“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
Thanks to all who wished me a Happy Birthday yesterday. It was a fun day that started with Stephens MFA alumni Julie Berkobienn, who brought me a celebratory cupcake while picking up books for a book signing event.
Then Doug and I had dinner with my Mom and my friend Peg Ann Lamphier before she and I spent the evening at the Chapman University Library making presentations on our historical novels.
Dr. Sarah Clark and I are having more fun than should be allowed by recording our Monkees 101 segments once a month for Zilch: A Monkees Podcast. Here’s our coverage of the classic episode guest starring Stan Freberg. — Rosanne
Drs. Rosanne Welch and Sarah Clark are back for Zilch Monkees 101. Join them for a fun, thoughtful romp through S1 E2 “Monkee VS Machine” the 3rd episode of The Monkees to air. We also have a live version of “Saturday’s Child” from 2016 and Monkees News!. Originally aired 11/29/18.
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.
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
My non-Monkee example of that is Cher because when Cher was doing rock music she wanted to act everybody said well you can’t do that you’re a singer. Then she got an Oscar for Moonstruck and she got Best Supporting for Silkwood and then she wanted to go on tour again. Like well you can’t be a singer in a concert you’re an actress. How about both? Maybe we can actually do more than one thing. So America is not good at that and it really harmed them when the show was over. For a little moment Micky Dolenz was considered to play the Fonz on Happy Days but they were afraid his fame coming into the show would be too hard to make you understand and believe the rest of the characters. So as we know Henry Winkler got that job right but that might have been his next TV show?
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.
Learn more about the American Revolution through the eyes of an important, Italian Immigrant, Filippo Mazzei. Read his story today!
“To bolster the King’s subjects back in England their newspapers reported large numbers of Englishmen flooding into the Royal army to help put down the insurrection. Rather than instill terror into the Americans, the news drew hundreds more volunteers from all over the colonies, determined to help stand against the flood of what to them were foreign invaders.”
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
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
So we’re here today to talk about why I created a history of screenwriting class not a history of film class and that’s my problem. This is quickly Who I am. I’ve been a screenwriter in Los Angeles. I’ve written on Touched By An Angel Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences and for ABC news…oh… too fast. I’ve also just come up with a book and I’ll tell you about that came out of my class so that’s part of why I love this class. It’s another set of books that I’ve done. I’m also the book review editor for Journal of Screenwriting which I mentioned the other day. So please offer to review books and I’m on the editorial board for Written By which I always recommend as part of a screenwriting class because it’s free online digitally. You can look it up as Written By magazine and you’ll have the digital copy every month we interview either a movie writer or a television writer and it’s quite good, Of course, it’s in English. My apologies and I work for Stephens College which is located in Columbia Missouri but we do a low residency program where the students come to Los Angeles and work at the Jim Henson studios…hence Kermit … and this is Charlie Chaplin’s original studio so it’s still designed the way it was when he set it up in 1917.
* 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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