Women – Page 35 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 20: Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir by Sheri Chinen Biesen

Months of research went into the creation of the essays in “When Women Wrote Hollywood.” Here are some of the resources used to enlighten today’s film lovers to the female pioneers who helped create it.

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 20: Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir by Sheri Chinen Biesen

Challenging conventional scholarship placing the origins of film noir in postwar Hollywood, Sheri Chinen Biesen finds the genre’s roots firmly planted in the political, social, and material conditions of Hollywood during the war. After Pearl Harbor, America and Hollywood experienced a sharp cultural transformation that made horror, shock, and violence not only palatable but preferable. Hard times necessitated cheaper sets, fewer lights, and fresh talent; censors as well as the movie-going public showed a new tolerance for sex and violence; and female producers experienced newfound prominence in the industry.

Biesen brings prodigious archival research, accessible prose, and imaginative insights to both well-known films noir of the wartime period―The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and Double Indemnity―and others often overlooked or underrated―Scarlet Street, Ministry of Fear, Phantom Lady, and Stranger on the Third Floor.

Read more

Buy “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Today!

†

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

Help Support Local Bookstores — Buy at Bookshop.org

* 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 Amelia Edwards from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 7 seconds)

Watch this entire presentation

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

I presented this holiday lecture “When Women Write Horror” on Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. Researching the many, many women who have written horror stories – in novels, films and television – brought new names to my attention who I am excited to start reading. I hope you will be, too!

Transcript:

Now this woman really fascinated me. Amelia Edwards. She is known again for travel writing. She traveled the world and that was very fascinating. It’s what she published and got more fame for but in fact, she published ghost stories and there’s a whole collection of her supernatural and weird stories that was just put out again in 2009. So we’re having a Renaissance of looking at women as writers and thinking about the material they put out so many years ago. So I think that’s fascinating. What’s double fascinating. Women have been hidden in history as we know. Women have been hidden in the history of literature. Also, LGBTQ people have been hidden in the history of our actual public life and our literature. Turns out Emilia traveled the world with a widowed friend who never bothered to get married a second time and the two women were companions and did not ask for a male escort which was proper in the day for women to travel with a man to protect them and when they died they were buried side by side in this graveyard.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Women’s History Month 31: Mary Walker

Mary Walker

A surgeon for the Union during the American Civil War and the only woman to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor, Mary Edwards Walker was born on November 26, 1832, in Oswego Town, New York. Her parents, Vesta Whitcomb and Alvah Walker, held 25 acres of land on which they grew fruits and vegetables for market. The family also kept a library for all five of their daughters to use. As a youth, Walker was interested in Spiritualism and supported abolition, temperance, and women’s rights, including suffrage.

Learn more about Mary Walker

Learn about more Women In History with these encyclopedia from Dr. Rosanne Welch and Dr. Peg Lamphier

† †

* 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

03 About Stephens College MFA from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (34 seconds)

Watch this entire presentation

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

Transcript:

My college is actually in the state of Missouri but we are what is called low residency. So students come to Los Angeles and the picture on the bottom is the Jim Henson Studio in Los Angeles and this is where the students come for workshops twice a year. You’ll see Kermit standing on top. Before Kermit this was the Charlie Chaplin studio founded in 1917 and was never torn down. So it is the original buildings that Charlie Chaplin did all his work in and now we do it with our students. So I you can see the difference in Missouri is quite far away from California.

A Note About This Presentation

A clip from my keynote speech at the 10th Screenwriters´(hi)Stories Seminar for the interdisciplinary Graduation Program in “Education, Art, and History of Culture”, in Mackenzie Presbyterian University, at São Paulo, SP, Brazil, focused on the topic “Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered.” I was especially pleased with the passion these young scholars have toward screenwriting and it’s importance in transmitting culture across the man-made borders of our world.

To understand the world we have to understand its stories and to understand the world’s stories we must understand the world’s storytellers. A century ago and longer those people would have been the novelists of any particular country but since the invention of film, the storytellers who reach the most people with their ideas and their lessons have been the screenwriters. My teaching philosophy is that: Words matter, Writers matter, and Women writers matte, r so women writers are my focus because they have been the far less researched and yet they are over half the population. We cannot tell the stories of the people until we know what stories the mothers have passed down to their children. Those are the stories that last. Now is the time to research screenwriters of all cultures and the stories they tell because people are finally recognizing the work of writers and appreciating how their favorite stories took shape on the page long before they were cast, or filmed, or edited. But also because streaming services make the stories of many cultures now available to a much wider world than ever before.

Many thanks to Glaucia Davino for the invitation.

* 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

Women’s History Month 30: Ellen Craft

Ellen Craft

Ellen Craft was a fugitive slave made famous by the daring escape she and her husband William Craft (1824–1900) made in December 1848. Ellen, disguised as an infirm and sickly slaveholding gentleman, and her husband William, posing as a slave servant, traveled from the slaveholding state of Georgia to freedom in Philadelphia. So widely publicized was their escape that the Crafts became world- renowned spokespersons for abolitionism.

Learn more about Ellen Craft

Learn about more Women In History with these encyclopedia from Dr. Rosanne Welch and Dr. Peg Lamphier

† †

* 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

Women’s History Month 29: Margaretta Forten

Margaretta Forten

Margaretta Forten was instrumental in founding the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, an influential local chapter of abolitionist and journalist William Lloyd Garrison’s American Anti-Slavery Society, and served as an active member and frequent officer of the society during its entire 37-year history.

Forten was the daughter of free blacks James and Charlotte Vandine Forten. The Fortens were staunch abolitionists, and their children spent much of their time attending abolitionist meetings while they were growing up. The family also entertained prominent abolitionists and moral reformers in their home. After one such visit, poet John Greenleaf Whittier was so taken with the family that he wrote a poem titled “To the Daughters of James Forten.”

Learn more about Margaretta Forten

Learn about more Women In History with these encyclopedia from Dr. Rosanne Welch and Dr. Peg Lamphier

† †

* 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

Listen to the latest “How I Wrote That” Podcast with Screenwriter Deborah Starr Seibel from Sisters and 21 Jump Street

Subscribe to the Podcast with iTunes | TuneIn

Listen to this episode

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Deborah Starr Seibel is a multiple award-winning journalist and screenwriter. For the past eight years, she has been an instructor at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts in the John Wells Division of Writing for Film & Television. In addition, she serves as a mentor for Stephens College’s MFA in Screenwriting program. In prime time television, Deborah recently sold two pilots to CBS and is credited with four years on staff. During those years, she wrote six episodes for the final season of NBC’s Sisters and spent three additional years on the staff of Promised Land, the spin-off to CBS’s Touched By An Angel. She has also written episodes for Mysterious Ways and 21 Jump Street.

As a television reporter, Deborah won a George Foster Peabody award for investigative journalism, two Emmy Awards and First Place from the Associated Press for one of her documentaries. As a print journalist, she has written for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Parade and USA Today. In addition, she is a long-time national correspondent for TV Guide.

In 2010, Deborah was awarded a USC Annenberg Fellowship to receive her Master’s Degree in Specialized Journalism/The Arts.

“If there isn’t a kernel of truth you shouldn’t be writing. You get to know the people in a writers’ room better than your family, because you have to bring yourself, your stories, your history, your family experience into that room or you have nothing to contribute because nobody on this planet has lived the life you’ve lived and if you don’t bring that into the writers’ room, what good are you? What we are as artists are people who are trying to allow other people to feel that they are not alone.”” Deborah Starr Seibel

Presented by Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

Visit the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting for more information.

Follow @StephensMFA on Instagram

Follow and Like the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

Women’s History Month 28: Aretha Franklin

Aretha Franklin

Singer, songwriter, and the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Aretha Louise Franklin was born on March 25, 1942, in Memphis, Tennessee. The fourth of five children, Aretha Franklin was raised in Detroit, Michigan, where her father was the head of the congregation of the New Bethel Baptist Church. Often in the presence of popular singers, both gospel and secular, she was influenced by performers such as Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, and Dinah Washington. Gospel great Mahalia Jackson was also a visitor to the Franklin household. Franklin was first recorded as a gospel artist at age 14.

Learn more about Aretha Franklin

Learn about more Women In History with these encyclopedia from Dr. Rosanne Welch and Dr. Peg Lamphier

† †

* 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

Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting Alumni, Sahar Jahani, Interviewed in Voyage LA Magazine

Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting alum Sahar Jahani recently sat for an interview with Voyage LA magazine. Check it out and join our fall 2020 cohort to put yourself on the road to your screenwriting future.

Write. Reach. Represent.

Today we’d like to introduce you to Sahar Jahani.

Sahar, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I am first generation Iranian-American and come from a Muslim family, so it took me a while to realize that this career was even a possibility. If you can’t see it, it’s hard to believe you can also do it. By that, I mean that I didn’t know any other Muslims or Iranians who worked in Hollywood even though I grew up twenty minutes from all the studios. I remember driving by the Disney Animation building on the 134 freeway on my way to school every day and just think it was the coolest place in the world. But for me, it felt unattainable.

Ten years later, I’m having meetings there all the time. I was always interested in storytelling from a young age. My sister and I would put on plays for my family and I developed an interest in photography in high school, but I never considered film as a career until I was in college. I had planned to become a journalist because that was the closest thing to film that I could consider a tangible career. But when I started school at UC Irvine and began interning at different newspapers, I realized how much journalism was changing in an era of digital media.

Read the entire article – Meet Sahar Jahani

Visit the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting for more information.

Follow @StephensMFA on Instagram

Follow and Like the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 19: Algonquin Round Table Web Site

“Don’t think I’m not incoheret.” — Harold Ross

This site is an extension of the research for The Algonquin Round Table New York: A Historical Guide by Kevin C. Fitzpatrick, foreword by Anthony Melchiorri. Published by Lyons Press, Hardcover, Dec. 2014, ISBN: 978-1-4930-0757-8.

“That is the thing about New York,” wrote Dorothy Parker in 1928. “It is always a little more than you had hoped for. Each day, there, is so definitely a new day.”

Now you can journey back there, in time, to a grand city teeming with hidden bars, luxurious theaters, and dazzling skyscrapers.

Read more

Buy “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Today!

†

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

Help Support Local Bookstores — Buy at Bookshop.org

* 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