This time I’ll discuss the women in my new book “When Women Wrote Hollywood” which covers female screenwriters from the Silents through the early 1940s when women wrote over 50% of films and Frances Marion was the highest paid screenwriter (male or female) and the first to win 2 Oscars – but fails to appear in film history books, which continue to regurgitate the myth that male directors did it all – even though it’s been proven that the only profitable movies Cecil B. de Mille ever directed were all written by Jeannie Macpherson film ever won for Best Picture was written by Robert E. Sherwood (who people have heard of, mostly due to his connection to Dorothy Parker) and Joan Harrison.
* 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
Cari Beauchamp wrote “Without Lying Down” which was one of the first books to have covered entirely the career of Frances Marion and all these women I’m speaking of. This textbook does not appear in any film history course that I have found in Los Angeles or around the United States and yet it covers all these important women. Cari comes in as well. She lives in Los Angeles. So I am lucky. I’ve also expanded recently to invite the writers of video games because that is a whole new area for our students to move into. A very important area. These gentlemen were early writers of half-hour children’s shows and they moved into video games and now they run the development for Blizzard which is a very major video game company. They do Overwatch.
* 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
Rosanne Welch, PhD, Author of Why The Monkees Matter, presents “How The Monkees Changed Television” at a Cal State Fullerton Lunch Lecture on May 8, 2018.
In this talk, she shows how The Monkees, and specifically their presence on television, set the stage for large changes to come in the late 1960s.
Transcript
Grace and Frankie. If you haven’t watched it is an adorable show, Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda. In their second season they were telling secrets from their childhoods — from their teenhood — and Lily Tomlin’s secret, Frankie’s secret was she’d had sex with a Monkee and the question was which one and Jane Fonda guessed Micky and that was the answer and I said “You people did not research this program.” The Lily Tomlin character would have had sex with Peter Tork. That’s her boy! That’s the hippie! Not Micky, right? Mickey’s the name most people recognize, but if I was adorable just watching the show BAM a Monkees reference. You cannot get away from the fact that they’re still culturally relevant. I totally forgot my Simpsons thing. So f course in the fifty fiftieth year my book came out, which made me very happy and it’s on our little new author thing right when you walk in. So you can rent a copy. Also, they released an album in their 50th anniversary year they got together with a bunch of modern songwriters and they released an album that was in the top ten because it was written by a whole bunch of famous people. Of course, that’s me outside Warner Brothers cuz you know I had it and I thought it was pretty cute.
A hit television show about a fictitious rock band, The Monkees (1966-1968) earned two Emmys–Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Directorial Acheivement in Comedy.
Capitalizing on the show’s success, the actual band formed by the actors, at their peak, sold more albums than The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined, and set the stage for other musical TV characters from The Partridge Family to Hannah Montana. In the late 1980s, the Monkees began a series of reunion tours that continued into their 50th anniversary.
This book tells the story of The Monkees and how the show changed television, introducing a new generation to the fourth-wall-breaking slapstick created by Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers.
Its creators contributed to the innovative film and television of 1970s with projects like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laugh-In and Welcome Back, Kotter. Immense profits from the show, its music and its merchandising funded the producers’ move into films such as Head, Easy Riderand Five Easy Pieces.
“I focus on the writers of television programs and authorship. That’s my thing, because we focus on directors as auteurs of film and we don’t realize — or we forget — that writers, are just like the writers of books. A director can’t direct 20 empty pages.”
A hit television show about a fictitious rock band, The Monkees (1966-1968) earned two Emmys–Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Directorial Acheivement in Comedy.
Capitalizing on the show’s success, the actual band formed by the actors, at their peak, sold more albums than The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined, and set the stage for other musical TV characters from The Partridge Family to Hannah Montana. In the late 1980s, the Monkees began a series of reunion tours that continued into their 50th anniversary.
This book tells the story of The Monkees and how the show changed television, introducing a new generation to the fourth-wall-breaking slapstick created by Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers.
Its creators contributed to the innovative film and television of 1970s with projects like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laugh-In and Welcome Back, Kotter. Immense profits from the show, its music and its merchandising funded the producers’ move into films such as Head, Easy Riderand Five Easy Pieces.
* 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
I also love what you guys said about early film — the music — that we have to study the visual. So we do go back to the silence and talk about them from the very start. We chronologically do this course so you understand the visual is as important as the verbal. In the first year, I used several textbooks. This one I learned about through the Journal of Screenwriting, yea, so it is a very handy thing to have as the teacher. I also use Writers in Hollywood and this lovely book of Anita Loos’ early screenplays as they were first written. They’re written mostly in prose. You can read the stories and why should she stood out back in the day. So that’s a set of them. Then I also use Framework which we mentioned the other day and one of the keynotes and I’m also lucky that I am in Los Angeles so we can have guest speakers come in and this of course is Thomas Stemple we mentioned the other day.
* 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
“Today I want to focus on the concept of the women who’ve travelled with The Doctor and what they tell us about feminism across the years that this program has been on the air.”
Read more essays from Rosanne on Doctor Who in 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 from the LA Public Library
That video is now available on YouTube and the Cal Poly Pomona CEIS Podcast Page. It’s a great way to capture the experience of some of my more expressive and interesting students in the middle of their educational journeys – and to demonstrate the idea of being able to articulate your values and ideas in public, a ‘soft skill’ we all can use for the rest of our lives. I often argue that these soft skills make the difference between acing a job interview (and later the career) and not because everyone who comes to an interview has a matching resume of accomplishment so it’s how they handle those soft skills that wins the race.
“When people talk about television I get them to try and look at what were your favorite episodes of a program. Now, go to IMDB and find out who wrote those episodes and look at the rest of their career. What else have they written that you might enjoy, because clearly they speak to you. Their voice speaks to you.”
Watch this entire presentation – Doctor Who Regenerated with Dr. Rosanne Welch
Read more essays from Rosanne on Doctor Who in 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 from the LA Public Library
Rosanne Welch, PhD, Author of Why The Monkees Matter, presents “How The Monkees Changed Television” at a Cal State Fullerton Lunch Lecture on May 8, 2018.
In this talk, she shows how The Monkees, and specifically their presence on television, set the stage for large changes to come in the late 1960s.
Transcript
Had The Monkees done Sugar Sugar we wouldn’t have the Archie and, of course, the Archie comics — another side tangent — has become Riverdale. The big show right and a big show because you all know him from your own childhood TV watching right? So the grown-up version. So it’s like Circus Boy becoming a Monkee. It just happens over and over again right? All right, you’ve also all known a Monkee song all your life even if you didn’t think you did because in Shrek they use I’m A Believer. So now we’re years behind. We’re thirty years from the show being on the air and a whole run of children know this song right and this is Micky Dolenz closing song in all his concerts. This is his song, right? Breaking Bad in the season before it went off the air did a whole meth — a whole montage of putting meth together to the Monkees song Going Down because Vince Gilligan was a Monkees fan when he was a kid. So his chance to use Monkees music and his own TV show was something exciting for him. Likewise, Mad Men did an episode that used the song for the Monkees. So highly rated Emmy-winning TV shows are airing their music to a whole new generation. I thought that was cool.
A hit television show about a fictitious rock band, The Monkees (1966-1968) earned two Emmys–Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Directorial Acheivement in Comedy.
Capitalizing on the show’s success, the actual band formed by the actors, at their peak, sold more albums than The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined, and set the stage for other musical TV characters from The Partridge Family to Hannah Montana. In the late 1980s, the Monkees began a series of reunion tours that continued into their 50th anniversary.
This book tells the story of The Monkees and how the show changed television, introducing a new generation to the fourth-wall-breaking slapstick created by Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers.
Its creators contributed to the innovative film and television of 1970s with projects like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laugh-In and Welcome Back, Kotter. Immense profits from the show, its music and its merchandising funded the producers’ move into films such as Head, Easy Riderand Five Easy Pieces.
Watch this entire presentation – Doctor Who and Culture with Dr. Rosanne Welch
Read more essays from Rosanne on Doctor Who in 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 from the LA Public Library
![10 More Textbooks and Writing For Video Games from Why I Created a History of Screenwriting Course [Video] (46 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/srn-rmw-2018-10.jpeg)
![34 Modern TV, Music, and The Monkees in Popular Culture from How the Monkees Changed Television [Video] (1 minute, 6 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/monkees-tv-34-tv-music.jpeg)
![09 First Year Textbooks from Why I Created a History of Screenwriting Course [Video] (49 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/srn-rmw-2018-09.jpeg)
![Rosanne appears on Cal Poly Pomona College of Education and Integrative Studies (CEIS) Podcast to discuss Interdisciplinary General Education (IGE) [Video] (30 Minutes)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/cpp-ige-podcast.jpeg)
![33 The Monkees in Popular Culture from How the Monkees Changed Television [Video] (1 minute, 4 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/monkees-tv-33-pop-culture.jpeg)
