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
Co-presented by Stephens College, whose MFA in TV and screenwriting is designed to bring more female and minority stories into mainstream media through a low-residency graduate degree program.
“The Gordon/Kanin scripts also helped invent Katharine Hepburn’s popular culture reputation for female empowerment. Upon Gordon’s death in 1985, New York Times writer Mel Gussow wrote in his appreciation of her work: “Every time you enjoy Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn sparring in Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike, remember who created their characters and wrote their witty dialogue. Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin’s contribution to the symbiosis of the Tracy-Hepburn team is inestimable.” Biographers and critics of Hepburn often claimed that she based her independent women persona and characters on a combination of her mother and of Eleanor Roosevelt. I contend that the Hepburn was also, even if subconsciously, basing the women in her Tracy/Hepburn films on Ruth Gordon. As actress and writer Elaine May once observed to Kanin about his wife, “She really is about the only person who gives you the feeling that maybe it could be a woman’s world.”
Gordon and Kanin clearly had a feminist agenda at work in their films, one that focuses on the need for both members of a marriage to understand the inherent equality of the sexes and to respect the equal intellectual capacity of wives. When summarizing Kanin’s screenwriting career, author Richard Corliss says “Because of Kanin’s close collaboration with his wife on scripts written for another, very close couple – [Spencer] Tracy and Katharine Hepburn – the ‘marriages’ portrayed in Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike have a sense of natural familiarity and mutual respect rare in Hollywood domestic comedies.”
Read the full excerpt from When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry on our blog!
Introduction by Cari Beauchamp. Join us after the film for a book signing by contributors to When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry.
Watch presentations from When Women Wrote Hollywood
* 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
“Again in Dark Star, “Nancy’s earliest memory establishes an association between the marginal and the sexual:
‘Watching their meeting, an emotion blind of understanding but vivid as pain shot through her. Something was meant by that glow in the dark face that bent upon her mother’s; something terrifying was meant by the glamour in her mother’s face as she looked back at him . . . these two were set apart and deaf to any cry but the cry that clamoured in their blood’ (83).””
Lorna Moon: A Woman of a Certain Influence Elizabeth Dwyer Sandlin
* 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
Rosanne Welch, PhD, Author of Why The Monkees Matter, presents “How The Monkees Changed Television” at a Cal State Fullerton Lunch Lecture on May 8, 2018.
In this talk, she shows how The Monkees, and specifically their presence on television, set the stage for large changes to come in the late 1960s.
Transcript
He was voted the number one teen idol of all time about two years before he died and that’s over all the other guys you can think of David Cassidy who comes after him and the Partridge Family and anybody can think of so that’s a big deal right? After their show was cancelled they appeared on Laugh-In. Look at those great hippie clothes. So they were still considered cool enough to show up on the coolest new show. The sad part of that is the show was canceled because after two years they didn’t want to do a comedy anymore a sitcom a situation comedy. They wanted to do a variety show with rock and roll music and bring in their rock and roll friends and the network said “Oh that’ll never sell” and the next year Laugh-In came, Smothers Brothers came, the Sonny and Cher show came and rock and roll shows were all the rage but because they didn’t let them do it they all chose to quit at that one time which is too bad.
A hit television show about a fictitious rock band, The Monkees (1966-1968) earned two Emmys–Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Directorial Acheivement in Comedy.
Capitalizing on the show’s success, the actual band formed by the actors, at their peak, sold more albums than The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined, and set the stage for other musical TV characters from The Partridge Family to Hannah Montana. In the late 1980s, the Monkees began a series of reunion tours that continued into their 50th anniversary.
This book tells the story of The Monkees and how the show changed television, introducing a new generation to the fourth-wall-breaking slapstick created by Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers.
Its creators contributed to the innovative film and television of 1970s with projects like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laugh-In and Welcome Back, Kotter. Immense profits from the show, its music and its merchandising funded the producers’ move into films such as Head, Easy Riderand Five Easy Pieces.
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!
For all his efforts to aid the fledgling United States, Filippo is asked to do one more thing – leave the new country he has come to love in order to secure support from foreign governments for the impending war against England. This support would include seeking loans, buying – or rather, smuggling – weapons to the colonies and obtaining political and military information useful to the fledgling nation.
Spike Lee is, of course, famous for that. Spike Lee wrote this film — his first film alone but every film after he’s had a co-writer and those co-writers names barely appear on the poster yet obviously they’re necessary to process. Same is true here for Black KKKlansman his new film. The producer Jordan Peel has a bigger credit than Kevin Willmott who co-wrote the film. No one even knows who Kevin Willmott is and he’s written two of Spike Lee’s most important films. Jordan Peele we know and look at his own poster written directed by very big so we are used crediting directors. Some directors are kind enough to tell us, it’s collaborative effort all I can take credit for is the directing. So this is the attitude that I’m trying to instill in my students.
* 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
Rosanne Welch, PhD, Author of Why The Monkees Matter, presents “How The Monkees Changed Television” at a Cal State Fullerton Lunch Lecture on May 8, 2018.
In this talk, she shows how The Monkees, and specifically their presence on television, set the stage for large changes to come in the late 1960s.
Transcript
They were friends with all the Beatles so so much for the Beatles not taking them seriously and they were friends across their lives. Of course this is Mickey many years later with Ringo and Graham Nash right? This is him of course Paul McCartney and up here we got John. John Lennon would come to Mickey Dolenz’s house and they would jam and hang out because Mickey’s wife was from England and so when Lennon was in town he liked to go to the Dolenz house because she knew how to serve tea at 4 o’clock Most American girls weren’t doing that Right? So they already had a cachet. Then the show gets off the air and they go into reruns and they put them on Saturday morning because the television people think that it’s a kids show and they don’t think about all those other references and how serious to show was. So they’re in reruns on Saturday morning and in the 70s still so important that when Marcia Brady wants a prom date she writes to Davey Jones and of course he comes and he sings at her prom.
A hit television show about a fictitious rock band, The Monkees (1966-1968) earned two Emmys–Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Directorial Acheivement in Comedy.
Capitalizing on the show’s success, the actual band formed by the actors, at their peak, sold more albums than The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined, and set the stage for other musical TV characters from The Partridge Family to Hannah Montana. In the late 1980s, the Monkees began a series of reunion tours that continued into their 50th anniversary.
This book tells the story of The Monkees and how the show changed television, introducing a new generation to the fourth-wall-breaking slapstick created by Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers.
Its creators contributed to the innovative film and television of 1970s with projects like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laugh-In and Welcome Back, Kotter. Immense profits from the show, its music and its merchandising funded the producers’ move into films such as Head, Easy Riderand Five Easy Pieces.
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
“From the start Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin had a writing career like few other writers in the hollywood of the 1940s and 1950s. Their career earned them praise as ‘probably the greatest pure screenwriting collaboration in all Tollywood history'”
A Team in Passionate Action: Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin Rosanne Welch
* 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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