Our Executive Team is growing! I want to welcome Rosalie, the HFC Executive Assistant and Jackie, the HFC Director of Development. As many of you know, it takes a lot to drive this ship forward and with their help and expertise, we are striving to foster and showcase independent filmmakers in Hawaii and above all Make More Films!
Thanks Rosalie and Jackie for joining our team and making HFC your kuleana and ohana!
Every Monday we will be profiling a member of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting 2020 graduating class. This exciting, fresh crop of writers are the future of the industry and are going on to do BIG things, so get to know them now!
#MeetTheGraduatesMonday: Cierra Winkler
Cierra Winkler is a screenwriter and playwright from the Appalachian region of northeast Georgia. She is currently pursuing her MFA in TV & Screenwriting from Stephens College at Jim Henson Studios, where she’s been able to cultivate her love for creating Southern characters who defy stereotypes and bring authentic Southern voices to the screen. Cierra also enjoys telling female-driven epic adventures, and she’s even had the audacity to rewrite Homer in an epic reimaging of the Odyssey as told from Queen Penelope’s point of view.
In 2019 Cierra placed 2nd out of 400 pitches in Screencraft’s Pitchfest at the Atlanta Film Festival for her Odyssey-based feature screenplay Queen of Ithica. She was also a finalist in the 2019 Athena Film Festival’s Writer’s Workshop. Cierra is a member of the Atlanta Film Society and has been accepted into their Spring 2020 Production Academy, where she’ll be training for different positions within the Georgia film industry. Cierra will graduate from Stephens with her MFA in May 2020 and looks forward to what adventures in the film industry lie ahead!
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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.
* 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
Guest lecturer Pavel Jech, former Dean of FAMU, the Film and Television School of the Academy of the Performing Arts in Prague and currently at Chapman University, gave excellent insights into the craft of writing a short film screenplay at January’s MFA workshop.
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 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.
* 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
Claudia Puig, President of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, came to January’s workshop to discuss the art of film critique as well as the current state of Diversity in Media. She also curates two film festivals and spoke about how to work the festival circuit to gain attention for your writing career.
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This one allowed me to riff on some of my favorite female science fiction writers across time, whether they be novelists or television writers. It also opened up a good conversation on what art we support and include in our lives – and what that art says to us and about us. — Rosanne
Transcript:
Moves us into the world of Buffy which is part horror/part sci-fi I would say blending and I think really finally a powerful woman though yes she does use weapons but it’s also about her inner strength and her buddy Willow who doesn’t have to be sexy she’s just a cool really smart girl. So we’re trying to get some more normal representations of women. However when they sell the box set, uhhh, that’s a pretty like it yeah, an overtly sexual pose that doesn’t really thrill me, but the series is pretty brilliant and she’s pretty powerful in it and there’s an ending to it — not gonna spoil it — but there’s a choice made in the last episode in terms of how men would take having to deal with their power issues and how a woman decides to save the day. — what she does and it’s a big interesting thing.
* 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!
One of the highlights of January’s Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting workshopcame in the form of a story structure seminar with screenwriting Jane Anderson (The Wife, Olive Kitteridge, The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio) held on the Henson soundstage. Her energy and honesty in discussing her work and her life in the business was greatly appreciated.
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
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.
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.
* 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
Carol Barbee, creator and showrunner of Netflix’s Raising Dion came to speak to the combined 1st and 2nd year students during January’s workshop. She outlined how she pitched her take on the original IP, how she hired her writers room, and how the create stories for the first year series – which has been given a pickup for season two so watch for it!
![42 Lucille Kallen and Selma Diamond from “When Women Wrote Hollywood” with Dr. Rosanne Welch[Video] (1 minute 2 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/csuf-rmw-w3h-42.jpeg)
![39 Buffy The Vampire Slayer from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (48 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/scifi-rmw-cpp-39.jpeg)
![41 Madelyn Pugh, Lucy and Desi from “When Women Wrote Hollywood” with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (39 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/csuf-rmw-w3h-41.jpeg)
