31 If You Censor Storytellers…You Censor Culture from Why Researching Screenwriters Mattered [Video] (36 seconds)

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31 If You Censor Storytellers...You Censor Culture from Why Researching Screenwriters Mattered

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Transcript:

If you censor the storytellers you’re going to censor the stories and that’s why we get such a small block of stories that are repeated over and over and over again, right, and this makes me crazy. Stories equal culture. So if we censor the stories, we are censoring these moments of culture. We’re not allowing people to learn about these other people and their struggles, which is what art has always been about, right, about highlighting these ideas. Now, this is where we come to streaming because streaming services are finally our chance to show all the many cultures of the world to each other, right? You can’t really block them, which I think is fascinating.

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A Note About This Presentation

A clip from my keynote speech at the 10th Screenwriters´(hi)Stories Seminar for the interdisciplinary Graduation Program in “Education, Art, and History of Culture”, in Mackenzie Presbyterian University, at São Paulo, SP, Brazil, focused on the topic “Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered.” I was especially pleased with the passion these young scholars have toward screenwriting and it’s importance in transmitting culture across the man-made borders of our world.

To understand the world we have to understand its stories and to understand the world’s stories we must understand the world’s storytellers. A century ago and longer those people would have been the novelists of any particular country but since the invention of film, the storytellers who reach the most people with their ideas and their lessons have been the screenwriters. My teaching philosophy is that: Words matter, Writers matter, and Women writers matte, r so women writers are my focus because they have been the far less researched and yet they are over half the population. We cannot tell the stories of the people until we know what stories the mothers have passed down to their children. Those are the stories that last. Now is the time to research screenwriters of all cultures and the stories they tell because people are finally recognizing the work of writers and appreciating how their favorite stories took shape on the page long before they were cast, or filmed, or edited. But also because streaming services make the stories of many cultures now available to a much wider world than ever before.

Many thanks to Glaucia Davino for the invitation.


 

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From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 45: Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage by Stanley Cavell

Months of research went into the creation of the essays in “When Women Wrote Hollywood.” Here are some of the resources used to enlighten today’s film lovers to the female pioneers who helped create it.

From The

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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!
† Available from the LA Public Library

During the ’30s and ’40s, Hollywood produced a genre of madcap comedies that emphasized reuniting the central couple after divorce or separation. Their female protagonists were strong, independent, and sophisticated. Here, Stanley Cavell names this new genre of American film―“the comedy of remarriage”―and examines seven classic movies for their cinematic techniques and for such varied themes as feminism, liberty, and interdependence.

Included are Adam’s Rib, The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, It Happened One Night, The Lady Eve, and The Philadelphia Story. – Amazon


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When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry

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When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – 11 in a series – Min and Bill (1930), Wr: Lorna Moon

Min and bill 1930 poster

By Source, Fair use, Link

Min and Bill is a 1930 American Pre-Code comedy-drama film starring Marie Dressler and Wallace Beery, and based on Lorna Moon’s 1929 novel Dark Star, adapted by Frances Marion and Marion Jackson. The film tells the story of dockside innkeeper Min’s tribulations as she tries to protect the innocence of her adopted daughter Nancy, all while loving and fighting with boozy fisherman Bill, who resides at the inn.

Min and Bill stars Marie Dressler (Min), Wallace Beery (Bill), Dorothy Jordan (Nancy), and Marjorie Rambeau (Bella, Nancy’s ill-reputed mother), and was directed by George W. Hill. Dressler won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1931 for her performance in this film.[2]

This film was such a runaway hit that it and its near-sequel Tugboat Annie, which re-teamed Dressler and Beery in similar roles, boosted both to superstar status. Dressler topped Quigley Publications’ annual Top Ten Money Making Stars Poll of movie exhibitors in 1933, and the two pairings with Dressler were primarily responsible for Beery becoming MGM’s highest-paid actor in the early 1930s, before Clark Gable took over that crown;  — Wikipedia

More about Lorna Moon


Buy “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Today!


When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

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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!
† Available from the LA Public Library

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 2: Greenaway’s books: Peter Greenaway’s published screenplays by Miguel Mota

Highlighting the articles in the past editions of the Journal of Screenwriting, of which I am the Book Reviews Editor. Hopefully these abstracts will entice you to did a little deeper into the history and future of screenwriting. — Rosanne


Greenaway’s books: Peter Greenaway’s published screenplays by Miguel Mota

Greenaway’s published screenplays – screenplays produced and consumed as discrete material objects – function both as fluid, hybrid texts and as material books that stand ambivalently and therefore suggestively and productively poised between print and film technologies. Ranging from the early scripts published by Faber and Faber in the mid-to-late 1980s to the later and still-ongoing series of scripts produced by the French publisher Dis Voir, Greenaway’s published screenplays are fascinating examples of print film texts that produce and demand unique ways of reading and looking. By addressing these books as visual and material objects, distinct from the films, we might evince and extract from the pages of these published screenplays entirely new texts with a plurality of narrative possibilities, in which juxtapositions and relationships amongst different cultural discourses can give rise to innovative visual and verbal structures. Such an approach to Greenaway’s published film scripts as material events might contribute a curious but compelling chapter to the history of the ontology of the screenplay, affording the published script a visibility it often otherwise lacks.


The Journal of Screenwriting is an international double-blind peer-reviewed journal that is published three times a year. The journal highlights current academic and professional thinking about the screenplay and intends to promote, stimulate and bring together current research and contemporary debates around the screenplay whilst encouraging groundbreaking research in an international arena. The journal is discursive, critical, rigorous and engages with issues in a dynamic and developing field, linking academic theory to screenwriting practice. 

Get your copy and subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting Today!



* 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!

30 Michael Wilson – Censored from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (34 seconds)

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30 Michael Wilson - Censored from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered

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Transcript:

In this time period this gentleman, Michael Wilson was completely censored. His movies were put out without his name on them at all. The movies were released and there was no written by credit at all because the studio refused to recognize him because he was marked as a communist.Both of these movies are anti-war films The first one Friendly Persuasion is about our Civil War and Salt of the Earth is actually a union movie. Iit’s about a union of miners, New Mexican miners who are on strike and the women who support them and nobody wanted to support those ideas so his he just disappeared right?

A Note About This Presentation

A clip from my keynote speech at the 10th Screenwriters´(hi)Stories Seminar for the interdisciplinary Graduation Program in “Education, Art, and History of Culture”, in Mackenzie Presbyterian University, at São Paulo, SP, Brazil, focused on the topic “Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered.” I was especially pleased with the passion these young scholars have toward screenwriting and it’s importance in transmitting culture across the man-made borders of our world.

To understand the world we have to understand its stories and to understand the world’s stories we must understand the world’s storytellers. A century ago and longer those people would have been the novelists of any particular country but since the invention of film, the storytellers who reach the most people with their ideas and their lessons have been the screenwriters. My teaching philosophy is that: Words matter, Writers matter, and Women writers matte, r so women writers are my focus because they have been the far less researched and yet they are over half the population. We cannot tell the stories of the people until we know what stories the mothers have passed down to their children. Those are the stories that last. Now is the time to research screenwriters of all cultures and the stories they tell because people are finally recognizing the work of writers and appreciating how their favorite stories took shape on the page long before they were cast, or filmed, or edited. But also because streaming services make the stories of many cultures now available to a much wider world than ever before.

Many thanks to Glaucia Davino for the invitation.


 

* 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!
† Available from the LA Public Library

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 44: Jane Murfin at the Women Film Pioneers Project

Months of research went into the creation of the essays in “When Women Wrote Hollywood.” Here are some of the resources used to enlighten today’s film lovers to the female pioneers who helped create it.

From The

From The

As a woman who wrote or cowrote over sixty produced films, a producer who championed strong female roles, and a Hollywood insider with a career spanning over three decades, Jane Murfin may be one of the most prolific but least known writers of the 1920s and ’30s.

Jane Murfin was born Jane Macklem in Quincy, Michigan. Her first marriage, in 1907, to lawyer James Murfin, lasted less than five years, but Jane adopted his surname and would use it—excluding the brief period in the late 1910s when she and Jane Cowl used the pseudonym Allan Langdon Martin—throughout her life. Although the 1910 US Census records list her as living as a housewife in Michigan with her lawyer-husband James, according to Murfin family correspondence from 1967, Jane moved shortly after to New York City while her husband remained in Michigan. According to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, James eventually became a school regent, after a long career teaching law, and even has a gate on the grounds named after him.

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Buy “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Today!


When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

Help Support Local Bookstores — Buy at Bookshop.org

* 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!
† Available from the LA Public Library

When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – 10 in a series – Ben Hur (1907), Wr: Gene Gauntier

When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies - 10 in a series - Ben Our (1907), Wr: Gene Gauntier

Ben Hur is a 1907 American silent drama film set in ancient Rome, the first screen adaptation of Lew Wallace’s popular 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Co-directed by Sidney Olcott and Frank Oakes Rose, this “photoplay” was produced by the Kalem Company of New York City, and its scenes, including the climactic chariot race, were filmed in the city’s borough of Brooklyn.[5][a]

While this film is significant for being the first motion-picture adaptation of Wallace’s novel, its production also served as a landmark case of copyright infringement by an early American film studio. In 1908 Kalem was successfully sued for representing parts of Wallace’s book on screen without obtaining permission from the author’s estate. Copies of the film, which survive, are now in the public domain and are readily available for free viewing online in the collections of various digital archives and on streaming services. — Wikipedia

More about Alice Guy Blaché


Buy “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Today!


When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

Help Support Local Bookstores — Buy at Bookshop.org

* 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!
† Available from the LA Public Library

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 2: Escape from the stage? From play to screenplay in British cinema’s early sound period by Victoria Lowe

Highlighting the articles in the past editions of the Journal of Screenwriting, of which I am the Book Reviews Editor. Hopefully these abstracts will entice you to did a little deeper into the history and future of screenwriting. — Rosanne


Escape from the stage? From play to screenplay in British cinema’s early sound period by Victoria Lowe

In this article I discuss the evolution of the screenplay from play to film of Escape (1930) through a detailed examination of the archive correspondence between its producer Basil Dean and the original writer of the play, John Galsworthy. My aim is to provide a more nuanced account of the relationship between stage and screen practices at this time, one that goes beyond histories that have understood the adaptation of stage material to have been a burden from which British cinema had to escape, in order to create its own distinctive identity. I argue that the relationship between the two practices was affected by the coming of sound, and the cultural anxiety and debates around the film industry and national identity formations that it engendered. I then examine Basil Dean’s thoughts about the adapted screenplay, in particular his ideas around the retention of the original author’s dialogue, and his practical response to the issues in terms of his collaboration with Galsworthy in the writing of the screenplay of Escape, one of the first talkies made in the United Kingdom.


The Journal of Screenwriting is an international double-blind peer-reviewed journal that is published three times a year. The journal highlights current academic and professional thinking about the screenplay and intends to promote, stimulate and bring together current research and contemporary debates around the screenplay whilst encouraging groundbreaking research in an international arena. The journal is discursive, critical, rigorous and engages with issues in a dynamic and developing field, linking academic theory to screenwriting practice. 

Get your copy and subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting Today!



* 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!

29 Screenwriters Are Important from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (52 seconds)

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29 Screenwriters Are Important from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

 

Transcript:

But we always knew that writers were important — if not the most important — because, if the directors were so important — when we had the Blacklist, 9 out of 10 of those people were writers. It wasn’t the director’s philosophy that we were afraid of showing the world. It was the writer’s philosophy. It was their ideas about poverty and what it was like in America and how we needed to fix it. That’s what scared the big guys and that’s why they all went to prison, right? They aren’t directors. They’re writers. Yeah, they all went to prison for about 10 months because they wouldn’t give names of fellow communists and it didn’t even matter that nobody cared. Half of them weren’t — some were communists and it’s legal for them to be a communist in the United States, but they were mostly all writers. So we know that writers are deeply important because it’s the stories that matter because those were the things that changed people, right? That’s what fascinates me.

A Note About This Presentation

A clip from my keynote speech at the 10th Screenwriters´(hi)Stories Seminar for the interdisciplinary Graduation Program in “Education, Art, and History of Culture”, in Mackenzie Presbyterian University, at São Paulo, SP, Brazil, focused on the topic “Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered.” I was especially pleased with the passion these young scholars have toward screenwriting and it’s importance in transmitting culture across the man-made borders of our world.

To understand the world we have to understand its stories and to understand the world’s stories we must understand the world’s storytellers. A century ago and longer those people would have been the novelists of any particular country but since the invention of film, the storytellers who reach the most people with their ideas and their lessons have been the screenwriters. My teaching philosophy is that: Words matter, Writers matter, and Women writers matte, r so women writers are my focus because they have been the far less researched and yet they are over half the population. We cannot tell the stories of the people until we know what stories the mothers have passed down to their children. Those are the stories that last. Now is the time to research screenwriters of all cultures and the stories they tell because people are finally recognizing the work of writers and appreciating how their favorite stories took shape on the page long before they were cast, or filmed, or edited. But also because streaming services make the stories of many cultures now available to a much wider world than ever before.

Many thanks to Glaucia Davino for the invitation.


 

* 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!
† Available from the LA Public Library

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 43: COMEDY OUTLOOK SADDENS SPEWACK (1960) – The New York Times

Months of research went into the creation of the essays in “When Women Wrote Hollywood.” Here are some of the resources used to enlighten today’s film lovers to the female pioneers who helped create it.

From The

COMEDY OUTLOOK SADDENS SPEWACK; Calls Times ‘Unfortunate’ for the Writer of Humor — Cites ‘Method’ School as ‘Grim’
By Louis Calta

Available in facsimile version on the NY Times web site.


Buy “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Today!


When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

Help Support Local Bookstores — Buy at Bookshop.org

* 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!
† Available from the LA Public Library