Writing, Film, Television and More!
More on the Monkees: Behind the Scenes with The Monkees
Discovered via Someday Women on Tumblr
Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture
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Walking through Hollywood with visiting family I happened upon this…again!
Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture
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Thanks for Ken Mills for asking me to record this fun piece of commentary about how important the Mr. Rogers documentary is to our understanding of the power of television and the importance of early childhood education in empathy.
My segment starts at the 15 minute mark in the show.
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My segment starts at the 15 minute mark in the show.
Transcript
I can’t recommend the new Mr. Rogers documentary strongly enough.
“Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” is about so much more than the man behind one children’s program. It’s about the way you can dedicate your life to a cause. It’s about the obvious point that if we teach children they are loved and give them security in their early years, we can avoid so much of the issues in their later lives. It’s about standing up for what you believe in. It’s about how hard it is to fight our society’s glorification of toxic masculinity. And, to me, most importantly, it’s about the power of television – a topic we all need to consider.
The two quotes I can’t forget – from a set of interviews with Fred Rogers that contained many worthwhile quotes (which is why you need to see the film so I don’t have to replicate them all here) — are:
“What we see and hear on television molds our lives”
and
“Television has the capability of being a neighborhood for the whole country.”
People far too often ignore television but because it comes into our homes effortlessly and is ever present, it does have the ability to shape ideas and opinions and it has always had the ability to educate. I don’t mean it only has to teach us multiplication and fractions, but like any good genre of storytelling, it teaches us empathy and understanding of others. Mr. Rogers did that gently and quietly because he was addressing children as they formed their identities, and for that we ought to be grateful.
On top of all that, when he says “The greatest thing you can teach someone is that they are loved, and are capable of loving,“ he validates a frequent comment I make to writing students – that every story, in the end, is a love story. And this one is one you should not miss.
It almost makes me sad that children today on their iPads are watching the animated adventures of Daniel Tiger. While I’m happy they are being exposed to Mr. Rogers’ stories and lessons, I hope they don’t forget to show this new generation the actual episodes starring Mr. Rogers because seeing a gentle man in real life is probably more instructive than all the messages an animated tiger can give.
I was so proud to receive a request from Susan La Tempa, editor of the new Paperback L.A about reprinting my first article, Hey, Hey, They Wrote The Monkees!, on the writers of The Monkees, which I had done for Written By magazine in 2012.
Her new anthology covers life in LA and she found both the lives of writers AND, of course, the existence of The Monkees to be iconic to Los Angeles.
Check out her first book in the series: Book 1, A Casual Anthology: Clothes. Coffee. Crushes. Crimes
And look out for the announcement when the issue containing “Hey, Hey, They Wrote The Monkees!” publishes!
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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From The Research Vault: NME’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Years, 1992 by John Tobler
This is the “New Musical Express” chronicle of the rock ‘n’ roll generation. The book chronicles one of the major potent cultural forces of the 20th century. The lively, newsy text is drawn from “NME” archives and is illustrated with photographs from each era. Alongside these stories are reviews and chart information as well as other contemporary references to films, sex, TV, drugs, politics and many other items that have impinged on the culture. Such events as Live Aid and Woodstock are covered.
Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture
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The Shocking Miss Pilgrim is a 1947 American musical comedy film in Technicolor written and directed by George Seaton, and starring Betty Grable and Dick Haymes.
The screenplay, based on a story by Frederica Sagor Maas and Ernest Maas, focuses on a young typist who becomes involved in the Women’s Suffrage movement in 1874. The songs were composed by George and Ira Gershwin. Marilyn Monroe made her film debut as an uncredited voice as a telephone operator.
In 1941, husband-and-wife screenwriting team Ernest Maas and Frederica Sagor collaborated on Miss Pilgrim’s Progress, a story about a young woman who enters the business world by demonstrating the newly invented typewriter in the window of a Wall Street establishment. When she tries to fend off the unwanted advances of one of the firm’s clerks, her employer comes to her rescue but is killed when he falls down the stairs in the ensuing altercation. Abigail Pilgrim becomes the focus of a murder trial that attracts widespread coverage by the media and the attention of Susan B. Anthony when the concept of women working in offices comes under fire.[2] — Wikipedia
More about Frederica Sagor Maas
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If you’re in Melbourne – or have friends and family there – check out the invitation and GO to this exhibit centered solely on The Monkees in honor of the 50th anniversary of their Australian tour.
In another wonderful example of how The Monkees bring people together I’m happy to help announce an exhibit open to all our Australian Monkees fans. I met Derham Groves, professor architecture at the Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne because he wrote a review of Why The Monkees Matter for The Journal of American Culture and was kind enough to send me a link. Then he happened to be in Los Angeles for a conference so we met for a marvelous dinner of pasta and Monkees conversation in Hollywood.
Derham’s special interest is the influence of popular culture on architecture and design, but he’s written quite a lot about the history of television in Australia, including a book called TV Houses: Television’s Influence on the Australian Home (2004). Last year he curated an exhibition at the Baillieu Library to celebrate the 60th anniversary of television in Australia.
For fun – here are some great clips on Youtube – their arrival and conference:
And the newsreel (though the footage jumps a lot) about their arrival with the funny line “the only thing to rival man’s descent from the apes is their descent from an airplane”:
It’s certainly an event worth celebrating!
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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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
Back in the day — I just mentioned the war — they did have many moments where they referenced the war — the war on poverty — and President Lyndon Johnson and they mentioned particularly — there was a great episode where they were playing dominoes and they dropped all the dominoes and then Davy Jones said to Peter Tork “what do you call this game?” and Peter Tork said “Southeast Asia” and nobody cut that, right, because nobody who is a censor at the network understood what it meant which is pretty shocking if you ask me.
This is Dr. Timothy Leary who was famous back in the day for dropping LSD and whatnot and taking experiments with the psyche and he was watching the program and defining it and recognizing that it was far deeper than anyone else had given it the thought before. So already in the 60s people in the know knew that this was something different and worth paying attention to.
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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Working hard every day on my book on Giuseppe Garibaldi — “In Search of Unity” — for the Mentoris Project.
Done by the end of Summer.
My Previous Mentoris Project Title
Order an autographed copy of America’s Forgotten Founding Father
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When Women Wrote Hollywood – 10 in a series – Frederica Sagor Maas
Frederica Alexandrina Sagor Maas (/ˌfɹɛdəˈɹikə səˈgɔɹ mæs/; July 6, 1900 – January 5, 2012) was an American dramatist and playwright, screenwriter, memoirist, and author,[1] the youngest daughter of Russian immigrants. As an essayist, Maas was best known for a detailed, tell-all memoir of her time spent in early Hollywood.[2] She was one of the oldest surviving entertainers from the silent film era.[3]
Once in Hollywood, Maas negotiated a contract with Preferred Pictures to adapt Percy Marks’s novel The Plastic Age for film. Based on this, she was signed to a three-year contract with MGM for $350 per week, though in her words: “I had the peculiar feeling that wily Louis B. [Mayer] was less interested in my writing ability than in signing someone who had worked for Ben Schulberg and Al Lichtman.”[5] It was in this period that she wrote the screenplays for silent films Dance Madnessand The Waning Sex. — Wikipedia
More about Frederica Sagor Maas
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