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
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
“When Gauntier’s name is mentioned, it is commonly associated with great directors, companies, actresses, actors, producers, screenplays, and films. Gauntier was truly a pioneer in the motion picture world at its outset.”
Gene Gauntier: Ascending by Drowning Yasser Shahin
* 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
Script Magazine publishes the “Understanding Screenwriting” column by historian Tom Stempel (author of Framework: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film). In this post Mr. Stempel reviews our book “When Women Wrote Hollywood.”
The review is the last thing in the column, so you will have to scroll down to it – but it’s well worth it – as it is well worth reading his reviews of the several films he writes about in the front matter of the article. — Rosanne
Rosanne Welch is a television writer who also teaches screenwriting at a variety of places. One of her gigs is handling the Los Angeles residency for screenwriting courses offered at Stephens College in Missouri. The students come out to L.A. a couple of times a year, where they get lectures from people connected to the business. One assignment that Welch has her students do is research papers on screenwriters of the past. This book is a collection of those papers, 23 by her students and one by Welch.
Stephens used to be an all-women’s college, but it now takes male students. The preponderance of its students are female, so all of the essays, including two by male students, are about women screenwriters in the early days of Hollywood. Some writers, like Anita Loos, you have probably heard of. Many of them you probably have not.
I was particularly taken by Amelia Phillips’s piece on Jeanie Macpherson. I wrote briefly about Macpherson in my book FrameWork: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film(1988), but one reviewer gave me a hard time for not mentioning that she was Cecil B. De Mille’s mistress. He seemed to think that disqualified her as a writer. Phillips starts out in the first paragraph by noting that Macpherson was only one of De Mille’s three long-time mistresses and has credits on a lot more than just De Mille’s films.
Several of the pieces, such as the ones on Zoe Atkins and Bella Spewack, note that they worked in both the theatre and film, which was a lot more common than is generally assumed about the early days of movies.
Welch takes her students to the Margaret Herrick Library of the Motion Picture Academy and some get into the archives in depth. Others, such as the people writing on Anita Loos and Dorothy Parker, depend mostly on memoirs and biographies. Then there is Pamela Scott, who found very little material on Sarah Y. Mason, the wife and co-writer of Victor Heerman, but was able to follow her connections with other people to give a nice little view of Mason’s career.
Like virtually every other book that is a collection of essays by different writers, the quality varies a lot, but there is enough good stuff to make it worth your while.
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
Watching several current and alumni students of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting who shared their research on female screenwriters with professional presentations at the Citizen Jane Film Festival in a panel titled: Frank and Funny Female Screenwriters Who Should Be More Famous”. @citizenjanefilmfestival
“At the height of her career, “Weber would receive an annual salary amounting to $5,000 per week, making her the highest-paid director in Hollywood” (Stamp 148). So how did a modest girl from Allegheny, Pennsylvania become the highest paid director, male or female, in Hollywood? Like many successful creative people, their stories begin with an eventful childhood.”
* 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
The goal of our program and the goal of the book in general is to remind people that there was a time in Hollywood when 50% of the writers and producers were women and that was in the silent and the early Hollywood era and then they were all sort of wiped away and what happened was now we think oh can women do that? women did it in droves just a hundred years ago .It was a lot of research for all the different contributors many of who came from Columbia Missouri and it was because a lot of these women don’t have books written about them. They had to look through newspaper archives.They had to look through the Library of Congress. They — you know we could check the internet but the Internet’s not your perfect source for anything. It took a lot of time about six months for everyone to get enough research to be able to write and then the book itself took two years to go through the editing production and then produced available today. I have been a fan of very famous women from the past and Anita Loos, Adela Rodgers St. John. I’ve read their books. I’d seen them on television when I was a child doing talk shows and I thought how fascinating their lives had been and yet I never saw them in the history books that I was given about Hollywood. They always talked about the men. They never talked about the women who done that work and I wanted to create a program and a course that would allow other women to learn how many women had come before them.
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
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![Frank and Funny: Female Screenwriters Who Should Be More Famous from Citizen Jane Film Festival 2018 [Video] (1:15:00)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/cjff-2018-mfa-presentations.png)
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