From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 2: Zen and the art of film narrative: towards a transcendental realism in film by Erik Knudsen

Highlighting the articles in the past editions of the Journal of Screenwriting, of which I am the Book Reviews Editor. Hopefully these abstracts will entice you to did a little deeper into the history and future of screenwriting. — Rosanne


Zen and the art of film narrative: towards a transcendental realism in film by Erik Knudsen
 
Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future flowerings. (Okri 1995: 21) What defines the classic narrative is also at the root of its limitations; an epistemology that ties it to a material and psychological paradigm governed by largely explicable laws of cause and effect. Such notions as character motivation, narrative aims, obstacles, climax and so on have evolved to become as overwhelmingly dominant in cinema as the dogma of reason which subsequently the industrial age solidified. It is from this that the moving-image medium emerged: empirical evidence of motivations, mechanistic notions of causes and effects and scientifically based including the pseudosciences of psychology and sociology that provide justifications for events and actions all serve to reinforce the dominance of the classic narrative’s role in the storytelling of the developed world.In this article, I shall call for a different perspective on cinematic narrative form; not with a view to discussing what film generally is, but to make some general suggestions of what it could be, particularly from the perspective of a film-maker trying to transcend the limitations of the classic narrative. The motive is to try and understand how, in practice, one may evolve narrative forms in such a way as to deal with experiences not sufficiently touched by the classic form, as it is currently generally practised in cinema. I shall, in particular, look at the relationship between emotions and feelings and their relationship to narrative structure and bring into this examination some notions and ideas from Zen Buddhism to re-evaluate that relationship. The issues I hope to raise are about paradigms and I shall therefore deliberately base my discussion on general assertions and eclectic contextualization.


The Journal of Screenwriting is an international double-blind peer-reviewed journal that is published three times a year. The journal highlights current academic and professional thinking about the screenplay and intends to promote, stimulate and bring together current research and contemporary debates around the screenplay whilst encouraging groundbreaking research in an international arena. The journal is discursive, critical, rigorous and engages with issues in a dynamic and developing field, linking academic theory to screenwriting practice. 

Get your copy and subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting Today!



* 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!

17 Albert Hackett & Frances Goodrich from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (1 minute)

Watch this entire presentation

17 Albert Hackett & Frances Goodrich from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered

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Transcript:

In this case, Frank Capra took a lot of credit for this film, It’s A Wonderful Life. It plays in the United States often, It’s a Christmas film. You can see Frank Capra’s name in big red letters on the bottom over there. It was actually written by this couple — a married couple who wrote for over 50 years together — Albert Hackett and Frances Goodrich. I think they’re quite wonderful because they also wrote the Broadway play and the film production of The Diary of Anne Frank. They won a Pulitzer Prize for that work. Frank Capra has never won a Pulitzer Prize. I believe these are Hackett/Goodrich Films. They are not Frank Capra films. So the unbalance of the credits — the lack of credit — for such incredible work — such incredible craftsmanship, I think is quite sad. They also wrote The Thin Man movies which were adaptations of a book by Dashiell Hammett. There was a book written by this couple by their nephew called The Real Nick and Nora. So they had quite the career.

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

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 33: “Elinor Glyn.”, Denise Cummings , Women Film Pioneers Project. Columbia University

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 33: “Elinor Glyn.”, Denise Cummings , Women Film Pioneers Project. Columbia University

From The

From The

Perhaps most remembered in the United States for her best-selling 1907 novel of exotic sensuality Three Weeks and her brainchild “It,” that enigmatic characteristic embodied in actress Clara Bow and dramatized in the silent motion picture It (1927), English-born journalist, novelist, screenwriter, and actress Elinor Glyn, born Elinor Sutherland, embarked on her American career in 1920 during her second visit to the United States. In October of 1907, at forty-two, Glyn, traveling as Elinor Glyn, the authoress of romantic fiction, boarded the Lusitania and set sail for New York on her first American tour in order to promote Three Weeks. According to her British biographer, Joan Hardwick, “the reception of Three Weeks in the States had renewed [Glyn’s] confidence and she decided to try her hand at dramatizing it” (133). Before that version materialized, however, Glyn returned to England, but only after lengthening her stay with a journey by rail through the American West to California. Her 1907 tour of the United States and her introduction to American culture and way of life may very well have laid the fertile groundwork for her 1920 return and subsequent work as writer, director, producer, and actress in Hollywood.

Read More


Buy “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Today!


When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

Help Support Local Bookstores — Buy at Bookshop.org

* 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

18 Jane Espenson & Marti Noxon from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 9 seconds)

Watch this entire presentation

18 Jane Espenson & Marti Noxon from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 9 seconds)

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’m also really excited about TV shows as you can see and because TV affects more people — because more people are exposed to it — and so I like to think about who are the women in television and what stories are they putting out there. This is our modern literature in many ways and these ladies, Jane Espenson and Marti Noxon were pivotal to a show that took horror and used it to flip all the gender stereotypes that could possibly flip in one one-hour program and that program is… Buffy the Vampire Slayer right. So we generally attribute the show to Joss Whedon and that is true and that is fine and he did write the pilot and he did show run and managed the show. We have since come to find that he was a me-too kind of guy and we don’t need to talk about him that much anymore. So then the question is how could the show have been so feminist with that mind behind it? Well, turns out these ladies were on staff and I believe when you look at the episodes they wrote it was the soul of Marti Noxon and Jane Espenson which gave us the true stories that last in the Buffy realm.

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 2: First of all, the screenplay problem has to be solved: the public debate on screenwriting in 1930s Finland by Raija Talvio

Highlighting the articles in the past editions of the Journal of Screenwriting, of which I am the Book Reviews Editor. Hopefully these abstracts will entice you to did a little deeper into the history and future of screenwriting. — Rosanne


First of all, the screenplay problem has to be solved: the public debate on screenwriting in 1930s Finland by Raija Talvio

In 1930s Finland the new medium of the sound film was regarded as an essential part of modern culture. After the advent of sound, the domestic film industry flourished and the development of the national cinema became the subject of a lively debate in popular film magazines. A large part of this discussion was centred on the screenplay. The choice of suitable subject matter and important themes were investigated, as were the special requirements of the craft for the writer. In this article I explore how screenwriting and the screenwriter were constantly defined and redefined in public discussion in film magazines during the decade and how this discussion influenced the formation of the identity of the screenwriting profession.


The Journal of Screenwriting is an international double-blind peer-reviewed journal that is published three times a year. The journal highlights current academic and professional thinking about the screenplay and intends to promote, stimulate and bring together current research and contemporary debates around the screenplay whilst encouraging groundbreaking research in an international arena. The journal is discursive, critical, rigorous and engages with issues in a dynamic and developing field, linking academic theory to screenwriting practice. 

Get your copy and subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting Today!



* 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!

16 Robert Riskin from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (1 minute)

Watch this entire presentation

16 Robert Riskin rom Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

 

Transcript:

This is an anecdotal piece of history. Robert Riskin is a famous American screenwriter. He won an Oscar for It Happened One Night, which is the first movie to win all Oscars in all five of the major categories and there is a story in town — he often worked with the director named Frank Capra, also a gentleman of Italian heritage who I’m not very fond of these days — because in my research I’ve discovered that often he took credit from writers because he wanted it to be a Capra Production. He wanted to be the auteur of all things. So this story, which as I said is anecdotal, is that at one point Robert Riskin was tired of hearing that the Capra Touch made movies beautiful. So one day when he had a deadline on a script, he handed in 200 blank pages of paper and he said “Go ahead. Put your touch on that!” because you cannot direct if there is no material to direct. Alright. So we don’t know if that really happened but it’s a reminder that we have to think about the work of writers.

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

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 32: The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild by Miranda J Banks

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 32: The Writers: A History of American Screenwriters and Their Guild by Miranda J Banks

From The

Screenwriters are storytellers and dream builders. They forge new worlds and beings, bringing them to life through storylines and idiosyncratic details. Yet up until now, no one has told the story of these creative and indispensable artists. The Writers is the only comprehensive qualitative analysis of the history of writers and writing in the film, television, and streaming media industries in America.

Featuring in-depth interviews with over fifty writers–including Mel Brooks, Norman Lear, Carl Reiner, and Frank Pierson–The Writers delivers a compelling, behind-the-scenes look at the role and rights of writers in Hollywood and New York over the past century. Granted unprecedented access to the archives of the Writers Guild Foundation, Miranda J. Banks also mines over 100 never-before-published oral histories with legends such as Nora Ephron and Ring Lardner Jr., whose insight and humor provide a window onto the enduring priorities, policies, and practices of the Writers Guild.

With an ear for the language of storytellers, Banks deftly analyzes watershed moments in the industry: the advent of sound, World War II, the blacklist, ascension of television, the American New Wave, the rise and fall of VHS and DVD, and the boom of streaming media. The Writers spans historical and contemporary moments, and draws upon American cultural history, film and television scholarship and the passionate politics of labor and management. Published on the sixtieth anniversary of the formation of the Writers Guild of America, this book tells the story of the triumphs and struggles of these vociferous and contentious hero-makers.


Buy “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Today!


When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

Help Support Local Bookstores — Buy at Bookshop.org

* 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

17 Margaret Atwood from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (58 seconds)

Watch this entire presentation

17 Margaret Atwood from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch

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:

What works I think best is when you blend horror and social commentary. As I’ve sort of been examining as we go through. Obviously, The Handmaid’s Tale and Margaret Atwood also falls into that world looking at a future that is horrific for one particular gender, which happens to be chicks right? This is not a great world to grow up in and she just, some 25 years later, came up with the sequel, Testaments, which is different from the television show. The TV show stopped –the first season stopped at the end of the book and then the people on the show had to create the rest of that. She’s like “No no no. This is where I thought the story was going.” So, as an author, she has the power to say “No this is where I wanted those characters to be not whatever you guys are doing on a weekly basis. So I think it’s really interesting to compare that to the later seasons of the show. I love her early picture and then her current while the CBS while the Emmys are going on. So Margaret’s been writing for a long time. It’s a very long illustrious career writing horror.

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 2: The hero and heroine’s journey and the writing of Loy by Helen Jacey

Highlighting the articles in the past editions of the Journal of Screenwriting, of which I am the Book Reviews Editor. Hopefully these abstracts will entice you to did a little deeper into the history and future of screenwriting. — Rosanne


The hero and heroine’s journey and the writing of Loy by Helen Jacey

Christopher Vogler suggests an essential humanity beyond gender and sexual difference lies at the heart of the Hero’s Journey archetypal paradigm which he presents in The Writers Journey (2007), yet he still advises readers to go elsewhere for alternative theories on the woman’s journey, recommending key Jungian feminist theories including Maureen Murdock’s The Heroine’s Journey (1990), and Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s Women Who Run With The Wolves (1992). Through the practice of writing a screenplay Loy, a biopic based on the life of modernist poet and artist Mina Loy (18821966), I questioned to what extent is the Hero’s Journey useful as a metaphoric aid in supporting the development of a screenplay with two female protagonists, and to what extent does the paradigm have a masculine bias? This article first sets out the principles of Vogler’s Hero’s Journey and Murdock’s Heroine’s Journey cycle. I then explore the strengths and weaknesses of both models as creative aids during the development of my screenplay, with particular reference to the development of character, structure and theme. Turning to the notion of archetypes as a creative system for characterization, I discuss how I used archetypes in the development of Loy’s protagonists. Finally, I draw on Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s myth of the Skeleton Woman as an effective metaphoric aid for the development of narratives where relationships are central. I conclude that while the Hero’s Journey has key strengths, models from Jungian feminism are particularly rich for screenwriters developing female-led stories.


The Journal of Screenwriting is an international double-blind peer-reviewed journal that is published three times a year. The journal highlights current academic and professional thinking about the screenplay and intends to promote, stimulate and bring together current research and contemporary debates around the screenplay whilst encouraging groundbreaking research in an international arena. The journal is discursive, critical, rigorous and engages with issues in a dynamic and developing field, linking academic theory to screenwriting practice. 

Get your copy and subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting Today!



* 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!

15 More On Charlie Brackett from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (57 seconds)

Watch this entire presentation

15 More On Charlie Brackett from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

 

Transcript:

This is the two men. Also now Charlie Brackett working with Billy Wilder. Also a man who’s more famous because he became a director as well. Together they wrote Sunset Boulevard. If you look at this poster, you can see Billy Wilder’s name on the bottom in the middle — very big letters. You can’t see Charles Brackett’s name. He’s not part of that poster, even though he co-wrote this very important film and then also in his diary he had this funny line about how he noticed when his own daughter eloped, he thought the trade papers would say that Billy Wilder was upset because his collaborator’s daughter had disappeared. He already knew that they weren’t going to remember his name. Which is terrible because he had an Oscar for writing the very first version of Titanic. Not the James Cameron one that most people know of today, but the very first. So the man was an Oscar-winning screenplay writer and yet does not appear in too many histories because the directors he co-wrote with overtook that fame.

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