Thanks to the librarians at Cal Poly Pomona for all the work they do in preparing the Annual Golden Leaves Awards honoring faculty members (current and emeritus) who have published works this year.
I’m once again happy to see two of my works included in this year’s list – first, the three volume encyclopedia I co-edited with my good friend and colleague, Peg Lamphier, Technical Innovation in American History and the second is When Women Wrote Hollywood, the collection of essays on female screenwriters from the early days of the film industry which I also edited.
I can’t wait for the event this Friday the 12th.
* 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
Luckily we’re in Los Angeles, so we do the research hands-on of the Margaret Herrick Library. These are in the database the screen archivist has created so that you can find the digital things for your own students and much is being scanned and put online for us these days. This is the Writers Guild of America. We have an archive as well of original scripts which is a great test to bring students to read. We don’t have enough writers who give their stuff to the Guild. They give it to the Herrick because that’s fancier and more cool. So we’re trying to give their own personal correspondence to the Writers Guild. Anyway, All of this and my first couple of years led me to realize that when I had started having them do essays — research essays — 20-page research papers, they were all so good in the first year the students were so excited by what they were discovering that I wrote my publisher — emailed my publisher — and said I have twenty really good essays on early women’s screenwriters in Hollywood from Dorothy Parker to Frances Hackett to Ruth Gordon and would you want to publish them? And they said “Yes” and so I was able to give my students their first publications through this course and one of them is here Jackie Perez has an essay in the book. She’s come to the conference for the first time. So this was an amazing thing for me to be able to create through the use of these students. This is that first class who are all published in that book. Even though we’re a women’s college in higher learning you have to accept men so there three men in that class also represented in the book. Men have become interested in our mission which is to provide more female-focused stories and more female writers into the business so it was a really good class. We love them all and that’s what I have to say.
* 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
How exciting – the folks who man the main website at Cal State Fullerton choseto highlight an article recently written about the book I edited – When Women Wrote Hollywood – on the very, very front of the university website – so when you log on, I’m the one of the first things you see. Pretty cool. — Rosanne
* 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
They also all do a research paper — as anyone should do in a master’s class. A gain through the network I’ve been able to provide them with books they can think about. Nunnally’s there. Emma’s there because of female screenwriters. That’s a lovely book –where she has the script and then she discusses filming and being on set as a writer and how difficult it was to do both and and of course it’s one of the movies I have them watch, so that’s lovely. There’s a million books they can use. These are some examples. I like, while it’s John Gregory Dunn’s book, it’s the story of he and his wife Joan Didion, who were creating a film for Disney and this is the entire eight years it took them from the day they were offered the job until the day the movie was made and how — the difficulty. So to teach students the process and how hard the process is I think is very important. So that’s very handy book. It’s also very thin. So students like to read it. They also are the writers of the third — the second remake of “A Star IS Born.” The one with Kris Kristofferson and Barbra Streisand. So interesting to hear their perspective before the new Lady GaGa version comes out.
* 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
We also bring in guest lecturers like my friend Paolo who I met coming to an SRN. So he came to town for a week and we did some story work with our students. This is our first class. You can hear about it a little more in a minute. So this was great. He came to lecture about the Global Neorealism because we wanted an Italian expert so there you go. I’m also very fond of the idea that I’ve learned a lot from doing this with my students because I planned the whole thing focusing on women only to realize that I’ve left behind minorities. There were African American filmmakers in the silent era. Oscar Micheaux is one of them. Very famous. Much of their work has been lost so it’s difficult to teach them or to offer students the chance to study them or analyze their work but he has a lot of work out there. So I’ve had to find texts that cover the gaze the focus of African Americans in the film in America through the years. So this one– it turned out it’s mostly about actors — but it gives you a sense and then also my LGBTQ students want to see where they fit in the picture and this is an excellent book on the history of LGBTQ people in Los Angeles — screenwriters, actors, directors — the whole thing. So by them asking me what they want or where they don’t see themselves in the picture, it’s forced me to go outside of my own background and give them more.
* 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
Married at age nineteen and together until Sam’s death, their marriage fed the comedic portrayals of the mishaps of women and men as they fall head over heels for each other and rage against the other. More of a writing partnership than romantic in some ways, as a team the Spewacks conquered Hollywood during a turbulent time when their peers were being sacrificed by producers to a government blacklist fueled by fear of Communism.
Marriage of Words: Bella And Sam Spewack
by Laura Kirk
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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!
† Available from the LA Public Library
Thanks to Karen Lindell for attending my library lecture on When Women Wrote Hollywood at the Pollak Library on the campus of California State University, Fullerton. Her article tries to make sense of the many subjects that have populated my books, and she rightly deduces that it is highlighting the work of women writers that is my main mission. Even in my book on The Monkees I made sure to fully cover the career of Treva Silverman, who by writing on that show became one of the first women to write for television without a male partner.
Video of “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Coming Soon!
As a young girl in Ohio, Rosanne Welch was a regular at her local library, pouring over autobiographies and memoirs of screenwriters from Hollywood’s early years. By the age of 10, she knew that she wanted to have a career in television or film.
Welch, lecturer in screenwriting at Cal State Fullerton, did make it to Hollywood, where she wrote for television shows “Beverly Hills 90210,” “Picket Fences,” ABC’s “Nightline” and “Touched by an Angel.”
But a funny thing happened on the way to the studio … as Welch prepared for her career, she was surprised to find that the female screenwriters she had read about as a child weren’t mentioned in her screenwriting courses.
This piqued her curiosity. Upon researching the matter, she found several reasons why these women had been sidelined in history.
* 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
We also bring in guest lecturers like my friend Paolo who I met coming to an SRN. So he came to town for a week and we did some story work with our students. This is our first class. You can hear about it a little more in a minute. So this was great. He came to lecture about the Global Neorealism because we wanted an Italian expert so there you go. I’m also very fond of the idea that I’ve learned a lot from doing this with my students because I planned the whole thing focusing on women only to realize that I’ve left behind minorities. There were African American filmmakers in the silent era. Oscar Micheaux is one of them. Very famous. Much of their work has been lost so it’s difficult to teach them or to offer students the chance to study them or analyze their work but he has a lot of work out there. So I’ve had to find texts that cover the gaze the focus of African Americans in the film in America through the years. So this one– it turned out it’s mostly about actors — but it gives you a sense and then also my LGBTQ students want to see where they fit in the picture and this is an excellent book on the history of LGBTQ people in Los Angeles — screenwriters, actors, directors — the whole thing. So by them asking me what they want or where they don’t see themselves in the picture, it’s forced me to go outside of my own background and give them more.
* 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
“As Zoë Akins attempted to prove the legitimacy of her work, the need for commercial success could not be ignored. Like her characters, Akins had to secure her own economic future. While her parents lived a comfortable life, they did not support her fiscally. Such restraints meant setting aside the high-minded rebellion of Papa. She needed to fill theatre seats, so she had to fulfill specific story requirements. Akins wrote, “…I longed for the freedom which money alone could buy” (OTM 127). She used that declaration as the foundation for her next work.”
* 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
Kevin Willmott is located at Kansas University, much farther than Los Angeles and he’s come in through Skype. Where he’s not gonna fly up to LA. So we can get guest speakers who are current working writers. We need to do more of that. in the second year, we go into looking at screenplays right — so William Goldman is the head guy there and I’m happy to use books that I found out about from my coming to these conferences and also I wanted to expand their studies so — because I’m — my grandparents were Italian so that’s how come I get to call myself Italian, so I said “Oooo let’s do some Italian films. What’s my excuse? Global neo-realism affected American film so let’s study that!” So this turned out to you great piece because there are essays by followers in many countries so it’s also pretty international which is also something made for me to bring to the Americans. We aren’t the only ones who do movies. Sometimes we pretend we are but we should not think that way and we learn a lot from international films. So I do 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! † Available from the LA Public Library
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