As the show was winding down this second season, the occasions for recognizing themselves as actors in a television program, often referenced as being trapped inside the program, become more pronounced, giving evidence of the growing conflict between the artists and the front offices of the studio and network.
Frances Perkins, the first woman appointed to a U.S. presidential cabinet, served during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration as his secretary of labor, piloting both the New Deal and the creation of the Social Security Administration. Perkins was the primary force behind unemployment insurance, minimum wage, a shorter workweek, and federal laws that regulate child labor and worker safety.
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.
This is a huge thing to adapt and what I think is fascinating is This guy over here, Steve Kloves, he did 6 of the 7 Harry Potter movies. He actually quit after the 3rd movie. He’s like “Well I have to go focus on my own work” and his son said — his son was 10-years-old — “Dad, there’s no cachet in being the son of the guy who used to write the Harry Potter movies.” So he took on the next one and he did all the rest of them. He created a great friendship with J. K. Rowling to the point where they could talk often about things she hadn’t released yet. He was privy to new things coming up and books that had yet to be published and it was a very deep secret — you can’t tell anybody, blah, blah, blah. Really kind of fascinating, but to study the work they did — and one of the great things he said in several interviews — was that they had to look at these giant books and think of the theme. Which is what we teach people to do when their writing films. It’s all about theme. Start with a theme and any storyline that is tangential to that theme has to be thrown away. We can’t waste our time on that.
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.”
Most famous for being the author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Anita Loos was also a prolific screenwriter, playwright, and memoirist, chronicling the early days of Hollywood.
Though a number of women in the United States and worldwide worked as architects in the 1800s, Julia Morgan was the first woman licensed to practice architecture in California and one of the most prominent and prolific architects of her time. Her best- known achievement was the Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California.
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
Luis Martinetti, Contortionist is an 1894 short film produced by the Edison Manufacturing Company. The film, which runs 12.5 seconds, consists of a contortionist act performed by Luis Martinetti of the Martinetti Brothers trapeze act. Martinetti wears tiger-striped tights and performs contortionist poses on a pair of trapeze rings.[1]
As a member of the artist’s group known as the Impressionists, Mary Stevenson Cassatt was a preeminent painter and graphic artist who forged a new image of the “modern” woman and molded American appreciation of art. Cassatt’s iconic works were contemplative portraits, especially of women and children engaged in contemporary activities.
Thought I’d read Carrie Fisher’s “The Princess Diarist” for some frothy relaxing fun this weekend and found myself dazed by what a brilliant writer she was at 19. Her opening chapters are all from the recent past year (who knew it would be her last?) and sound like the distinct voice she became as a writer, but her journal entries from the filming of Star Wars are a distinct voice as well, capturing the thrill of obsessive first love better than many authors I’ve read (and I’ve read a LOT of them from Jane Austen to Judy Blume).
The quality of the poem she wrote about her infatuation with Harrison (how nice to know she was as human as the rest of us and couldn’t resist the smuggler in the Cantina – AND that she had the opportunity to live our ALL our fantasies, so she “Tried not, she DID) will sadly be ignored — both for being written by a celebrity (hey, wasn’t F. Scott a celebrity?) and for being written by a young girl (hey, wasn’t Mary Shelley 19 when she wrote Frankenstein?).
I’d teach this book in a high school literature class if I was still teaching one. For now I recommend it as: ‘can’t put down even though I have scripts to read and grade’.
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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
I started by writing an article for Written By Magazine which is the magazine of the Writers Guild and I’m on their board and I wanted a chance to meet some people so I recommended this idea and from that article, I then used that as the proposal for the book company and that’s what they chose to let me continue it. So that was what was fun. Here’s the beginning part. I was a fan from the beginning. At the age of 6 when the show debuted on NBC and caused what I often teased was the first great choice of a childhood lived without the benefit of DVR. Should I watch The Monkees or Gilligan’s Island? Both aired at the same non-Bat Time on the same non-Bat Channel. I used that question as the thesis to an essay when many years later I applied to film school and I’m amazed how it still resonates with others of my generation. For my students, that choice harkens back to an unimagined time before VCRs, DVRs or iPads. When one had to choose between two favorite programs and wait for summer reruns to see if the one they hadn’t chosen was going to re-run and you could finally see that story.
![Harry Potter and Theme from A History of the Art of Adaptation [Video] (0:55)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/adapt-41-harry-potter-theme.jpeg)
![Carrie Fisher’s “The Princess Diarist” [Book]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/princess-diarist-carrie-fisher-cover.jpg)
![How It All Began from Why The Monkees Matter Book Signing, Book Soup, Hollywood [Video] (1:07)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/wtmm-reading-02-beginnings.jpeg)