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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!
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Months of research when 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.
* 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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This one allowed me to riff on some of my favorite female science fiction writers across time, whether they be novelists or television writers. It also opened up a good conversation on what art we support and include in our lives – and what that art says to us and about us. — Rosanne
Transcript:
The other thing that’s cool about her — well she’s written many books — but Kindred is my favorite. A little chat about that from last week. She wanted to talk about race and she wanted to figure out a way to do that. So she chose the time-travel story and she took a modern-day African-American woman who without explanation — sort of like Narnia where they stumble into a wardrobe and bam they’re in a kingdom — we don’t need to know the machinations of how the time travel works. We don’t need to put dials in a car and drive the DeLorean down the street. We just walk into a room and oh my god now we’re in pre Civil War south and she’s a woman of African descent and she’s got to deal with now I’m in a place where they’re slaves and now she ends up being on the plantation where her ancestors were held in slavery and she comes up with you know drama. You want the big choice, the big question. She discovers that the way she could get back to her own future is she has to save the life of the plantation owner who owns her family on time for him to rape her great-great grandmother or she won’t exist yeah. There’s there’s a moral decision you gotta make in your lives right? But that’s a really fascinating and of course it allows her to have a discussion about what we don’t talk about in classrooms about the reality of slavery right? So this is a really fascinating book. It’s a one-off book. That’s good. She’s got a lot of you know series books so you can get involved in her writing and be busy for a while. That’s a great book to start with though. So I think Octavia Butler is of good attention for us.
* 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!
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Transcript:
Dorothy and her husband Alan Campbell wrote A Star Is Born which if you know obviously the story is about a marriage where the woman is far more famous than the man. His career is going while hers is rising. That’s Dorothy Parker and her husband’s story. That’s exactly the emotion she was experiencing. She just put it on an actor and actress. It became such a classic it was remade in the 50s with Julia my brain just went dead. Thank you. Judy Garland. I was saying Julianne and that was wrong. Judy Garland. Thank you and it was written this was adapted by Moss Hart who’s a famous name from Broadway. He wrote it himself however he credited several scenes from the original movie he’d just cut and pasted them out of the first script and put them in his and admitted that when he was doing it. So whenever he got notes from the studio that they wanted to change something he would say “No no no. That’s how Parker had it the first time. It’s good enough. We’re not fixing it.” So essentially it’s Moss Hart and Dorothy Parker together right?
Dr. Rosanne Welch discusses the women in her new book “When Women Wrote Hollywood” which covers female screenwriters from the Silents through the early 1940s when women wrote over 50% of films and Frances Marion was the highest paid screenwriter (male or female) and the first to win 2 Oscars. Yet, she fails to appear in film history books, which continue to regurgitate the myth that male directors did it all – even though it’s been proven that the only profitable movies Cecil B. de Mille ever directed were all written by Jeannie Macpherson film ever won for Best Picture was written by Robert E. Sherwood (who people have heard of, mostly due to his connection to Dorothy Parker) and Joan Harrison.
* 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
Moderating panels at local film festivals is a good way to highlight the great work of mentors like Maria Escobedo and to meet new possible mentors for MFA program like Peruvian filmmaker Donna Bonilla Wheeler. Here we are chatting after a panel on how Writers Can avoid implicit bias in their work at the DTLA film Festival in Los Angeles.
Zoë Akins is described as “a perplexing figure in the history of American theatre” by historian Yvonne Shafer (58). Akins was a poet, novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. Despite many successful publications, productions, films, and a Pulitzer Prize, she is not considered an obvious success. In creative fields dominated by the male perspective, her female-centric work failed to find acclaim with critics.
* 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
![When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch (Complete) - Cal Poly Pomona University Library [Video] (36 minutes)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/rmw-cpp-horror.jpeg)
![24 Octavia Butler’s Kindred from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 25 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/scifi-rmw-cpp-24.jpeg)
![26 Dorothy Parker and A Star Is Born from “When Women Wrote Hollywood” with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (55 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/csuf-rmw-w3h-26.jpeg)
