Writer Treva Silverman said that for the musical romps the writers were asked to indicate props and sets and specify a few bits but let the actors and the director improvise the rest. This made the prop department the third improvisational collaborator.
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: Why The Monkees Matter. Cute kids. Mop Tops. Allowed to talk about controversial things that adults didn’t like talking about back in the 50’s, right? Rosanne is a busy woman. She does it all and actually one of the exciting things about me living here in Los Angeles — I’m a Texan if up can’t tell – is I love people like Rosanne. It’s a different world and it’s a fascinating one that’s I’ve always been interested in. So here we have The Monkees/They introduce touchy subjects like the Vietnam War just by playing a domino game. Things like that. They don’t put it in your face like that. So, The Monkees start to be a popular show among teenagers obviously. Now, Were adults starting to like it, as well?
Rosanne: A little bit, I mean, you know. it did all right but it never made the top 10 for lots of reasons, including that it didn’t air all over the country because there were some southern stations that didn’t take because their long hair — which we would laugh at today, because we wouldn’t consider it long — was so strange and anti-establishment that they immediately dismissed the show for their purposes.
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.
Many Thanks to Sarah Clark for inviting me along on this book group discussion of Mike Nesmith’s new “Infinite Tuesday” – which due to his eclectic writing style and his honest look at his life’s successes and failures, turns out to be an interesting testament to how to survive having been young and famous in the 1960s.
Sarah Clark is joined by Rosanne Welch, Ghosty Tmrs, and Music Biographer Andrew Vaughan to dig deep into Infinite Tuesday: an Autobiographical Riff! Hear the panel’s thoughts, some of Sarah’s favorite Nez Songs (not featured on the Infinite Tuesday soundtrack), Then Melanie Mitchell talks Peter Tork “SSB” Pics surface, Monkees News & More!
Carol McAlice Currie and Michael Davis, Statesman Journal
With apologies to the songwriting duo of Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart:
“Here she comes. Walkin’ down the street. She could get the funniest looks from. Ev’ryone she meets.”
But she doesn’t. In fact, rather than monkeying around, Salem author Jerri Keele has been busy writing a book to benefit the Davy Jones Equine Memorial Foundation. (Yes, that Davy Jones, the lead-singing, television heartthrob of ’60s boy band The Monkees).
The Kiss (also known as The May Irwin Kiss, The Rice-Irwin Kiss and The Widow Jones) is an 1896 film, and was one of the first films ever shown commercially to the public. Around 18 seconds long, it depicts a re-enactment of the kiss between May Irwin and John Rice from the final scene of the stage musical The Widow Jones. The film was directed by William Heise for Thomas Edison. At the time, Edison was working at the Black Maria studios in West Orange, New Jersey.
The film contained the very first kiss on film, with a close-up of a nuzzling couple followed by a short peck on the lips (“the mysteries of the kiss revealed”). The kissing scene was denounced as shocking and obscene to early moviegoers and caused the Roman Catholic Church to call for censorship and moral reform – because kissing in public at the time could lead to prosecution.[1]
The film caused a scandalized uproar and occasioned disapproving newspaper editorials and calls for police action in many places where it was shown. One contemporary critic wrote, “The spectacle of the prolonged pasturing on each other’s lips was beastly enough in life size on the stage but magnified to gargantuan proportions and repeated three times over it is absolutely disgusting.”[2]
The Edison catalogue advertised it this way: “They get ready to kiss, begin to kiss, and kiss and kiss and kiss in a way that brings down the house every time.”
Perhaps in defiance and “to spice up a film”, this was followed by many kiss imitators, including The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899) and The Kiss (1900).
Learn more about Thomas Edison and Early Movies with these books and videos
* 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
This book signing at Book Soup was wonderful – good people, good conversation (before and after the signing). Just another example of the kind of quality positive people who have been drawn to The Monkees across generations – I even met a former head of publicity for ScreenGems who had some fun stories to tell. — Rosanne
The thing that I think is special about TV is that if you go to a film, you’ve chosen to pay your money for that message. So, you’re not likely to learn anything new. You’re not likely to believe you’re going to pay for something you don’t wan to be told, but television is intimate. It sneaks into your house when you’re not thinking. When you kid switches the channel and suddenly new messages come to them that you might never have wanted them to hear and that’s what The Monkees were doing. They were embedding some new political ideas into the 13 and 14-year-olds who were watching the show at that time and if you think about it, we’re in 1966, give those kids 5 or 6 years and they’re the ones protesting the Vietnam War in the 70’s. That’s when the big protests hit. So, this is a period that The Monkees falls into.
On a side note, there are many connections between The Dean Martin Show and The Monkees, beginning with the connection between his daughter, Deana Martin, and The Monkees. She guest starred in “Some Like it Lukewarm” which aired as the next episode after “Mind Their Manor”.
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:
Hello again, I’m here with Dr. Rosanne Welch. She’s a professor She’s a screenwriter. She’s a producer. She’s this Hollywood lady and she has lots of interesting things to tell us about and I am fascinated. Here’s her book we’re going to talk about today — “Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture.” You can go to Amazon.com to get this book and yea, we have lift off now. Let me go ahead and tell you er credentials again because I’m going to have this memorized. I know all about my friend, Rosanne. Alright, she’s a professor at Cal State Fullerton, Mount San Antonio Community College, and Cal Poly Pomona. She has a Ph.D. in 20th Century United States Film History from Claremont Graduate University and she has a Master of Arts in 20th Century US History from California State University Northridge in 2004. She’s a writer. She’s a producer with credits for Beverly Hills 90210, CBS’ Emmy-winning Picket Fences and Touched by and Angel.
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.
Historians and social critics differ on the specifics of the timeline, but most cultural observers agree that the strange and fascinating creature known as the American teenager — as we now understand the species — came into being sometime in the early 1940s. This is not to say that for millennia human beings had somehow passed from childhood to adulthood without enduring the squalls of adolescence. But the modern notion of the teen years as a recognized, quantifiable life stage, complete with its own fashions, behavior, vernacular and arcane rituals, simply did not exist until the post-Depression era.
Here, in the first of a series of galleries on the evolution of LIFE magazine’s — and, by extension, America’s — view of teenagers through the middle part of the 20th century, LIFE.com presents photos that the inimitable Nina Leen shot for a December 1944 article, “Teen-Age Girls: They Live in a Wonderful World of Their Own.”
Summary From Raff & Gammon price list: A very interesting and amusing subject. $10.00.
Contributor Names Dickson, W. K.-L. (William Kennedy-Laurie), 1860-1935, production. Heise, William, camera. Welton, Henry, cast. Thomas A. Edison, Inc. Hendricks (Gordon) Collection (Library of Congress) Created / Published United States : Edison Manufacturing Co., [1894]
Subject Headings – Cats–Training–United States – Boxing–United States – Animal fighting – Animal trainers–United States
Genre Novelty films Peep shows (Motion pictures) Silent films Nonfiction films
Notes – Copyright: no reg. – Featuring: Henry Welton. – Camera, William Heise. – Duration: 0:20 at 27 fps. – MAVIS 179897; The boxing cats (Prof. Welton’s). – Filmed ca. July 1894, in Edison’s Black Maria studio. – Sources used: Copyright catalog, motion pictures, 1894-1912; Musser, C. Edison motion pictures 1890-1900, 1997, p. 104-5; Raff & Gammon. Price list of films, ca. June 1895, p. 1 [MI]. – Available also through the Library of Congress Web site as digital files. – Received: 1994-05-13; viewing print; preservation; Hendricks (Gordon) Collection. Medium viewing print 1 film reel of 1 (ca. 33 ft.) : si., b&w ; 35 mm.
Additional Metadata Formats MARCXML Record MODS Record Dublin Core Record
Learn more about Thomas Edison and Early Movies with these books and videos
* 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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