Category: Screenwriting

When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – 11 in a series – Min and Bill (1930), Wr: Lorna Moon

Min and bill 1930 poster

By Source, Fair use, Link

Min and Bill is a 1930 American Pre-Code comedy-drama film starring Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery, and based on Lorna Moon’s 1929 novel Dark Star, adapted by Frances Marion and Marion Jackson. The film tells the story of dockside innkeeper Min’s tribulations as she tries to protect the innocence of her adopted daughter Nancy, all while loving and fighting with boozy fisherman Bill, who resides at the inn.

Min and Bill stars Marie Dressler (Min), Wallace Beery (Bill), Dorothy Jordan (Nancy), and Marjorie Rambeau (Bella, Nancy’s ill-reputed mother), and was directed by George W. Hill. Dressler won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1931 for her performance in this film.[2]

This film was such a runaway hit that it and its near-sequel Tugboat Annie, which re-teamed Dressler and Beery in similar roles, boosted both to superstar status. Dressler topped Quigley Publications’ annual Top Ten Money Making Stars Poll of movie exhibitors in 1933, and the two pairings with Dressler were primarily responsible for Beery becoming MGM’s highest-paid actor in the early 1930s, before Clark Gable took over that crown;  — Wikipedia

More about Lorna Moon

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Related posts:

  1. When Women Wrote Hollywood – 24 in a series – Lorna Moon (Nora Helen Wilson Low)
  2. When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – 8 in a series – Blue Jeans (1917) Wr: June Mathis
  3. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 35: The Collected Lorna Moon
  4. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 14: My Secret Mother: Lorna Moon by Richard de Mille
  5. When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – 10 in a series – Ben Hur (1907), Wr: Gene Gauntier

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 2: Greenaway’s books: Peter Greenaway’s published screenplays by Miguel Mota

Highlighting the articles in the past editions of the Journal of Screenwriting, of which I am the Book Reviews Editor. Hopefully these abstracts will entice you to did a little deeper into the history and future of screenwriting. — Rosanne

Greenaway’s books: Peter Greenaway’s published screenplays by Miguel Mota

Greenaway’s published screenplays – screenplays produced and consumed as discrete material objects – function both as fluid, hybrid texts and as material books that stand ambivalently and therefore suggestively and productively poised between print and film technologies. Ranging from the early scripts published by Faber and Faber in the mid-to-late 1980s to the later and still-ongoing series of scripts produced by the French publisher Dis Voir, Greenaway’s published screenplays are fascinating examples of print film texts that produce and demand unique ways of reading and looking. By addressing these books as visual and material objects, distinct from the films, we might evince and extract from the pages of these published screenplays entirely new texts with a plurality of narrative possibilities, in which juxtapositions and relationships amongst different cultural discourses can give rise to innovative visual and verbal structures. Such an approach to Greenaway’s published film scripts as material events might contribute a curious but compelling chapter to the history of the ontology of the screenplay, affording the published script a visibility it often otherwise lacks.

The Journal of Screenwriting is an international double-blind peer-reviewed journal that is published three times a year. The journal highlights current academic and professional thinking about the screenplay and intends to promote, stimulate and bring together current research and contemporary debates around the screenplay whilst encouraging groundbreaking research in an international arena. The journal is discursive, critical, rigorous and engages with issues in a dynamic and developing field, linking academic theory to screenwriting practice. 

Get your copy and subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting Today!


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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!

Related posts:

  1. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 1: No room for the fun stuff: the question of the screenplay in American indie cinema by J. J Murphy
  2. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 2: The first screenplays? American Mutoscope and Biograph scenarios revisited by Steven Price
  3. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 2: Lost and gone for ever? The search for early British screenplays by Jacob U. U. Jacob
  4. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 1: An evolving present within a past a history of screenwriting practices in popular Hindi cinema by Anubha Yadav
  5. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 2: An uneven marketplace of ideas: Amateur screenwriting, the Library of Congress and the struggle for copyright by Torey Liepa

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 44: Jane Murfin at the Women Film Pioneers Project

Months of research went into the creation of the essays in “When Women Wrote Hollywood.” Here are some of the resources used to enlighten today’s film lovers to the female pioneers who helped create it.

From The

From The

As a woman who wrote or cowrote over sixty produced films, a producer who championed strong female roles, and a Hollywood insider with a career spanning over three decades, Jane Murfin may be one of the most prolific but least known writers of the 1920s and ’30s.

Jane Murfin was born Jane Macklem in Quincy, Michigan. Her first marriage, in 1907, to lawyer James Murfin, lasted less than five years, but Jane adopted his surname and would use it—excluding the brief period in the late 1910s when she and Jane Cowl used the pseudonym Allan Langdon Martin—throughout her life. Although the 1910 US Census records list her as living as a housewife in Michigan with her lawyer-husband James, according to Murfin family correspondence from 1967, Jane moved shortly after to New York City while her husband remained in Michigan. According to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, James eventually became a school regent, after a long career teaching law, and even has a gate on the grounds named after him.

Read this entire article

Buy “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Today!

† When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry†

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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!
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Related posts:

  1. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 33: “Elinor Glyn.”, Denise Cummings , Women Film Pioneers Project. Columbia University
  2. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 16: “Ida May Park.” Women Film Pioneers Project. Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, 27 Sept. 2013
  3. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 36: Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History
  4. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 21: The Progressive Silent Film List
  5. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 29: Eighty Odd Years in Hollywood: Memoir of a Career in Film and Television by John Meredyth Lucas

Now Available: The Civil War on Film (Hollywood History) by Dr. Rosanne Welch and Dr. Peg Lamphier

My newest book The Civil War on Film (co-written with my colleague Peg Lamphier as part of ABC-Clio’s Hollywood History series) was published today. 

Peg and I discuss 10 Civil War films based on their accuracy and cultural context. It is no surprise that we agree with a collection of historians that the most accurate of all the films of the Civil War is Glory (written by Kevin Jarre), though even that film makes the ‘mistake’ of omitting the fact that Harriet Tubman served as a spy for the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment. 

As we say about many of the films, one film can’t encapsulate the entirety of a historical event (though Free State of Jones (written by Gary Ross) does try, and here we admit that that attempt to do it all makes for a long and plodding film, which is sad since it is a thorough portrait of Reconstruction, which is nearly never covered in films as they all prefer ending when the war ends).

As always it was a pleasure to work with Peg.  We’re in the middle of our second book for this series – chronicling how Women’s History is covered in films coming sometime in 2021.

Want to use The Civil War On Film as a classroom text?
Contact ABC-CLIO for more information

The Civil War on Film will inform high school and college readers interested in Civil War film history on issues that arise when film viewers confuse entertainment with historical accuracy.

The nation’s years of civil war were painful, destructive, and unpleasant. Yet war films tend to embrace mythologies that erase that historical reality, romanticizing the Civil War. The editors of this volume have little patience for any argument that implies race-based slavery isn’t an entirely repugnant economic, political, and cultural institution and that the people who fought to preserve slavery were fighting for a glorious and admirable cause

To that end, The Civil War on Film will open with a timeline and introduction and then explore ten films across decades of cinema history in ten chapters, from Birth of a Nation, which debuted in 1915, to The Free State of Jones, which debuted one hundred and one years later. It will also analyze and critique the myriad of mythologies and ideologies which appear in American Civil War films, including Lost Cause ideation, Black Confederate fictions, Northern Aggression mythologies, and White Savior tropes. It will also suggest the way particular films mirror the time in which they were written and filmed. Further resources will close the volume.

  • Makes clear that depictions of the Civil War on film are often mythologized
  • Analyzes films in a manner that shows students the historical context in which the films were made and viewed
  • Goes beyond just synopses and historical facts, helping students to develop critical thinking skills
  • Stimulates debate over the various ways the war was interpreted and experienced

Film discussed include:

  1. Gone with the Wind (1939)
  2. Friendly Persuasion (1957)
  3. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
  4. Glory (1989)
  5. Gettysburg (1993)
  6. Andersonville (1996)
  7. Ride with the Devil (1999)
  8. Gangs of New York (2002)
  9. Lincoln (2012)
  10. Free State of Jones (2016)

 

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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!

More books from Dr. Rosanne Welch


Related posts:

  1. New Book Arrives April 2020 – The Civil War on Film by Dr. Rosanne Welch and Dr. Peg Lamphier (ABC-CLIO) – Pre-Order Now
  2. Latest Project from Dr. Rosanne Welch and Dr. Peg Lamphier – “The Civil War On Film” — Coming in 2020
  3. Dr. Rosanne Welch and Dr. Peg Lamphier Talk Women In American History on the College of Education and Integrative Studies Podcast [Video]
  4. My Chapter in The American Civil War on Film and TV: Blue and Gray in Black and White and Color
  5. Women’s History Month: Fascinating Females You Should Know by Dr. Rosanne Welch and Dr. Peg Lamphier – Polycentric

When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – 10 in a series – Ben Hur (1907), Wr: Gene Gauntier

When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies - 10 in a series - Ben Our (1907), Wr: Gene Gauntier

Ben Hur is a 1907 American silent drama film set in ancient Rome, the first screen adaptation of Lew Wallace’s popular 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Co-directed by Sidney Olcott and Frank Oakes Rose, this “photoplay” was produced by the Kalem Company of New York City, and its scenes, including the climactic chariot race, were filmed in the city’s borough of Brooklyn.[5][a]

While this film is significant for being the first motion-picture adaptation of Wallace’s novel, its production also served as a landmark case of copyright infringement by an early American film studio. In 1908 Kalem was successfully sued for representing parts of Wallace’s book on screen without obtaining permission from the author’s estate. Copies of the film, which survive, are now in the public domain and are readily available for free viewing online in the collections of various digital archives and on streaming services. — Wikipedia

More about Alice Guy Blaché

Buy “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Today!

† When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry†

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

Help Support Local Bookstores — Buy at Bookshop.org

* 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 from the LA Public Library

Related posts:

  1. When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – 8 in a series – Blue Jeans (1917) Wr: June Mathis
  2. When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – 3 in a series – The Captive (1915) Wr: Jeannie MacPherson
  3. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 11: Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Screenplay. Wr: June Mathis. Dir. Fred Niblo, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1925 USA 142 mins.
  4. When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – 5 in a series – The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) – Wr: Anita Loos
  5. When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – 6 in a series – La Fee aux Choux | The Cabbage Fairy , Wr: Alice Guy Blaché (1896)

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 2: Escape from the stage? From play to screenplay in British cinema’s early sound period by Victoria Lowe

Highlighting the articles in the past editions of the Journal of Screenwriting, of which I am the Book Reviews Editor. Hopefully these abstracts will entice you to did a little deeper into the history and future of screenwriting. — Rosanne

Escape from the stage? From play to screenplay in British cinema’s early sound period by Victoria Lowe

In this article I discuss the evolution of the screenplay from play to film of Escape (1930) through a detailed examination of the archive correspondence between its producer Basil Dean and the original writer of the play, John Galsworthy. My aim is to provide a more nuanced account of the relationship between stage and screen practices at this time, one that goes beyond histories that have understood the adaptation of stage material to have been a burden from which British cinema had to escape, in order to create its own distinctive identity. I argue that the relationship between the two practices was affected by the coming of sound, and the cultural anxiety and debates around the film industry and national identity formations that it engendered. I then examine Basil Dean’s thoughts about the adapted screenplay, in particular his ideas around the retention of the original author’s dialogue, and his practical response to the issues in terms of his collaboration with Galsworthy in the writing of the screenplay of Escape, one of the first talkies made in the United Kingdom.

The Journal of Screenwriting is an international double-blind peer-reviewed journal that is published three times a year. The journal highlights current academic and professional thinking about the screenplay and intends to promote, stimulate and bring together current research and contemporary debates around the screenplay whilst encouraging groundbreaking research in an international arena. The journal is discursive, critical, rigorous and engages with issues in a dynamic and developing field, linking academic theory to screenwriting practice. 

Get your copy and subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting Today!


* 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!

Related posts:

  1. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 1: An evolving present within a past a history of screenwriting practices in popular Hindi cinema by Anubha Yadav
  2. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V10 Issue 3: Die Filmprimadonna (The Film Primadonna, 1913): A case study of the fiction of a screenplay and the process of filmmaking in German early cinema by Jan Henschen
  3. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 2: Lost and gone for ever? The search for early British screenplays by Jacob U. U. Jacob
  4. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 1: No room for the fun stuff: the question of the screenplay in American indie cinema by J. J Murphy
  5. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 1: If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage: screenwriting, national specificity and the English-Canadian feature film by Janice Kaye and Charles H Davis

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 43: COMEDY OUTLOOK SADDENS SPEWACK (1960) – The New York Times

Months of research went into the creation of the essays in “When Women Wrote Hollywood.” Here are some of the resources used to enlighten today’s film lovers to the female pioneers who helped create it.

From The

COMEDY OUTLOOK SADDENS SPEWACK; Calls Times ‘Unfortunate’ for the Writer of Humor — Cites ‘Method’ School as ‘Grim’
By Louis Calta

Available in facsimile version on the NY Times web site.

Buy “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Today!

† When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry†

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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 from the LA Public Library

Related posts:

  1. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 19: Algonquin Round Table Web Site
  2. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 23: Satire and Melodrama in a Newspaper Play Entitled “Clear All Wires”, New York Times
  3. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 07: “Frederica Sagor Maas, Hollywood’s ‘Shocking Miss Pilgrim'” The Forward.
  4. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 22: Latitude in Mass-Produced Culture’s Capital: New Women and Other Players in Hollywood, 1920-1941
  5. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 09: “Eve Unsell in New York.” Film Daily 6 August 1936

When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – 9 in a series – Suspense (1913) Wr: Lois Weber

When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies - 9 in a series - Suspense (1913) Wr: Lois Weber

Suspense 1913 film shot

Suspense is a 1913 American silent short film thriller directed by Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley. Weber also wrote the scenario and stars in the film with Valentine Paul. The film features early examples of a split screen shot[1] and a car chase. The Internet Movie Database lists Lon Chaney as having an unconfirmed and uncredited brief role;[2] however, this is disputed by silentera.com, which states “Despite attributions to the contrary, Lon Chaney does not appear in the film.”[3][4][5]

A print of the film is preserved at the film archive of the British Film Institute.[6]

A servant leaves a new mother with only a written letter of notice, placing her key under the doormat as she leaves. Her exit attracts the attention of a tramp to the house. As the husband has previously phoned that he is working late, the wife decides not to ring back when she finds the note but does ring back when she sees the tramp. Her husband listens, horrified, as she documents the break-in and then the tramp cuts the line. The husband steals a car and is immediately pursued by the car’s owner and the police, who nearly but don’t quite manage to jump into the stolen car during a high-speed chase. The husband manages to gain a lead over the police but then accidentally strikes a man smoking in the road and checks to see that he is okay. Meanwhile, the tramp is breaking into the room where the wife has locked herself and her baby, violently thrusting himself through the wood door, carrying a large knife. At that moment the husband arrives, pursued by the police. As the husband runs towards the home, the police fire warning shots into the air, panicking the hobo. He runs down the stairs, to be met by the husband at the front door. After a short struggle, he overpowers the hobo, who is then grabbed by the police. The husband runs upstairs, everything is explained, and all is forgiven as the couple embrace. — Wikipedia

More about Alice Guy Blaché

* 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 from the LA Public Library

Buy “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Today!

† When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry†

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

Help Support Local Bookstores — Buy at Bookshop.org

* 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 from the LA Public Library

Related posts:

  1. Chase Thompson, Writer, “Writing Around Lois Weber” from When Women Wrote Hollywood
  2. When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – 7 in a series – “it” (1927, Wr: Eleanor Glyn
  3. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 12: Lois Weber in Early Hollywood by Shelley Stamp
  4. When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – 2 in a series – Lady of the Night (1925): Story By Adela Rogers St. Johns
  5. When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – First in a series – Fanchon, the Cricket by Frances Marion

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 2: The first screenplays? American Mutoscope and Biograph scenarios revisited by Steven Price

Highlighting the articles in the past editions of the Journal of Screenwriting, of which I am the Book Reviews Editor. Hopefully these abstracts will entice you to did a little deeper into the history and future of screenwriting. — Rosanne

The first screenplays? American Mutoscope and Biograph scenarios revisited by Steven Price

This article builds on the earlier work of Patrick Loughney in discussing a series of texts written by Frank J. Marion and Wallace McCutcheon, and registered by American Mutoscope & Biograph (AM&B) at the Library of Congress in 1904–05. It assesses the arguments for regarding these as the earliest surviving texts that were written specifically in order to be filmed. Significant historical contexts include copyright disputes between the studios, developments in narrative film since 1902, and the problematic classification system at the Library of Congress that prompted AM&B to register a sequence of films as both ‘photographs’ and ‘dramatic compositions’. A comparison of the scenarios to the films provides evidence that they were written prior to filming. The formal arrangement of the scenarios is almost indistinguishable from that for contemporary playscripts, which may have been due to a deliberate attempt to facilitate their registration as ‘dramatic compositions’.

The Journal of Screenwriting is an international double-blind peer-reviewed journal that is published three times a year. The journal highlights current academic and professional thinking about the screenplay and intends to promote, stimulate and bring together current research and contemporary debates around the screenplay whilst encouraging groundbreaking research in an international arena. The journal is discursive, critical, rigorous and engages with issues in a dynamic and developing field, linking academic theory to screenwriting practice. 

Get your copy and subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting Today!


* 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!

Related posts:

  1. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 2: Lost and gone for ever? The search for early British screenplays by Jacob U. U. Jacob
  2. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 1: Creative decision making within the contemporary Hollywood studios by Alexander G Ross
  3. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 1: No room for the fun stuff: the question of the screenplay in American indie cinema by J. J Murphy
  4. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 1: The protagonist’s dramatic goals, wants and needs by Patrick Cattrysse
  5. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 2: The early screenwriting practice of Ernest Lehman by Ted Nannicelli

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 42: Interpretations, a book of first poems (1912) by Zoë Akins

Months of research went into the creation of the essays in “When Women Wrote Hollywood.” Here are some of the resources used to enlighten today’s film lovers to the female pioneers who helped create it.

From The

Buy “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Today!

† When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry†

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

Help Support Local Bookstores — Buy at Bookshop.org

* 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 from the LA Public Library

Related posts:

  1. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 39: A Conversation With Lillian Hellman: A still unfinished woman via Rolling Stone
  2. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 40: Women Screenwriters: An International Guide by Jill Nelmes and Jule Selbo
  3. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 22: Latitude in Mass-Produced Culture’s Capital: New Women and Other Players in Hollywood, 1920-1941
  4. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 41: Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930-1939 by Tino Balio
  5. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 19: Algonquin Round Table Web Site