Tag: film

Transcript:

Host: I mean you seem to be such a knowledgeable person who comes to film history, do you have any favorite stories or have you met any maniacs, you know? Have you met any of these great the great directors of the great auteurs or have you had any experiences worth sharing.

Rosanne: I have – gosh – there’s so many stories. I worked in television for 20 years so there are good and bad stories. I don’t need to recount the bad ones but one survives all those and moves forward. That’s what you want to do and it’s been interesting to study the greats and introduce them to students and see how they respond. It’s so interesting because yes we teach Preston Sturges of course because he comes from the screenwriting world. There was a new book a couple years ago based on Charlie Bracket’s diaries and Charlie Brackett wrote with Preston but also wrote with Billy Wilder and that was a big you know. That’s a really interesting pair to piece up because Billy Wilder came to this country and didn’t speak English yet and Charlie Brackett had gone to some Ivy League college so of course he did and yet you know you got the ideas from one and the sort of quippy dialogue from the other until the one caught up to the – you know language is different in every country even between the states and the UK right we have different phraseology. So it was important to catch up to that and then Billy Wilder could go off and write on his own but then Charlie Bracket gets forgot sort of in history but he got an Oscar for writing the “Titanic” that happened in the 1950s with Barbara Stanwick which is a really great version of Titanic.

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So there’s a ton of those kinds of books. I like any writer’s biography because you want to learn from that. One of the things I always recommend –– I should have a copy sitting in front of me but it’s on my bedside table –– is “Monster: Living life off the big screen.” It was written by John Gregory Dunn who together with Joan Didion wrote several films including the 1976 Barbra Streisand, Kris Kristofferson “A Star Is Born” and “Monster” is a book where they got an assignment from the Disney company to write a movie based on the life of Jessica Savitch who was a TV anchorwoman who died badly. She was a cocaine addict and things like that. They got assigned to write this movie and the book is the story of the nine years it took to get the movie made in which they quit and they were fired and they came back and eventually the movie was made as “Up Close and Personal” with Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer and it is the best look at the ins and outs of a writer’s life and here were the notes we got. Here’s how we answered them and here’s you know the argument we came into and then they hired a new writer and then they didn’t like that draft and they came back and they begged us. So we got a higher fee because we didn’t want to but you know just the negotiations and then dealing with the actors. Finally, the actors signed on to the script – one of the, you know, 27th version of the script, and then the studio thought they needed a polish. So they hired someone else and then the actor said that’s not the script I said yes to. So what are we going to do? We’ll leave the production and so they went back. It’s a great look at the life of a writer and it’s a very thin little book. So it’s fun it’s a fun read.

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…and there were some older books they argue about. So I won’t say that. I don’t want to put anybody down but we notice in some later texts they’re still not mentioning women enough and so that’s a big deal. That’s something – there’s no one who’s written that history of screenwriting that has the balance that without having to bring in two other books to teach you everything and then there is a great book called Anita Loos Rediscovered where they found a bunch of her written screenplays which were more or less short stories right back in the silent era but you can see the germs of who she was and how her voice came through those stories and much of her stuff has been preserved. So you can then go watch the silent film on youtube because it does still exist. So that’s a lovely way to see the growth of a writer. I like those kinds of books that – so, of course, any biography of a writer. There’s a new one on Salka Viertel that just came out and she wrote for Greta Garbo and then she also hosted salons that had most of the German refugees that moved to Hollywood. So she was sort of giving them a place to be together while they sort of found their legs in this new city.

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Host: What are these books that they couldn’t teach without? The people you know were interested in screenwriting or studying screenwriting maybe go check out or it could be film theory in general.

Rosanne: Right. Well, I definitely like Carrie Beauchamp’s book “Without Lying Down” which is the story of Francis Marion and all the other women who worked at the same time. She was a sort of a salon kind of person, lots of female friends and they helped each other. So that’s a great book. I used Tom Stemple’s “Framework” which is older now. It’s one of the first textbooks of screenwriters, not directors. He was a student at UCLA and he wrote that he was assigned to cover the –– to create the oral history for Nunnally Johnson and in getting to know the man I think he did 11 hours of tapes and so then he wrote the first biography of Nunnally Johnson. One of the earliest biographies of a writer and then we’re going to get the biographies of Dalton Trumbo coming from other people. So he sort of started this niche –– what is the history of screenwriting? Then Horton and Hockster have a really good book on screenwriting which is more modern which is good but it’s been out for about eight or nine years now and my students tend to like that.