June Mathis, one of the most prolific screenwriters of the Silent Era, not only wrote cinema, she lived it. Mathis traumatically passed away at the young age of 40 in the same place she began her career as an entertainer, the stage. The New York Times reported her dramatic demise in a front-page headline: “June Mathis Heart Victim” after Mathis died suddenly of a heart attack while attending a play at a New York theatre. Mathis lived out what cinephile critics would later coin “cinema 360”.
Fearless and Fierce: June Mathis by Lauren E. Smith
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Last night the Class of 2021 shared a treat – a visit by alum Sahar Jahani (Class of 2018)
Since graduation she has written episodes for Ramy on Hulu and landed on the staff of season 4 of 13 Reasons Why, while also adapting a YA novel into a film.
She credited the spec script she wrote under the mentorship of Jon Vandergriff for helping open doors.
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:
Now most of you I imagine in your in your younger years read Harry Potter which is written by JK Rowling because the publishers didn’t want or didn’t assume that boys would read a book written by Joanna. We’re not gonna read books written by women. My favorite book as a kid, which is still quite popular, The Outsiders is written by SE Hinton. Susan Elizabeth Hinton and nobody believed that boys would read a book about gangs written by a girl. Even though she lived with those kids and that was her childhood. She understood those kids obviously so well but yeah so we still do that to women, right? The best-selling book really of the last generation had to be written by someone with initials.
* 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!
* 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 you watch the credits of your favorite television shows go by, do you know the difference between a Staff Writer, a Story Editor, or a Supervising Producer?
If not, we wish you could’ve been with us on our first full day of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting workshop with the Class of 2021. Valerie Woods, mentor and Co-Executive Producer of Queen Sugar, gave a talk explaining exactly that.
Some people recognize or have heard if you know anything about aviation history, Harriet Quimby was the first pilot — female pilot — licensed in the United States. To pay for her flying lessons she wrote screenplays for the Biograph Company. So there was a new world. A new place to make money and women were jumping in that world if it was possible. So I always thought was pretty cool. Jeanie MacPherson is probably one of my favorite early film screenwriters and she is the perfect example of how women get left behind. Everybody who does film history has heard about Cecil B. DeMille over and over and over again. Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant. If you look at his films, all the films he made, that made a profit, were written by Jeanie MacPherson. When they stopped working together, he never made a profitable film again. So are they Cecil B. DeMille films or are they Jeanie MacPherson films or are they Macpherson/DeMille films?
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
Glyn’s experiences as an English barrister and landowner’s (Mrs. Clayton Louis Glyn) wife, I believe, form the basis of much of her work. The nuances of high society and high language associated with a life of pleasure and wealth are a recurrent theme through her available works.
* 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
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:
Jumping into the 1960s thank you very much which is sad to go that far but what’s going on is we have to think about how women are being presented in the purchasing public, right? So when we come over here this woman is named Alice Sheldon. First of all, she doesn’t look like a science fiction writer because we think that they’re all dudes. She has the little pearl thing going on which is kind of cute. She couldn’t get her novels published under her own name. So she went by the name of James Tiptree jr. and James wrote a whole lot of books that were big bestsellers and then eventually, almost 20 years later, Alice was like “No, the next book is going out of my name right, but it had to say formerly known as James Tiptree Jr. to make sure that her fans would travel over. I Know is that silly? It’s silly but it is a habit we are still in.
* 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!
Wow – these pictures show my first lecture with our first Stephens MFA cohort – who all became contributors to our first book!
Wonderful memories and a wonderful foundation on which to build the program as tonight we welcome the 5th cohort – the MFA candidates of the Class of 2021! — Rosanne