They’re the people behind Nick and Nora Charles. Dashiell Hammet wrote the novel. If you read the novel, Nora is nothing. She’s just his wife. She drinks a lot and she’s pretty. In the movie, she has agency and she helps solve the case because Frances Hackett was a female writer on the movie adaptation and she made sure that the woman had something to do. She has a great quote where she says, “I was always the only woman in the room when the stories were being discussed and it was my job to protect the women in the program — in the film and in the story or nobody else would” and if you look at that — it’s so interesting — they did 6 Thin Man movies. The Hacketts only wrote the first 3 and when you come to the fourth one Nora becomes a dumb chick. Doesn’t understand what the cops are doing or what the laws are and she does funny jokes and falls on her face. They entirely lost the believability of that character when the woman who was protecting her left the writing part of it.
Frank Capra, who — you all know the Robert Riskin anecdote? He turned in 200 blank — he was the screenwriter behind much of Capra’s work and Capra had a famous “Capra Touch” and he would run around town discussing “well, that movie has the ‘Capra touch.’ That’s why it’s successful.”So Robert Riskin had a deadline for this screenplay for Capra and he handed in 200 pages of blank nothing and he said: “Put your fucking touch on that!” Because you cannot direct what does not exist and that’s and important — now it may be an anecdote. We’re not sure, but (unknown) it’s a reminder of the truth. So here we have this Pulitzer Prize-winning set of writers who students have never heard of. You have to look at the book that their nephew wrote about them. You only get the story if someone “puts you in the story.” Luckily their nephew did and it is a really fun little book about their life in Hollywood and New York.
It’s a popular culture breakthrough moment where an iconic hero character will now be a female
It’s a writer saying goodbye to probably the coolest job he will ever have – in the form of the monologue he gives the character of The Doctor to perform as he regenerates – so when the character says things like “It’s a treadmill” and “Yes, yes I know, they’ll get it all wrong without me” he is, of course, speaking for himself.
It’s also a writer using his podium to shout out his philosophy of life (which makes a nice New Years Eve kind of message: “Never be cruel. Never be cowardly. Hate is always foolish and love is always wise.” THAT’s why we all want to be writers – to teach empathy whenever we can.
It’s an actor at the top of his game getting the kind of Shakespearean death few actors have the chance to perform
It’s the moment the character switches from Capaldi to Whitaker and her first line upon seeing a female face is “Ah, brilliant” – which is one writer (Steven Moffat) complimenting another (Chris Chibnall) who had the creativity and hutzpah to finally make a choice that had been in discussions for 40 years.
Finally, If you follow Moffat’s writing at all, you’ll have noticed that throughout his tenure as the showrunner he continually focused on the importance of fairy tales to a society – even naming this episode “Twice Upon a Time”.
Peter Tork underwent perhaps the deepest changes from who he was before being cast in the show, who he became during and after, and how he eventually earned respect for his virtuoso musicianship in the later round of reunion tours where he began to play a wide variety of instruments – along with bits of Bach Concertos between songs.
Maybe the first book written about screenwriting, How To Write Photoplays is co-written by one of the most important screenwriters of the silent era, Anita Loos. She wrote the novel “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and much much more.
* 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 at the LA Public Library
So I am talking about Gidget. So we’re at the SRN Conference and we’re very excited about that and because we’re talking about fact and fiction, that’s why I cam to this. My title is very long. I laugh about that. So, it’s “How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto” and I’m sorry to use that word, but it is a negative word in the United States, but I like the alliteration of the words and I think it is a real problem because you’ll see, of course, the film began — the adaptation began as a film starring Sandra Dee and as far as Americans are concerned, Sandra Dee is kind of a bubble gum, cutesy pie, blonde WITH NO real serious — nothing but the superficiality of her being cute and a babe on the beach, right and so that is what I was thinking about when I thought about doing this and it came to me that it’s TV that gave Gidget her her groove back so I should have shrunk the title but it was too late for the publication.
“How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto by Accident (and How We Can Get Her Out of it): Demoting Gidget: The Little Girl with Big Ideas from Edgy Coming of Age Novel to Babe on the Beach Genre Film via Choices made in the Adaptation Process.”
It’ a long title, as I joke up front, but covers the process of adapting the true life story of Kathy Kohner (nicknamed ‘Gidget’ by the group of male surfers who she spent the summers with in Malibu in the 1950s) into the film and television series that are better remembered than the novel. The novel had been well-received upon publication, even compared to A Catcher in the Rye, but has mistakenly been relegated to the ‘girl ghetto’ of films. Some of the adaptations turned the focus away from the coming of age story of a young woman who gained respect for her talent at a male craft – surfing – and instead turned the focus far too much on Kathy being boy crazy.
Along the way I found interesting comparisons between how female writers treated the main character while adapting the novel and how male writers treated the character.
Dr. Rosanne Welch 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.
The Screenwriting Research Network is a research group consisting of scholars, reflective practitioners and practice-based researchers interested in research on screenwriting. The aim is to rethink the screenplay in relation to its histories, theories, values and creative practices.
So why are we studying this? Because I believe and we can prove that writers have been lost in the history of film. If you look at this, what do we call know? We all know this movies is by who? Frank Capra! Right? Right. Look at this — no, no, no, — Screenplay by Frank Capra. You can’t read this from there. I can barely read this from here. This movie which plays perennially at Christmas a million times was written by them. Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. A married screenwriting time that worked for 35 years together until she died. They were the highest paid screenwriting team and they’re nothing to sneeze at because they got a Pulitzer for the play, The Diary of Anne Frank and then they adapted it into a film and it kills me that children — they know Anne Frank. They know It’s a Wonderful Life and they know Frank Capra.
Long after new episodes involving that character ceased to exist, Jones continued to exist in the most intimate space of their home – their bedroom. When asked what she dreams about, Tony Award-winning composer and pop diva Cyndi Lauper told the Daily Mail, “What or who do you dream about? I have vivid dreams – from banal to crazy. One time I was married to Davy Jones of The Monkees. Go figure!”
Mabel’s Married Life (1914) is an American comedy silent film made by Keystone Studios starring and co-written by Charles Chaplin and Mabel Normand, and directed by Chaplin. As was so often the case during his first year in film, Chaplin’s character is soon staggering drunk. —Wikipedia
Learn More About Mabel Normand 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 at the LA Public Library
![Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/ufva-14-hacketts.jpeg)
![The “Capra Touch” and Writers from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/ufva-13-capra-touch.jpeg)
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† ![02 How TV Gave Gidget Her Groove Back from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto – Dr. Rosanne Welch – SRN Conference 2017 [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/gidget-srn-02.jpeg)
![Writers Have Been Lost In Film History from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/ufva-12-forgotten-writers.jpeg)
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