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:
…On a book that for years and years Hollywood wasn’t making into a movie because it starred a little girl and they really didn’t think enough people would pay money to see the story of a little girl having this wild crazy adventure. Even though Alice in Wonderland has been around a long time okay. So it’s interesting. We really we sort of censor before we even put things out into the audience for them to really tell us what they’re gonna watch right? So we have to think about that.
* 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!
Gene Gauntier is from Ireland. She was born in Kansas. She ended up being the first person to film a movie on location and it was “From The Manger to the Cross” which was the story of The Christ. It was the first time that the story of Jesus was told on film and she went to Jerusalem and then she filmed some in other places in Europe. So she was pretty famous for a good long time. A company called the Kalum company. Again when that company went out of business and all their paperwork disappeared, a lot of her history disappeared with it but you can find “From The Manger to the Cross” on YouTube
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.
* 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
What’s interesting about this video game trailer (is first of all that they have trailers for video games!) but that at the 5:36 mark they begin giving the credits for all the relatively big name actors in this – including Guillermo del Toro and (for me) Lindsay Wagner (the original Bionic Woman) which shows how this new-ish art form is following the path of films – which originally did not name their actors until they realized actors bring in audience.
Also, that the branding of the creator “Kojima Productions”. The parallels between these arts-turned-businesses are so interesting. — Rosanne
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?
Transcript
Down in the right corner is Peter Meyerson. Clearly from his photograph truly on the hippie train back in the day — had a very interesting life and ended up married to one of Michael Nesmith’s early girlfriends later in life — like his third wife was Nesmith’s first girlfriend or some silly thing like that. Gentlemen the middle is Bernie Ornstein. He was a writer of more mainstream work and had a lot to say about what The Monkees were about, Dave Evans, the gentleman who’s smiling. He’s so adorable He’s the nicest man you would ever want to meet and he had written for Bullwinkle before he came to The Monkees and then Treva Silverman is the woman I was speaking of. The first woman to write on television write comedy without a male partner and so she went on to earn two Emmys in her career writing on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. So all these writers had very good histories coming into and then moving out of The Monkees and again people dismissed the show but it really deserves much more attention. She wrote the particular episode of Mary Tyler Moore where Lou Grant’s wife asked for a divorce which was huge in the early 70s and that’s what she got the Emmy for.
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.
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:
Now, most people know Madeleine L’Engle. So guess what? She gets the put her name on the book is definitely a chick name right? Madeleine L’Engle. Definitely a chick name. And “A Wrinkle In Time.” How many people saw the movie? Two people. Really good movie. Ava Duvernay directed it. Really interesting to think about the fact that the controversy here was switching out the race right and then it was a big deal. You’re gonna change who the child is in the book and thereby change some of who the other characters are that she’s connected with but one of the first movies starring an African-American who that scored over 100 million dollars in the box office right of way kind of thing, right? Then Black Panther is going to come in and score a bajillion, million dollars, but so it’s a trend that Ava Duvernay wanted to get started.
* 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!
Really more interesting, I want to know more about Jennie Louise Toussaint Welcome. That is actually her full name, which is beautiful. She as well, she wrote a movie that was meant to be the answer to “Birth of a Nation”, right? She wrote a movie in defense of how badly African-Americans were treated in “Birth of a Nation”, that doesn’t exist anymore. Bits and pieces online you can find of “The Charge of the Colored Divisions”. She was covering the African-American men in World War I, right? So she did some work like that, both reality and fiction. I have to believe we’ll find some more work on her, because her brother was Booker T. Washington’s personal photographer during the Harlem Renaissance and her parents were the butler and maid to President Ulysses S. Grant, so there’s got to be somebody mentioning them somewhere. It’s just that nobody’s put all that together, but I really think we’re going to to get more about her pretty soon.
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.
* 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
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?
Transcript
I got very involved on this one. I wrote an article for Written By about The Monkees — the writers of The Monkees. I wanted to find out who it is people who had stories to tell and who were telling their philosophy through these four characters right and so that really interested me and these are most of the folks that I got to meet. Obviously when I met them they were in their late 70s and had been around for a while and they have some marvelous stories to tell. Gerald Gardner, the gentleman just to the left of my book picture was actually a script writer and a speech writer for a Robert Kennedy’s Senate campaign in New York. He came to television through a show called That Was The Week That Was, which is kind of the SNL Weekend Update of its time and then he moved to Get Smart and when they started The Monkees the folks in charge were like “We need some cool funny, young men,” and he and his partner showed up. So that’s Gerald Gardner.
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.
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:
So and this is a really brilliant interesting book because basically, she’s talking about Indiana Jones — that character — what if someone who did that archaeological work could commune with the spirit of the people who own the things that you’re digging up and what would happen if you could connect to them and learn about their world? I think that’s it’s a really fascinating book and written by Pat Murphy, which is pretty cool.
†
Winner of the Nebula Award: “A lovely and literate exploration of the dark moment where myth and science meet” (Samuel R. Delany).
When night falls over the Yucatan, the archaeologists lay down their tools. But while her colleagues relax, Elizabeth Butler searches for shadows. A famous scientist with a reputation for eccentricity, she carries a strange secret. Where others see nothing but dirt and bones and fragments of pottery, Elizabeth sees shades of the men and women who walked this ground thousands of years before. She can speak to the past—and the past is beginning to speak back.
As Elizabeth communes with ghosts, the daughter she abandoned flies to Mexico hoping for a reunion. She finds a mother embroiled in the supernatural, on a quest for the true reason for the Mayans’ disappearance. To dig up the truth, the archaeologist who talks to the dead must learn a far more difficult skill: speaking to her daughter.
* 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!
The hardest thing to do now — we’re having trouble reviving some of these female names but it is far more worse reviving African-American female names because these folks have had no paperwork left about them and even the men they worked with haven’t been cataloged in a way that we can look to them for information. Tressi Souders, we only have through newspaper accounts of films of hers that were opening in African-American neighborhoods. So we can see advertisements that she had product but the product doesn’t exist. You can’t find it even on — most of the women I’m gonna mention, the Caucasian women — the European women — and you could find some of their movies on YouTube because stuff has been kept in the Library of Congress. Sadly some has been saved because of men it’s connected to but at least it’s been saved. These women, none of their work exists anymore and that’s one of the most depressing things.
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.
* 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
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?
Transcript
First thing is a little bit of who I am. On television I wrote for Touched By An Angel, Beverly Hills 90210, and Picket Fences and ABC’s News Nightline. When I decided to get into academia and start writing first of all the Monkees book obviously but then I’ve written a lot of stuff about women in history, women in popular culture, very interested in that and you’ll be hopefully interested in finding out but there is some things to be said about feminism on The Monkees in the 60s which nobody would have expected until I studied it. I also do book reviews for the Journal of Screenwriting. I’m their book review editor and I work on Written By magazine on the editorial board. That’s a magazine for members of the Writers Guild. So my deep focus is generally — words matter — writers matter — and women writers matter and we’re gonna find out that on The Monkees, there was the first female television writer who didn’t need a male partner in order to be have job which is sounds a little crazy to us today but was true back in the day.
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.
![19 Gene Gauntier from “When Women Wrote Hollywood” with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (32 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/csuf-rmw-w3h-19.jpeg)
![04 More On The Writers of The Monkees from “Why The Monkees Matter: Even 50 Years Later [Video] (1 minute 4 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/monkees-popcon-2019-04.jpeg)
![16 Madeleine L’Engle from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (43 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/scifi-rmw-cpp-16.jpeg)
![18 Jennie Louise Toussaint Welcome from “When Women Wrote Hollywood” with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (52 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/csuf-rmw-w3h-18.jpeg)
![03 The Writers of The Monkees from “Why The Monkees Matter: Even 50 Years Later – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (50 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/monkees-popcon-2019-03.jpeg)
![15 More On Pat Murphy from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (25 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/scifi-rmw-cpp-15.jpeg)
![17 Tressie Souders from “When Women Wrote Hollywood” with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (49 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/csuf-rmw-w3h-17.jpeg)
![02 Rosanne’s Writing History from “Why The Monkees Matter: Even 50 Years Later – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/monkees-popcon-2019-02.jpeg)