Philip Mazzei (1730-1816), a Florentine merchant, surgeon, and horticulturist, befriended Thomas Jefferson through business connections several years before the two men actually met.1 After working as a wine merchant in London for about eighteen years, Mazzei sailed to Virginia in 1773 to indulge his interest in the political life of the Colonies and to conduct agricultural experiments. The Virginia Legislature had promised Mazzei some land in Augusta County and, on his way to the Shenandoah Valley, he stopped to see Jefferson. When he discovered that the land he was to receive was divided into separate tracts, Mazzei was persuaded by Jefferson to settle in Albemarle County. Jefferson gave him a tract of land on the south side of Monticello.2 Mazzei purchased about 700 more acres by 1778 and named his farm Colle.3
“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.”
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** 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
Learn more about the American Revolution through the eyes of an important, Italian Immigrant, Filippo Mazzei. Read his story today!
“Filippo sent Jefferson the Virginia Declaration of Rights and Jefferson sent back drafts of his Declaration of Independence, pointing out the places where he had incorporated several of the points Filippo had argued so strongly for in the Virginia version. Filippo sent back his ideas as if the two men were once again across the table at Monticello, something that would rarely happen again in the tumultuous new world they were helping to create, if they both survived the creation.”
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
For her 5th Doctor Who lecture to the CPP community, Dr. Rosanne Welch discusses how society – and the show’s writing staff – prepared the audience for a major change in this 50-year franchise – the creation of the first Lady Doctor!
Transcript:
I love this quote because this is pretty much my summation of what we learned from Doctor Who is that men and women should be free to be both sensitive and strong. That’s what makes us human. To deny those things or to try to claim those things only belong to one sex. It’s a waste of everybody’s time because that’s not the kind of human being you want to have in your life is it? You want someone who blends it all so yay for back to Hermione it’s all about Harry Potter and Doctor Who. Again, we come back to Jodie Whittaker. This was the quote I mentioned before and this has been chosen as the costume for this character and there’s already some controversy about that because people don’t think it’s quite right. Well that’s what the people have come up with so we’re gonna have to see how they create this character and how this is carried off. My only complaint is where little girl’s gonna find teal culottes for Halloween next year. You know the colors are fun but yeah it’s not I mean hello I could find a tweed jacket anywhere and instantly you’re Matt Smith right? So a little more difficult I think but in the long run I think we’ll be fine. But this was a posted the other day and people had some issues with it. People had issues with everything. Everyone wants to critique the writers but look what a good job they did paving the way for this new character and I think that that proves writers are sensitive and strong and cool. So basically that’s what I have to say about gender diversity. It’s always been there in Doctor Who if we’re able to interpret it and when we’re watching it when we’re seeing it and have those conversations. Art opens conversations for people to think about their world and how they like it and what they want to change about it and I think a show obviously that’s been this influential and lasted this long has had so much more power than even we can imagine. Thank you for coming. If anybody questions? chatting?
Rosanne Welch PhD teaches the History of Screenwriting and One-Hour Drama for the Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting.
Writing/producing credits include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, ABCNEWS: Nightline and Touched by an Angel. In 2016 she published the book Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop; co-edited Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia; and placed “Transmitting Culture Transnationally Via the Characterization of Parents in Police Procedurals” in the New Review of Film and Television Studies. Essays appear in Torchwood Declassified: Investigating Mainstream Cult Television and Doctor Who and Race: An Anthology. Welch serves as Book Reviews editor for Journal of Screenwriting and on the Editorial Advisory Board for Written By magazine, the magazine of the Writers Guild.
“One of the characteristics that set Mathis apart from other writers and filmmakers of her time was her determination to study the art of filmmaking, not only for the art’s sake but the artist’s sake. Gus Hardy of Scenario-Bulletin Digest points out, ‘Her debut as a motion picture writer was vastly different from the average person who gets a story idea, spends a half an hour writing it–ships it off to a motion picture company and in two weeks receives the story back plus a nicely worded rejection slip.‘”
* 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
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
My Favorite Wife (released in the U.K. as My Favourite Wife) is a 1940 screwball comedy produced and co-written by Leo McCarey and directed by Garson Kanin. The picture stars Irene Dunne as a woman who returns to her husband and children after being shipwrecked on a tropical island for several years, and Cary Grant as her husband. The story is an adaptation of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem, “Enoch Arden”; in tribute, the main characters’ last name is Arden. The supporting cast features Gail Patrick as the woman Arden has just married when his first wife, now declared dead, returns, and Randolph Scott as the man with whom his wife had been marooned. My Favorite Wife was RKO’s second-biggest hit of 1940. — 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
This series will focus on material I found while researching my book, America’s Forgotten Founding Father: A Novel Based on the Life of Filippo Mazzei. 
![Dr. Rosanne Welch is interviewed by MUTV23, on “When Women Wrote Hollywood” [Video] (1:21)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/rmw-skylark-interview.jpeg)
![37 In Conclusion from Gender Diversity in the Who-niverse [Video] (2:02)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/gender-dw-37-conclusion.jpeg)
