To refute the cultural myth that all their peers reviled them in their first incarnation, it appears the opposite was the more true from the very beginning. As a television program, The Monkees won two Emmy Awards in their first season, for Outstanding Comedy Series and for Outstanding Directorial Achievement for a Comedy.
So then we come to the television show, which stars Sally Field. This was her first major job. She’d never done a film or anything large before, so she is the active character in every episode which is the thing that we do in television so maybe that helped Ruth bring the story back to being about Gidget’s decisions. I don’t know, but I am sure that contributed to it and later in her career Flippen is going to write these other “plucky” women. That Girl being the first single woman on television to live without her parents and have a career. We always think about Mary Tyler Moore who did that but it was That Girl who did it first and her career was acting so that wasn’t taken quite seriously but she lived on her own. She supported herself, right? And Bewitched who, of course, had the power of magic and always ended up saving the day for her husband and I would say maybe see the Brady girls had some power in their lives — they brought Davy Jones into their world, so that’s a big deal. So I think it’s interesting that she always wrote female characters that are well remembered.
“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.
For her 5th Doctor Who lecture to the CPP community, Dr. Rosanne Welch discusses how society – and the show’s writing staff – prepared the audience for a major change in this 50-year franchise – the creation of the first Lady Doctor!
Transcript:
Whether you know new Who or old Who we’re going to talk about a kind of a combination of both of them and looking particularly at how gender has been portrayed and what I think works on the show and why the show has lasted so long. we all know it started in 1963 and so it survived because, if you don’t know Doctor Who, I imagine you do, but if you don’t writers invented the act of regeneration which was a brilliant idea because in the first few years their lead actor got sick and the whole show was going to have to be cancelled and the writers didn’t want to lose their jobs so they smartly sat around the room and said “How can we save this?” and suddenly somebody — and they don’t remember who it was now — said, “Hey, our lead character’s an alien. How about when he dies he doesn’t really die. He just regenerates into another body and then we can hire another actor and we can all keep our jobs?” and the network was agreeable to that and they did it and of course, as we know, they’ve done it and done it and done it over the years.
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.
A final note on the long tail of their cultural footprint comes from the fact that the financial success of the show funded the filmmaking careers of show creators Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson. Screen Gems executive Steve Blauner adamantly believed, “There’d have been no Easy Rider without The Monkees so they should canonize The Monkees just for that.”
This one was written largely by Gabrielle Upton and we have the Gidget who needs help and has to ask and is always worried about things and she cries which is always the thing that girls go to when they have to be dramatic. When we get over to this one, which is co-written with Katherine and Dale Eunson again she’s in college. Suddenly her vocabulary has popped up. the woman knew three-syllable words that she used with her friends as a normal and casual as you could be. She quotes Shakespeare and Dante’s Inferno because her father is a professor of literature so that’s the culture of her home, which is actually true and she is very proud of her independence in that film. So as Ruth Brooks Flippen gets ahold of the character, she starts to mold her back into who she was in her original book.
“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.
For her 5th Doctor Who lecture to the CPP community, Dr. Rosanne Welch discusses how society – and the show’s writing staff – prepared the audience for a major change in this 50-year franchise – the creation of the first Lady Doctor!
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.
In the year Davy Jones died (2012), the critically acclaimed, hard-edged AMC drama Breaking Bad used Micky’s vocals on the song “Goin’ Down” for a montage of Walter White making meth in his makeshift lab. That exposure began a new run of references on several critically acclaimed television programs.
I also noticed when watching all the movies — first of all, the girl playing Gidget changed in every film. So it wasn’t even like we cared that she had to be the same woman. She was just this image and the boy stays the same. James Darrin plays Moondoggie in all three of these films. So it turns out to be a trilogy about the life of a boy who surfs and has an everchanging girlfriend with the same name. This is not at all what I expected to find when I came to this and he sings music. So then we get Ruth Brooks Flippen who shows up and Ruth, she writes a bit of Gidget Goes Hawaiian and she does Gidget Goes to Rome. The second one is kind of silly and dumb. I’m hoping that means the studio had choices about what got done and when it was successful enough she had more of her own power in the third sequel where suddenly Gidget’s in college. She reads books again, just like the actual first book and she makes more interesting decisions.
“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.
![11 Gidget On Television from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto [Video] (0:58) – Dr. Rosanne Welch – SRN Conference 2017](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/gidget-srn-11-gidget-tv.jpeg)
![01 Generation and Regeneration from Gender Diversity in the Who-niverse with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1:01)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/gender-dw-01.jpeg)
![10 Gidget Grows Up from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto [Video] (0:44) – Dr. Rosanne Welch – SRN Conference](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/gidget-srn-10-gidget-grows-up.jpeg)
![Gender Diversity in the Who-niverse: Paving the Way for a Lady Doctor with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (36:58)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/gender-diversity-doctor-who.jpeg)
![09 Writers and Story on the Gidget Movies from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto [Video] (0:55) – Dr. Rosanne Welch – SRN Conference](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/gidget-srn-09-writers-movies.jpeg)