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.
So why are we studying this? Because I believe and we can prove that writers have been lost in the history of film. If you look at this, what do we call know? We all know this movies is by who? Frank Capra! Right? Right. Look at this — no, no, no, — Screenplay by Frank Capra. You can’t read this from there. I can barely read this from here. This movie which plays perennially at Christmas a million times was written by them. Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. A married screenwriting time that worked for 35 years together until she died. They were the highest paid screenwriting team and they’re nothing to sneeze at because they got a Pulitzer for the play, The Diary of Anne Frank and then they adapted it into a film and it kills me that children — they know Anne Frank. They know It’s a Wonderful Life and they know Frank Capra.
Mabel’s Married Life (1914) is an American comedy silent film made by Keystone Studios starring and co-written by Charles Chaplin and Mabel Normand, and directed by Chaplin. As was so often the case during his first year in film, Chaplin’s character is soon staggering drunk. —Wikipedia
Learn More About Mabel Normand with these books
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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
Hi everybody! It’s so wonderful to have you here. I’m going to be talking about a book and a film and a television series and I think the trajectory from serious to bubblegum back to slightly serious is what’s interesting to me and it’s all about the adaptation of something and how the true person’s story can get lost along the way and I believe TV allows a chance to tell longer stories — you can tell a hundred hours in the life of a person instead of two hours and so I think we’re going to end up discovering that TV was the better place for this story to house itself.
“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.
I think when you teach slient films and early films of course your teaching character because that is where all these archetypes came from. Yes, we can go back to France and we can go back to Aristophanes. They came from way back then, but on the film they came from this time period and we find all these characters in these early films.Sometimes in more simplistic ways which helps students understand how to back to the simple part of their story — who wants what and what’s getting in their way and you see that in this sort of film. You can teach structure in teaching silent films because we all know the purpose of having 3 acts is because you had reels and you had 1 reel and then 2 reels and then 3 reels and began to write in terms of that. It was also Paul Gulino’s sequence approach which is just about each reel. You have 8 reels, 8 sequences. They visualize, ‘Oh, this is why they do it this way because they had to to — oh, I get it!” It helps students understand the history of this profession. I love that Warren calls it a profession because that is what it is.
Teaching Silent Films allows you to teach diversity again because there were filmmakers of all colors and ethnic backgrounds. Much of that work has been lost. Some of it is findable. Oscar Micheaux was one of the people I found for my students. He was a hugely successful African-American writer/director and he also wrote novels and he translated his novels into films. One of them is called Within Our Gates and it’s free on YouTube as well and he looked at middle class African-Americans talking in the 1910’s and presented them to the audience in ways that other movies were not and I thin kit’s important for them to know his work in line with Cecil B. DeMille and D. W. Griffith and all those other guys because they’re not the only men – they’re not the only people who are around but if you look at film history classes that’s all they’ve learned and that really bothers me.
So, I think it’s really important to teach silent films because we’re teaching the screenwriters that the visual is important. Much as I love the words more, you do have to think about how they’re shown and, of course, these are visuals that show is the emotion of the moment and I think that they are really beautiful. So, it’s fun for the students — I totally agree with Warren — to have this heritage in their life, to understand that this all came before them. That’s very, very important.
Alice has two persistent suitors, one rich, one poor. Each buys her an engagement ring; the rich man pays cash, but the poor man must pay on installments. He has trouble making the payments, but then he’s injured in an auto accident and the settlement allows him to pay off the ring and propose to Alice.
Learn More About Mabel Normand 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
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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)
![Writers Have Been Lost In Film History 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/2017/12/ufva-12-forgotten-writers.jpeg)
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![01 Introduction from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto – Dr. Rosanne Welch – SRN Conference 2017 [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/gidget-srn.png)
![Teaching Character and Structure 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/2017/12/ufva-11-character-structure.jpeg)
![Silent Films and Diversity 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/2017/12/ufva-10-diversity.jpeg)
