The Mentoris Project Book Launch Party And Reading With Dr. Rosanne Welch
I was deeply honored to be asked to read a section of my novel America’s Forgotten Founding Father (on the life of Filippo Mazzei) at the launch party for the entire Mentoris Book Project, which includes over 30 books about famous Italians and Italian Americans. At the Italian Cultural Institute in Westwood over a hundred family and friends gathered to celebrate this new publishing venture created by Robert Barbera under the umbrella of his Barbera Foundation. The evening also offered the chance to meet the director of the Italian Cultural Institute, Valeria Rumori and her cultural attache, Leonilde Callocchia.
A selection of Mentoris Project Books Now Available
Dr. Rosanne Welch reads from America’s Forgotten Founding Father
I was deeply honored to be asked to read a section of my novel America’s Forgotten Founding Father (on the life of Filippo Mazzei) at the launch party for the entire Mentoris Book Project, which includes over 30 books about famous Italians and Italian Americans. At the Italian Cultural Institute in Westwood over a hundred family and friends gathered to celebrate this new publishing venture created by Robert Barbera under the umbrella of his Barbera Foundation. The evening also offered the chance to meet the director of the Italian Cultural Institute, Valeria Rumori and her cultural attache, Leonilde Callocchia.
Dr. Rosanne Welch and Robert Barbera, Founder of The Barbera Foundation and The Mentoris Project
It was especially nice that my mother Mary was on hand as she is the youngest child of the immigrants who brought our family to America, and my son Joseph, who is their great grandchild — and of course my wonderful husband Douglas, who recorded the event and took all the photos, which means, of course, that he does not appear in any of them.
Dr. Rosanne Welch and Mary Danko
Mary Danko, Joseph “Guiseppe” Welch and Dr. Rosanne Welch
Many thanks to Robert and to Ken LaZebnik, editor of the series who invited me along for the ride and to all the local Stephens MFA students who came out to support their professors in this new venture.
Fellow Mentoris Author, Pamela Winfrey, signs her book, “Marconi and His Muses”
Fellow Mentoris Author (Soldier, Diplomat, Archaeologist: A Novel Based On The Bold Life Of Louis Palma Di Cesnola), Dr. Peg Lamphier and Dr. Rosanne Welch
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.
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.
So, we’ll start with the real woman. This is the real woman in the modern day. She’s still alive. She works in — she works as a Maitre D of a restaurant in Malibu and she’s still known as the “Real Gidget.” That’s kind of her — everyone in Hollywood is a bit of a celebrity so you can go that restaurant and meet the “Real Gidget” and have dinner. It is pretty funny. She also did a documentary a few years ago about her life that traveled the festival circuit. She’s trying to bring back the real story out of all the Hollywood glitz and glamour. So that’s Kathy Kohner and this was said about the book in the introduction and which I found very interesting. This is what connected me to it, that when it came out there was a thought that this was essentially a female Catcher in the Rye. Catcher in the Rye being the JD Salinger book that every high school student in America is still made to read and I don’t understand. It’s about a kid who decided whether or not to go to a hooker and I’m not really sure why that’s the most important book for teenagers to read.
“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.
Runs Thursday, January 18, 2018 to Sunday, July 15, 2018 Central Library, History and Genealogy Department, LL4
From Lucy to ALF, from game shows to talk shows, from local news to the made-for-TV movie, The Industry In Our Backyard: Television Production In Los Angeles 1940s-1980s showcases four decades in the life of the medium that dominated American culture, yet for Angelenos, was just another part of daily life. The images displayed in the exhibit were largely taken by photographers from the Herald Examiner and the Valley Times newspapers, who were granted exclusive access to back lots, sound stages and location shoots around town for their TV sections. These photos, which have not been seen in as many as sixty-five years when they first ran in the papers, provide rare glimpses of the earliest L.A. stations, the crews at work and the stars in action.
The exhibit runs from January 18 through July 15, 2018, along with a series of presentations given by television industry professionals and archivists.
Exhibit sponsored by Photo Friends, a nonprofit organization that supports the Los Angeles Public Library’s Photo Collection/History & Genealogy Department at Central Library.
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