“It” is a 1927 silentromantic 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 consideredlostfor many years, but aNitrate-copy was found inPraguein the 1960s.[1]In 2001,“It”was selected for preservation in the United StatesNational Film Registryby theLibrary of Congressas being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. — Wikipedia
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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.
“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.
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.
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 firstAcademy Award for Best Pictureat the first annualAcademy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciencesaward ceremony in 1929,[5]the only fully silent film to do so.[b]It also won theAcademy Award for Best Engineering Effects(Roy Pomeroy).Wingswas one of the first to show two men kissing, and also one of the first widely released films to shownudity. In 1997,Wingswas selected for preservation in the United StatesNational Film Registryby theLibrary of Congressas being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”, and the film was re-released toCinemarktheaters 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. TheAcademy Film ArchivepreservedWingsin 2002.[6] — Wikipedia
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* 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
…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.
“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.
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.
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.
It’s a popular culture breakthrough moment where an iconic hero character will now be a female
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.
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.
It’s an actor at the top of his game getting the kind of Shakespearean death few actors have the chance to perform
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”.
Maybe the first book written about screenwriting, How To Write Photoplays is co-written by one of the most important screenwriters of the silent era, Anita Loos. She wrote the novel “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and much much more.
* 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
So I am talking about Gidget. So we’re at the SRN Conference and we’re very excited about that and because we’re talking about fact and fiction, that’s why I cam to this. My title is very long. I laugh about that. So, it’s “How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto” and I’m sorry to use that word, but it is a negative word in the United States, but I like the alliteration of the words and I think it is a real problem because you’ll see, of course, the film began — the adaptation began as a film starring Sandra Dee and as far as Americans are concerned, Sandra Dee is kind of a bubble gum, cutesy pie, blonde WITH NO real serious — nothing but the superficiality of her being cute and a babe on the beach, right and so that is what I was thinking about when I thought about doing this and it came to me that it’s TV that gave Gidget her her groove back so I should have shrunk the title but it was too late for the publication.
“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.
![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]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/ufva-15-hacketts-2.jpeg)
![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]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/ufva-14-hacketts.jpeg)
![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]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/ufva-13-capra-touch.jpeg)
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† ![02 How TV Gave Gidget Her Groove Back from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto – Dr. Rosanne Welch – SRN Conference 2017 [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/gidget-srn-02.jpeg)