Video – Page 56 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

18 Popular Culture and The Monkees from “Why The Monkees Matter: Even 50 Years Later [Video] (56 seconds)

Enjoy This Clip? Watch this entire presentation and Buy Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture

From Denver Pop Culture Con 2019.

Wherever you go, you find Monkees fans and the Denver Popular Culture Con was no different. Amid rooms full of caped crusaders and cosplay creations, I was initially not sure how many folks would attend a talk on a TV show from the 1960s – but happily I was met by a nice, engaged audience for my talk on Why the Monkees Matter – and afterward they bought books! What more could an author ask for?

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Transcript

They were their own comic book. I’m sure somewhere in this place this weekend at one of the big comic cage upstairs might have a copy. I don’t know. It’s probably pretty rare. They were drawn by who knows who the drawer — the artist — Hirschfeld — thank you very much. That’s a huge thing that he would choose them right? This was for a piece in TV Guide at the time but he did all the great Broadway stars. So and I just think that’s beautiful (Audience: Is his daughter’s name in there somewhere?) You know it should be and I think it’s in Peter’s hair I think or it might be at the end of Mike’s hair. It’s got to be in this hair somewhere. He always had the name Nina — his daughter’s name. That’s a fun fact of Hirschfeld and if you go online you can google Hirschfeld Nina and it will show all the photos where her name appears. So I’m guessing if we looked hard enough it would be in there. So they’re making it all over popular culture. Obviously, there’s other Hirschfeld’s where you can see more of them and look at all the famous people that he’s covered but there in that world. Nina’s definitely in her Marilyn Monroe’s skirt.

Buy Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture

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.

McFarland (Direct from Publisher) | Amazon | Kindle Edition | Nook Edition

Want to use “Why The Monkees Matter” in your classroom?

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From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 07: “Frederica Sagor Maas, Hollywood’s ‘Shocking Miss Pilgrim'” The Forward.

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 07: “Frederica Sagor Maas, Hollywood’s ‘Shocking Miss Pilgrim'” The Forward.

Read From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 07: “Frederica Sagor Maas, Hollywood’s ‘Shocking Miss Pilgrim'” The Forward.

Buy “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Today!

†

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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

30 More On Jane Espenson from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (58 seconds)

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The Sisterhood of Science Fiction: A Walk Through Some Writers and Characters You (Should) Know And Love

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This one allowed me to riff on some of my favorite female science fiction writers across time, whether they be novelists or television writers. It also opened up a good conversation on what art we support and include in our lives – and what that art says to us and about us. — Rosanne

Transcript:

Likewise, she wrote many Buffy’s but one of the best is an episode called Earshot and Buffy’s all streaming for free on Facebook right now so you can watch. (Audience: I grew up watching that.) I Iove Buffy, I know. It’s really brilliantly written show. Earshot was a brilliant episode about Buffy who is the Vampire Slayer being cursed with the ability to hear what everyone is thinking — so mental telepathy and the problem is the cacophony in your head starts to make you crazy because if you can hear what everyone was thinking you couldn’t think your own thoughts and along the way — she’s in high school — she hears someone say “It doesn’t matter tomorrow by noon they’ll all be dead.” So now she knows she’s in a school with a shooter but who is it because she can’t pinpoint where the voice came from. So the whole episode is about trying to find the kid and of course, you trace the kid who looks the most bullied and seems to be the most stereotypically that kid. I’m not going to tell you you did it but — spoiler alert — it ain’t that kid right? So it’s really again excellently written episode using all the tropes of the era so Jane Espenson a pretty important writer.

* 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!

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32 Adam’s Rib and Ruth Gordon from “When Women Wrote Hollywood” with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 7 seconds)

Part of the California State University, Fullerton Faculty Noon Time Talks at the Pollak Library.

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Transcript:

In Adam’s Rib they’re two lawyers who work on the opposite side of a case. In real life, she and her husband were equally famous writers. They shared a profession together at which they both excelled right? So that was exactly her experience and the kind of dialogue and language — the kind of attitude that comes from Katharine Hepburn and all her in all the films written by Ruth, that’s Ruth Gordon talking right? She’s the feminist we should think about. She was an early Broadway actress. Best friends of Thornton Wilder who wrote Our Town. He wrote the matchmaker for her which became — Hello Dolly — and when she was young her husband died. Her first husband died of disease when he was like 28 which was very sad and she ended up in a relationship with a famous producer — Broadway producer. They had a baby out of wedlock. She was supposed to have the baby adopted away because you weren’t supposed to tell people you had gotten pregnant and had sex outside of marriage but she kept it instead and everybody said “Well your acting career will be over!” and she said “Only if you say it’s over.” and she kept working. So she was breaking the societal rules that were trying to trap her all right? So she is who Katharine Hepburn is in those movies and we should pay more attention.

Dr. Rosanne Welch discusses the women in her 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. Yet, she 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.

Buy a signed copy of when Women Wrote Hollywood

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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

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17 Commercial Value and The Monkees from “Why The Monkees Matter: Even 50 Years Later [Video] (1 minute)

Enjoy This Clip? Watch this entire presentation and Buy Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture

From Denver Pop Culture Con 2019.

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Transcript

This is Micky with who? I mean Davy with who? (Audience: Sissy Spacek?) Close. Sally Field. Sally Field of Gidget fame at that time Gidget had been on the season before. She’s going to move into the Flying Nun right after that. This is Micky with his wife , Samantha Just. This is Davy with his first wife and then this is Nesmith with his first wife Phyllis and their son. So they’re all over these magazines so they’re beginning to sell things outside of the television show. So the program is very important commercially. It’s making money for a lot of people. They do commercials on the show right? Sponsorships. Look at me. I’m eating Rice Krispies. Sure. Maybe. I don’t know. but they’re that you could get an album off the back of your cereal box and it would actually play on a record player which is pretty cool and if you go to like antique stores and whatnot now people sell this stuff for way too much money, when that that was free but again a great way to show the value — the commercial value — program.

Buy Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture

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.

McFarland (Direct from Publisher) | Amazon | Kindle Edition | Nook Edition

Want to use “Why The Monkees Matter” in your classroom?

Order Examination Copies, Library and Campus Bookstore orders directly from McFarland

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From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 05: Clip from Don Juan (1926) Written by Bess Meredyth

Don Juan is a 1926 American romantic Adventure film directed by Alan Crosland. It is the first feature-length film to utilize the Vitaphone sound-on-disc sound system with a synchronized musical score and sound effects, though it has no spoken dialogue.^[4] The film is inspired by Lord Byron‘s 1821 epic poem of the same name. The screenplay was written by Bess Meredyth with intertitles by Maude Fulton and Walter Anthony.^[5]

Don Juan stars John Barrymore as the hand-kissing womanizer.^[5] The film has the most kisses in film history, with Barrymore kissing (all together) Mary Astor and Estelle Taylor 127 times.^{[6] — Wikipedia}

Buy “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Today!

†

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

* 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

29 Jane Espenson from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 15 seconds)

Watch this entire presentation

The Sisterhood of Science Fiction: A Walk Through Some Writers and Characters You (Should) Know And Love

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Transcript:

This lady I love. Jane Espenson. She got her start in Star Trek. Many women writers in television were first given a script on some version of Star Trek whether it was Deep Space 9 or The Next Generation. She’s been around a long time. She also worked on Buffy which is one of my favorite shows which is really particularly well-written. She created Warehouse 13 which I thought was an adorable show and a great interesting premise about all the objects in the world that were alien objects and when they passed through history they were hidden in a big warehouse. If they got stolen, people could take the powers of early people because they were inside the object. So, you know, Marilyn Monroe’s hairbrush made you sexy because it turned you into a platinum blonde and we couldn’t put that out in the world because there’d be way too much of that going on. Really cute interesting stuff. Of course, she also wrote the Battlestar Galactica. She wrote one of the best episodes of Once Upon A Time. It was called Red-Handed and it has to do with the real story of Red Riding Hood and werewolves and how those two stories converge and it’s just so brilliantly and it uses our biases about gender and power against us to not predict where it’s going. So it’s a really lovely interesting piece of writing. I think is in the third season.

* 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!

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31 Ruth Gordon from “When Women Wrote Hollywood” with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] ( 1 minutes 15 seconds)

Part of the California State University, Fullerton Faculty Noon Time Talks at the Pollak Library.

Watch this entire presentation

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Transcript:

Ruth Gordon. Now we’re up to Ruth. Ruth only wrote four movies together with her husband Garson Kanin. Two of them you’ve heard of Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike these are Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy vehicles. This couple was best friends with Gordon and Kanin and they wrote the movies outside of the studio system. If you worked as a writer in a studio you got assigned something to work on. These two just wrote movies they wanted to in their own house and then sold them to the studio to actors they knew so nobody rewrote them and they were on the set through most of the production because they hired George Cukor who was a famous director, and another friend of theirs, to direct them. What I think is important for us to think about Ruth is that — and I love Katharine Hepburn and I don’t want to like mess with her reputation too much — but she has a reputation for being a feminist. That’s wrong. Katharine Hepburn stayed the mistress of Spencer Tracy their entire relationship. He never left his wife and she never left him for not leaving his wife. Rumor has it — stuff has come out lately — that he actually beat on her and she put up with that. That’s not a feminist woman. Her characters in the films were feminists because guess why? Ruth was. Ruth was writing herself and her own attitude.

Buy a signed copy of when Women Wrote Hollywood

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

* 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

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16 Cultural Impact and The Monkees from “Why The Monkees Matter: Even 50 Years Later [Video] (29 seconds)

Enjoy This Clip? Watch this entire presentation and Buy Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture

From Denver Pop Culture Con 2019.

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

Transcript

Obviously popular culture, which were here to celebrate. It mattered on The Monkees. They were moments in popular culture. A moment that has lasted for the last 50 years but a lot of what they did affected the other popular culture we know. Some people do or don’t know that when they added the Chekhov character to Star Trek in their second season Gene Roddenberry said “He needs to have a haircut that matches that kid on the Monkees” because he is here to appeal to the young girls right? So if you think about it, that’s that’s considered a hippie long hair haircut.

Buy Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture

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.

McFarland (Direct from Publisher) | Amazon | Kindle Edition | Nook Edition

Want to use “Why The Monkees Matter” in your classroom?

Order Examination Copies, Library and Campus Bookstore orders directly from McFarland

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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28 D.C. Fontana from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 9 seconds)

Watch this entire presentation

The Sisterhood of Science Fiction: A Walk Through Some Writers and Characters You (Should) Know And Love

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Transcript:

I like novels but I also like TV a lot. I’m a pretty big pop-culture person. So I wanted to look a little bit into the women who’ve written science fiction on television. We don’t hear a lot about them. We know this show. Everyone’s heard of it even if you’ve never seen it. Everyone credits it to Gene Roddenberry, who is the man who invented it. He’s quite a brilliant man. That’s wonderful but along the way he hired this lady DC Fontana who went by the name DC because she didn’t think they’d hire a girl named Dorothy to write a science fiction television show. So she got the job as DC Fontana and did it – she’s worked in every iteration of Star Trek including the games, including the animated series on Saturday. She’s been involved in Star Trek forever and was involved in the very beginning — Wrote several episodes in the first original series. Wrote a few early novels that were out. So she was deeply embedded in that show and embedded in creating powerful female characters and also on creating the alien — the Vulcan guy, Spock, giving him a background. She created much of the background of his culture because culture was important to her. So she’s pretty cool and of course they loved her so much they made — they put her in the animated show. They made an animated version of her.

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs
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