From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 33: Blood and Sand. Wr: June Mathis, Dir: Fred Fred Niblo, Paramount Pictures, 1922, USA 80 mins.

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 “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 33: Blood and Sand. Wr: June Mathis, Dir: Fred Fred Niblo, Paramount Pictures, 1922, USA 80 mins.

From The

Juan Gallardo (Valentino), a village boy born into poverty, grows up to become one of the greatest matadors in Spain. He marries a friend from his childhood, the beautiful and virtuous Carmen (Lee), but after he achieves fame and fortune he finds himself drawn to Doña Sol (Naldi), a wealthy, seductive widow.

They embark on a torrid affair with sadomasochistic overtones, but Juan, feeling guilty over his betrayal of Carmen, tries to free himself of Doña Sol. Furious at being rejected, she exposes their affair to Carmen and Juan’s mother, seemingly destroying his marriage. Growing more and more miserable and dissipated, Juan becomes reckless in the arena. He is eventually killed in a bullfight but does manage to reconcile with Carmen moments before he dies.

There is also a subplot involving a local outlaw whose career is paralleled to Juan’s throughout the film by the village philosopher: Juan’s fatal injury in the bullring comes moments after the outlaw is shot by the police. — Wikipedia


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

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From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 33: “Elinor Glyn.”, Denise Cummings , Women Film Pioneers Project. Columbia University

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 “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 33: “Elinor Glyn.”, Denise Cummings , Women Film Pioneers Project. Columbia University

From The

From The

Perhaps most remembered in the United States for her best-selling 1907 novel of exotic sensuality Three Weeks and her brainchild “It,” that enigmatic characteristic embodied in actress Clara Bow and dramatized in the silent motion picture It (1927), English-born journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and actress Elinor Glyn, born Elinor Sutherland, embarked on her American career in 1920 during her second visit to the United States. In October of 1907, at forty-two, Glyn, traveling as Elinor Glyn, the authoress of romantic fiction, boarded the Lusitania and set sail for New York on her first American tour in order to promote Three Weeks. According to her British biographer, Joan Hardwick, “the reception of Three Weeks in the States had renewed [Glyn’s] confidence and she decided to try her hand at dramatizing it” (133). Before that version materialized, however, Glyn returned to England, but only after lengthening her stay with a journey by rail through the American West to California. Her 1907 tour of the United States and her introduction to American culture and way of life may very well have laid the fertile groundwork for her 1920 return and subsequent work as writer, director, producer, and actress in Hollywood.

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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

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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

Rosanne is part of a virtual Bucharest Symposium in Screenwriting and Literature

I spent a lovely and engaging morning in the company of several international screenwriting academics discussing teaching online thanks to being invited to this virtual Bucharest Symposium in Screenwriting and Literature by Tudor Voican, PhD, WallachiaIFF Jury President.

Rosanne is part of a virtual Bucharest Symposium in Screenwriting and Literature

Bucharest

The invitation arrived in my email inbox and almost looked like a fake – until I saw the names of the other participants and knew them to be pretty stellar in their fields. So I said yes.  We’ll meet online each Sunday for 3 Sundays to make 20 minute presentations to each other and share our knowledge.  

Though I would have loved to actually fly to what Tudor calls “the legendary land of Principe Vlad III Drăculea aka Vlad the Impaler, Voivode of Wallachia” but for now I am outside on the patio using our built-in Zoom background.

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 32: The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild by Miranda J Banks

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 “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 32: The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild by Miranda J Banks

From The

Screenwriters are storytellers and dream builders. They forge new worlds and beings, bringing them to life through storylines and idiosyncratic details. Yet up until now, no one has told the story of these creative and indispensable artists. The Writers is the only comprehensive qualitative analysis of the history of writers and writing in the film, television, and streaming media industries in America.

Featuring in-depth interviews with over fifty writers–including Mel Brooks, Norman Lear, Carl Reiner, and Frank Pierson–The Writers delivers a compelling, behind-the-scenes look at the role and rights of writers in Hollywood and New York over the past century. Granted unprecedented access to the archives of the Writers Guild Foundation, Miranda J. Banks also mines over 100 never-before-published oral histories with legends such as Nora Ephron and Ring Lardner Jr., whose insight and humor provide a window onto the enduring priorities, policies, and practices of the Writers Guild.

With an ear for the language of storytellers, Banks deftly analyzes watershed moments in the industry: the advent of sound, World War II, the blacklist, ascension of television, the American New Wave, the rise and fall of VHS and DVD, and the boom of streaming media. The Writers spans historical and contemporary moments, and draws upon American cultural history, film and television scholarship and the passionate politics of labor and management. Published on the sixtieth anniversary of the formation of the Writers Guild of America, this book tells the story of the triumphs and struggles of these vociferous and contentious hero-makers.


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

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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!
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Listen to the latest “How I Wrote That” Podcast with Screenwriter Laura Brennan from Most Likely to Die, and Faux Baby. [Audio]

Listen to the latest How I Wrote That Podcast with Tera Hernandez of The Big Bang Theory [Audio]

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Laura Brennan’s eclectic writing career includes television, film, theater, web series, fiction and news. Behind the scenes, she has helped production companies develop movies, TV pilots and limited series. She has taught pitching workshops to executives at Netflix and Film Victoria, as well as MFA programs and undergraduate classes at universities including Stephens College, University of California, Los Angeles, University of Southern California, Boston University and National University.A graduate of Yale University, Brennan has won awards for journalism, television writing and fiction. Her children’s book, Nana Speaks Nanese, tackles the confusing changes brought on by dementia in a reassuring and straightforward way. She hopes it will help families facing a diagnosis of dementia open up a conversation with their young children. Her web series Faux Baby is also for parents, but it is definitely not for children—or even safe for work.

“You are not everything to everyone. And you shouldn’t try to be.  You should figure out what you do best and double down on it. Learn the stuff that you’re not great at so that you are comfortable and confident but narrow down what it is you really bring to the table ” -Laura Brennan

Presented by Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting


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2020 Jan Marino Scholarship to Stephens MFA in TV and Screenwriting Announced at SeriesFest [Video]

2020 Jan Marino Scholarship to Stephens MFA in TV and Screenwriting Announced at SeriesFest [Video]

It was a pleasure to take part in announcing our Class of 2022 Jan Marino Scholarship winner at this year’s (online of course) SeriesFest.

Betsy Leighton, the founder of the scholarship, and I each recorded short videos to be played before one of the major panels of the festival.

I wanted to share the videos here so everyone can join me in welcoming Jen Bosworth-Ramirez to the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting.

Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting Alumna Sarah Phillips Batchelder (Class of 2017) in Drama Series Comeptition at SeriesFest

SeriesFest 2020

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 31: Marion Fairfax, Exhibitors Herald, 17 April 1922.

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 “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 31: Marion Fairfax, Exhibitor’s Herald. Exhibitors Herald, 15 April 1922.

From The

From The

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

Text of Rosanne’s Keynote at 10th Screenwriter Stories Seminar: Screenplay-X at the Université Presbytériènne Mackenzie in São Paulo, Brazil.

I’m happy to post this ebook of papers presented at the10th Screenwriter Stories Seminar: Screenplay-X at the Université Presbytériènne Mackenzie in São Paulo, Brazil

Screenplay-X at the Université Presbytériènne Mackenzie in São Paulo, Brazil.

I gave the opening lecture entitled, “Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered” which appears here in English, though the rest of the papers (naturally) are in Portuguese.  It was an honor to be asked to do the lecture and privilege to spend time with Professor Glaucia Davino and her students who made me feel very welcome in their city.

Words matter. Writers matter and women writers matter in this world. It is important to consider writers because the word writer comes before the word director when you describe a filmmaker who can do two things. They are writer-directors, they are not director-writers. That tells us something. The vision of a movie cannot exist without the screenplay. A director cannot direct nothing. There must be an idea. There must be a philosophy. There must be a theme. There must be a story. This proves that the writer is of equal importance. We must remember writers have to be equal partners and I think we realize that without realizing it. When people talk about movies to their friends they don’t say “I loved the camera angle in scene 7.” They quote dialogue from their favorite movies whether they are from a Pixar film or a Disney one, they quote the dialogue and that is the work of the writer. That’s the person who should be given credit, yet often at the start a class I ask students to list their two or three favorite films, who directed those films and who wrote that film. They very often cannot name the person who wrote the film they claim to adore. How can you study to be a writer if you don’t remember writers yourself? Hence the reason to study Screenwriting. Hence researching screenwriters has always mattered.

When actors Frances McDormand won her Oscar for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri she said of the screenwriter Martin McDonagh, “He did not sketch a blueprint. That’s an insult to a screenplay. He didn’t string together a few words. He wrote, meticulously crafted, a tsunami, and then he allowed his troupe of actors to surf it into the shore.” (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/sag-awards-three-billboards-takes-top-honors-at-a-show-women-took-center-stage-1076726) She credited the writer in a way that many people do not.

Stories – and therefore screenplays and therefore screenwriters — are important because they transmit culture around the world. The United States has had a corner on that market for far too many years but now we’re beginning to see other stories permeate our culture, a good and beneficial thing for a country made of immigrants and the ancestors of immigrants. Stories have always transmitted culture far back to the cave paintings of many ancient cultures, through Gilgamesh, and the griots of Africa. Humans have used stories to move culture forward. Movies are the most current version of doing that so why do we forget to study the storytellers? Now is the time to fix this glaring omission both in casual discussions of films and in academia.

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Read and Download The Entire Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered Presentation in PDF Format

Text of Rosanne's Keynote at 10th Screenwriter Stories Seminar: Screenplay-X at the Université Presbytériènne Mackenzie in São Paulo, Brazil.
Download the Portuguese PDF 

Watch the the entire presentation here

Photos from the event

Screenplay-X at the Université Presbytériènne Mackenzie in São Paulo, Brazil. Screenplay-X at the Université Presbytériènne Mackenzie in São Paulo, Brazil.

Screenplay-X at the Université Presbytériènne Mackenzie in São Paulo, Brazil. Screenplay-X at the Université Presbytériènne Mackenzie in São Paulo, Brazil.

Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting Alumna Sarah Phillips Batchelder (Class of 2017) in Drama Series Competition at SeriesFest

Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting Alumna Sarah Phillips Batchelder (Class of 2017) in Drama Series Comeptition at SeriesFest

Congratulations to alumna Sarah Phillips Batchelder (Class of 2017).

The pilot she wrote and directed this year — Supplements — is in the Drama Series competition in SeriesFest, which starts online this Thursday.

Don’t forget to vote for Sarah and her team for Audience Award!

Watch the Supplements trailer on YouTube.

SeriesFest 2020

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 30: “Frederica Sagor Maas, 1900 – 2012 on Notebook.” MUBI. David Hudson

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 “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 30: “Frederica Sagor Maas, 1900 – 2012 on Notebook.” MUBI. David Hudson

From The

“Frederica Sagor Maas, a pioneering female screenwriter who scored her first big success with The Plastic Age, a smash hit for ‘It Girl’ Clara Bow in 1925, died Jan 5.” She was 111. Mike Barnes in the Hollywood Reporter: “Because she was a woman, Maas was typically assigned work on flapper comedies and light dramas. Her efforts includes such other Bow films as Dance Madness (1926), Hula (1927) and Red Hair (1928); two films featuring Norma Shearer, His Secretary (1925) and The Waning Sex (1926); the Greta Garbo drama Flesh and the Devil (1926); and the Louise Brooks film Rolled Stockings (1927)…. In 1927, she married Ernest Maas, a producer at Fox, and they wrote as a team but struggled to sell scripts…. The pair, interrogated by the FBI for allegedly Communist activities, were out of the business by the early 1950s. Ernest Mass died in 1986 at age 94. In 1999, at the urging of film historian Kevin Brownlow, Maas published her autobiography, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood. She was 99 at the time.”

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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