On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch
Writing, Film, Television and More!
Realizing the location would be as much a character as any person, Turner negotiated for some of the scenes to be filmed on the actual Gettysburg battlefield itself, an unprecedented National Park Service allowance, though strict federal regulations ruled out any scenes showing opposing fire or combat. In this way, Turner can be compared to David O. Selznick in terms of the way he too obsessed over every detail of the production in ways producers do not always do.
Movies profiled in this book:
Many historians and critics consider Glory the best American Civil War movie ever made. The film shatters the great taboo of Civil War movies—making race and slavery central to the story and using black characters to do so (Chadwick 2001).
Movies profiled in this book:
MFA Executive Director Dr. Rosanne Welch gave a Zoom presentation on“When Women Wrote Hollywood” for the Empire State Center for the Book, the New York State affiliate of the Library of Congress Center for the Book.
Dr. Welch discussed many highly successful female screenwriters of early Hollywood and explained why they don’t appear in most mainstream histories of the era.
The essays in this book were written by the alumni of the inaugural class of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting and come from the stories of the many brilliant female screenwriters studied in our History of Screenwriting courses and collected into When Women Wrote Hollywood.
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In the decades before World War II, Civil War films were largely set in the Eastern theater, but as the center for movie making shifted west to California and studios built permanent western sets (so as to make a great number of inexpensive western films), filmmakers began combining the two film genres. The innovation not only expanded the kind of movie stories that could be told, but allowed filmmakers to avoid the contentious issue of slavery.
Movies profiled in this book:
In honor of World Book Day I wanted to say thanks to all the Readers of all my books — and to all the Librarians who have purchased books to be read!
What would we do without librarians and libraries? Writers need them for our research and readers need them as homes away from home. I can’t count the summer days I spent in the local library gathering a cart of books to take home and read. As an only child, books were my summer companions. Now it’s amazing to me to think books with my name on them sit on shelves beside all the ones I loved.
Read a book today to celebrate a Happy World Book Day!
While many Civil War films cover the Southern perspective, Friendly Persuasion involves the much rarer Northern experience, this one of a devout Indiana Quaker female minister whose family tries valiantly to uphold their pacifist values in the face of Confederate attack.
Movies profiled in this book:
Tuesday, March 9, 2021 – 7 pm EST
MFA Executive Director Dr. Rosanne Welch will give a Zoom presentation on “When Women Wrote Hollywood” for the Empire State Center for the Book, the New York State affiliate of the Library of Congress Center for the Book. This event begins at 7 p.m. Eastern/6 p.m. Central on Tuesday, March 9, and is free and open to the public.
Dr. Welch will discuss many highly successful female screenwriters of early Hollywood and explain why they don’t appear in most mainstream histories of the era.
Join the Zoom Call — Passcode: 120524
Visit Empire State Center for the Book Web Site
There are many exciting steps along the way to having a chapter you’ve written about a beloved television show accepted into a book collection.
All those steps (except the cover page) happened recently on a couple of upcoming collections I’m contributing to but the other day this cover came along for Doctor Who: New Dawn: Essays on the Jodie Whitaker Era and I couldn’t be more excited that a show I originally watched on PBS back in Ohio and followed all these years then made their lead character a female and then I had the chance to write about how a writer could go about making such a culturally important change.
My essay is entitled ‘She is wise and unafraid’: writing the first female Doctor and a diverse universe for her to protect
The book itself will be out later this year!
As the twenty-first century began to mature, so too did Americans’ ideas about who qualified as heroes of the Civil War. While conflicts over taking down statues of old Confederate generals roiled southern cities, artists around the country started making art that glorified the anti-Confederates, and films were no different. This climate bred Free State of Jones, the story of a Confederate army deserter who organizes his own interracial militia of formerly enslaved people and lower-income farmers, all dedicated to ending the war, though for differing reasons.
Movies profiled in this book:
This fictional vision of slavery was pervasive many years after the war, up to and including GWTW. In her book Clinging to Mammy (2007), Micki McElya posits the idea that “the myth of the faithful slave lingers because so many white Americans have wished to live in a world in which African Americans are not angry over past and present injustices, a world in which white people were and are not complicit, in which the injustices themselves—of slavery, Jim Crow, and ongoing structural racism—seem not to exist at all.”.
Movies profiled in this book: