preserved Wings in 2002.[6] — Wikipedia 


Learn More About Clara Bow with these books

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!
† Available at the LA Public Library

03 Ruth Brooks Flippen from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto – Dr. Rosanne Welch – SRN Conference 2017

03 Ruth Brooks Flippen from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto – Dr. Rosanne Welch – SRN Conference 2017

03 Ruth Brooks Flippen from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto - Dr. Rosanne Welch - SRN Conference 2017

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Transcript:

…and it’s because of this woman, Ruth Brooks Flippen, who was the television writer who did the adaptation for television and frankly I had never heard of her. There are a lot of female writers in Hollywood that never get exposure and so this shocked me. Theses are photographs, more likely I was to find her online with her husband because he was an actor in the period. So she is more known as Jay Flippen’s wife than she is as an executive producer for television in her own right and after she got through with Gidget she’s going to do a lot of interesting things. Along the way we’re going to talk about gendered writing and how scripts became different when a man wrote an episode of Gidget versus when a female did, which I did not think would happen and yet it is exactly what I discovered along the way. Sadly, when women write women they give them jobs and make the educated and smart and when men write woman they often don’t give them jobs and they have them shop a lot, which doesn’t seem to suit me as a definition as I really don’t like shopping.

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.


Gidget


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.


SRN logo red

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.

Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

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Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

 

A recording of my presentation at this year’s University Film and Video Association (UFVA) 2017 conference.

Transcript:

They’re the people behind Nick and Nora Charles. Dashiell Hammet wrote the novel. If you read the novel, Nora is nothing. She’s just his wife. She drinks a lot and she’s pretty. In the movie, she has agency and she helps solve the case because Frances Hackett was a female writer on the movie adaptation and she made sure that the woman had something to do. She has a great quote where she says, “I was always the only woman in the room when the stories were being discussed and it was my job to protect the women in the program — in the film and in the story or nobody else would” and if you look at that — it’s so interesting — they did 6 Thin Man movies. The Hacketts only wrote the first 3 and when you come to the fourth one Nora becomes a dumb chick. Doesn’t understand what the cops are doing or what the laws are and she does funny jokes and falls on her face. They entirely lost the believability of that character when the woman who was protecting her left the writing part of it.

Books Mentioned In This Presentation

Follow Dr. Rosanne Welch

Twitter: https://twitter.com/rosannewelch
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drrosannewelch/

The “Capra Touch” and Writers from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

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The “Capra Touch” and Writers from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch

The

 

A recording of my presentation at this year’s University Film and Video Association (UFVA) 2017 conference.

Transcript:

Frank Capra, who — you all know the Robert Riskin anecdote? He turned in 200 blank — he was the screenwriter behind much of Capra’s work and Capra had a famous “Capra Touch” and he would run around town discussing “well, that movie has the ‘Capra touch.’ That’s why it’s successful.”So Robert Riskin had a deadline for this screenplay for Capra and he handed in 200 pages of blank nothing and he said: “Put your fucking touch on that!” Because you cannot direct what does not exist and that’s and important — now it may be an anecdote. We’re not sure, but (unknown) it’s a reminder of the truth. So here we have this Pulitzer Prize-winning set of writers who students have never heard of. You have to look at the book that their nephew wrote about them. You only get the story if someone “puts you in the story.” Luckily their nephew did and it is a really fun little book about their life in Hollywood and New York.

Books Mentioned In This Presentation

Follow Dr. Rosanne Welch

Twitter: https://twitter.com/rosannewelch
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drrosannewelch/

5 Lessons from the Doctor Who Season Finale

Even if you don’t watch Doctor Who, watch this 5 minute clip of the regeneration of Peter Capaldi into Jodie Whitaker for a few reasons:

  1. It’s a popular culture breakthrough moment where an iconic hero character will now be a female
  2. It’s a writer saying goodbye to probably the coolest job he will ever have – in the form of the monologue he gives the character of The Doctor to perform as he regenerates – so when the character says things like “It’s a treadmill” and “Yes, yes I know, they’ll get it all wrong without me” he is, of course, speaking for himself.
  3. It’s also a writer using his podium to shout out his philosophy of life (which makes a nice New Years Eve kind of message:  “Never be cruel. Never be cowardly. Hate is always foolish and love is always wise.” THAT’s why we all want to be writers – to teach empathy whenever we can. 
  4. It’s an actor at the top of his game getting the kind of Shakespearean death few actors have the chance to perform
  5. It’s the moment the character switches from Capaldi to Whitaker and her first line upon seeing a female face is “Ah, brilliant” – which is one writer (Steven Moffat) complimenting another (Chris Chibnall) who had the creativity and hutzpah to finally make a choice that had been in discussions for 40 years.

Finally, If you follow Moffat’s writing at all, you’ll have noticed that throughout his tenure as the showrunner he continually focused on the importance of fairy tales to a society – even naming this episode “Twice Upon a Time”. 

Check it out!

5 Lessons from the Doctor Who Season Finale