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
Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze (1894)
The earliest surviving copyrighted motion picture, the Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze is a short film made by W. K. L. Dickson in January 1894 for advertising purposes. Often referred to as “Fred Ott’s Sneeze,” this is is one of the world’s earliest motion pictures and America’s best known early film production. The star is Fred Ott, an Edison employee known to his fellow workers in the laboratory for his comic sneezing and other gags. This item was received in the Library of Congress on January 9, 1894, as a copyright deposit from Dickson.
Two other Edison experimental films on the Library’s YouTube site – DICKSON GREETING (May 1891) and NEWARK ATHLETE (May or June 1891), predate The Sneeze. The Sneeze was submitted for copyright as 45 frames from the motion picture printed as positive prints on paper rather than as a reel of film. The prints were mounted on cardboard and submitted to the Copyright Office in this form. The video of the Sneeze on loc.gov and YouTube was later rephotographed and turned into a moving image from these mounted frames.
SUMMARY Film made for publicity purposes, as a series of still photographs to accompany an article in Harper’s weekly.
OTHER TITLES Sneeze Fred Ott’s sneeze
CREATED/PUBLISHED United States : Edison Manufacturing Co., 1894.
NOTES Copyright: W. K. L. Dickson; 9Jan1894; 2887.
Performer: Fred Ott.
Camera, William Heise.
Filmed ca. January 2-7, 1894, in Edison’s Black Maria studio.
SUBJECTS Sneezing. Publicity. Motion picture industry–Public relations–United States. Actuality
RELATED NAMES Dickson, W. K.-L. (William Kennedy-Laurie), 1860-1935, production. Ott, Frederic P., performer. Heise, William, camera. Thomas A. Edison, Inc. Hendricks (Gordon) Collection (Library of Congress) Paper Print Collection (Library of Congress)
“1960s TV Censorship and The Monkees” gives a brief overview of where censorship standards were in the era – and how The Monkees pushed the envelope with its mentions of the Vietnam War – and Sunset Strip riots – and even with the outrageous storytelling behind “Frodis Caper”, the episode that celebrated the saving of an alien plant that very closely resembled a marijuana plant…
Writer Treva Silverman said the staff got away with such jokes because the network executives were just old enough not to understand any of the references. Presented at Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting classes on Friday, August 5, 2016
Transcript:
They had a couple of other big names come in. And then this was Treva’s explanation to me about why they got away with it. Network guys thought they were hip and cool, but they had no idea what was going on. And these guys knew it. She defined herself as a hippy as did Peter Meyerson like I said and she said she started smoking pot during the course of working on the show and when she went home to New York to visit her relatives they were like, ahhh…scandalized. She said, “Well, that’s just what everyone is doing.” So, I wanted to mention that we’re not done with censorship on television briefly. If you know Amy Schumer recently had this sketch canceled from her show. It was censored. She wasn’t to air it and it was anti-gun thing based on all the mass shootings. We still obviously knew about the “wardrobe malfunction” and what can and can’t be shown of a woman on television and of course, George Carlin went to court over The 7 Dirty Words You Can’t Say on Television. Dexter, of course, think how violent that is. We worry so much about what sex we show on TV but look how much violence we show and I think Gilda Radner, who I love dearly, is pretty brilliant because she talked about the violence on television back in the day. So we’re still not done with that. If you’re interested in censorship on TV, these are some books that are fun to look at that talk about this period of time. And so, if you want to look into that, that’s what they are. And that’s the flat out presentation.
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.”
Among the many technical terms students confront when studying the aesthetics of television, the one they seem to remember most is metatextuality, which in laymen’s terms happens when a character breaks the fourth wall with an aside to the audience, thereby acknowledging that someone, the audience, is watching and admitting they know they are playing a character in a fictional world.
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.
Of course, we all know, gee whiz, the biggest adaptation of the last ten years has been the whole set of Tolkien books. I’m just going to look at The Hobbit for a minute because when it became a movie they invented an entire character who doesn’t appear in the book at all. Just made her up, because there weren’t enough chicks involved in this story, right? They thought “Oh no, we need to do something about that.” So Tauriel doesn’t exist in the books, but they wanted to have a little bit of a love story. They wanted to have a female character largely because one of the more popular female characters in The Lord of The Rings adaptation is Eowyn, right? Everybody — well that’s Tauriel. Excuse me. She’s so important she got on one of the posters. It’s Eowyn, right? And she stood out in the whole Lord of the Rings saga because of what line? (Laughs) “I am no man!” Wham. What a great moment, right? That’a a moment everybody…so, they knew in making The Hobbit a film, they had to have some sort of female character who could bring that to the new production.
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.”
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
Men Boxing is an 1891 American shortblack-and-whitesilentactuality film, produced and directed by William K.L. Dickson and William Heise for the Edison Manufacturing Company, featuring two Edison employees with boxing gloves, pretending to spar in a boxing ring. The 12 feet of film was shot between May and June 1891 at the Edison Laboratory Photographic Building in West Orange, New Jersey, on the Edison-Dickson-Heise experimental horizontal-feed kinetograph camera and viewer, through a round aperture on 3/4 inch (19mm) wide film with a single edge row of sprocket perforations, as an experimental demonstration and was never publicly shown. A print has been preserved in the US Library of Congress film archive as part of the Gordon Hendricks collection.[1][2]— Wikipedia
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“1960s TV Censorship and The Monkees” gives a brief overview of where censorship standards were in the era – and how The Monkees pushed the envelope with its mentions of the Vietnam War – and Sunset Strip riots – and even with the outrageous storytelling behind “Frodis Caper”, the episode that celebrated the saving of an alien plant that very closely resembled a marijuana plant…
Writer Treva Silverman said the staff got away with such jokes because the network executives were just old enough not to understand any of the references. Presented at Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting classes on Friday, August 5, 2016
Transcript:
And this is the Sunset Strip Riots which had to do with Pandora’s Box which was a club down in Hollywood and the curfew was that kids under 21 had to go home by 10 o’clock and so there were marches and protests and stuff and these guys were part of that. But they had been told when they went to press events they weren’t allowed to talk about any of this stuff. And they didn’t, at the press events, but they did in the show all the time. Which I think is hilarious. Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart wrote most of the songs for the first 2 years of the show and I love this, in the early 70’s they started this protest, Let Us Vote, the L.U.V. protest and it contributed obviously to lowering the voting age from 21 to 18. I think that’s really cool. And Peter Tork said, probably, one of the most intelligent things “the show probably garnered a larger audience for their point of view than The Beatles did” because TV comes into your house for free. You had to buy The Beatles albums. You had to pay to go to a concert. TV came into your house whether your parents allowed it or not and the parents just thought these were just a bunch of goofy guys and, by the way, who’s he sitting with at the Monterey Pop Festival? Janis Joplin. She was going to guest on the show in the 3rd season but it was cancelled.
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.”
Today 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.”
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.
Interestingly, all the elderly episodes concern the middle-aged generation trying to take advantage of the elderly. Yet while the elderly characters are clearly a bit naïve, they also all live independently, take care of their normal daily business well, and none of them suffer from any long term illnesses, as elderly characters seem to have done more frequently in the later television seasons.
![Wrapping Up The Monkees from 1960’s TV Censorship and The Monkees [Video] (1:26)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/monkees-censorship-22-conclusion.jpeg)
![Adapting Tolkien from A History of the Art of Adaptation [Video] (1:02)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/adapt-38-tolkien.jpeg)
![Sunset Strip Riots and The Monkees from 1960’s TV Censorship and The Monkees [Video] (1:09)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/monkees-censorship-21-sunset-strip.jpeg)
![Watch Now: Rosanne Welch talks about “Why The Monkees Matter” with Jean Hopkins Power [Video] (45 mins)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/monkees-cover-large.jpg)
