Writing, Film, Television and More!
More on the Monkees: Peter Tork is VJ on MTV 4th May 1986
Peter Tork spent a whole day as guest VJ on MTV on 4th May 1986. So many banjo jokes on MTV!
Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture
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It’s not quite the loss of a Beatle. But it’s obviously up there in pop culture significance, considering how TV and other media played up Wednesday’s news of the death of Davy Jones, star of TV touchstone The Monkees and the top-selling rock band of the same name.
Some will scoff — The Monkees were a manufactured group, their ’60s show looks silly, et al. But Davy Jones’ death seemed to strike a chord in baby boomers — and even in younger culture vultures, who still hear Monkees tunes like “Daydream Believer” on oldies radio, on movie soundtracks, or as background sound in public places.
Maybe it’s because The Monkees stand for a particular pop culture moment, at a confluence of events, trends and fault lines. The show’s 1966-68 TV run essentially defines the morph of what we’ll call the Mad Men ’60s — on-the-surface simple, sunny, neat — into the Vietnam-era, with all of its messy, moody, culture-shift conflicts.
Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture
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It was a pleasure sharing our book launch party with historian Tom Stempel, who had come to speak to our new students earlier in the day and kindly stayed to attend out event.
Many thanks to the essay contributors who joined us and spoke so eloquently about the women writers they had researched: Toni Anita Hull, Laura Kirk, Amelia Phillips, Sarah Phillips, Julie Berkobien, Khanisha Foster, Lauren Smith, and to Cari Beauchamp, who wrote the Forward to the collection.
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“From copyright records, we know that almost half of all films made before 1925 were written by women yet too often their names are found only in the footnotes of Hollywood histories.”
Cari Beauchamp
Author, Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood
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Where Are My Children? is a 1916 American silent drama film directed by Phillips Smalley and Lois Weber and stars Tyrone Power, Sr., Juan de la Cruz, Helen Riaume, Marie Walcamp, Cora Drew, A.D. Blake, Rene Rogers, William Haben and C. Norman Hammond
The film tells the story of a district attorney (Power, Sr.) who, while prosecuting a doctor for illegal abortions, finds out that society people, including his wife, used the doctor’s services.
Richard Walton, a district attorney, is presented with an obscenity case: A medical practitioner, Dr. Homer, has been arrested for distributing ‘indecent’ birth control literature. On the stand, Dr. Homer makes a strong case for legalizing contraception. He recounts three incidents from his medical practice, each shown in a brief flashback: children are exposed to violent abuse in a family riddled with alcoholism; an impoverished family is unable to provide adequate medical care for their sick children; and a single mother, abandoned by her male lover, commits suicide with her young infant.
Meanwhile, Richard’s wife, Edith, has been keeping a secret from him for many years: she has been seeing a doctor, one Herman Malfit, who performs abortions so that her busy social life will not be interrupted by the inconvenience of pregnancy. She suggests it as an option for her friend Mrs. William Carlo, who is with child. Mrs. Carlo has the abortion.
The Waltons receive two new guests in their house almost simultaneously: Edith Walton’s ne’er-do-well younger brother, and their maid’s young daughter, Lillian. Smitten by the brother’s advances, the maid’s daughter is seduced and soon finds herself pregnant. She is taken to Dr. Malfit and then abandoned by the boy after the operation goes wrong. Making her way back to the Walton mansion, she collapses and dies from the botched abortion.
Following Malfit’s arrest and trial, Richard Walton examines the doctor’s ledgers and realized that his wife and many of her friends are listed as having received ‘personal services.’ He returns home, furious, to find them lunching at his home. He banishes his wife’s friends, saying ‘I should bring you to trial for manslaughter!’ and confronts Edith with the cry, ‘where are my children?’ She is overcome with remorse. As the years pass, the couple must contend with a lonely, childless life, full of longing for the family they might have had. — Wikipedia
Watch Where are my children?
More about “Where are my children?”
More about Lois Weber
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![13 More Than Just a Rom-Com from How The Monkees Changed Television [Video] (0:40)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/monkees-tv-13-rom-com.jpeg)
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
When I think about feminism, gender, and sexuality — again, I watched all the episodes again — and the impression, when I was a kid, was every episode was about Davy falling in love with someone. Turned out that wasn’t true. Turns out the other boys fell in love too, but even more so there were lots of different genres. If you think about TV. Sometimes they did a horror episode. Sometimes they did an entire music video for the whole half an hour — running through the streets of Paris. Sometimes they did a rom-com which was Davy or someone falling in love. Sometimes they did an old West show. So they introduced students and children to lots of different kinds of genres which I think was pretty fun too.
Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture
McFarland (Direct from Publisher) | Amazon | Kindle Edition | Nook Edition
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About Rosanne Welch, PhD
Rosanne Welch, PhD is a writer, producer and university professor with credits that include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, Touched by an Angel and ABC NEWS/Nightline. Other books include Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture (McFarland, 2017) and Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia and Document Collection (ABC-CLIO, 2017), named to the 2018 Outstanding References Sources List, by the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA), a division of the American Library Association. Welch has also published chapters in Torchwood Declassified: Investigating Mainstream Cult Television (I.B.Tauris) and The American Civil War on Film and TV: Blue and Gray in Black and White and Color (Lexington Books, 2018) and essays in Doctor Who and Race: An Anthology and Outside In Makes it So, and Outside in Boldly Goes (both edited by Robert Smith). By day she teaches courses on the history of screenwriting and on television writing for the Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting programs. Her talk “The Importance of Having a Female Voice in the Room” at the 2016 TEDxCPP is available on YouTube.
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Class of 2020 – Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting in Television
Our latest class is in Los Angeles for their first workshop session so we took the opportunity to grab our first group photo.
They’ll be back in August for another 10-day session and two more workshops in their second year.
Always great to welcome a new set of MFA students each year!
eBook Editions Now Available – When Women Wrote Hollywood
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This collection of 23 new essays focuses on the lives of female screenwriters of Golden Age Hollywood, whose work helped create those unforgettable stories and characters beloved by audiences–but whose names have been left out of most film histories. The contributors trace the careers of such writers as Anita Loos, Adela Rogers St. Johns, Lillian Hellman, Gene Gauntier, Eve Unsell and Ida May Park, and explore themes of their writing in classics like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Ben Hur, and It’s a Wonderful Life.
When Women Wrote Hollywood – 20 in a series – Lois Weber
Lois Weber (June 13, 1879 – November 13, 1939) was an American silent film actress, screenwriter, producer, and director, who is considered “the most important female director the American film industry has known”,[1] and “one of the most important and prolific film directors in the era of silent films”.[2][3] Film historian Anthony Slide asserts that: “Along with D.W. Griffith, Weber was the American cinema’s first genuine auteur, a filmmaker involved in all aspects of production and one who utilized the motion picture to put across her own ideas and philosophies.”[4]
Weber produced an oeuvre which Jennifer Parchesky argues is comparable to Griffith’s in both quantity and quality,[5] and brought to the screen her concerns for humanity and social justice in an estimated 200 to 400 films,[2][6] of which as few as twenty have been preserved,[7][8] and has been credited by IMDb with directing 135 films, writing 114, and acting in 100.[9] Weber was “one of the first directors to come to the attention of the censors in Hollywood’s early years”.[10] — Wikipedia
Watch a movie by Lois Weber
A clip from The Blot
More about Lois Weber
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The friendship that was to last a lifetime began as the Adams’ carriages rode up the grand driveway of Monticello and Filippo saw at a glance how much Jefferson esteemed all things Italian. The neoclassical design of the main home came from principles described by Italian Renaissance architect Andrea Palladio.
From America’s Forgotten Founding Father — Get Your Copy Today!
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Also from the Mentoris Project
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