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
Spike Lee is, of course, famous for that. Spike Lee wrote this film — his first film alone but every film after he’s had a co-writer and those co-writers names barely appear on the poster yet obviously they’re necessary to process. Same is true here for Black KKKlansman his new film. The producer Jordan Peel has a bigger credit than Kevin Willmott who co-wrote the film. No one even knows who Kevin Willmott is and he’s written two of Spike Lee’s most important films. Jordan Peele we know and look at his own poster written directed by very big so we are used crediting directors. Some directors are kind enough to tell us, it’s collaborative effort all I can take credit for is the directing. So this is the attitude that I’m trying to instill in my students.
* 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
“From the start Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin had a writing career like few other writers in the hollywood of the 1940s and 1950s. Their career earned them praise as ‘probably the greatest pure screenwriting collaboration in all Tollywood history'”
A Team in Passionate Action: Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin Rosanne Welch
* 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
To highlight the wonderful yet largely forgotten work of a collection of female screenwriters from the early years of Hollywood (and as a companion to the book, When Women Wrote Hollywood) we will be posting quick bits about the many films they wrote along with links to further information and clips from their works which are still accessible online. Take a few moments once or twice a week to become familiar with their names and their stories. I think you’ll be surprised at how much bold material these writers tackled at the birth of this new medium. — Rosanne Welch
The Women is a 1939 American comedy-drama film directed by George Cukor. The film is based on Clare Boothe Luce’s play of the same name, and was adapted for the screen by Anita Loos and Jane Murfin, who had to make the film acceptable for the Production Code for it to be released.
The film stars Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell, Paulette Goddard, Joan Fontaine, Lucile Watson, Mary Boland, Florence Nash, and Virginia Grey, as well as Marjorie Main and Phyllis Povah, the last two of whom reprised their stage roles from the play. Ruth Hussey, Virginia Weidler, Butterfly McQueen, and Hedda Hopperalso appeared in smaller roles. Fontaine was the last surviving actress with a credited role in the film; she died in 2013.
The film continued the play’s all-female tradition—the entire cast of more than 130 speaking roles was female. Set in the glamorous Manhattan apartments of high society evoked by Cedric Gibbons, and in Reno, Nevada, where they obtain their divorces, it presents an acidic commentary on the pampered lives and power struggles of various rich, bored wives and other women they come into contact with. — Wikipedia
* 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
You’ll notice in this particular poster it’s Frank Capra’s film and we have to really down here to see who wrote the movie right? Who broke the movie is this marvelous couple Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, a married couple who wrote for 50 years together. They wrote the play and the film version of The Diary of Anne Frank. They won a Pulitzer Prize for that. Capra never won a Pulitzer Prize. Why is that Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life? Explain that to me. I don’t like that. They also adapted the Thin Man films which were highly successful and there’s a book about them which is lovely but much less read than the biography of Frank Capra. There is a Capra story that I tell my students it may be anecdotal but Robert Riskin — who wrote many of Capra’s best films and won Academy Awards in his life — was said to have heard often Frank Capra say “I have the Capra touch”. It makes the movies beautiful and one day Riskin handed in 200 blank pages said put your fucking touch on that! Excuse the Americanism but seriously Riskin in the man who made all those films. Why is it we are not talking about him?
* 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
Another wonderful and well-detailed review of When Women Wrote Hollywood came out today, written by film historian Elaine Lennon and appearing in Offscreen, the longest running monthly online film journal.
This new collection of 24 essays on women screenwriters offers fascinating insights into early Hollywood and beyond. Editor Rosanne Welch (herself a screenwriter) set her Stephens College MFA History of Screenwriting students a task: to outline the achievements of those screenwriters who have been systematically erased from the majority of film studies. The foreword by film historian Cari Beauchamp sets the tone in the first sentence, reminding us that “almost half of all films made before 1925 were written by women” (1). This volume is a sparky assemblage which not only acts as a corrective to conventional screenwriting historiography, it highlights careers which were multi-faceted, wide-ranging and virtually Renaissance in their scope.
* 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
To highlight the wonderful yet largely forgotten work of a collection of female screenwriters from the early years of Hollywood (and as a companion to the book, When Women Wrote Hollywood) we will be posting quick bits about the many films they wrote along with links to further information and clips from their works which are still accessible online. Take a few moments once or twice a week to become familiar with their names and their stories. I think you’ll be surprised at how much bold material these writers tackled at the birth of this new medium. — Rosanne Welch
Jane Murfin (October 27, 1884 – August 10, 1955) was an American playwright and screenwriter. The author of several successful plays, she wrote some of them with actress Jane Cowl—most notably Smilin’ Through (1919), a sentimental fantasy that was adapted three times for motion pictures. In Hollywood Murfin became a popular screenwriter whose credits include What Price Hollywood? (1932), for which she received an Academy Award nomination. In the 1920s she wrote and produced films for her dog Strongheart, the first major canine star. — Wikipedia
* 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
You’ll notice in this particular poster it’s Frank Capra’s film and we have to really down here to see who wrote the movie right? Who broke the movie is this marvelous couple Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich, a married couple who wrote for 50 years together. They wrote the play and the film version of The Diary of Anne Frank. They won a Pulitzer Prize for that. Capra never won a Pulitzer Prize. Why is that Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life? Explain that to me. I don’t like that. They also adapted the Thin Man films which were highly successful and there’s a book about them which is lovely but much less read than the biography of Frank Capra. There is a Capra story that I tell my students it may be anecdotal but Robert Riskin — who wrote many of Capra’s best films and won Academy Awards in his life — was said to have heard often Frank Capra say “I have the Capra touch”. It makes the movies beautiful and one day Riskin handed in 200 blank pages said put your fucking touch on that! Excuse the Americanism but seriously Riskin in the man who made all those films. Why is it we are not talking about him?
* 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
![05 Writing and Directing from Why I Created a History of Screenwriting Course [Video] (0:44)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/srn-rmw-2018-05.jpeg)
![04 The “A Film By” Problem from Why I Created a History of Screenwriting Course [Video] (0:52)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/srn-rmw-2018-04.jpeg)
![03 The “Capra Touch” from Why I Created a History of Screenwriting Course [Video] (1:08)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/srn-rmw-2018-03.jpeg)
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