books – Page 5 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

06 More On Women and Westerns from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

Rosanne: Right. One of the great comparisons people will make – and I adore “Star Wars” and we’re going to talk about “Star Wars” and how that’s really a western –

Host: Okay.

Rosanne: I adore “Star Wars” but of course, that’s the lesson that you know young Luke Skywalker learns whereas you compare that to – and there’s a lovely Ted Talk that does this – “The Wizard of Oz”, which is a female heroine and what she does is she takes the group around her, empowers all of them to do their best, and as a team they succeed and those – that’s a different look at our West but we know the West did not survive because one or two men took on one or two other people. It survived because great communities of people came together right and did that and on the flip side –when we think about Native Americans – they all fought together as well. It wasn’t just the male warriors. The women were upholding all these things and they also took the brunt of the disease that was passed and all those things. So the community idea is really what – I think – we all succeed at and by not seeing that side of a story, we’re telling men they have too much work to do all by themselves and that’s not fair.

Host: that’s a great way to tell – I’ll teach my daughter that.

The Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting is building a relationship with the Autry Museum of the American West since both organizations are devoted to bringing out more diverse and untold stories. Last year we were able to take our cohort of graduating MFA candidates to the museum’s theatre for a showing of Michael Wilson’s Salt of the Earth and we had plans to present a film of our choice this year – but of course the pandemic changed all that. Instead, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis asked me if I would sit for an interview about female screenwriters in the western genre and so “When Women Wrote Westerns” came to be a part of their “What Is a Western? Interview Series”.

I had a great time discussing so many wonderful women writers – from Jeanne MacPherson to D.C. Fontana to Edna Ferber to Emily Andras. If you love westerns I suggest you watch Josh’s other interviews covering everything from the work of Native Americans in Western movies to films in the western-horror hybrid. —

What this entire presentation

As part of a series exploring the significance of the Western genre and the ways in which the movies shape our understanding of the American West, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis interviews Professor Rosanne Welch about the women screenwriters of Hollywood and their contributions to the Western genre.

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05 Women and Westerns from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

Host: So when we think about westerns in particular which seems like such a male-oriented genre – The cowboy is such a looming figure in that genre – how do we see them differently when we focus on the stories that women wrote or that are less often told?

Rosanne: Certainly the difference is that when we think of a female-focused story versus a male-focused story – and this is unfair to young boys and to men – we teach men in our literature – in our drama, in our movies – we teach them that the only way for them to succeed is to master a particular weapon – which, of course, in the west is a rifle, it’s the pistol, it’s the gun – and take on the bad guy all alone. We’re doing “High Noon” and it’s me and you, that’s it. If I die the whole world falls apart and that’s a lot of pressure to put on one character. Whereas female stories are generally centered in I have come to this new place with a bunch of other people. We are a community and we must all rise together. We must all help each other.

What this entire presentation

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04 More On Unreliable Narrators from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

…and then this unreliable narrator thing is a new thing I learned when I got involved in academia and that’s when you look at the interviews that happen with the men who founded Hollywood, they forget to mention the women who did it with them or they mention women without mentioning their names. One of my favorite sad examples is a woman named Jeanie MacPherson – who wrote several westerns under Cecil B DeMille – and you know if students study film history they’ve all heard of Cecil B. DeMille and they rarely hear of Jeanie MacPherson but on almost any movie he made that made money, she wrote it but she died young and he lived on another 30 years and he did an oral history and when they asked him about working with her he said she wasn’t a great writer. I kept her around because she needed a job but I did most of the work and that’s what goes down in the history books because she didn’t get to tell her side and so to me that’s the saddest part of this, is they disappeared and nobody – they didn’t even know they were going to disappear

Host: I think that will be familiar to a lot of people from a lot of different perspectives those types of those types of stories.

What this entire presentation

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03 Unreliable Narrators from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

The question about why we forget women screenwriters is bothering us for a long time and one of the things we fall back on is this thing called unreliable narrators and it’s really sad to think that many of these early women writers – and there were more women writing films in the early silent days than there were men. It was a Wild West of a job and so we always let women in in the beginning. We did the same thing in aviation. Tons of female flyers. They’re doing all kinds of contests flying from here to Cleveland. I don’t know why Cleveland did it with hub right and all these contests and then when it becomes a business we say oh no no no this is now a place where men can make money. You ladies should leave and we essentially leave them behind. So, one whenever we became a business – both in aviation and in Hollywood – they took women who had been producers, they’d been directors, they’d written their own material and the guys running the studio suddenly said um here’s your new contract. You’re now a junior writer and you can work with this guy and they were like thank you I’ll go back to new york and I’ll write novels right. So that’s Anita Loos and “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and you know Francis Marion who’s probably the most famous early female screenwriter. They just started writing novels where they could again be in charge of the whole story. You know why should they be treated that way.

What this entire presentation

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02 Why Study Women Screenwriters from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

Host: Our guest today is Rosanne Welch. She’s a former screenwriter and historian and a professor at the MFA program in Screenwriting and TV writing at Stephens College. She’s the editor of the book “When Women Wrote Hollywood” as well as the author of numerous other books that you can check out but welcome. Thanks for joining us today Rosanne.

Rosanne: Thanks for asking me. I love to talk about women screenwriters.

Host: That’s great yeah so we’re going to focus on a sub-topic within the book you edited When Women Wrote Westerns. How do we see the history of tv and film differently when we learn about these women screenwriters who are often forgotten and perhaps why were they forgotten in the first place.

Rosanne: The why is always sad to learn but we’re learning it in all of our history classes no matter what we teach in this country and we’re getting very good at that right? We’re learning that the people who told the stories were the winners and in fact, there were many many more stories that were left on the cutting room floor if you will. So having different people write – in this case, we’re discussing women – another gender looking at this perspective of the experience they had right? All those men didn’t come West by themselves. They generally brought women with them or met women here right because nobody wants to be alone for 20 years of their life right? So they have a different perspective of what happened and including them in the story makes the story richer because we need to understand who really were the founders of our country and who were the people who caused the trouble when they came out here right? If we’re colonizing an area that was already inhabited women were part of that too. So women have to take a shot about that and recognize that in their own privilege they came and thought this place belonged to them.

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01 Introduction from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

It’s really sad to think that many of these early women writers – and there were more women writing films in the early silent days than there were men – it was a wild west of a job and so we always let women in the beginning and then when it becomes a business we say oh no no this is now a place where men can make money. You ladies should leave

VO: From the Autry museum located on Tongva homelands in Los Angeles California join us in asking “What is a western?

(Western Music)

What this entire presentation

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New Book Coming This November – “American Women’s History on Film” by Rosanne Welch and Peg A. Lamphier

I’m proud to announce my latest book (co-written by my colleague Peg Lamphier) is set for publication this November 2022 by ABC-Clio/Bloomsbury. In it we take a look at 10 films that tell stories about famous moments or women from Women’s History in the United States.

Films covered in each chapter are:

Norma Rae (1979)
Silkwood (1983)
Joy Luck Club (1993)
GI Jane (1997)
Iron-Jawed Angels (2004)
Salt of the Earth (1954)
Monster (2003)
Hidden Figures (2016)
Confirmation (2016)
On the Basis of Sex (2018)

We’re particularly pleased with this cover. We learned from our Encyclopedia of Science and Technology that you have to ask for what you want upfront. For that one, the art department had chosen photos of 2 male inventors and the space shuttle to decorate the cover. We asked that it be 2 male inventors and one female inventor for balance. No one had thought about including a female until we asked. So for our Civil War on Film book, we asked for that upfront and sure enough, though the bulk of Civil War films are full of dudes in uniforms they found a photo of Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln sitting beside Mr. Lincoln.

For Women’s History in the United States, we asked to be sure to include women of color and you’ll see we succeeded at that request.

Similarly, a couple of years ago in my work as book reviews editor for the Journal of Screenwriting I asked to use a photo of Ruth Prawer Jhabvala on the cover since one major article was about her amazing career writing everything from Room with a View to Howard’s End to Jefferson in Paris. The editor agreed but then production hit a snag in that the only photo available in our price range was too small to blow up to fill the whole cover. But then someone in production had the great idea to use that small photo several times, strung along on a graphic that made it look like a strip of film with that same picture in every frame. Creative and brilliant and salvaged the idea of having a female face on the cover while simultaneously celebrating the work of a wonderful female writer.

I’m learning!

RMW Rosanne Signature for Web

From ABC-Clio…

By exploring a range of films about American women, this book offers readers an opportunity to engage in both history and film in a new way, embracing representation, diversity, and historical context.

Throughout film history, stories of women achieving in American history appear few and far between compared to the many epic tales of male achievement. This book focuses largely on films written by women and about women who tackled the humanist issues of their day and mostly won.

Films about women are important for all viewers of all genders because they remind us that the American Experience is not just male and white. This book examines 10 films, featuring diverse depictions of women and women’s history, and encourages readers to discern how and where these films deviate from historical accuracy. Covering films from the 1950s all the way to the 2010s, this text is invaluable for students and general readers who wish to interrogate the way women’s history appears on the big screen.

Features

Focuses on 10 films with an emphasis on racial and class diversity
Explores where storytelling and historical accuracy diverge and clarifies the historical record around the events of the films
Organized chronologically, emphasizing the progression of women’s history as portrayed on film
Accessible for general readers as well as students

19 Conclusion From Women in Early TV for the American Women Writers National Museum [Video]

Many thanks to Janice Law of the American Women Writers National Museum who invited me to give a short talk on The Women of Early TV.

I enjoyed sharing the names and careers of women like Peg Lynch, Gertrude Berg, Selma Diamond, and D.C. Fontana to the members who gathered on Zoom last Wednesday morning. There are so many more I could have talked about whose names don’t appear in mainstream books about the history of television so we have to learn who they are and carry those names forward ourselves. It’s one of the missions of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting – and has been one of my missions all my life.

Transcript:

…But we can say it took from Treva in the 60s and early 70s, it takes until 2017 for an African-American woman to win an Emmy for writing again a comedy and that’s Lena Waithe who was writing on Master of None. She won the Emmy in 2017. She was also a performer on the show so much like Molly Goldberg she was in the show. She wrote an episode for her character and that episode was so honest and so beautiful that she won the Emmy award for it. So this is where we have come to right? This is where we have come to in our world. I am happy again to say that I work for Stephens College and we are all about bringing out these stories of women. We want more people to read about women, read books like Phantom Lady, who read books like my book on the Women of Early Hollywood, and know more of the names of these important women. For my world that’s pretty much what I’m here to say this morning. So we have I see 10 minutes on the clock here, so that if we would like to have any questions or chatting that’s totally optional. I’ve unshared my screen and I’m going to remake Janice the host again so I am no longer in charge of the screen. So that Janice can go from there.

Janice: Thank you very much Dr. Welch. It was just lovely. A wonderful, wonderful, wonderful program. You do so much to illuminate women and to rescue them from oblivion. As many of our women speakers have said women in various fields, we’ll do our part.

Many thanks to Janice Law of the American Women Writers National Museum who invited me to give a short talk on The Women of Early TV.

I enjoyed sharing the names and careers of women like Peg Lynch, Gertrude Berg, Selma Diamond, and D.C. Fontana to the members who gathered on Zoom last Wednesday morning. There are so many more I could have talked about whose names don’t appear in mainstream books about the history of television so we have to learn who they are and carry those names forward ourselves. It’s one of the missions of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting – and has been one of my missions all my life.

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Women pioneers who created, produced, or shepherded many of America’s most wildly popular, early television programs will be profiled by Dr. Rosanne Welch.

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18 Joanna Lee & Madeline Anderson From Women in Early TV for the American Women Writers National Museum [Video]

Many thanks to Janice Law of the American Women Writers National Museum who invited me to give a short talk on The Women of Early TV.

Transcript:

Then we have to think about who’s getting recognized. In this case, Joanna Lee – in the early mid-1970s – is the first female to win her Emmy Award for a drama right? We have Treva winning for a comedy. Just about eight years later, Joanna Lee is going to win for the Thanksgiving episode of The Waltons. She had been an actress in the 40s and had sadly a car accident which made it difficult for her to perform and be on set for long hours. So she turned to writing. She became a television writer working on all of these many shows right? All the way through and it’s interesting to see how she went from comedies – we always think girls have to be funny first – and then she started to do dramas right? The Mod Squad and then moved into Dynasty but she got her Emmy award for The Waltons. So this is a huge moment – again a female winning this award on her own. That’s a big deal. Outside of that are there women of color in early television. Not as many as we would like as is always the case however Madeleine Anderson came up through the news business right? She started doing a black journal out of Chicago originally and then she got jobs on Sesame Street. So through the PBS network, she started working for them doing children’s programming and The Electric Company. Always things with an educational bent. She’s the first African-American woman who ever produced a nationally aired television series, also on PBS, and also an educational series. So Madeleine Anderson’s someone whose name does not appear in most of our history books. That’s always been a problem for me.

Many thanks to Janice Law of the American Women Writers National Museum who invited me to give a short talk on The Women of Early TV.

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Women pioneers who created, produced, or shepherded many of America’s most wildly popular, early television programs will be profiled by Dr. Rosanne Welch.

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17 Even More On Treva Silverman From Women in Early TV for the American Women Writers National Museum [Video]

Many thanks to Janice Law of the American Women Writers National Museum who invited me to give a short talk on The Women of Early TV.

Transcript:

That particular season The Emmys also gave an overall Emmy for best writer of the whole year and Treva won that. So she’s the only person to win two Emmys in one year. Happens to be a female who worked alone right which I love. Now before that she worked on – she did a couple episodes of That Girl and I simply want to mention that because we often say Mary Tyler Moore was the first single woman on television. She was not. Actually, That Girl was because she was an actress but we don’t take that job seriously but she was the first show. She came on two seasons before Mary Tyler Moore and even before that we should say that Julia was the first working woman on television right and that’s an early just before Mary Tyler Moore as well. So we have a few things to think about in terms of Treva Silverman. After she did television she did script doctoring. So we don’t see her name come up very often because she’s someone that would be hired — in this case for this movie Romancing The Stone — to fix it right? There’s something wrong. We want to make this movie but it’s not working. In this case, the adorable thing was the Kathleen Turner character everyone thought was too harsh and what can we do to soften her up without giving her, you know, a boyfriend or whatever because she’s going to end up you know with Michael Douglas and Treva’s idea was the idea that has spawned a series of books on how to write film and that’s called Save The Cat. She brought in a cat. She wrote an early scene where Kathleen Turner was feeding her cat and because she loved a pet the audience loved her and that salvaged the character. So that’s the kind of script doctoring that she would do pretty much for the rest of her career.

Many thanks to Janice Law of the American Women Writers National Museum who invited me to give a short talk on The Women of Early TV.

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Women pioneers who created, produced, or shepherded many of America’s most wildly popular, early television programs will be profiled by Dr. Rosanne Welch.

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