history – Page 13 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

16 Joan Didion & John Gregory Dunne 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:

Again, as I said, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne who wrote all these wonderful things together. John Gregory Dunne actually would have Joan go to meetings first because the men you work with in Hollywood, if you went to a meeting together would look at John while they talked. So, if they sent Joan alone and pretended John was sick one day the men got used to looking at her and then when they came together they looked at both of them. so, they were pretty brilliant about making sure she didn’t get forgotten in the writing process like that.

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Reading Leads to 6 Degree Games with Famous Names

Reading Leads to 6 Degree Games with Famous Names by Dr. Rosanne Welch

A funny thing happens when you read a lot of biographies – sometimes names you never heard of turn up in the lives of people who never met and you’re reminded that the 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon game could be played in generations in the past (with different names of course).

Rachel Carson By U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service – This image originates from the National Digital Library of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service at this page This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing. See Category:Images from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. http://training.fws.gov/history/carson/carson.html, Public Domain, Link

That’s what happened when I picked up William Souder’s biography of Rachel Carson On a Farther Shore. I had taught her book Silent Spring which reinvigorated the environmental movement in the 1960s so I wanted to know how she became a writer. As I was reading one of her influences was Hendrik Willem van Loon, a Dutch-American children’s book author, historian, and journalist (like Carson). He wrote The Story of Mankind in 1921 as a history of the world for children and won the first Newbery Medal in 1922. I’ve been reading Newberry Award winners all my life so it was fun to learn he won the first, but that’s not why I remembered his name.

Hendrik Willem van Loon By Underwood & Underwood – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3a02154. This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information., Public Domain, Link

That knowledge came from another biography I had delved into several years ago when I started teaching the History of Screenwriting. There I ‘met’ Frances Goodrich Hackett, co-screenwriter with her husband Albert of several classics including The Thin Man, Father of the Bride, It’s a Wonderful Life before winning both the Tony and Pulitzer Prize for the stage version of The Diary of Anne Frank. Then they adapted it into a film. Turns out Von Loon had been Goodrich’s second husband (Albert was her third and final since their marriage and writing partnership lasted over 50 years).

Frances Goodrich Hackett, By not known Fair use , Link

I love accidental finds like that. Carson was influenced by Von Loon to become a writer and Frances became one after she left him. Interesting that both of these women and their writings are now more well-known than he or his works when, at the time, he was the more famous.

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25 Referencing the History of the Show from The Difficulties and Delicacies of Writing the First Female Doctor in 50+ years [Video] [Doctor Who]

It was great to be able to attend this year’s SD WhoCon in San Diego and present this lecture on “The Difficulties and Delicacies of Writing the First Female Doctor in 50+ years” in which I discuss how successful I think showrunner Christopher Chibnall was in making that transition.

It gave me a chance to talk about the creative work of a showrunner/screenwriter while also reconnecting to some friends we had met at this same convention some 3 years ago – and to talk about one of my favorite subjects – Doctor Who!

Transcript:

Now what you have to do when you’re taking over a franchise like this that’s been around forever and you’re the showrunner, you have to remember its history and I think you have to homage that to the new audiences. So that they feel like this is new but it’s also old, right? I’m still in a world I understand and I appreciate and for me, that’s demons of the Punjab because “Father’s Day” was such a beautiful episode for Rose. I know. Any time a character, of course, wants to go back and see a moment in history that they shouldn’t be tampering with and that’s the temptation of being in a TARDIS. You can do that. Should you do that? So I think it’s so cool that he could have done that with any of the characters right? Graham could have gone back to see something maybe that happened to him when he was younger. Obviously, Ryan could have gone back 10 years. He’s kind of young but I don’t know something might have happened when he was 12 that made him upset but he decided to have Yaz go back and to go back to a part of history that – again in the United States – the Partition – when did I ever learn about that in some high school history class. Barely right unless you did maybe Western Civ and even then they didn’t really get deep into it.

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16 The “Bury Your Gays” Trope from Why Torchwood Still Matters (2021) with Dr. Rosanne Welch , San Diego Who Con 2021 [Video]

I recently presented a talk on Torchwood (Why Torchwood Still Matters) where I highlighted a few ways in which the show (airing from 2006 to 2011) came up with progressive and innovative ideas that are being used by other franchises today.

I always enjoy attending the SD (San Diego) WhoCon because the audiences are so well-informed on the Whoniverse and Whovians love Captain Jack and the crew that made this spinoff program so engaging.

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16 The

Transcript:

When I talk about Buffy The Vampire Slayer we get to the Tara/Willow relationship and that’s the first lesbian relationship on television and then – spoiler alert – Tara is killed and that is the beginning of the “Bury Your Gays” trope which went on for a few years, but then Emily Andras who does “Wynonna Earp” – if you haven’t seen that. it’s quite good, on SciFi and now it’s on Netflix – when she created her series she gave Wynonna a little sister named Waverly and she’s a lesbian who has a relationship with the local town sheriff and, the producer, Emily, promised to in the run of this show will either of those 2 women die. I will break this trope and, sure enough, you get to the end of the fourth season – the series finale – and it’s the ladies’ wedding. She’s gone all the way to that point. So, some people told her that’s a bad idea because we want the worry about our characters but because she promised they wouldn’t die she also got to be more innovative because she put them in some of the worst possible situations where you could never get out of and, as an audience member, you were like, ok, they can’t die. How – so you were equally involved. It wasn’t like well I know they can’t die. I don’t care. it was like, how are they going to get out of this? So the interactivity stayed. So, I would say that that is not – I don’t think that is “fridging.”

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06 More On Women and Westerns from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

Rosanne: Right. One of the great comparisons people will make – and I adore “Star Wars” and we’re going to talk about “Star Wars” and how that’s really a western –

Host: Okay.

Rosanne: I adore “Star Wars” but of course, that’s the lesson that you know young Luke Skywalker learns whereas you compare that to – and there’s a lovely Ted Talk that does this – “The Wizard of Oz”, which is a female heroine and what she does is she takes the group around her, empowers all of them to do their best, and as a team they succeed and those – that’s a different look at our West but we know the West did not survive because one or two men took on one or two other people. It survived because great communities of people came together right and did that and on the flip side –when we think about Native Americans – they all fought together as well. It wasn’t just the male warriors. The women were upholding all these things and they also took the brunt of the disease that was passed and all those things. So the community idea is really what – I think – we all succeed at and by not seeing that side of a story, we’re telling men they have too much work to do all by themselves and that’s not fair.

Host: that’s a great way to tell – I’ll teach my daughter that.

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.

Find more information at the Autry Museum of the American West

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15 Nice Guys and Allies 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:

I very briefly want to be fair to all the lovely nice men in the world because they are –they do exist and they do credit the women in their lives. These husbands all – from Garson Kanin to Albert Hackett to John Gregory Dunn all credited their wives with equal or more work on all the projects they did together and you’ll recognize of course Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon having done these films which won them all Academy Award nominations and Garson always talks about how much of a writer Ruth was even though we as a culture remember her as an actress but he does complain about the fact that they call it George Cukor’s “Adam’s Rib” when in fact much of the direction was written into the script by Garson and Ruth. Having been theater people they understood exactly where they wanted the camera to go, So they get erased by Cukor. Albert and Francis, of course, are brilliant. They wrote for almost 50 years in Hollywood but when you look at the posters of their work it’s the director Frank Capra who essentially erases them from the picture. Their names are down here very tiny and here’s the crazy thing about that. They also in their career are going to write “The Diary of Anne Frank” for which they’re going to get the Pulitzer Prize. Capra don’t have no Pulitzer Prize but it’s called Frank Capra’s “It’s A Wonderful Life” right? No thank you. They also wrote Nick and Nora Charles the real “The Thin Man” which is Nick and Nora Charles. I’m talking fast because I want to use up all my time. I’m sorry and that’s normally put off on Dashiell Hammett who wrote the novel but if you look at the movie the couple in the movie is actually Francis and Albert.

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24 The Voice of the Writer from The Difficulties and Delicacies of Writing the First Female Doctor in 50+ years [Video] [Doctor Who]

Transcript:

Now, this was great out of Witchfinders. Obviously, he had to keep reminding the audience that this is different and I have to deal with this difference and we have to look in history about this difference right? So literally that’s him, I think, that’s Chris Chibnall talking to the audience okay. If i was still a bloke I could get on with the job and not to waste time defending myself all right but I understand that – and think about it they were defending themselves in the public a little bit in the whoa what a choice you made what a crazy choice why’d you do that. So, in a way, sometimes when I’m watching movies I’ll hear a line and I’ll say oh that’s the writer telling us how they feel right now right and putting it into the mouth of the character and this is one of those lines for me. I really think that was the impression that it gave me.

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