“Writer and director Garson Kanin referred to the Hacketts as “…an enchanting couple; they were the writers the producers and directors used to kill to get”. David Brown said they were “The ultimate class writing team of the Golden Age of Hollywood… Virtually all their films were successful… They were the epitome of elegance in writing””
Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett: The Most Beloved Couple in Hollywood By Julie Berkobien
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So how I teach it. That’s why I teach I want respect to come back to writers. That seems simple right? How I do it. I start in the very beginning when women were the major writers of Hollywood films. There were 50 percent of the films are in by women if not more and they made more money. This is Gene Gauntier from Ireland, this is Anita Loos and Jeannie Macpherson working with Cecil B. DeMille. She wrote every one of his financially successful films and when they stopped working together, his movies stopped making money. That’s the end of Cecil B. DeMille. How I teach it. I start by asking students very quick questions. What are your first five favourite films? Who directed those films? They always know. Who wrote those films? and the look of humiliation on their faces when they sit in a screenwriting class and cannot name the people who wrote their favorite films is ridiculous to me.
* 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
On Saturday, November 3rd, 2018 several of the contributors to When Women Wrote Hollywood gathered at the Skylark Bookshop in Columbia, Missouri for a signing and launch party that functioned like a mini-reunion of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting Class of 2017.
Many thanks to all who came to hear them each speak with passion about the research subjects who became whole chapters in this book of essays on female screenwriters from the Silent Era into the 1940s.
* 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
“The majority of Park’s films feature a female lead who begins the story as poor, beaten, and/or single and receives a fairy tale ending. It happens to Eve, the poor flower girl in Lights and Shadows (1914); Nan, the tempted chorus girl in When The Gods Played A Badger Game (1915) and Rose, raised by a cruel hag in Where The Forest Ends (1915).”
* 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
So how I teach it. That’s why I teach I want respect to come back to writers. That seems simple right? How I do it. I start in the very beginning when women were the major writers of Hollywood films. There were 50 percent of the films are in by women if not more and they made more money. This is Gene Gauntier from Ireland, this is Anita Loos and Jeannie Macpherson working with Cecil B. DeMille. She wrote every one of his financially successful films and when they stopped working together, his movies stopped making money. That’s the end of Cecil B. DeMille. How I teach it. I start by asking students very quick questions. What are your first five favourite films? Who directed those films? They always know. Who wrote those films? and the look of humiliation on their faces when they sit in a screenwriting class and cannot name the people who wrote their favorite films is ridiculous to me.
* 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
On Saturday, November 3rd, 2018 several of the contributors to When Women Wrote Hollywood gathered at the Skylark Bookshop in Columbia, Missouri for a signing and launch party that functioned like a mini-reunion of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting Class of 2017.
Many thanks to all who came to hear them each speak with passion about the research subjects who became whole chapters in this book of essays on female screenwriters from the Silent Era into the 1940s.
* 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
“Beranger’s professional career as screenwriter, scenarist, and adaptation writer was largely associated with Famous Players-Lasky Company, which later became Paramount Pictures. Her best known work occurred in the late 1910s through the late 1920s. During this period, Beranger wrote an adaptation of Zona Gale’s novel Miss Lulu Bett, an adaptation of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), and The World’s Applause (1923) plus a multitude of other screenplays, original and adapted.”
Clara Beranger: The Unseen Laborer Amanda Stockwell
* 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
* Music from Hamilton — Who lives? Who Dies? Who Tells Your Story?”*
“His financial system is a work of genius. I couldn’t undo if I tried and I tried.”
Also a piece very famous for the writer Lin-Manuel Miranda more so than anyone else. Historiography is something we teach in masters programs that we don’t really teach in undergrad and they have to understand who wrote these books and why do we know who why do we have that. I want to teach the history screenwriting these all artists stand on the shoulders of those who came before them be they men or women and we should know who those people were and how they created what we have.
* 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
On Saturday, November 3rd, 2018 several of the contributors to When Women Wrote Hollywood gathered at the Skylark Bookshop in Columbia, Missouri for a signing and launch party that functioned like a mini-reunion of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting Class of 2017.
Many thanks to all who came to hear them each speak with passion about the research subjects who became whole chapters in this book of essays on female screenwriters from the Silent Era into the 1940s.
* 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
Co-presented by Stephens College, whose MFA in TV and screenwriting is designed to bring more female and minority stories into mainstream media through a low-residency graduate degree program.
“The Gordon/Kanin scripts also helped invent Katharine Hepburn’s popular culture reputation for female empowerment. Upon Gordon’s death in 1985, New York Times writer Mel Gussow wrote in his appreciation of her work: “Every time you enjoy Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn sparring in Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike, remember who created their characters and wrote their witty dialogue. Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin’s contribution to the symbiosis of the Tracy-Hepburn team is inestimable.” Biographers and critics of Hepburn often claimed that she based her independent women persona and characters on a combination of her mother and of Eleanor Roosevelt. I contend that the Hepburn was also, even if subconsciously, basing the women in her Tracy/Hepburn films on Ruth Gordon. As actress and writer Elaine May once observed to Kanin about his wife, “She really is about the only person who gives you the feeling that maybe it could be a woman’s world.”
Gordon and Kanin clearly had a feminist agenda at work in their films, one that focuses on the need for both members of a marriage to understand the inherent equality of the sexes and to respect the equal intellectual capacity of wives. When summarizing Kanin’s screenwriting career, author Richard Corliss says “Because of Kanin’s close collaboration with his wife on scripts written for another, very close couple – [Spencer] Tracy and Katharine Hepburn – the ‘marriages’ portrayed in Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike have a sense of natural familiarity and mutual respect rare in Hollywood domestic comedies.”
Read the full excerpt from When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry on our blog!
Introduction by Cari Beauchamp. Join us after the film for a book signing by contributors to When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry.
Watch presentations from When Women Wrote Hollywood
* 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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