The Trespasser is a 1929 American pre-Code film directed and written by Edmund Goulding, starring Gloria Swanson, Robert Ames, Purnell Pratt, Henry B. Walthall, and Wally Albright. The film was released by United Artists in both silent and talkie versions.
A humble woman (Swanson) marries a wealthy man (Ames). Their marriage is annulled by the man’s father (Holden), who considers her a fortune-hunter, and she is left alone to raise her child. She later becomes a “kept woman” for an older, married man. When the man dies, leaving Swanson a $500,000 inheritance, the press is quick to cast doubts upon the paternity of Swanson’s child. Her ex-husband has since remarried, and now comes back into Swanson’s life. For the sake of her child, she sends the boy to live with her ex and his wife. The wife dies and the film ends happily (if improbably) with Swanson reunited with her ex-husband.
The Trespasser was produced as both a silent and sound version for a total negative cost of $725,000.[1] The film earned an Academy Award nomination for (Gloria Swanson) in her talkie debut. It was written and directed by Edmund Goulding and was first filmed as a silent film. A talkie version was quickly made and was a smash hit for its star, Gloria Swanson. Goulding remade the film as That Certain Woman (1937) with Bette Davis and Henry Fonda. .- Wikipedia
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I also noticed when watching all the movies — first of all, the girl playing Gidget changed in every film. So it wasn’t even like we cared that she had to be the same woman. She was just this image and the boy stays the same. James Darrin plays Moondoggie in all three of these films. So it turns out to be a trilogy about the life of a boy who surfs and has an everchanging girlfriend with the same name. This is not at all what I expected to find when I came to this and he sings music. So then we get Ruth Brooks Flippen who shows up and Ruth, she writes a bit of Gidget Goes Hawaiian and she does Gidget Goes to Rome. The second one is kind of silly and dumb. I’m hoping that means the studio had choices about what got done and when it was successful enough she had more of her own power in the third sequel where suddenly Gidget’s in college. She reads books again, just like the actual first book and she makes more interesting decisions.
“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 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.
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.
That’s NOT all folks. In my classes I make them read books — so they review books that are about writing and there are a ton of them, but I make these pretty little pictures because they’re fun. I love Doctor Who. I’ve done a lot of stuff on Doctor Who. This is a great book. Basically, a journalist (Benjamin Cook) connected with Russell T Davies who was producing the first five years of the remake — first seven years — and he said, “Can I email you anytime you have — and just say ‘What are you thinking about? and you just give me a quick answer'” So it’s a series of email, which makes it easy for kids to read even though it’s a very thick book and he will say things like “Well, today I had the idea, what if water was like acid and it killed people?”and about 5 pages later — ‘I wonder if it’s the water on another planet, like Mars?”and 2 chapters later he has written an entire script called ‘The Waters of Mars” and there’s a copy of the script and you can see the genesis from the idea all the way through and then he discusses production, because he was the executive producer. He’ll talk about “I got this guest star. Oh no, she pulled out. I need to rewrite the character to suit this person.” It gives you a real understanding of what the job is to be a writer in television. Obviously, John Gregory Dunne. All those guys, but I think they should always read one book and find many of them tell me they haven’t read a book in a long time and/or this is the longest book I’ve ever read, but they generally tend to like them if you force them to do it. I think that is a good assignment and I also make them write a paper on one famous screenwriter from any of the eras I talk about. I don’t just do silents. I start with them but of course, I move through the modern day so they pick someone and again I put up the encyclopedia because I think all university libraries should have a copy of it. It’s put out by a friend of mine. So I think that’s a really cool thing. It always brings me back to, it’s all about remembering the ladies. We need to teach as much of that as possible and get past all the stuff that hasn’t been settled years ago and that’s why Ido what I do.
In the book, she makes all the decisions about her own life as I said, including whether or not to have sex with a really cute surfer. In the movie, her boyfriend makes all the decisions about whether or not they’ll be together and I didn’t even think about that until I watched all the sequels and I kept waiting and it was always him breaking up with her and her waiting for him to come back to her. I thought Oh this is just a disaster and sad and scary in many ways. This really struck me, too. In the book, this is her conclusion. Her definition of who she is. “The summer with Jeff could have been just a dream, but with the board and the sun and the waves it was for real. Maybe I was just a woman in love with a surfboard. It’s a simple as that.” That’s literally the thesis of her own book. In the movie, it was getting pinned by her boyfriend which was the absolute ultimate moment in her life. I mean you can’t water it down any more than that. It fascinates me and yet this is mythology that is known about Gidget and it’s not her true story at all — which really makes me sad.
“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 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.
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.
So I think it’s really important to give voice to these women through teaching this. Representation matters. This is one of my favorite Facebook memes going around right now. For children of today, this is a huge deal, right? When I was a kid Luke was the Jedi. We didn’t know until a later movie that Leia could be and she never got to be. Like, wait a minute. Why isn’t she as good as him? Why didn’t Obi-Wan find her? So, it’s important for kids to see that and finally, I like to teach silent films because I always tell them, as academics. or as writers, we’re standing on the shoulders of the people came before us. We need to credit them with being in the world first and giving us the foundation to build upon. That’s important to me.
Ninotchka is a 1939 American film made for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer by producer and director Ernst Lubitsch and starring Greta Garbo and Melvyn Douglas.[1] It is written by Billy Wilder, Charles Brackett, and Walter Reisch,[1] based on a screen story by Melchior Lengyel. Ninotchka is Greta Garbo’s first full comedy, and her penultimate film. It is one of the first American movies which, under the cover of a satirical, light romance, depicted the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin as being rigid and gray, in this instance comparing it with the free and sunny Parisian society of pre-war years.- Wikipedia
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It really hurt me to watch these generations of women discuss the business of being a woman and their dismissing her skill entirely.
Audience: Which year is the film? In which year was that a film, sorry?
The film is 1959. Thank you, sorry. Yes, 1959. We’re going to move into the 1960s with the next 2 sequels and the show.
So this is typical when a guy writes it and also the difference between the book and the films. In the book, she has a friend who’s an aspiring playwright. Gidget herself is reading Rachel Carson because Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring was about how we were affecting the environment and the environment means everything to her because that’s where the surf is. In the movie, she doesn’t read because that’s a boring thing for a girl to do. Her father’s a professor, in the movie he’s kind of a sitcom goof-off. He’s actually played by Carl Reiner in one of the sequels. She wants to learn to surf. that’s her “character want.” If we scripting this story. In this she want’s a boyfriend. I mean entirely take away the thing that makes her special and different.
“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 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.
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.
So why are we doing this? Why are we studying Screenwriting History? Because who tells your story is important. All the books about screenwriters have been written by men. They write about all the important men. They read each other’s books. They repeat what they learned in the last book. Cari came out of nowhere and said “Who’s this lady who’s paycheck is bigger? I want to find out about her life.” And as she delved into it, she found fourteen women around her who were all friends, part of the same sort of path and friends, who wrote movies. As I said, Anita Loos and all those other women. It matters that students understand any history book they read is not the entire history of what they are reading about. There’s no way to fit it all into one book so you have to your own research and move further, which is what have them do. So, again, as I said, they got into the story because their nephew put them in the story.
…and yet we don’t read books about a girl’s coming of age and Gidget turns out to be just such a thing. About a woman who goes to the beach to learn a skill. Yes, she meets some boys along the way and, of course, she finds one or two of them handsome, but she also makes choices about whether or not to have sex and that is a huge moment in the coming of age of a girl. Nobody takes advantage of her which tends to be the way the story goes. She makes the choices and the men respect her for it and thought that was fascinating when I read this book. So, Hollywood gets a hand of this book and they have to do something with it. They have to make it silly. So, in the real world, this is what she has to say. This book is all about how much she loves surfing and that’s a picture of the real Kathy Kohner back in the day with her surfboard. That is how she identified herself. We get to the movies and this is some typical dialogue. Yeah, the cringing can start at any time.
“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 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.
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.
This is from the very beginning with D. W. Griffith. It’s not his movie. Right? He shouldn’t get the credit. Then again, it’s a terrible movie and I hope nobody ever teaches this movie. I always tell my students, we’ll never touch this movie. It’s all awful and everything that someone says you’re supposed to learn from about it close-ups and tracking shots are in all the movies by all these women that I’m telling you about. So watch one of their movies that show those things. Don’t watch his movies.
I love John Carpenter because he’s the one who said…Let’s be fair. It’s a collaboration. Be honest about it. I do this. They do that. We blend together and that is what makes a product really good.
![09 Writers and Story on the Gidget Movies from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto [Video] (0:55) – Dr. Rosanne Welch – SRN Conference](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/gidget-srn-09-writers-movies.jpeg)
![Reading, Writing and Resources from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/ufva-20-reading-writing.jpeg)
![Representation Matters from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/ufva-19-rey-leia.jpeg)
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![Who Tells Your Story? from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/ufva-18-who-tells.jpeg)
![Film Is A Collaborative Effort from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/ufva-17-collaborative-effort.jpeg)