This new “A Woman Wrote That” post is an echo of the Writers Guild campaign of a few years ago (“A Writer Wrote That”) where they noted famous movie quotes and credited the screenwriter rather than the director. The difference here being that we will be posting lines from films written by female screenwriters. Feel free to share! — Rosanne
On the hillside, the same loneliness had filled Aninha Ribeiro da Silva for most of her young life. She had ridden to the bluff that morning in order to see for herself the ships of this glorious rebel navy, come to create a new nation. Freedom fascinated her.
In keeping with the binary nature of ideologies, the honorable Southern generals stand in contrast to venal, uncouth Northerners. The Lost Cause insists upon the illegitimacy of Abraham Lincoln’s election and his personal villainy as a backwoods barbarian, miscegenationist and all-purpose bad dude.
It’s always nice to read a positive review of a newly published book so when the Kirkus Review of my new book on the life of Giuseppe Garibaldi said it was “A wonderfully researched and dramatically gripping work of historical fiction” I smiled.
Research IS my middle name these days and ‘gripping’ is what’s needed for the pace when one is documenting such an epic life so that it doesn’t feel like it is just meandering from battle to battle with no story growth.
The book gave me the chance to finally delve deeply into Garibaldi and Anita’s lives and come to a deeper understanding of the revolution that united Italy. — Rosanne
“A novelistic biography of the 19th-century Italian general who devoted his life to the unification of Italy.
Giuseppe Garibaldi was raised in Nice, an Italian territory in Piedmont held by the French. His mother nevertheless insisted, against convention, that he learn to read Italian and to zealously assert his independence. After an aborted attempt to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a sailor, Garibaldi joined the Young Italy movement under the direction of Giuseppe Mazzini and agitated for Italian independence. As a result, he was sentenced to death and was forced to flee to South America, an exile that lasted more than a decade.
While in Brazil, he discovered thousands of misplaced Italians, and he recruited them to participate in the Ragamuffin War to establish a republican experience that prepared him for the wars of independence in Italy later. Also, he fought in the Uruguayan civil war before finally returning to Italy intoxicated by the dream of Italian independence and unification—a devotion stirringly portrayed by Welch.
He formed a group of volunteers, called the Hunters of the Alps, to fight in the Second Italian War for Independence and later participated in the Expedition of the Thousand in Sicily, successfully establishing Victor Emmanuel II as king.
Welch’sresearch is impeccably rigorous. She captures the minute details of Garibaldi’s life, the machinations of military strategy of the period, and the atmosphere of both 19th-century Italy and South America. One could quibble that the accumulating, granular detail finally becomes daunting to digest. However, her prose is reliably lucid and sometimes achieves genuine poignancy, particularly in the representation of Garibaldi’s indefatigable fervor: “Italy will not truly exist as a nation until her flag, symbolizing the unity and freedom of the former Roman Empire, flies from the Capitol in Rome.
”A wonderfully researched and dramatically gripping work of historical fiction.” – Kirkus Reviews
This new “A Woman Wrote That” post is an echo of the Writers Guild campaign of a few years ago (“A Writer Wrote That”) where they noted famous movie quotes and credited the screenwriter rather than the director. The difference here being that we will be posting lines from films written by female screenwriters. Feel free to share! — Rosanne
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Transcript:
This is a film — excuse me — a tv show that started in Europe. I learned about it through an Italian screenwriting colleague — Braccialetti Rossi and it’s about a group of young children in a hospital and they wear red bands because they have terminal illnesses and it’s about them banding together and being friends, One of the things that’s good or maybe bad about what’s going on with international television is that I believe we could air the original version in the United States and that enough people would watch it but the networks still believe they need to have an American version — a United States version. I had to learn to stop saying that this week right because I’m in America right now.
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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
“Where’s HER Movie” posts will highlight interesting and accomplished women from a variety of professional backgrounds who deserve to have movies written about them as much as all the male scientists, authors, performers, and geniuses have had written about them across the over 100 years of film. This is our attempt to help write these women back into mainstream history. — Rosanne
As one of the most prominent racing pilots of her generation Jackie Cochran pioneered women’s aviation. The head of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) during WWII she oversaw over 1000 civilian female pilots who ferried planes from factories to port cities and later became the first woman to break the sound barrier on 18 May 1953. She originally learned to fly in order to expand her sales area.
In the 1960s, Cochran was a sponsor of the Mercury 13 program, an early effort to test the ability of women to be astronauts. Thirteen women pilots passed the same preliminary tests as the male astronauts of the Mercury program before the program was cancelled.[40][41][42][N 2] It was never a NASA initiative, though it was spearheaded by two members of the NASA Life Sciences Committee, one of whom, William Randolph Lovelace II, was a close friend of Cochran and her husband. Though Cochran initially supported the program, she was later responsible for delaying further phases of testing, and letters from her to members of the Navy and NASA expressing concern over whether the program was to be run properly and in accordance with NASA goals may have significantly contributed to the eventual cancellation of the program. It is generally accepted that Cochran turned against the program out of concern that she would no longer be the most prominent female aviator.[43]
On 17 and 18 July 1962, Representative Victor Anfuso (D-NY) convened public hearings before a special Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics[44] to determine whether or not the exclusion of women from the astronaut program was discriminatory, during which John Glenn and Scott Carpenter testified against admitting women to the astronaut program. Cochran herself argued against bringing women into the space program, saying that time was of the essence, and moving forward as planned was the only way to beat the Soviets in the Space Race. (None of the women who had passed the tests were military jet test pilots, nor did they have engineering degrees, which were the two basic experiential qualifications for potential astronauts. Women were not allowed to be military jet test pilots at that time. On average, however, they all had more flight experience than the male astronauts.) “NASA required all astronauts to be graduates of military jet test piloting programs and have engineering degrees. In 1962, no women could meet these requirements.” This ended the Mercury 13 program.[45] However, John Glenn and Scott Carpenter, who were part of the Mercury 7, also did not have engineering degrees when they were selected. Both of them were granted a degree after their flights for NASA. [46] [47]
Significantly, the hearings investigated the possibility of gender discrimination a two full years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made that illegal, making these hearings a marker of how ideas about women’s rights permeated political discourse even before they were enshrined in law.[45]
Giuseppe agreed and rose to leave, but the prisoner had one more thing to say. “While I admire your love for country do not let it blind you to the need for other forms of love in this short life we lead. To be a soldier is honorable. To be a husband, to be a father, that is to be human. The land will not remember you, the ones you love will.”
Join our program director, Dr. Rosanne Welch, for a virtual open house to learn more about our Master of Fine Arts in TV and Screenwriting. As we prepare to welcome the 2021 cohort in fall 2021, we invite you to learn about the program, hear how the admissions process works, and an open Q&A to get all your questions answered.
Write Reach Represent
Online Open House with Program Executive Director Dr. Rosanne Welch and Director of Admissions Alexandra Miller
New York, USA Wed, Nov 18, 2020 at 7:00 pm EST Columbia, USA Wed, Nov 18, 2020 at 6:00 pm CST Denver, USA Wed, Nov 18, 2020 at 5:00 pm MST Los Angeles, USA Wed, Nov 18, 2020 at 4:00 pm PST
While any past event is vulnerable to the mythmaking of film, the Civil War might be the most contested event in American History. No national historical moment has been more written about (except perhaps World War II), argued over and romanticized than the so-called Irrepressible Conflict.
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