Writing, Film, Television and More!
It’s Time For History of Screenwriting 101!
My Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting students are in town for the next 20 days and we are diving into our work.
This is a low-residency program where most of the work is done online but each cohort (1st year and 2nd year) comes to LA twice each year and meets for 10 days of intense workshops and research at the Jim Henson Studio (originally the Chaplin Studio) in the heart of Hollywood.
This week is the first workshop for our new class of 2020.
Blood and Sand is a 1922 American silent drama film produced by Paramount Pictures, directed by Fred Niblo and starring Rudolph Valentino, Lila Lee and Nita Naldi. It was based on the 1909 Spanish novel Sangre y arena (Blood and Sand) by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez and the play version of the book by Thomas Cushing.
Juan Gallardo (Valentino), a village boy born into poverty, grows up to become one of the greatest matadors in Spain. He marries a friend from his childhood, the beautiful and virtuous Carmen (Lee), but after he achieves fame and fortune he finds himself drawn to Doña Sol (Naldi), a wealthy, seductive widow.
They embark on a torrid affair with rather sadomasochistic overtones, but Juan, feeling guilty over his betrayal of Carmen, tries to free himself of Doña Sol. Furious at being rejected, she exposes their affair to Carmen and Juan’s mother, seemingly destroying his marriage. Growing more and more miserable and dissipated, Juan becomes reckless in the arena. He is eventually killed in a bullfight but does manage to reconcile with Carmen moments before he dies.
There is also a subplot involving a local outlaw whose career is paralleled to Juan’s throughout the film by the village philosopher: Juan’s fatal injury in the bullring comes moments after the outlaw is shot by the police. — Wikipedia
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More about June Mathis
Buy a signed copy of when Women Write 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
![12 Acceptance, Critics and The Monkees from How The Monkees Changed Television [Video] (0:48)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/monkees-tv-12-acceptance.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
Peter Tork, who’s pretty brilliant, said they probably got a larger audience for this anti-war point of view than even The Beatles did because TV was free and young kids couldn’t always afford to buy an album and The Beatles weren’t on TV every week, The Monkees were, so their message got through to those kids on a more regular basis.
Who can guess who’s Peter Tork sitting with at the Monterey Pop Festival? Janis Joplin! There’s a whole lot of talk about how nobody took them seriously. People in the music business took them seriously because they were selling millions of records. They hung out together. They played music and jammed at each other’s houses over the weekend. They were all friends. It was the critics who didn’t take their music seriously and as I was discussing before we started their music has legs and is still around so the critics were wrong for once.
Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture
McFarland (Direct from Publisher) | Amazon | Kindle Edition | Nook Edition
Want to use “Why The Monkees Matter” in your classroom?
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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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Another Fun Day at the Stephens MFA In Screenwriting Program
My Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting students are in town for the next 20 days and we are diving into our work.
This is a low-residency program where most of the work is done online but each cohort (1st year and 2nd year) comes to LA twice each year and meets for 10 days of intense workshops and research at the Jim Henson Studio (originally the Chaplin Studio) in the heart of Hollywood.
This week is the first workshop for our new class of 2020.
My Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting students are in town for the next 20 days and we are diving into our work.
This is a low-residency program where most of the work is done online but each cohort (1st year and 2nd year) comes to LA twice each year and meets for 10 days of intense workshops and research at the Jim Henson Studio (originally the Chaplin Studio) in the heart of Hollywood.
This week is the first workshop for our new class of 2020.
All of the callers shared Filippo’s enthusiasm for the making – and drinking – of wine, knowing that in 1768, Virginians exported from Britain a little more than thirteen tons of wine from overseas, and another 78,264 from other North American colonies. But a few warned him that Virginia soil had been tried and so far unproven to be suitable.
From America’s Forgotten Founding Father — Get Your Copy Today!
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Also from the Mentoris Project
Want to use these books in your classroom? Contact the Mentoris Project!`
When Women Wrote Hollywood – 18 in a series – June Mathis
June Mathis (January 30, 1887 – July 26, 1927) was an American screenwriter. Mathis was the first female executive for Metro/MGM and at only 35, she was the highest paid executive in Hollywood.[1] In 1926 she was voted the third most influential woman in Hollywood, behind Mary Pickford and Norma Talmadge.[2] Mathis is best remembered for discovering Rudolph Valentino and writing such films as The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and Blood and Sand (1922).
Mathis was determined to become a screenwriter and, accompanied with her mother, she moved to New York City, where she studied writing and went to the movies in the evenings.[6] She entered a screenwriting competition; but despite not winning, her entry was so impressive it did bring job offers. Her first script, House of Tears, would be directed by Edwin Carewe in 1915 and led to a contract in 1918 with Metro studios, later to be merged into MGM. As one of the first screenwriters to include details such as stage directions and physical settings in her work, Mathis saw scenarios as a way to make movies into more of an art form. Much of the standard screenwriting styles can be attributed to her. Mathis later credited her success to a strong concentration on plot and theme: “No story that did not possess a theme has ever really lived…. Occasionally one may make money and perhaps be popular for a time. But in the end it dies.”[6]
By 1919 Mathis and her mother had moved to Hollywood. After only a year of screenwriting, she had advanced to the head of Metro’s scenario department.[7] She was one of the first heads of any film department and the only female executive at Metro.[8]
During her early years, she had a close association with silent star Alla Nazimova. Their films together can be said to be marked by over-sentimentality; what little praise these films received was due to Nazimova’s acting rather the conventional romantic stories.[6] — Wikipedia
Watch a movie by June Mathis
More about June Mathis
Buy a signed copy of when Women Write 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
Watch this entire presentation: Gender Diversity in the Who-niverse: Paving the Way for a Lady Doctor with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (36:58)
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:
Sarah Jane is one of my favorite companions. She’s come from the old Who to new Who and then she even had her own program The Sarah Jane Adventures. So what happened was she came into the Third Doctor’s life. She was an investigative reporter so she wasn’t some girl who did nothing and she wasn’t just reporting on fashion and/or celebrities. She was an investigative reporter. She looked for things that were wrong in her society and she highlighted that with being her newspaper writer. So that’s how she came to meet The Doctor. She traveled with him through Tom Baker obviously. Then she left and returned in an episode called School Reunion with David Tennant. So in the new Who era and at that time, of course, time had passed and she was invited to continue traveling and she had the strength and the intelligence to say No. I need to move on with my life. I’ve been thinking of you for too long. I need to have my own life.
Follow Dr. Welch on Twitter and Instagram
https://twitter.com/rosannewelch – http://instagram.com/drrosannewelch
Rosanne Welch, PhD
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.
Watch Dr. Welch’s talk “The Importance of Having a Female Voice in the Room” at the 2016 TEDxCPP.
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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.
These next few items come from the Bibliography I submitted when proposing the original book. — Rosanne.
Madison Papers at the Library of Congress
Order an autographed copy of America’s Forgotten Founding Father
Print Edition | Kindle Edition | Apple iBooks Edition | Nook Edition
Also from the Mentoris Project
Want to use these books in your classroom? Contact the Mentoris Project!`
More on the Monkees: “Isn’t That Dumb?”
Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture
McFarland (Direct from Publisher) | Amazon | Kindle Edition | Nook Edition
Want to use “Why The Monkees Matter” in your classroom?
Order Examination Copies, Library and Campus Bookstore orders directly from McFarland
