Women – Page 6 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

02 Who was Jeanne Macpherson? From Jeanne to Suso to Julie to Spike: How Jeanne Macpherson’s Manual on Screenwriting Influenced Italian Realism which Influenced Black Independent Film in the U.S. [Video]

Transcript:

So we’ll start back with Jeanne McPherson. This is Jeannie McPherson and yes that’s a picture of her with Cecil B Demille. So this is mostly where you see her photographs in the world. She was also an aviator and several years ago at a conference, I saw a marvelous presentation on how women are always there at the beginning of a new thing like the Wild West and women aviators in America and all over the world were doing flying until it became a job that made money and then suddenly women couldn’t be hired to fly anymore and you had to have had experience in the military, where they hadn’t allowed women to fly. So suddenly you couldn’t be a pilot anymore and certainly couldn’t be an astronaut until they broke that rule. So same thing happened in early Hollywood. All these women are working like crazy and then suddenly it becomes the system and they’re all slowly petered out. Often it was because the movie Moguls offered them new contracts – after 20 years of working as screenwriters and being their own directors and casting – they were offered contracts as Junior writers to work with men who would teach them how to do it and to that they said: “I’m going home and writing my own novel.” So they and they didn’t know that by doing that they pulled themselves out of the history and therefore we’re archaeologically discovering all of them.

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At the recent Screenwriting Research Network conference in Vienna, I gave this talk titled “From Jeanne to Suso to Julie to Spike: How Jeanne Macpherson’s Manual on Screenwriting Influenced Italian Realism which Influenced Black Independent Film in the U.S.”

In the talk, I trace the ways a manual about screenwriting by silent film writer Jeanne Macpherson influenced Suso Cecchi d’Amici who began to utilize Macpherson’s ideas and became the queen of Italian neorealism screenwriting in Europe. Then those Italian neo-realist screenwriters in turn inspired the Los Angeles School of Black Independent Film Makers (the L.A. School). In turn, such as Charles Burnett, Billy Woodberry, Haile Gerima, and Julie Dash and their ideas fueled Spike Lee. Finally, when he became the first Black man to head the jury at the Cannes Film Festival (where Suso had once served) his choice of films influenced yet another generation of screenwriters.

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14 More On Writer Vs. Director from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

There is a classic Robert Riskin story. He’s the guy who wrote all the Frank Capra movies and it’s and anecdotal – the idea that one day he got so mad about the “Capra Touch.” They handed in 200 blank pages and he said ‘Go ahead. Put your touch on that.” Because you can’t direct nothing, right? So there’s a lot of reasons why in the Forties-ish we start getting these celebrity directors and the problem with teaching directors as the heads of their movies is that, largely, they were men. So we’re teaching the great, male history of the world again when many of those stories were written by women.

The Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting is building a relationship with the Autry Museum of the American West since both organizations are devoted to bringing out more diverse and untold stories. Last year we were able to take our cohort of graduating MFA candidates to the museum’s theatre for a showing of Michael Wilson’s Salt of the Earth and we had plans to present a film of our choice this year – but of course the pandemic changed all that. Instead, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis asked me if I would sit for an interview about female screenwriters in the western genre and so “When Women Wrote Westerns” came to be a part of their “What Is a Western? Interview Series”.

I had a great time discussing so many wonderful women writers – from Jeanne MacPherson to D.C. Fontana to Edna Ferber to Emily Andras. If you love westerns I suggest you watch Josh’s other interviews covering everything from the work of Native Americans in Western movies to films in the western-horror hybrid. —

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As part of a series exploring the significance of the Western genre and the ways in which the movies shape our understanding of the American West, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis interviews Professor Rosanne Welch about the women screenwriters of Hollywood and their contributions to the Western genre.

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01 Introduction From Jeanne to Suso to Julie to Spike: How Jeanne Macpherson’s Manual on Screenwriting Influenced Italian Realism which Influenced Black Independent Film in the U.S. [Video]

Transcript:

…The woman I’m going to start with is Jeannie McPherson who is also a famous silent film screenwriter of that period. As famous as Marion was in her own day. Forgotten much in the history books because she wrote for Cecil B. Demille. She wrote all the films that he made that made money. She was also one of his three mistresses and so textbooks tell you she was his mistress and they forget the part where she wrote the movies that made him money. Yes. So I love Jeannie and I borrowed this title from this play which I love “Vanyan and Sonya and Masha and Spike.” It just seemed to suit me perfectly but I wanted to credit the author. I did not make up the title. I’m Rosanne Welch. I am working with Stephens College which is in Missouri but we run our MFA programs in Los Angeles. So it confuses everybody because I live in LA. I don’t live in Missouri. Our theme of our program is Write, Reach and Represent which of course suits everything that everyone’s been talking about today. I’m very excited about that. My background is that I came from being a television screenwriter and wrote on all these shows and then came into Academia and was like how are people learning how to do this because not everybody’s very good at it and then I’ve written on these various Books. Thank you for mentioning “When Women Wrote Hollywood” which has chapters on Jeannie and many of these other women we can talk about. I also am the book review editor for “The Journal Of Screenwriting” so if you want to review a book – you have a book that needs reviewing – let me know because we always need more reviews all right. So that’s a good thing and we’re here doing Global Screenwriting.

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From Jeanne to Suso to Julie to Spike: How Jeanne Macpherson’s Manual on Screenwriting Influenced Italian Realism which Influenced Black Independent Film in the U.S. (Complete)

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Dr. Rosanne Welch at the beach in Stazzo, Italy via Instagram [Photography]

The accidental pose reminds me of the Venus de Milo.

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Emma Thompson on Adapting “Sense and Sensibility”

On one of my strolls through YouTube, I went down the rabbit hole of wonderful interviews with screenwriter Emma Thompson and landed on this “Making of” Sense and Sensibility.

While it is fun to hear about the casting and the costuming, the best part (naturally) is near the end.

In “Adapting Austen” they discuss choosing the (at that time) relatively unknown-in-the-States Emma Thompson to adapt the novel and then the segment goes over her process in writing the film.

Producer Lindsay Doran had seen some of Thompson’s UK sketch comedy show (then airing on PBS) and knew her favorite novel would need a writer who understood that Austen was funny in her comments about the societal rules she and her sisters were forced to abide.

No surprise Thompson asked for adaptation advice from Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, who had adapted Howard’s End, the film Thompson was then acting in (and which would lead to her 1993 Oscar for Best Actress.

Creative women helping other creative women for the win!

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13 Writer Precedes Director from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

Host: Usually the directors become the heroes of film history. What’s different between the history of screenwriters and the history of directors or actors or actresses in what gets remembered?

Rosanne: Of course. We always grant you that people go first to see an actor or an actress. They fall for that person. That’s who they are going to see the movie for. That’s just the truth. The whole writer-director thing makes me crazy. Back in the day, they recognized writers more. Writers were in “Photoplay” magazine when they had marriages or they were taking vacations. We read about people like Lorna Moon and Anita Loos, obviously. All these people and then what happens is the “Auteur Theory” shows up and the “Auteur Theory” blows us away because François Truffaut over there in France decides directors are the real author of a movie. Even though they don’t write anything unless they’re writer/directors and I always tell my students the word Writer still comes before Director in that phrase.a

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12 LGBTQIA+ in The West from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

…and then really in the very modern-day what I think is really interesting is there’s a show on Sci-Fi called “Wynonna Earp” and it’s out of Canada. So we have a Canadian, Emily Andrus, and so female writer. She’s taking a western icon, Wyatt Earp and she’s flipping it and giving his great-granddaughter the job of using his big rifle – which is called Peacemaker – and killing the ghosts of all the bad guys that Wyatt Earp was once up against because they come back. All right? So oh what a flip of our story, right? I think that’s a really cool and people sort of dismiss it but it also has a really lovely LGBTQ storyline because they give Wynonna a sister who’s gay and she and the sheriff – who’s a girl – are a partnership and you’re like whoa – girl Sheriff having a relationship. The whole thing is like so all this new stuff and yet there’s a really cool book called “Roaring Camp.” It’s about the Gold Rush by Susan Johnson. Using primary documents she documented all these people who truly lived in the Gold Rush and I remember this great team of two men who ran a restaurant for like 40 years together and they lived together. Of course, there’s no paperwork that says they were a couple because nobody’s going to write that down in the day but you know that’s what was going on. It’s like all these people occupied the west and we don’t talk about them and for whatever reason, maybe because women are forgotten a lot, they also like to look for those other forgotten stories and bring them to life. So I think Emily’s a pretty cool person and I’m really interested in a Canadian looking at American history. Very interesting.

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11 Edna Ferber from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

I think we sometimes have to think about women who wrote western novels which were then adapted by men but the core characters are going to have come from the female perspective. So for me, that’s Edna Ferber and it’s always weird that she wrote you know “So Big” and “Cimarron” and “Giant” which is a huge sprawling thing and she’s an easterner. She’s a member of the Algonquin Round Table. She hangs around with you know Harpo Marx and you know Alexander Wolcott and she’s doing all that witty New York stuff but she’s writing about this period. Which is to me reminiscent of the fact that Teddy Roosevelt right is just a straight New Yorker but he comes out here and becomes I’m the West dude and I’m gonna do all that stuff. So anyone can claim to sort of own the West because it becomes our American Myth and everybody wants to be tied to that. Which is why I think Edna Ferb is someone I think you should read.

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10 Women Writing Westerns from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

Host: When you look at all of the histories and biographies that you learned about of women screenwriters are there a couple in particular that you wish more people knew? Maybe these are some of the ones you’ve mentioned already, but are there a couple that you just want to sort of shout from the rooftops? This is a classic. This is a person who should be on the marquee.

Rosanne: Oh, yeah. Well, obviously I did mention Frances Marion. She wrote a series of westerns for her husband, Fred Thomson, who was a western star, right? He was right up there rivaling William S. Hart moving into the talkie world. The problem is he died young and when he died she lost her interest in writing westerns because, of course, it was too reminiscent of him. They were right up there with Pickford and Fairbanks except they were a writer/actor team. So I think that Frances Marion is someone who people have to look more into. I love Jeannie MacPherson and she wrote several westerns. Always about a woman going out west and having experiences and surviving the West. Which is really a western story. A lone person – doesn’t have to be a boy or a girl – a long person challenges themselves and succeeds. So I think she is a really big name.

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