Teenagers and Teenpics tells the story of two signature developments in the 1950s: the decline of the classical Hollywood cinema and the emergence of that strange new creature, the American teenager. Hollywood’s discovery of the teenage moviegoer initiated a progressive “juvenilization” of film content that is today the operative reality of the American motion picture industry. The juvenilization of the American movies is best revealed in the development of the 1950s “teenpic,” a picture targeted at teenagers even to the exclusion of their elders. In a wry and readable style, Doherty defines and interprets the various teenpic film types: rock ‘n’ roll pictures, j.d. films, horror and sci-fi weirdies, and clean teenpics. Individual films are examined both in light of their impact on the motion picture industry and in terms of their important role in validating the emerging teenage subculture. Also included in this edition is an expanded treatment of teenpics since the 1950s, especially the teenpics produced during the age of AIDS. — Amazon
A History of Screenwriting – 26 in a series – Tchin Chao the Chinese Conjurer – George Méliès, France, 1904
A Chinese conjurer stands next to a table, it becomes two tables. A fan becomes a parasol, lanterns appear and disappear. The conjurer spins the open parasol in front of himself, and a dog leaps out from behind it. The dog becomes a woman, then a second woman appears. The conjurer sits them each on a box a few feet apart: suddenly the women have changed places. The disappearing and the transfers continue in front of a simple backdrop. — The Early Cinema
* 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!
I teach several classes for the Stephens College Low-Residency MFA in Screenwriting, including History of Screenwriting. In fact, I created the curriculum for that course from scratch and customized it to this particular MFA in that it covers ‘Screenwriting’ (not directors) and even more specifically, the class has a female-centric focus. As part History of Screenwriting I, the first course in the four-class series, we focus on the early women screenwriters of the silent film era who male historians have, for the most part, quietly forgotten in their books. In this series, I share with you some of the screenwriters and films that should be part of any screenwriters education. I believe that in order to become a great screenwriter, you need to understand the deep history of screenwriting and the amazing people who created the career. — Dr. Rosanne Welch
Jean Powergirl takes the host reigns and welcomes her guest Rosanne Welch, PhD to the show! They’ll be discussing Roseanne’s book, “Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture.”
Transcript:
Rosanne: So, in fact, because we just lost Mary Tyler Moore a couple weeks ago there was a lot of discussion
Jean: God rest her soul
Rosanne:…about here show. Exactly and how she introduced a gay character on her show. She talked about birth control pills.
Jean: She was the working woman by herself. That’s why I watched it.
Rosanne: Exactly. Exactly.
Jean: I was shocked. She got a real job on her own.
Rosanne:…and she spent the night with boys without them coming to her apartment. We would see her come home wearing the same clothes she wore on the day before.
Jean: Oooo….Where’s my fainting couch?
Rosanne: So we were moving into that area where these things were going to be more open and so The Monkees couldn’t quite be blatant about it, but they could be subtle about the things they were saying.
Jean; Right and actually I do like the subtlety. I think it is an artistic thing that I appreciate.
A hit television show about a fictitious rock band, The Monkees (1966-1968) earned two Emmys–Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Comedy. Capitalizing on the show’s success, the actual band formed by the actors, at their peak, sold more albums than The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined and set the stage for other musical TV characters from The Partridge Family to Hannah Montana. In the late 1980s, the Monkees began a series of reunion tours that continued into their 50th anniversary.
This book tells the story of The Monkees and how the show changed television, introducing a new generation to the fourth-wall-breaking slapstick created by Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers. Its creators contributed to the innovative film and television of 1970s with projects like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laugh-In and Welcome Back, Kotter. Immense profits from the show, its music and its merchandising funded the producers’ move into films such as Head, Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces.
Rosanne Welch, PhD has written for television (Touched by an Angel, Picket Fences) and print (Three Ring Circus: How Real Couples Balance Marriage, Work and Kids and The Encyclopedia of Women in Aviation and Space). In the documentary world she has written and produced Bill Clinton and the Boys Nation Class of 1963 for ABC NEWS/Nightline and consulted on PBS’s A Prince Among Slaves, the story of a prince from West Africa who was enslaved in the 1780s, freed by order of President John Quincy Adams in the 1820s and returned to his homeland.
The article provides a quick historical survey of the work of several prominent female screenwriters across the first century of filmmaking, including Anita Loos, Dorothy Parker, Frances Goodrich and Joan Didion. In all of their memoirs and other writings about working on screenplays, each mentioned the importance of (often) being the lone woman in the room during pitches and during the development of a screenplay. Goodrich summarized all their experiences concisely when she wrote, ‘I’m always the only woman working on the picture and I hold the fate of the women [characters] in my hand… I’ll fight for what the gal will or will not do, and I can be completely unfeminine about it.’ Also, the rise of female directors, such as Barbra Streisand or female production executives, such as Kathleen Kennedy, prove that one of the greatest assets to having a female voice in the room is the ability to invite other women inside. Therefore, this paper contributes to the scholarship on women in film and to authorship studies.
The title is a riff on a series of one-act plays I worked on in college called “Honey, You Know I Can’t Hear You When the Water’s Running” written by Robert Anderson (author of the plays Tea and Sympathy and was Oscar-nominated for the screenplays A Nun’s Story and I Never Sang for my Father.)
You can read and download the entire journal, edited by Louise Sawtell, Stayci Taylor, which includes other fine articles have a global reach, covering questions of gender in screenwriting practice; reflections on the Irish film industry; Female Screenwriters and Street Films in Weimar Republic; Narrative and Masculinity in The Long Goodbye; How Hollywood Screenplays Inscribe Gender.
The editors had also asked all contributors to create video abstracts for each piece. Thanks to Doug’s help, mine came out pretty good:
Forty-two years ago today — September 11, 1966 — Del Mar was renamed “Clarksville” as part of a promotion for the Monkees’ TV show to debut the following night. The Sunday event marked the first time the foursome performed in public.
Ron Jacobs was a DJ at L.A. radio station KHJ at the time. “One of Boss Radio’s most exciting promotions was staging an actual ‘Last Train to Clarksville,’ ” he says on his website. “A few hundred KHJ winners rode to ‘Clarksville,’ the city of Del Mar.”
“The tenth callers would get two free tickets to the Last Train to Clarksville,” recalls KHJ promotions associate Barbara Hamaker in the Michael Nesmith biography Total Control.
“To this day I don’t know how we did it,” continues Hamaker. “I was the one who had to type up all the releases and all of the stuff that was involved in getting kids onto the train…we used some Podunk town called Del Mar.”
A History of Screenwriting – 25 in a series – Excelsior! Prince of the Magicians (George Méliès, France, 1901)
The magician appears upon the stage with his assistant. Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, he causes an empty jar to suddenly appear under it. He places the empty jar upon the table and seizing his assistant by one arm, begins pumping, when lo! a stream of water emits from the mouth of the assistant and fills the dish. One by one he takes six fishes from the mouth of his assistant and places them in the dish.
Directed by Georges Melies Produced by Georges Melies DetailsCountry France Release Date: 1900 Production Co: Star-Film
* 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!
I teach several classes for the Stephens College Low-Residency MFA in Screenwriting, including History of Screenwriting. In fact, I created the curriculum for that course from scratch and customized it to this particular MFA in that it covers ‘Screenwriting’ (not directors) and even more specifically, the class has a female-centric focus. As part History of Screenwriting I, the first course in the four-class series, we focus on the early women screenwriters of the silent film era who male historians have, for the most part, quietly forgotten in their books. In this series, I share with you some of the screenwriters and films that should be part of any screenwriters education. I believe that in order to become a great screenwriter, you need to understand the deep history of screenwriting and the amazing people who created the career. — Dr. Rosanne Welch
Jean Powergirl takes the host reigns and welcomes her guest Rosanne Welch, PhD to the show! They’ll be discussing Roseanne’s book, “Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture.”
Transcript:
Jean:Your saying that part of thing was that this was just this era was the dawn of trying to show people more real life situations as opposed to fantasy like, for example, you cited in your book, the “Look Who’s Coming to Dinner” film about an interracial couple, which is this huge production back then and this was already happening in film, but not so much in TV, right?
Rosanne: Now, TV is interesting. I have to give credit, of all things, afternoon soap operas are some of the places where controversial stuff happened first. AIDS stories were first done. Gay characters were first introduced. People didn’t take the soaps seriously because they were just for housewives to watch.
Jean: Right.
Rosanne: … bit as those things seeped into daytime TV then they slowly can seep into nighttime television and usually in the hipper, younger, new programming.
A hit television show about a fictitious rock band, The Monkees (1966-1968) earned two Emmys–Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Comedy. Capitalizing on the show’s success, the actual band formed by the actors, at their peak, sold more albums than The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined and set the stage for other musical TV characters from The Partridge Family to Hannah Montana. In the late 1980s, the Monkees began a series of reunion tours that continued into their 50th anniversary.
This book tells the story of The Monkees and how the show changed television, introducing a new generation to the fourth-wall-breaking slapstick created by Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers. Its creators contributed to the innovative film and television of 1970s with projects like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laugh-In and Welcome Back, Kotter. Immense profits from the show, its music and its merchandising funded the producers’ move into films such as Head, Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces.
Rosanne Welch, PhD has written for television (Touched by an Angel, Picket Fences) and print (Three Ring Circus: How Real Couples Balance Marriage, Work and Kids and The Encyclopedia of Women in Aviation and Space). In the documentary world she has written and produced Bill Clinton and the Boys Nation Class of 1963 for ABC NEWS/Nightline and consulted on PBS’s A Prince Among Slaves, the story of a prince from West Africa who was enslaved in the 1780s, freed by order of President John Quincy Adams in the 1820s and returned to his homeland.
Due to the way former cast members have defined the stories on The Monkees during countless interviews, casual viewers assume the genre of every episode was light romance. Dolenz, Nesmith and Tork often recall the show as merely a weekly romp around the trouble caused by plots involving Davy-wanting-a-girl/Davy-getting-a-girl or Davy-losing-a-girl.
It is an unfortunate truth that performers and artists who were overlooked, unappreciated, or reviled in their time only gain critical acclaim and attention in death. When this article was first conceived, Davy Jones (1945–2012) was still alive, viewed by many Monkees fans (including this author) as the proverbial stick in the mud, the one who warned his bandmates to stick with the formula that yielded commercial success rather than challenge the whims of their management. He was the one who always went to the press with overtly critical and spiteful comments about his cohorts, most recently after the abrupt cancellation of their summer tour. Although Jones was the least innovative of the four Monkees, one can only hope that the band as a whole will still receive the critical reappraisal that should come with his passing.
The Monkees have never quite been able to enjoy their moment in the sun. In their time, the burgeoning rock press viewed them as an instrument of the music industry, an example of plastic pop marketing creeping its way into the “authentic” world of rock music. Their first reunion in the 1980’s was marred by bad publicity and a refusal to play ball with the media, with subsequent reunion efforts being greeted with increasing levels of derision and internal friction. Although they have been eligible since 1991, The Monkees have never been considered for inclusion in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, an embarrassing fact that says more about the music industry than it does about the band. Beneath the pop façade, the one that made the group such a punch line among critics, scholars, and rockists, were creative forces that were innovative, subversive, and groundbreaking.
Screenwriters have always been viewed as Hollywood’s stepchildren. Silent-film comedy pioneer Mack Sennett forbade his screenwriters from writing anything down, for fear they’d get inflated ideas about themselves as creative artists. The great midcentury director John Ford was known to answer studio executives’ complaints that he was behind schedule by tearing a handful of random pages from his script and tossing them over his shoulder. And Ken Russell was so contemptuous of Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay for Altered States that Chayefsky insisted on having his name removed from the credits.
Of course, popular impressions aside, screenwriters have been central to moviemaking since the first motion picture audiences got past the sheer novelty of seeing pictures that moved at all. Soon they wanted to know: What happens next? In this truly fresh perspective on the movies, veteran Oscar-winning screenwriter Marc Norman gives us the first comprehensive history of the men and women who have answered that question, from Anita Loos, the highest-paid screenwriter of her day, to Robert Towne, Quentin Tarantino, Charlie Kaufman, and other paradigm-busting talents reimagining movies for the new century.
* 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!
I teach several classes for the Stephens College Low-Residency MFA in Screenwriting, including History of Screenwriting. In fact, I created the curriculum for that course from scratch and customized it to this particular MFA in that it covers ‘Screenwriting’ (not directors) and even more specifically, the class has a female-centric focus. As part History of Screenwriting I, the first course in the four-class series, we focus on the early women screenwriters of the silent film era who male historians have, for the most part, quietly forgotten in their books. In this series, I share with you some of the screenwriters and films that should be part of any screenwriters education. I believe that in order to become a great screenwriter, you need to understand the deep history of screenwriting and the amazing people who created the career. — Dr. Rosanne Welch
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![06 : From Soap Operas to Primetime : “Why The Monkees Matter” Interview [Video] (0:51)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/rmw-power-06-soaps-primetime.jpeg)
