film – Page 8 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

13 Women Writers To Remember from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

Nearly two years ago I had the pleasure of being invited to join a panel at the then upcoming SCMS (Society of Cinema and Media Studies) conference set for Seattle. As you know that was canceled due to Covid with the hopes of reconvening in Colorado in 2021. That became a virtual conference but our group decided to reapply our panel and we four were able to ‘meet’ on Zoom on Sunday and present: Writing Between the Lines: Feminist Strategies for Historical Absences, Cliché, and the Unreliable Narrator.

Here you can watch a clip from my part of the presentation,

“When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues in Oral Histories”

Transcript:

Selma Diamond. Brilliant writer back in the day. We know her more from being an actress on “Night Court” and being on many of the talk shows and Lucille Kallan found a way to stay in the history books because she became a novelist after she stopped writing television and I think she’s pretty brilliant. You can see this lovely picture of her. So pictures from back in the day do include the women but that’s not the one Vanity Fair chose to publish. She was memorialized a little bit in Neil Simon’s play although he took the two women and turned them into one female character. There are seven boys in this play and one girl. They couldn’t do two girls and six boys. Just thinking about how they could have arranged that right? They thought they were all the same. Even though almost any female tv writer that you meet will tell you that it was the existence of Sally Rogers that turned them into a tv writer and Sally Rogers is patterned after Selma and Lucille right because “The Dick Van Dyke Show” was the Sid Caesar Show. So the importance of those women disappears in history.

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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.

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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Original documents acquiring the barn for DeMille/Famous Players Lasky, Hollywood Heritage Museum (Lasky-DeMille Barn) via Instagram [Photography]

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18 ”Angels With Dirty Faces“ from In Conversation with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

Transcript:

Host: What are your what’s your favorite Jimmy Cagney movie if you have one?

Rosanne: Oh gosh I like angels and actually have my students watch “Angels With Dirty Faces” because it’s such a very perfect movie from that period right? It’s him and Pat O’Brien. He’s the gangster who’s about to go to the death you know to to to be executed and Pat O’Brien is a priest and the beginning of that movie is their two little boys – two young boys – who are robbing a train like you know stealing pencils or something and they the cops see him and they start running and the cops catch Jimmy Cagney but they don’t catch Pat O’Brien’s character and of course the concept is he goes to juvenile hall he learns how to be a bigger criminal whereas the other guy gets to go and become a priest and so it’s the perfect like I mean it’s funny because it seems cheesy but in fact it’s really about the fact that it’s about nurturing right and and how we should take children and give them better things so they want to be they can be better in life and then there’s a great ending that no one’s ever sure and it’s wonderful when the ending makes the audience think because the priest goes to his friend on the eve of his execution because there’s a bunch of boys in the neighborhood who think he’s cool and the priest is like oh no they’ll grow up to be like him and not like me. So it goes to his friend and he says you gotta do something that keeps them from making a martyr out of you and he’s like I’m never gonna do that. I’m strong and brave and everything and then they come to take him to the electric chair and he falls apart and you never know is he really just not he’s a coward he’s scared to death of dying or is he doing his priest friend a favor.

Host: Yeah i think it’s a very powerful movie.

One of the benefits of attending conferences is that you can meet the editors from the companies that have published some of your books face to face. That happened at the recent SCMS conference where I met Intellect editor James Campbell and he invited me to be a guest on his InstagramLive show.

We chatted about my work with the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting, and then my work with co-editor Rose Ferrell on the Journal of Screenwriting’s special issue on Women in Screenwriting (Volume 11, Number 3) that came out recently and which featured articles about an international set of female screenwriters from Syria, Argentina, China and Canada (to name a few).

We even had time to nerd out on our own favorite classic films across the eras which brought up fun memories of Angels with Dirty Faces, Back to the Future, Bonnie and Clyde, and of course, all things Star Wars from the original 3 to The Mandalorian. It’s always so fun to talk to fellow cinephiles.

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With Intellect Books Editor James Campbell (@IntellectBooks)

Speaking with Dr. Rosanne Welch, Author, teacher, and television screenwriter. Today we cover everything from women in screenwriting to our favorite Jimmy Cagney movies and Friends.

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12 Photography can be an Unreliable Narrator from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

Here you can watch a clip from my part of the presentation,

“When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues in Oral Histories”

Transcript:

Photography can be an unreliable narrator to us. In this case, this is a famous photo of the writers of the Sid Caeser show. So I’ve flipped over to tv for a minute. Look at all these important men whose careers went on and on and on but when they took this picture Selma Diamond and Lucille Callan – the two women who were on Sid Caeser shows – had died. So they were not present for this photograph which goes down in history as the picture of the writers of these shows. If you don’t read the small print in the tiny bottom corner there you don’t notice that unpictured are the only two women that we could possibly credit. Billy Crystal was so excited about this when this happened he helped organize this Vanity Fair gathering. This is the long thing I won’t get into but he talks about how much he wants in life he would dream of being in that room and he names all the men and none of the women because he’s forgotten they exist right? That photograph allows us to forget that.

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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.

What this entire presentation

Find more information at the Autry Museum of the American West

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Nickelodeon, Hollywood Heritage Museum (Lasky-DeMille Barn)

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17 My Favorite Actors and Movies from In Conversation with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

Transcript:

Rosanne: I love introducing students to classic films they’ve never seen and they think they know the whole story because so they saw they saw the one James Cameron directed and gee-whiz nobody knows about who wrote the thing and I can’t even quote that off the top of my head because I don’t actually like that movie so… yes but i know the 1920s the Cameron one? Did he write it?

Host: Yeah. I think he may have done. I think I would like to fact check someone fact-check us out but I’m not a big fan of that movie and but the one with Barbara Stanwyck is really cool.

Rosanne: Yeah that’s a really good version of that and Brackett got the Oscar for that so there’s reason for the Oscar and also it was one of the early movies of a young Robert Wagner and I was a big Robert Wagner fan when I was a kid watching his tv shows and whatnot. So seeing him as like a 19-year-old. I loved old movies for that reason. You’d see all these actors, in fact, I was kind of the geeky kid at my all-girl Catholic school and there was a kid who always liked to beat up on me – like verbally not physically – and I remember one time she asked me on the bus going to school who my favorite actor was and without thinking that it would be stupid I said Jimmy Cagney and like half the bus didn’t know who he was and half that did were like oh what’s wrong with you. He’s 85 and I was like I mean from the movies I’ve seen. He’s like really 30 and never mind yeah.

Host: Brilliant. I love Jimmy Cagney. I like the fact that he was able to do those gangster roles and then musicals and then come back later in life and be like a really gnarly gangster again.

Rosanne: When he had done he had done dancing with his sister on broadway so he was really a dancer and that kind of works in the gangster world because there’s that bouncy like you’re always a boxer and dancers and boxers have a lot in common.

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Watch this entire presentation

With Intellect Books Editor James Campbell (@IntellectBooks)

Speaking with Dr. Rosanne Welch, Author, teacher, and television screenwriter. Today we cover everything from women in screenwriting to our favorite Jimmy Cagney movies and Friends.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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11 Other Unreliable Narrators from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

Here you can watch a clip from my part of the presentation,

“When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues in Oral Histories”

Transcript:

Film reviewers are lousy unreliable narrators because they claim every movie belongs to a director right? So in this case we’re crediting how wonderful this Academy Award-winning adaptation is and they never once mentioned Sarah or Victor for that matter. Give him a break right? I blame these film reviewers. As we all know it was Francois Truffaut who helped create the whole authorship theory in his journal and of course Bogdanovich built on that because he loved it so much and by hearing the idea that directors own films we lose writers and we doubly lose women writers. We also blame Ben Hecht a little bit as a joke because he was an early writer and he didn’t care about credits. He just was used to working as a writer for hire. You know in the early days the original Copyright Act said that author shall include employer. So the studios are going to take credit as the authors of these films which begins to erase the names of these women who worked on them. All these studio heads are terrible unreliable narrators. They never credit the women that worked for them for many years and as we know when they started to take monetary control over the business they took women like Francis Marion and Anita Loos and they told them they could be junior writers if they wanted to stay on at the studios and so they left right? They wrote themselves out of history because of the behavior of these gentlemen. They thought of course that movies were like assembly lines and so who could trust that there was one author. There were many authors which ruined everything. They felt the playwright sold the product and a screenwriter sold a service.

Tag: film

13 Women Writers To Remember from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

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

Original documents acquiring the barn for DeMille/Famous Players Lasky, Hollywood Heritage Museum (Lasky-DeMille Barn) via Instagram [Photography]

18 ”Angels With Dirty Faces“ from In Conversation with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

12 Photography can be an Unreliable Narrator from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

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]

Nickelodeon, Hollywood Heritage Museum (Lasky-DeMille Barn)

17 My Favorite Actors and Movies from In Conversation with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

11 Other Unreliable Narrators from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

Overboard Costume Exhibit, Hollywood Heritage Museum (Lasky-DeMille Barn)