Tag: academic

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 1: If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage: screenwriting, national specificity and the English-Canadian feature film by Janice Kaye and Charles H Davis

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

If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage: screenwriting, national specificity and the English-Canadian feature film by Janice Kaye and Charles H Davis
  
Like other film-producing nations, Canada’s movie landscape was long ago colonized by US interests. While other nations also welcome American movies, the Canadian case is extreme: Canada has the lowest market share in the world of its own movies on its own screens. Living next to the world’s most powerful country, Canada occupies geographically, economically, linguistically and culturally a position unique in the world. The historical and ongoing predicament of the lack of success of English-Canadian feature films has been variously attributed to similarities to the United States in language and culture, lower production budgets, and weaknesses in distribution, exhibition, marketing and quality. The role of screenwriting, however, is little understood and rarely broached. In this article, we argue the importance of screenwriting in understanding national cinemas; show that it has institutional, sociological and nation-specific dimensions; and present Canada as an ideal case to begin examining such factors. The first dimension the institutional is defined by auteurism as well as the collaborative nature of production. The second the sociological is greatly affected by exclusionary networks and various levels of discrimination based on such factors as gender, ethnicity/race, age, sexuality and economic class. The nation-specific area pertains to diverse historical, cultural and institutional practices particular or exclusive to the country or region. English-Canada, for instance, experiences a unique and complex cultural policy environment. Moreover, its fractured and regional history is one that has resulted in the production of obsessively performed narratives of national identity, particularly imbricated with Qubec, the United States, Britain and France. Our analysis draws together strands of intersecting disciplines, combining film theory and history with production studies, close textual analyses, political economy and nation theory, calling for a more complete picture of the role of screenwriting in national cinemas.

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!

Related posts:

  1. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 1: Teaching screenwriting in a time of storytelling blindness: the meeting of the auteur and the screenwriting tradition in Danish film-making by Eva Novrup Redvall
  2. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V10 Issue 1: Creative resistance tactics in the work of English Canadian screenwriters by Kerry McArthur
  3. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 2: Zen and the art of film narrative: towards a transcendental realism in film by Erik Knudsen
  4. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 2: The constructive use of film genre for the screenwriter: mental space of film genre first exploration by Jule Selbo
  5. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V10 Issue 3: Reel by reel: Jan Stanislav Kolár’s narrative poetics in the context of transition to feature-length format in Czech silent cinema by Martin Kos

23 Edna Ferber and New York Writers from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (1 minute 8 seconds)

Watch this entire presentation

23 Edna Ferber and New York Writers from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered

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Transcript:

In the early days of Hollywood there were some issues because many of the people who came to write came from New York and they were very “fancy.” They thought they were better writers than that silly screenplay stuff. So when they came to Hollywood they didn’t really take their work seriously. They didn’t ask for too much credit. Edna Ferber I want to talk about for a minute. She was a novelist from New York. The quote I just think is cute. She said “A woman can look both moral and exciting if she also looks as if it was quite a struggle.” So she wrote a lot about early attitudes toward females and sex. She also wrote Showboat which is a classic film in the United States and she wrote Giant which is one of James Dean’s last films and she wrote this film Saratoga Trunk. All based on novels she had written first. She was smart enough when she came to Hollywood to require the studio to lease her novels not to buy the rights. So that they had to credit her and after a few years they couldn’t show the film anymore because it always remained in her possession and that was a brilliant idea but too many other of the New York writers didn’t take their work as seriously and didn’t bother with that idea. So it went away and we lost that chance to own our work.

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

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  3. 07 Storytelling And Unreliable Narrators from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (1 minute 30 seconds)
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From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 37: Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood

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



 

Between 1912 and 1919, the Universal Film Manufacturing Company credited eleven women with directing at least 170 films, but by the mid-1920s all of these directors had left Universal and only one still worked in the film industry at all. Two generations of cinema historians have either overlooked or been stymied by the mystery of why Universal first systematically supported and promoted women directors and then abruptly reversed that policy.

In this trailblazing study, Mark Garrett Cooper approaches the phenomenon as a case study in how corporate movie studios interpret and act on institutional culture in deciding what it means to work as a man or woman. In focusing on issues of institutional change, Cooper challenges interpretations that explain women’s exile from the film industry as the inevitable result of a transhistorical sexism or as an effect of a broadly cultural revision of gendered work roles. Drawing on a range of historical and sociological approaches to studying corporate institutions, Cooper examines the relationship between institutional organization and aesthetic conventions during the formative years when women filmmakers such as Ruth Ann Baldwin, Cleo Madison, Ruth Stonehouse, Elise Jane Wilson, and Ida May Park directed films for Universal.

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

Related posts:

  1. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 34: Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood by Karen Ward Mahar
  2. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 12: Lois Weber in Early Hollywood by Shelley Stamp
  3. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 16: “Ida May Park.” Women Film Pioneers Project. Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, 27 Sept. 2013
  4. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 27: Feminism and the Female Author: The Not So Silent Career of the Woman Scenarist in Hollywood—1896–1930 by Donna R. Casella
  5. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 36: Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History

When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – 2 in a series – Lady of the Night (1925): Story By Adela Rogers St. Johns

An on-going series highlighting the women screenwriters of early Hollywood.

When I was first asked to create a history course for a new MFA focused on the mission of bringing more female voices and female-centric stories to Hollywood, I knew we had to start at the very beginning, when women ran Hollywood. No other course I had ever taken or been asked to teach focused on these women, some of whom I had been reading about since the summers of my childhood in Cleveland, Ohio. Back then, I went to the library once a week to collect a stack of memoirs by women I had seen interviewed on The Merv Griffin Show, women like Anita Loos and Adela Rogers St. Johns. Their stories introduced me to moguls like Louis B. Mayer or Jack Warner, who make up most of the history courses I later found in academia. Knowing better, I found most of those courses, and their accompanying textbooks, glossed over these women with a paragraph if they mentioned them at all. I conceived a course that would begin with these women who began Hollywood and culminate in research by each graduate student into the life and career of one particular early female screenwriter. That is what you find here. A collection of herstories about how these women lived, loved and created the stories that gave their audiences reasons to live and love in their own lives. — Dr. Rosanne Welch, Editor. When Women Wrote Hollywood

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De6mZ9IAx7s

Lady of the NightLobbyCardFramed

Two women from opposite ends of the social spectrum seek love and happiness in Monta Bell’s Lady of the Night (1925). Conceived as a vehicle for rising Metro-Goldwyn star Norma Shearer to deliver a virtuoso performance — and seal her leading lady status — the film presents the actress in a dual role: as Florence, the pampered daughter of an affluent judge (Fred Esmelton), and Molly, an underprivileged dance hall girl. As fate (and a shamelessly sentimental script) would have it, both fall in love with the same man: David (Malcolm McGregor), an ambitious young inventor. — TCM

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

Related posts:

  1. More on When Women Wrote Hollywood – Adela Rogers St. Johns – Yesterday’s Children: A Cosmopolitan Book-Length Complete Novel
  2. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 26: Adela St. Johns, . The Honeycomb. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1969.
  3. When Women Wrote Hollywood – 1 in a series – “The Red Kimono” – Story by Adela Rogers St. Johns, Directed and Starring Dorothy Davenport
  4. When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – First in a series – Fanchon, the Cricket by Frances Marion
  5. When Women Wrote Hollywood – 2 in a series – Adela Rogers St. Johns

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 1: An evolving present within a past a history of screenwriting practices in popular Hindi cinema by Anubha Yadav

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

An evolving present within a past a history of screenwriting practices in popular Hindi cinema by Anubha Yadav

This article studies the mutual and exclusive relationship between the history of popular Hindi cinema and the writing of the screenplay by finding dominant points of reference in their individual and overlapping histories. It connects the unique storytelling tradition of Hindi cinema with the subsumed creative identity of a screenwriter. To do this the article focuses on significant historical markers in Hindi cinema: the Silent era, the Talkies, the Golden era of the 1950s, the New Wave of the 1960s, the SalimJaved era of the 1970s and the New New Wave of today. The New New Wave in Hindi popular cinema aims to recognize and legitimize the presence of the story and the screenwriter. The article studies the evolution of this recent phenomenon and examines the academic and industrial variants that have led to the coming of this change in Hindi cinema.

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!

Related posts:

  1. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 1: No room for the fun stuff: the question of the screenplay in American indie cinema by J. J Murphy
  2. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V10 Issue 3: Die Filmprimadonna (The Film Primadonna, 1913): A case study of the fiction of a screenplay and the process of filmmaking in German early cinema by Jan Henschen
  3. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V10 Issue 3: Reel by reel: Jan Stanislav Kolár’s narrative poetics in the context of transition to feature-length format in Czech silent cinema by Martin Kos
  4. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 2: The early screenwriting practice of Ernest Lehman by Ted Nannicelli
  5. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 2: First of all, the screenplay problem has to be solved: the public debate on screenwriting in 1930s Finland by Raija Talvio

22 More On The Auteur Theory from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (1 minute)

Watch this entire presentation

22 More On The Auteur Theory from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered

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

 

Transcript:

Some critics at the time even said they only did it because often a movie would have two or three writers and only one director and it was easier to use the director’s name. It didn’t really mean they thought he was the only one who’d done any work but it became the way we thought but also this leads to the great man version of filmmaking because mostly directors were men. So we could begin to say these geniuses who had created films for us — the Alfred Hitchcocks of the world — and we forget to mention Joan Harrison who is the female who wrote half of his movies including um one of them that won an Oscar whose name just escaped me, so this great man theory is no good. Also in America Peter Bogdanovich is a director and he wrote this book in 1997, which is about legendary directors. Even though Peter Bogdanovich was a writer/director. He privileged the directors in the history that he wrote about Hollywood. So this is crazy.

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Related posts:

  1. 04 Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (1 minute 5 seconds)
  2. 02 About Dr. Rosanne Welch from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 12 seconds)
  3. 21 Truffaut and The Auteur Theory from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (56 seconds)
  4. 01 Introduction from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute)
  5. 08 Jeannie Macpherson from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (1 minute 3 seconds)

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 36: Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History

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.

Reclaiming archive


Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History brings together a diverse group of international feminist scholars to examine the intersections of feminism, history, and feminist theory in film. Editor Vicki Callahan has assembled essays that reflect a range of methodological approaches-including archival work, visual culture, reception studies, biography, ethno-historical studies, historiography, and textual analysis-by a diverse group of film and media studies scholars to prove that feminist theory, film history, and social practice are inevitably and productively intertwined.

Essays in Reclaiming the Archive investigate the different models available in feminist film history and how those feminist strategies might serve as paradigmatic for other sites of feminist intervention. Chapters have an international focus and range chronologically from early cinema to post-feminist texts, organized around the key areas of reception, stars, and authorship. A final section examines the very definitions of feminism (post-feminism), cinema (transmedia), and archives (virtual and online) in place today.

The essays in Reclaiming the Archive prove that a significant heritage of film studies lies in the study of feminism in film and feminist film theory. Scholars of film history and feminist studies will appreciate the breadth of work in this volume. — Amazon

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

Related posts:

  1. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 09: “Eve Unsell in New York.” Film Daily 6 August 1936
  2. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 31: Marion Fairfax, Exhibitors Herald, 17 April 1922.
  3. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 27: Feminism and the Female Author: The Not So Silent Career of the Woman Scenarist in Hollywood—1896–1930 by Donna R. Casella
  4. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 33: “Elinor Glyn.”, Denise Cummings , Women Film Pioneers Project. Columbia University
  5. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 29: Eighty Odd Years in Hollywood: Memoir of a Career in Film and Television by John Meredyth Lucas

When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – First in a series – Fanchon, the Cricket by Frances Marion

An on-going series highlighting the women screenwriters of early Hollywood.

When I was first asked to create a history course for a new MFA focused on the mission of bringing more female voices and female-centric stories to Hollywood, I knew we had to start at the very beginning, when women ran Hollywood. No other course I had ever taken or been asked to teach focused on these women, some of whom I had been reading about since the summers of my childhood in Cleveland, Ohio. Back then, I went to the library once a week to collect a stack of memoirs by women I had seen interviewed on The Merv Griffin Show, women like Anita Loos and Adela Rogers St. Johns. Their stories introduced me to moguls like Louis B. Mayer or Jack Warner, who make up most of the history courses I later found in academia. Knowing better, I found most of those courses, and their accompanying textbooks, glossed over these women with a paragraph if they mentioned them at all. I conceived a course that would begin with these women who began Hollywood and culminate in research by each graduate student into the life and career of one particular early female screenwriter. That is what you find here. A collection of herstories about how these women lived, loved and created the stories that gave their audiences reasons to live and love in their own lives. — Dr. Rosanne Welch, Editor. When Women Wrote Hollywood

When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies - First in a series - Fanchon, the Cricket by Frances Marion

Fanchon, the Cricket (1915) - 1.jpg
By Paramount Pictures – Variety (Apr. 1915) on the Internet Archive, Public Domain, Link

Fanchon, the Cricket is a 1915 American silent drama film produced by Famous Players Film Company and distributed by Paramount Pictures. It is based on a novel, La Petite Fadette by George Sand. It was directed by James Kirkwood and stars Mary Pickford, now working for Adolph Zukor and Daniel Frohman. A previous film version of the story was released in 1912 by IMP (later Universal) and directed by Herbert Brenon.[1] — Wikipedia

Frances Marion(bornMarion Benson Owens, November 18, 1888[1]– May 12, 1973) was an American screenwriter, journalist, author, and film director, often cited as one of the most renowned female screenwriters of the 20th century alongsideJune MathisandAnita Loos. During the course of her career, she wrote over 325 scripts.[2]She was the first writer to win twoAcademy Awards. Marion began her film career working for filmmakerLois Weber. She wrote numeroussilent filmscenarios for actressMary Pickford, before transitioning to writingsound films. — Wikipedia

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

Related posts:

  1. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 27: Feminism and the Female Author: The Not So Silent Career of the Woman Scenarist in Hollywood—1896–1930 by Donna R. Casella
  2. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 31: Marion Fairfax, Exhibitors Herald, 17 April 1922.
  3. 34 More On Frances Goodrich & Albert Hackett – “When Women Wrote Hollywood” with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 10 seconds)
  4. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 17: After the Thin Man. Wrs: Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, and Dashiell Hammett. Dir: Van Dyke W. S. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1936, USA 112 mins.
  5. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 25 : Garson Kanin, a Writer and Director of Classic Movies and Plays, Is Dead at 86

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 1: The aesthetic independence of the screenplay by M.-R Koivumki

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

The aesthetic independence of the screenplay by M.-R Koivumki
  
The aesthetic independence of an artwork is usually defined by the direct relationship between the viewer and the artwork. The screenplay, however, is actualized for the viewer only via cinematic performance. Therefore, we should ask how the viewer experiences the performance and to what extent this experience is created by the contribution of the screenplay, and especially which elements are realized in the presentation and contribute to building up the performance for the viewer to experience.The approach I am leaning on, and through which I am hoping to gain new insights into the aesthetic independence, is dramaturgical and thus practice-based. The common hermeneutic approach in artistic research usually defines what the artworks are and how they exist in our world as cultural phenomena. Through the dramaturgical approach I explore how the screenplay functions within the presentational process.I discuss the contribution of the screenplay as a literary artwork by asking how the literary characteristics of the screenplay appear in a film and their function in the performance. I also explore the screenplay’s contribution from the viewer’s point of view. Here I am not leaning on the perception theories; instead I am using my own observation of the cinematic performance. Lastly, I discuss the dramaturgical process as an interpretive continuum that leads from the screenwriter to the viewer.

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!

Related posts:

  1. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 2: First of all, the screenplay problem has to be solved: the public debate on screenwriting in 1930s Finland by Raija Talvio
  2. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 2: Collaboration and control in the development of Janet Green’s screenplay Victim by Jill Nelmes
  3. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 1: After the typewriter: the screenplay in a digital era by Kathryn Millard
  4. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 2: Time, space and movement: screenplay as oral narrative by Adam Ganz
  5. From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 1: No room for the fun stuff: the question of the screenplay in American indie cinema by J. J Murphy

21 Truffaut and The Auteur Theory from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (56 seconds)

Watch this entire presentation

21 Truffaut and The Auteur Theory from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered

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

 

Transcript:

So how did this happen in a town called Hollywood where we thought we were all about filmmaking and caring about writers and all of that. Few directors are as fair as JOhn Carpenter, who basically said “It is a collaborative effort. All I take credit for is the directing.” That’s the kind of guy we need more of, right? We don’t have enough of that. The problem was, I blame France, not to insult anyone who might be here from France, but it was, in fact, Francois Truffaut, early in his career as a film reviewer her came up with what we call “The Auteur Theory,” which told us that directors were the “auteur”, the author, the writer of the film and that was the end of that. From that point on that’s how people referenced films and this is a deep problem. He was writing for this — Cahiers du Cinema — and this is where the auteur theory was born. To me the biggest mistake ever made.

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

Related posts:

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  2. 10 Oscar Micheaux from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (43 seconds)
  3. 06 Stories Are Important! from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (51 seconds)
  4. 05 Do You Know Who Wrote Your Favorite Films? from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (51 seconds)
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