books – Page 26 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 15: Peace Begins At Home by Clara Beranger

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 “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 15: Peace Begins At Home by Clara Beranger

THE GREAT DESIRE of individuals in every country of the world is for peace and security. We have discovered that the cessation of war does not automatically mean the establishment of peace.

Within a wide circle of acquaintances and friends, I have found that the only persons who have achieved true inner peace and serenity are those who believe in God and try to live according to the moral principles embodied in the Bible. They recognize the truth that peace begins at home. They know that in order to extend peace from the home to the world they must cultivate habits that create peace. At the same time they must free themselves from old habits that cause inharmony and dissension.

Because I believe that every one of us can and should be a link in the chain of world peace, I have attempted to set forth in these chapters certain common human faults and to present the spiritual means by which they can be changed to character traits conducive to individual and world well-being.

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42 Lucille Kallen and Selma Diamond from “When Women Wrote Hollywood” with Dr. Rosanne Welch[Video] (1 minute 2 seconds)

Part of the California State University, Fullerton Faculty Noon Time Talks at the Pollak Library.

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Transcript:

Lucille Kallen worked in a lot of those early sketch shows — Your Show Of Shows and things like that with Sid Caesar. She’s a really cool lady. I like this quote. She kind of falls out of the history but her work on that show plus this woman, Selma Diamond, who more people know as an actress from a show called Night Court, but Selma and Lucille were writers on Your Show Of Shows and when the writers created The Dick Van Dyke Show that’s who Sally Rogers is. She’s a composite of those two ladies right because they understood there was always one lady in those kinds of shows and she’s always a single lady who can’t find a guy and all that nonsense and that was true of both Lucille and Selma. They were unmarried. When Neil Simon wrote Laughter on the 23rd Floor which was the story of writing for the Sid Caesar show. This is what he had to say about Lucille — actually, Mel Tolkin said this. So she’s doing all the work but she’s not telling people about it. Women have to learn to tell their own stories so that we are remembered in history.

Dr. Rosanne Welch discusses the women in her new book “When Women Wrote Hollywood” which covers female screenwriters from the Silents through the early 1940s when women wrote over 50% of films and Frances Marion was the highest paid screenwriter (male or female) and the first to win 2 Oscars. Yet, she fails to appear in film history books, which continue to regurgitate the myth that male directors did it all – even though it’s been proven that the only profitable movies Cecil B. de Mille ever directed were all written by Jeannie Macpherson film ever won for Best Picture was written by Robert E. Sherwood (who people have heard of, mostly due to his connection to Dorothy Parker) and Joan Harrison.

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From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 14: My Secret Mother: Lorna Moon by Richard de Mille

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† Available at Los Angeles Public Library

The adopted son of Cecil B. de Mille traces the life of his biological mother, a screenwriter during the silent film era, and the privileged but uneasy youth he enjoyed in Hollywood while being kept in the dark about his origins.

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New Book Arrives April 2020 – The Civil War on Film by Dr. Rosanne Welch and Dr. Peg Lamphier (ABC-CLIO) – Pre-Order Now

The Civil War on Film will inform high school and college readers interested in Civil War film history on is-sues that arise when film viewers confuse entertainment with historical accuracy.

The nation’s years of civil war were painful, destructive, and unpleasant. Yet war films tend to embrace mythologies that erase that historical reality, romanticizing the Civil War. The editors of this volume have little patience for any argument that implies race-based slavery isn’t an entirely repugnant economic, political, and cultural institution and that the people who fought to preserve slavery were fighting for a glorious and admirable cause.

To that end, The Civil War on Film will open with a timeline and introduction and then explore ten films across decades of cinema history in ten chapters, from Birth of a Nation, which debuted in 1915, to The Free State of Jones, which debuted one hundred and one years later. It will also analyze and critique the myriad of mythologies and ideologies which appear in American Civil War films, including Lost Cause ideation, Black Confederate fictions, Northern Aggression mythologies, and White Savior tropes. It will also suggest the way particular films mirror the time in which they were written and filmed. Further resources will close the volume.

Makes clear that depictions of the Civil War on film are often mythologized
Analyzes films in a manner that shows students the historical context in which the films were made and viewed
Goes beyond just synopses and historical facts, helping students to develop critical thinking skills
Stimulates debate over the various ways the war was interpreted and experienced

41 Madelyn Pugh, Lucy and Desi from “When Women Wrote Hollywood” with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (39 seconds)

Part of the California State University, Fullerton Faculty Noon Time Talks at the Pollak Library.

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Transcript:

…and of course we have to realize the only reason we know her work and we know Lucy’s work is because Desi was smart enough to have all of their work filmed and he owned the film. He paid for the film and that’s why it is in rerun perpetually. There are so many other shows from that era that we could know as well but all of the stuff disappeared right? It was taped over and all that stuff. So his brilliance is why she gets to be Lucille Ball to us today which I think and around the world. I went to the Lucy Museum at Universal years ago and there were people speaking all kinds of languages and everybody understood Lucy because it was like a silent film. It’s all visual. You could manage that right? So Madelyn Pugh is pretty brilliant.

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From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 13: Anita Loos Rediscovered: Film Treatments and Fiction by Anita Loos, Creator of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, Cari Beauchamp, Mary Anita Loos

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 13: Anita Loos Rediscovered: Film Treatments and Fiction by Anita Loos, Creator of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, Cari Beauchamp, Mary Anita Loos

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† Available at Los Angeles Public Library

Anita Loos (1888-1981) was one of Hollywood’s most respected and prolific screenwriters, as well as an acclaimed novelist and playwright. This unique collection of previously unpublished film treatments, short stories, and one-act plays spans fifty years of her creative writing and showcases the breadth and depth of her talent. Beginning in 1912 with the stories she submitted from her San Diego home (some made into films by D. W. Griffith), through her collaboration with Colette on the play Gigi, Anita Loos wrote almost every day for the screen, stage, books, or magazines. Film scripts include San Francisco, The Women, and Red-Headed Woman. The list of stars for whom she created unforgettable roles includes Mary Pickford, Jean Harlow, Clark Gable, Audrey Hepburn, and Carol Channing.

This collection has been selected by Anita’s niece and close friend, the best-selling author Mary Anita Loos, together with the acclaimed film historian Cari Beauchamp. Their essays are laced throughout the volume, introducing each section and giving previously untold insights and behind-the-scenes stories about Anita―her life, her friendships, and her times.

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40 Madelyn Pugh and I Love Lucy from “When Women Wrote Hollywood” with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (54 seconds)

Part of the California State University, Fullerton Faculty Noon Time Talks at the Pollak Library.

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Transcript:

Madelyn worked not only on the first few seasons of I Love Lucy but then all of Lucy’s future TV shows. She helped create all of them and was a head writer on all of those shows. She also did every physical stunt that they wrote for Lucy to do first to make sure that it was safe and that would work in the timeframe they needed. So anything you saw Lucy do, Madeline had done before with the writers watching her and taking footage and trying to figure out if it was gonna be funny, right? So she’s a pretty interesting lady. I had a friend who went to a conference — so weird — it was a conference of optometrists and they ended up at a table chatting with this lovely older woman who was there with her husband, who was an optometrist, and when they asked what she had done in her career, she said oh she did a little writing. They looked her up later. She was Madelyn Pugh. Just dabbled in some writing back in the day oh my gosh.

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From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 12: Lois Weber in Early Hollywood by Shelley Stamp

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† Available at Los Angeles Public Library

“Among early Hollywood’s most brilliant filmmakers, Lois Weber was considered one of the era’s ‘three great minds’ alongside D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. Despite her accomplishments, Weber has been marginalized in relation to her contemporaries, who have long been recognized as fathers of American cinema. Drawing on a range of materials untapped by previous historians, Shelley Stamp offers the first comprehensive study of Weber’s remarkable career as director, screenwriter, and actress. Lois Weber in Early Hollywood provides compelling evidence of the extraordinary role that women played in shaping American movie culture. Weber made films on capital punishment, contraception, poverty, and addiction, establishing early cinema’s power to engage topical issues for popular audiences. Her work also grappled with the profound changes in women’s lives that unsettled Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century, and her later films include sharp critiques of heterosexual marriage and consumer capitalism. Mentor to many women in the industry, Weber demanded a place at the table in early professional guilds, decrying the limited roles available for women on screen and in the 1920s protesting the growing climate of hostility toward female directors. Through her examination of Weber’s career, Stamp demonstrates how female filmmakers who had played a part in early Hollywood’s bid for respectability were in the end written out of that industry’s history. Lois Weber in Early Hollywood is an essential addition to histories of silent cinema, early filmmaking in Los Angeles, and women’s contributions to American culture.”

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39 Fay Kanin from “When Women Wrote Hollywood” with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (40 seconds)

Part of the California State University, Fullerton Faculty Noon Time Talks at the Pollak Library.

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Transcript:

Fay Kanin is very cool. She was married to Garson Kanin’s brother and so they worked together and not only in movies but now we’re blending into the television era and she wrote this brilliant TV movie. She got an Emmy Award with Carol Burnett and it was about a mother who found out her son had been killed in Vietnam by friendly fire but the government had said it was enemy fire and she — when she — in looking into how he died — discovered that and then she wanted to make it known so people understood that was one of the risks that your children were taking when they joined the military. It’s a very powerful TV movie. There she is with her husband Michael. These are some of the other things that they did that everybody knows.

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38 Elaine May from “When Women Wrote Hollywood” with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (53 seconds)

Part of the California State University, Fullerton Faculty Noon Time Talks at the Pollak Library.

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Transcript:

Elaine May is another name that’s fallen out of history and shouldn’t. Now we’re in the 70s. Elaine I think is a brilliant writer. Heaven Can Wait wouldn’t be what it was. Warren Beatty got tons of focus for that but she wrote it. She came out of doing nightclub things with Mike Nichols. They were Nichols in May and they wrote all their routines. It was like a traveling SNL sketch. You probably still know who Mike Nichols is, but Elaine May has fallen out of history because at a certain point she started directing. Which is cool, but she directed a movie called Ishtar which lost a ton of money and she was never given a directing job again. I can name you many a man who has directed a film that lost a ton of money and somehow they still got a second and a third and a fourth job. Elaine Mae was never given the right to direct a film again. Her writing is brilliant and as you know she still continued writing she did Primary Colors.

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