Read From High School Teaching to Writing the First Screenwriting Bible: Marguerite Bertsch
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Category: Women
Hobnobbing with Her Fellow Writers (and Wizards) Across the Decades – The Screenwriting Career of Florence Ryerson – Dr. Rosanne Welch, Script Magazine, April 2024
Writing Successful Films into her 60s? Zelda Sears Did It! – Dr. Rosanne Welch, Script Magazine, March 2024
So Much More than Merely Her Chocolate Cake Recipe – Dr. Rosanne Welch, Script Magazine, February 2024
Between Broadway and Hollywood: The Screenwriting Career of Ketty Frings – Dr. Rosanne Welch, Script Magazine, January 2024
Great New Autobiography to add to your list – Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury by Drew Gilpin Faust [Books]
I was introduced to historian Drew Gilpin Faust’s books in my PhD program and learned so much (about writing, women’s involvement in the Civil War, and cultural shifts) from her This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War…
…that I was excited to read her new autobiography, Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury
As expected, I learned so much – she was born in Virginia to (sadly) racist parents but chose Northern schools to teach herself the opposite of their ways – ended up at the march in Selma and became friends with John Lewis — the book title comes from his famous phrase which she asked his permission to use.
My Mom always said you learn more from autobiographies than from fictional books. Though I still read copious amounts of both kinds, she was right in that the real-life details I’ve collected from autobiographies have stayed in my mind longer than much of my other reading.
And if you don’t know the story of how Gilpin Faust became the first female president of Harvard University – check it out:
Drew Gilpin Faust, the First Female Harvard President, Was Nicknamed ‘Chainsaw Drew’
Essentially, previous president Lawrence H. Summers was forced out for saying that “intrinsic” gender differences accounted for the lack of women in science (in other words there weren’t a lot of women in science and math departments because ‘girls aren’t good at math’) so they appointed Faust the immediate interim pres while they looked for a new one – and after 18 months of looking it suddenly occurred to them that she’d been doing the job for… 18 months so why not make her the permanent new pres? She held the gig for 11 years and “generated what might be considered the opposite kind of controversy: She was too PC, her critics griped — during her time, the number of tenured female faculty rose by 47 percent.”
Before Peanuts, Alice Guy Blaché Presented the First True Meaning of Christmas Film – Dr. Rosanne Welch, Script Magazine, December 2023
Though she never wrote a horror film, to celebrate Halloween this month’s focus is screenwriter, poet, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Zoe Akins, born on October 30, 1886. In 1935 Akins would become the third woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the highest honor for a Broadway play in the United States, after Zona Gale (1921) and Susan Glaspell (1931). Akins’ win came from her dramatization of Edith Wharton’s The Old Maid. Four years later the play was adapted by Casey Robinson into a film starring Bette Davis, even though Akins had begun adapting plays and turning out her own screenplays in the early 1930s. Throughout her career, she collaborated with some of the most important women both behind and in front of the cameras which has kept her work in the public eye.
Read Before Peanuts, Alice Guy Blaché Presented the First True Meaning of Christmas Film
Read about more women from early Hollywood
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From Silents to Talkies to TV Lenore J. Coffee Did It All – Dr. Rosanne Welch, Script Magazine, November 2023
Though she never wrote a horror film, to celebrate Halloween this month’s focus is screenwriter, poet, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Zoe Akins, born on October 30, 1886. In 1935 Akins would become the third woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the highest honor for a Broadway play in the United States, after Zona Gale (1921) and Susan Glaspell (1931). Akins’ win came from her dramatization of Edith Wharton’s The Old Maid. Four years later the play was adapted by Casey Robinson into a film starring Bette Davis, even though Akins had begun adapting plays and turning out her own screenplays in the early 1930s. Throughout her career, she collaborated with some of the most important women both behind and in front of the cameras which has kept her work in the public eye.
Read From Silents to Talkies to TV Lenore J. Coffee Did It All
Read about more women from early Hollywood
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Poems, Plays, Pulitzers: Screenwriter Zoe Akins Did it All – Dr. Rosanne Welch, Script Magazine, October 2023
Though she never wrote a horror film, to celebrate Halloween this month’s focus is screenwriter, poet, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Zoe Akins, born on October 30, 1886. In 1935 Akins would become the third woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, the highest honor for a Broadway play in the United States, after Zona Gale (1921) and Susan Glaspell (1931). Akins’ win came from her dramatization of Edith Wharton’s The Old Maid. Four years later the play was adapted by Casey Robinson into a film starring Bette Davis, even though Akins had begun adapting plays and turning out her own screenplays in the early 1930s. Throughout her career, she collaborated with some of the most important women both behind and in front of the cameras which has kept her work in the public eye.
Read Poems, Plays, Pulitzers: Screenwriter Zoe Akins Did it All
Read about more women from early Hollywood
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Applications Now Open – Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting for Fall 2024
We’re excited to have opened the window for applications to our Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting’s Fall 2024 cohort.
While we have rolling admissions until all seats in the new cohort are filled. If potential MFA candidates submit materials by March 30th and suit the criteria they will be in contention for our Jan Marino Scholarship (for a woman writer 45 or older).
Check out our new video with interviews with our most recent grads:
Inquire for more information on the program
or
Apply Now
Being a low residency program means you travel to Hollywood for 10 days at the beginning of each semester (once in August/once in January) for a workshop experience worth 3 units. We hold workshops at the historic Jim Henson Studios (originally the Charlie Chaplin Studios) in Hollywood, California.
Each semester students will take 3 courses after the workshop. They have one mentor for a television script and one mentor for a screenplay. The television mentors change each semester because in Fall semester you write a spec script/in Spring a pilot; the screenplay mentor is onboard for the whole year, as the Fall semester is all about developing an outline and writing Act One of the screenplay, and in the spring semester you complete and revise the script. Our instructors are all chosen because they are working writers and members of the Writers Guild of America (WGA).
In year two, there’s a second screenplay written (with a different mentor) and a thesis project, which can be anything from a web series to a limited series pilot and bible to a group of short films to an actual written thesis.
Our History of Screenwriting Courses are taught with a female gaze. Taught by our Executive Director so she can stay in touch with MFA candidates across their 2 years in the program. In the course, students read texts and view films each week that feature female-focused stories, and then post responses to the material. At the end of each semester, students turn in a profile of a screenwriter.
In 2017, 22 of these profiles written by MFA students were compiled into the book WHEN WOMEN WROTE HOLLYWOOD, published by McFarland Press.
If you are a writer looking to move your material to the next level so it will secure you a spot in the industry – or a college educator who wants a graduate degree to move up in the academic world – then our program is perfect for you.
Join us in Fall 2024 in Hollywood!
