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
…and The Monkees were part of the childish period where they were playing around with what they could do. I think that makes them very special. We think about where we were in 1966. it was only two decades after World War II. People were still holding on to memories of rationing– whether you’re in England or here in the United States — you remembered that period and the United States was still trying to figure out where it fit in the world. we were becoming a super power, but we didn’t know what that meant and so here come these four kids with the long hair breaking all the rules showing up on television and when you’re supposed to be the nice kids on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet or Leave it to Beaver and that made people sit up and take notice.
As an extra bonus, this episode also contained one of the 19 end-of-show interviews that gave the viewers a chance to see the stars discussing their personal lives. Rafelson found those final moments to be so important he left them raw. “Those interviews are strictly unedited. I don’t touch them. I don’t want to. If I have to edit them, out they go. I can tell you damn well they’re not puppets, they’re sensitive and intelligent–they have opinions on everything–they can speak for themselves.”
You Can Please Some of the People Some of the Time… None of the People All of the Time: A History of the Art of Adaptation in Movies like Dune, The Godfather, Harry Potter and More!
Dr. Rosanne Welch speaks on A History of the Art of Adaptation in Movies like Dune, The Godfather, Harry Potter and More! at the California State University, Fullerton Library
Part of the program series for Dune by Frank Herbert: A 50th Anniversary Celebration.
The latest latest is the Martian which is a really interesting book on several levels. You guys know it was self-published and he would put chapters online one chapter at a time and he would take input from people and then he would add that to the stuff he was writing as he went further and he had so much of a following online he was able to take it to publishing companies. They said “well so many people care about what’s happening we’ll try publishing it.” It became a best-seller now of course it’s become a movie with Matt Damon hugely successful the last two three weeks at the box office. It’s been the number one movie. What have they changed? Well happily not too much. In the book they jump right into him being there you know in the movie they have to show you how stuff exploded so it’s big and exciting. That’s why we know he’s stuck at Mars. That’s a small change no one’s too upset. What bothers me is we have another Argo situation. There’s a character in the book named Mindy Park and she is his connection down at NASA right. If I say the last name Park to you does any ethnicity come to mind? Korean-American that’s who she is in the book. In the movie can’t get much blonder than that. Absolutely every bit of ethnicity has been washed out of that character which is amazing because clearly it’s a very successful and popular character inside the novel. Why they didn’t think that they could allow a Korean-American actress to portray here kind of fascinating but also kind of sad because if you don’t read the book you don’t really get the story. and so frankly the moral of the story which I thought was hilarious is actually a book called the moral of the story. The Morel of the Story, you got to read the books. You can’t just see the movies.You have to read the book so you’re not really having the experience that the person wanted you to have and I think that’s the coolest thing because it lets a movie continue to live with you. If you liked it that much you’re going to love the extra details you get inside the book. That’s it. Thank you very much.
Yea!
About this talk
Dr. Rosanne Welch (RTVF) speaks on the craft of history of film adaptations from the controversy of the silent film Birth of a Nation (protested by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1915) to Breakfast at Tiffany’s (to which author Truman Capote famously said, “The only thing left from the book is the title”) to The Godfather . Naturally, the behemoth in adaptation – Harry Potter (which depended on the relationship created by adapter Steve Kloves and author J.K. Rowling) will be discussed, as will the subject of this month’s celebration: Dune.
Date: Wednesday, October 14, 2015 Time: 1:00pm – 2:00pm
About Dr. Rosanne Welch
Dr. Rosanne Welch is a professor in the Low Residency MFA in Screenwriting Program from Stephens College, California State University, Fullerton, Mount San Antonio Community College and Cal Poly Pomona. In 2007, she graduated with her Ph.D. in 20th Century U.S./Film History from Claremont Graduate University. She graduated with her M.A. in 20th Century United States History from California State University, Northridge in 2004.
Welch is also a television writer/producer with credits for Beverly Hills 90210 , CBS’s Emmy winning Picket Fences and Touched By An Angel . She also writes and hosts her own podcasts on 3rdPass.media, her first one titled “Mindful(I) Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch.”
An essential collection of essays, interviews and filmographies, this was a seminal work (and a precursor to Corliss’s 1974 manifesto, Talking Pictures) in terms of bringing the screenwriter out from under the director’s shadow, following a decade of auteurist criticism run rampant. There are essays on Anita Loos, Jules Furthman, Ben Hecht, Preston Sturges and Dudley Nichols; a memoir by Howard Koch about working with Max Ophuls on LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN; interviews with Ring Lardner Jr., Borden Chase, Dalton Trumbo, James Poe, Eleanor Perry and Penelope Gilliatt; a ” Screenwriters Symposium,” featuring twelve noted screenwriters’ answers to a questionnaire (included are Philip Dunne, Norman Krasna, Ernest Lehman and Michael Wilson); and filmographies of fifty prominent screenwriters. The Foreword is by Carl Foreman.
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
“Firemen in working uniform, rubber coats, helmets, and boots. Thrilling rescue from burning building. Smoke effects are fine.” – from the Edison Catalog
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!
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
…but it’s not just 50 years that makes the show special. That’s not the only reason that people were paying attention to it. I think it’s the ability to analyze the artistic achievements of the writers, the actors, the directors on the program. Many of these people had earned awards later in their career with Emmys, Grammys. Oscars across the whole time and the book wants to critically study who The Monkees were as a television program. Something that challenged the new rules of a new medium and the show itself paved the way for future innovation on television. Now television itself took nearly the same 50 years to climb out of the shadow of film. People have not wanted to respect television for a long time. We didn’t have television studies. We had film studies. That’s what important people went for, but in this time period, think about the shows that had been winning Emmys — in fact, last night we had the Emmys — so we had all the new stuff. In the last few years we’ve had Breaking Bad and Mad Men and now we have Game of Thrones and happily, Master of None won for best writing last night, so television has grown up.
New material in the form of Outtakes included in the course of an episode or added to the end in the form of a Tag, often became interjected inside the locked script. These outtakes truly let the audience feel as if they were a part of the whole production, in on the laugh as it were. In the end that is one key to the success of the program, letting the young audience be a part of something at a time they felt they had little say in anything going on around them.
You Can Please Some of the People Some of the Time… None of the People All of the Time: A History of the Art of Adaptation in Movies like Dune, The Godfather, Harry Potter and More!
Dr. Rosanne Welch speaks on A History of the Art of Adaptation in Movies like Dune, The Godfather, Harry Potter and More! at the California State University, Fullerton Library
Part of the program series for Dune by Frank Herbert: A 50th Anniversary Celebration.
Hey, guess what’s in the theaters right now that’s an adaptation? We have the Steve Jobs film which comes originally from the book by Walter Isaacson. Being made into the film now which just opened. Aaron Sorkin is the screenwriter here and Aaron Sorkin fully admits in all interviews “I want you to get the feel of his life, not the facts of his life.” So he made up a bunch of stuff and added it to the movie because he thought it made a more interesting scene. It doesn’t even come from the book. It’s things he imagined maybe Jobs might have done when he was visiting with friends or having a private conversation with this daughter. And Sorkin fully admits that he was interested in studying the relationship between the father and the daughter because in his own life he has a dysfunctional relationship with his daughter and so in a couple of interviews I heard recently on NPR he came out and said, “I really just wrote a movie about me and my daughter and I threw Steve Jobs name on it.” That’s how far from the book he has taken that particular story.
About this talk
Dr. Rosanne Welch (RTVF) speaks on the craft of history of film adaptations from the controversy of the silent film Birth of a Nation (protested by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1915) to Breakfast at Tiffany’s (to which author Truman Capote famously said, “The only thing left from the book is the title”) to The Godfather . Naturally, the behemoth in adaptation – Harry Potter (which depended on the relationship created by adapter Steve Kloves and author J.K. Rowling) will be discussed, as will the subject of this month’s celebration: Dune.
Date: Wednesday, October 14, 2015 Time: 1:00pm – 2:00pm
About Dr. Rosanne Welch
Dr. Rosanne Welch is a professor in the Low Residency MFA in Screenwriting Program from Stephens College, California State University, Fullerton, Mount San Antonio Community College and Cal Poly Pomona. In 2007, she graduated with her Ph.D. in 20th Century U.S./Film History from Claremont Graduate University. She graduated with her M.A. in 20th Century United States History from California State University, Northridge in 2004.
Welch is also a television writer/producer with credits for Beverly Hills 90210 , CBS’s Emmy winning Picket Fences and Touched By An Angel . She also writes and hosts her own podcasts on 3rdPass.media, her first one titled “Mindful(I) Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch.”
Each author was asked to describe their book. The encyclopedia came first (since Peg’s last name is Lamphier and the practice of alphabetical discrimination lives on). I let her have the honors since I knew I would speak about The Monkees’ book last. Going last I also had to keep in mind that the rest of the audience had already received their awards and were anxious to get back to the delightful dessert table – so humor came to the rescue as I commented on how odd it was to be speaking about my favorite television show when I was six after other professors had spoken of Immanuel Kant and architectural digs in South America and Mass Spectatorship in Modern France.
Here’s how I closed out the show…
Thanks to Doug for taking all the photos and video – and to Peg for being such a great collaborator – and to all the friends and fans who have read the book and enjoyed learning more about the 1967 Emmy Winner for Best New Comedy Series.
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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!
During the ’30s and ’40s, Hollywood produced a genre of madcap comedies that emphasized reuniting the central couple after divorce or separation. And the female protagonists were strong, independent, and sophisticated. Here, Stanley Cavell examines seven of those classic movies for their cinematic techniques, and for such varied themes as feminism, liberty and interdependence. Included are Adam’s Rib, Bringing Up Baby, and The Philadelphia Story.
![Adapting The Martian and Conclusion from A History of the Art of Adaptation [Video] (2:06)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/adapt-46-martian-conclusion.jpeg)
![The Monkees and Critical Studies in TV from Why The Monkees Matter Book Signing [Video] (1:04)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/wtmm-reading-05-critical-studies.jpeg)
![A Movie Not Really About Steve Jobs from A History of the Art of Adaptation [Video] (0:57)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/adapt-45-steve-jobs.jpeg)
![Dr. Rosanne Welch at Golden Leaves Presentation 2017, Cal Poly Pomona [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/golden-leaves-award.jpg)
