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.
The Progressive Silent Film List is a growing online collection of information on more than 23,400 silent and sound films produced from 1888 through the end of 1929. Selected silent films produced in other countries after 1929 are also listed.
The Progressive Silent Film List listings are accessed through the filmographies and indexes provided below, or you may use Google to SEARCH the entire Silent Era website, including the PSFL listings.
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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!
† Available from the LA Public Library
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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —
“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”
I presented this holiday lecture “When Women Write Horror” on Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. Researching the many, many women who have written horror stories – in novels, films and television – brought new names to my attention who I am excited to start reading. I hope you will be, too!
Transcript:
It’s very difficult studying LGBTQ people from the past because we don’t have a definitive “here’s a piece of paper that promises you that I am gay” because it was against the law, right? So nobody did that. So scholars have had to find ways to say ‘Here are some pieces of evidence we can use to generally guess this was probably the story and being buried side by side is kind of one of them. Another is wills. Often people would grant their land to someone who had been their companion for many years rather than inheriting it to a cousin or some far-flung relative if they didn’t have children. So scholars have had to work hard to figure that out but I think it’s really interesting. There’s a thing in the UK called Places Of Pride and it’s a tour you can take of LGBTQ locations and her gravesite is one of them. So I think, she’s a really interesting woman. To read her supernatural stories and see what underlying theme — what was she trying to say about how we’re afraid of different things. People tell you what they really want as a message in their writing and I think that’s somebody we should know.
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Transcript:
My teaching philosophy — I will apologize if the translations aren’t perfect. I used Google Translate — but I think it’s important that words matter, that writers matter, and that women writers matter in this world and we must pay attention to them. I think it’s important to consider writers because writer comes before director when you describe a filmmaker who can do two things. They are writer/ directors. They are not director/writers. That tells me something, right? To me that’s a very important point. I also think that we have to realize that the vision of a movie cannot exist without the screenplay. A director cannot direct nothing. There must be an idea. There must be a philosophy. There must be a theme right? There must be a story. So the writer is of equal importance. Sometimes my students who come from directing think that I am saying we should push the directors down to pull the writers up. I don’t think that’s true. I think they have to be equal partners in this right? I think that’s what we should remember.
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
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.
Challenging conventional scholarship placing the origins of film noir in postwar Hollywood, Sheri Chinen Biesen finds the genre’s roots firmly planted in the political, social, and material conditions of Hollywood during the war. After Pearl Harbor, America and Hollywood experienced a sharp cultural transformation that made horror, shock, and violence not only palatable but preferable. Hard times necessitated cheaper sets, fewer lights, and fresh talent; censors as well as the movie-going public showed a new tolerance for sex and violence; and female producers experienced newfound prominence in the industry.
Biesen brings prodigious archival research, accessible prose, and imaginative insights to both well-known films noir of the wartime period―The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and Double Indemnity―and others often overlooked or underrated―Scarlet Street, Ministry of Fear, Phantom Lady, and Stranger on the Third Floor.
* 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
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —
“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”
I presented this holiday lecture “When Women Write Horror” on Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. Researching the many, many women who have written horror stories – in novels, films and television – brought new names to my attention who I am excited to start reading. I hope you will be, too!
Transcript:
Now this woman really fascinated me. Amelia Edwards. She is known again for travel writing. She traveled the world and that was very fascinating. It’s what she published and got more fame for but in fact, she published ghost stories and there’s a whole collection of her supernatural and weird stories that was just put out again in 2009. So we’re having a Renaissance of looking at women as writers and thinking about the material they put out so many years ago. So I think that’s fascinating. What’s double fascinating. Women have been hidden in history as we know. Women have been hidden in the history of literature. Also, LGBTQ people have been hidden in the history of our actual public life and our literature. Turns out Emilia traveled the world with a widowed friend who never bothered to get married a second time and the two women were companions and did not ask for a male escort which was proper in the day for women to travel with a man to protect them and when they died they were buried side by side in this graveyard.
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.
This site is an extension of the research for The Algonquin Round Table New York: A Historical Guide by Kevin C. Fitzpatrick, foreword by Anthony Melchiorri. Published by Lyons Press, Hardcover, Dec. 2014, ISBN: 978-1-4930-0757-8.
“That is the thing about New York,” wrote Dorothy Parker in 1928. “It is always a little more than you had hoped for. Each day, there, is so definitely a new day.”
Now you can journey back there, in time, to a grand city teeming with hidden bars, luxurious theaters, and dazzling skyscrapers.
* 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
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —
“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”
I presented this holiday lecture “When Women Write Horror” on Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. Researching the many, many women who have written horror stories – in novels, films and television – brought new names to my attention who I am excited to start reading. I hope you will be, too!
Transcript:
I think she’s really interesting because she brings the female gaze — the first female to write about the Salem witch trials right? We hear stories from the male perspective about these crazy bad women who were doing these witchy things and now we have a book from the female perspective. What was this really about and what is being a witch about? Is that about power and is that what scared all the men back in Salem that they didn’t want women to have power right and when we look into the history of the Salem witch trials we know that there are many possibilities for why those women were chosen? Among them, several of them were land-owning women and back of the day women weren’t supposed to own land. Only men were but if your husband died and you had no male kids you inherited it and the funny thing about Salem was the men who sat on the council in the city who decided if you were a witch or not when you were convicted and your land went up for public sale the men on the council got to buy any public sale land first shot half price. Just by accident, they were finding women guilty who happened to own land that was rather lovely for them to buy. So she’s looking at this period through this female gaze which we don’t teach in schools.
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Transcript:
Thank you all very much. I apologize that I will speak in English because we do very bad in teaching languages in the United States. So this is the best that I can do, but I appreciate very much the translator who will help us all this evening. So thank you all for coming. We are here to talk about why researching screenwriters is important and I think it’s a very important thing. I’ve been teaching it for a while and I was, in fact, a screenwriter myself for a while. As a writer in Hollywood, I wrote for these television shows. You can see me in the little corner picture there quite a few years ago on “Touched by an Angel”, “Beverly Hills 90210”. These are the kind of programs from the United States that get traveled around the world and I teach my students now how important it is that they are finally being able to take in the stories from other countries and we’ll talk about the importance of streaming media and how that has allowed for that to happen as we move on.
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
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.
“Difficult” is probably the most tactful word one could use in characterizing Lillian Hellman. If ever there were an author safer to meet through her art rather than in real life, she was the one. Born in New Orleans into a Jewish family, Hellman came of age in the Roaring ’20s, liberated by flappers and Freud. Hellman drank like a fish, swore like a sailor and slept around like, well, like most of the men in her literary circle, chief among them Dashiell Hammett, with whom she had an open relationship spanning three decades. She was, recalled one observer, a “tough broad … the kind of girl who can take the tops off bottles with her teeth.”
* 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
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —
“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”
I presented this holiday lecture “When Women Write Horror” on Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. Researching the many, many women who have written horror stories – in novels, films and television – brought new names to my attention who I am excited to start reading. I hope you will be, too!
Transcript:
In also just a little bit post her period when I was researching this I found it so interesting. There were not many women who we teach in our schools, but here they were living full, professional careers as writers in eras when we don’t even think about women having jobs at all, right? So Elizabeth Gaskell really interested me. I love the fact that you can see full shelves of books written by women and books based on horror stories which again, we don’t really relate to women. So what was that about and why were they getting away with that? I think she’s really cool because we mostly know these women for the drama novels they wrote. The things that were proper books. If you wrote a book at all it was about a proper society. So Cranford is what she’s mostly known for which was turned into a miniseries with some famous ladies who’ve you seen in other sorts of Harry Potter-like stories, but she really wrote all kinds of ghost stories and she began her career by being published by Charles Dickens. So Dickens was doing magazine publishing and he’s publishing a lot of women which I thought was very interesting. I had not equated that with him. So Elizabeth Gaskell is one of the names we should know more.
* 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
![06 LGBTQ Writers In History from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 8 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/rmw-cpp-horror-06.jpeg)
![04 Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (1 minute 5 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/rmw-sao-paolo-04.jpeg)
![05 Amelia Edwards from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 7 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/rmw-cpp-horror-05.jpeg)
![04 Elizabeth Gaskell and the Salem Witch Trials from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 15 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/rmw-cpp-horror-04.jpeg)
![02 About Dr. Rosanne Welch from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 12 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/rmw-sao-paolo-02.jpeg)
![03 Elizabeth Gaskell from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 3 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/rmw-cpp-horror-03.jpeg)