Category: Stephens College

Transcript:

The question about why we forget women screenwriters is bothering us for a long time and one of the things we fall back on is this thing called unreliable narrators and it’s really sad to think that many of these early women writers – and there were more women writing films in the early silent days than there were men. It was a Wild West of a job and so we always let women in in the beginning. We did the same thing in aviation. Tons of female flyers. They’re doing all kinds of contests flying from here to Cleveland. I don’t know why Cleveland did it with hub right and all these contests and then when it becomes a business we say oh no no no this is now a place where men can make money. You ladies should leave and we essentially leave them behind. So, one whenever we became a business – both in aviation and in Hollywood – they took women who had been producers, they’d been directors, they’d written their own material and the guys running the studio suddenly said um here’s your new contract. You’re now a junior writer and you can work with this guy and they were like thank you I’ll go back to new york and I’ll write novels right. So that’s Anita Loos and “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and you know Francis Marion who’s probably the most famous early female screenwriter. They just started writing novels where they could again be in charge of the whole story. You know why should they be treated that way.

Transcript:

Host: Our guest today is Rosanne Welch. She’s a former screenwriter and historian and a professor at the MFA program in Screenwriting and TV writing at Stephens College. She’s the editor of the book “When Women Wrote Hollywood” as well as the author of numerous other books that you can check out but welcome. Thanks for joining us today Rosanne.

Rosanne: Thanks for asking me. I love to talk about women screenwriters.

Host: That’s great yeah so we’re going to focus on a sub-topic within the book you edited When Women Wrote Westerns. How do we see the history of tv and film differently when we learn about these women screenwriters who are often forgotten and perhaps why were they forgotten in the first place.

Rosanne: The why is always sad to learn but we’re learning it in all of our history classes no matter what we teach in this country and we’re getting very good at that right? We’re learning that the people who told the stories were the winners and in fact, there were many many more stories that were left on the cutting room floor if you will. So having different people write – in this case, we’re discussing women – another gender looking at this perspective of the experience they had right? All those men didn’t come West by themselves. They generally brought women with them or met women here right because nobody wants to be alone for 20 years of their life right? So they have a different perspective of what happened and including them in the story makes the story richer because we need to understand who really were the founders of our country and who were the people who caused the trouble when they came out here right? If we’re colonizing an area that was already inhabited women were part of that too. So women have to take a shot about that and recognize that in their own privilege they came and thought this place belonged to them.