Michael Nesmith of The Monkees isn’t exactly known for being a road warrior. With the exception of a few tours with his past and present Monkee bandmates (Davy Jones died in 2012), the last two years have brought Nesmith back to the road for his first official solo dates since 1992.
But don’t mistake this for indifference or laziness. Nesmith is more than just a musician. He’s an innovator (after all, he IS partially responsible for the beginning stages of MTV), thespian, Liquid Paper heir, novelist, entrepreneur and producer. Yes, Michael Nesmith never seems to have a problem staying occupied.
Over the last year Nesmith has cited several reasons for his long awaited return to the stage, but don’t expect a greatest hits package if he decides to stop by a venue near you.
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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
“It” is a 1927 silent romantic comedy film that tells the story of a shop girl who sets her sights on the handsome, wealthy boss of the department store where she works. It is based on a novella by Elinor Glyn that was originally serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine.
This film turned actress Clara Bow into a major star, and led people to label her the It girl.
The film had its world premiere in Los Angeles on January 14, 1927, followed by a New York showing on February 5, 1927. “It” was released to the general public on February 19, 1927.
The picture was considered lost for many years, but a Nitrate-copy was found in Prague in the 1960s.[1] In 2001, “It” was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. — Wikipedia
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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
This is a great shot. I love from the Associated Press. All four of the men — three of the men — were drafted while they were on the show because they were all like 18, 19 and 20 years old. Michael Nesmith had already been in the Air Force so he was not but the other 3 guys were and they had to find a way around it. Even Davy Jones who was from England was drafted because he was living and making money in the United States. Thee girls took to the streets and said “If Davy goes, we go too!” The protests against losing them were very huge, but in general they were talking about how this is a bad war.. So if you look at this line I love from one of the episodes…
“They want to put the blame on teenagers. Take the war. Whose fault is it? We’re not fighting. it must be those crazy kids. They’re the ones doing all the fighting.”
Again, if that’s not an anti-war message wrapped up in a funny show. I have not idea how they got away with that, but they did.
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.
Learn more about Hollywood History with these books
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* 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
Elinor Glyn (née Sutherland; 17 October 1864 – 23 September 1943) was a British novelist and scriptwriter who specialised in romantic fiction that was considered scandalous for its time. She popularized the concept of It. Although her works are relatively tame by modern standards, she had tremendous influence on early 20th-century popular culture and perhaps on the careers of notable Hollywood stars such as Rudolph Valentino, Gloria Swanson and Clara Bow in particular.
Glyn pioneered risqué, and sometimes erotic, romantic fiction aimed at a female readership, a radical idea for its time—though her writing is not scandalous by modern standards. She coined the use of the word it to mean a human characteristic that “…draws all others with magnetic force. With ‘IT’ you win all men if you are a woman–and all women if you are a man. ‘IT’ can be a quality of the mind as well as a physical attraction.” [13] Her use of the word is often erroneously[citation needed]taken to be a euphemism for sexuality or sex appeal. — Wikipedia
Elinor Glyn (a/w/d/p/o), Beyond the Rocks (1922). PC
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In late November the Triumph docked at Trebell’s Landing & Burwell’s Ferry, on the James River about four miles from Williamsburg. Filippo and his party, which the Captain had dubbed Filippo’s ark as it included such a combination of people, animals and plants as to constitute the beginning of a new Eden, disembarked.
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:
…and I also just jokingly have to say, from a strength standpoint Jean Marsh, the actress who played that character (Sara Kingdom) ended up writing the miniseries “Upstairs, Downstairs” which was the “Downton Abbey” of your parent’s generation. Huge PBS show about the maids and the rich people living in a house. So literally it was a copy — or the predecessor I should say — of “Downton Abbey.” So she moved her career, using this acting career into a writing career where she could write the kind of representations she felt that the world needed. So that is pretty cool. Liz Shaw came up in the John Pertwee era, The third Doctor Who and she was a scientist so she was the equal to any of the men she worked with and sometimes she was smarter than they were, because she had a Ph.D. and she could do science and these guys sometimes weren’t — sometimes just military dudes. So Liz Shaw is a pretty good example of a strong woman we’ve met along the way.
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.
What a treat – reading the review of my book America’s Forgotten Founding Father in Angelus, the weekly Catholic magazine of Los Angeles. I enjoyed the way the magazine’s reviewer, Robert Brennan, compared Mazzei to Forest Gump in that he met so many other, far more well known Founding Fathers. Since it is a novel, Mr. Brennan had called me to ask about the historical accuracy of some of those meetings and I was happy to have been able to say that Mazzei led such an interesting life I didn’t need to make any of that up – even much of his dialogue comes from his own prolific correspondence with everyone from Thomas Jefferson to John Adams.
My favorite part of the review is the ending when Brennan shows how history teaches us how to handle our current lives.
“Although men like Jefferson, Washington and Adams represented a homogeneous group of white, English, Protestant, landed gentry, they all welcomed a new immigrant from a non-English speaking, predominantly Catholic country. And Filippo Mazzei showed that a Catholic could, in good conscience, be fully integrated into that great American experiment at its birth, and help christen it with a little holy water.”
I’m working on my novel on the life of Giuseppe Garibaldi (the General who united Italy in 1860) for The Mentoris Project and I discovered that Giuseppe Verdi was a supporter of the Risorgimento (Resurgence), the movement to unite Italy. Moreover, in his 1842 opera, Nabucco (which follows the plight of the Jews as they are conquered and exiled by the Babylonian King Nebuchadnezzar II (Nabucco in Italian) he wrote a song — Va Pensiero (to think/to recall) — which was popular among the men of the movement in the 1840s through 1860.
Poetic license comes in when I see it wasn’t performed in South America (where Garibaldi could have access to it) until a year after he’d left that country. So, I created a scene where he hears it from a newly arrived Italian sailor on the local docks and then Garibaldi goes home to sing it as a lullaby with his wife, Anita, and their son.
Of course, I had to hear the song myself (being more a Dean Martin fan than an opera fan I had not seen Nabucco) so, naturally, I turned to YouTube where I found this beautiful rendition of it with Pavorotti singing in Italian and Italian singer Zucchero Fornaciari, known mostly as Zucchero (but brand new to me!).
Va, pensiero, sull’ali dorate; va, ti posa sui clivi, sui colli, ove olezzano tepide e molli l’aure dolci del suolo natal!
Del Giordano le rive saluta, di Sionne le torri atterrate… O, mia patria, sì bella e perduta! O, membranza, sì cara e fatal!
Arpa d’or dei fatidici vati, perché muta dal salice pendi? Le memorie nel petto raccendi, ci favella del tempo che fu!
O simile di Sòlimaai fati traggi un suono di crudo lamento, o t’ispiri il Signore un concento che ne infonda al patire virtù.[11]
Go, thought, on wings of gold; go settle upon the slopes and the hills, where, soft and mild, the sweet airs of our native land smell fragrant!
Greet the banks of the Jordan and Zion’s toppled towers… Oh, my country, so beautiful and lost! Oh, remembrance, so dear and so fatal!
Golden harp of the prophetic seers, why dost thou hang mute upon the willow? Rekindle our bosom’s memories, and speak to us of times gone by!
Either, akin to the fate of Jerusalem, give forth a sound of crude lamentation, or let the Lord inspire you a harmony of voices which may instill virtue to suffering.
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