history – Page 75 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 12: Lois Weber in Early Hollywood by Shelley Stamp

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 12: Lois Weber in Early Hollywood by Shelley Stamp

†

† Available at Los Angeles Public Library

“Among early Hollywood’s most brilliant filmmakers, Lois Weber was considered one of the era’s ‘three great minds’ alongside D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. Despite her accomplishments, Weber has been marginalized in relation to her contemporaries, who have long been recognized as fathers of American cinema. Drawing on a range of materials untapped by previous historians, Shelley Stamp offers the first comprehensive study of Weber’s remarkable career as director, screenwriter, and actress. Lois Weber in Early Hollywood provides compelling evidence of the extraordinary role that women played in shaping American movie culture. Weber made films on capital punishment, contraception, poverty, and addiction, establishing early cinema’s power to engage topical issues for popular audiences. Her work also grappled with the profound changes in women’s lives that unsettled Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century, and her later films include sharp critiques of heterosexual marriage and consumer capitalism. Mentor to many women in the industry, Weber demanded a place at the table in early professional guilds, decrying the limited roles available for women on screen and in the 1920s protesting the growing climate of hostility toward female directors. Through her examination of Weber’s career, Stamp demonstrates how female filmmakers who had played a part in early Hollywood’s bid for respectability were in the end written out of that industry’s history. Lois Weber in Early Hollywood is an essential addition to histories of silent cinema, early filmmaking in Los Angeles, and women’s contributions to American culture.”

Buy “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Today!

†

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

* 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

37 Sarah Connor and Dana Scully from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (52 seconds)

Watch this entire presentation

The Sisterhood of Science Fiction: A Walk Through Some Writers and Characters You (Should) Know And Love

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

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:

Of course, then we move over to Sarah Connor and the Terminator. Again. it’s this thing that gives everybody power. Not what I’m providing inside and Sarah Connor is pretty boss and pretty tough but it’s that gun we always go back to. So I don’t think about it’s– (Audience) I always remember her and even when I’m exercising when she’s doing the pull-ups. (Rosanne) Yes. (Audience) I — when I exercise, I think about her. (Rosanne) See that’s good. That’s– that’s the inner strength. That’s very cool yeah. That is the cool bit of it. Yeah. So we’re getting around to it. Of course through those movies we then come up with the X-Files and now we have Dana Scully who is all-powerful because it’s her brain. Not big on using the gun, right, that’s his job. She’s using her brain and she’s the more intellectual — the stronger one — in many ways. He’s the one running by his heart and his emotions and she’s the one running through her mind. So we’re switching the male and female sort of identifiers in this piece, which is pretty strong.

* 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!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Mentoris Project Podcast: Relentless Visionary: Alessandro Volta With Author, Michael Berick [Audio]

Mentoris Project Podcast: Relentless Visionary: Alessandro Volta With Author, Michael Berick

Read Relentless Visionary: Alessandro Volta

Listen Now

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Subscribe Via iTunes | Google Play | TuneIn | RSS

If asked to list important inventors, few remember to include Alessandro Volta. Yet, his is a household name more spoken than that of Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright Brothers, or even Thomas Edison. That’s because the terms “volt” and “voltage” can be attributed to Volta, the inventor of the “Voltaic pile,” which is recognized as the first electric battery. A product of the Age of Enlightenment—a time when ideas about reason, science, literature and liberty took center stage—Volta employed a very modern, hands-on approach to his work. Though he had no formal education, he was the first person to identify the gas known as methane, and created the first authoritative list of conducting metals. Alessandro Volta saw things not just as they were, but as what they could be. He was a disrupter, an innovator and a visionary. Above all, he was relentless. Without Volta’s hunger to create and his drive to invent and discover, we might not have electric cars, laptops, cellphones, and hearing aids today.

About the Author

Michael Berick is a writer and journalist, whose work has appeared in outlets such as the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly, LA Weekly, AAA Westways Magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He has written about European chocolate destinations, reviewed artist Ed Ruscha’s retrospective, and penned press material for the Grammy-nominated boxset, Battleground Korea: Songs And Sounds Of America’s Forgotten War. He also might possibly be the only music critic to have voted in both the Fids and Kamily Music Awards and the Village Voice’s annual Pazz & Jop Poll. Hailing from Cleveland, Ohio, Berick currently lives in Los Angeles with wife, playwright/screenwriter Jennifer Maisel, and their daughter and dog.

Follow @mentorisproject on Instagram

Visit the Mentoris Project for more!

Also from the Mentoris Project

Want to use these books in your classroom? Contact the Mentoris Project!`

39 Fay Kanin from “When Women Wrote Hollywood” with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (40 seconds)

Part of the California State University, Fullerton Faculty Noon Time Talks at the Pollak Library.

Watch this entire presentation

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

Transcript:

Fay Kanin is very cool. She was married to Garson Kanin’s brother and so they worked together and not only in movies but now we’re blending into the television era and she wrote this brilliant TV movie. She got an Emmy Award with Carol Burnett and it was about a mother who found out her son had been killed in Vietnam by friendly fire but the government had said it was enemy fire and she — when she — in looking into how he died — discovered that and then she wanted to make it known so people understood that was one of the risks that your children were taking when they joined the military. It’s a very powerful TV movie. There she is with her husband Michael. These are some of the other things that they did that everybody knows.

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.

Buy a signed copy of when Women Wrote Hollywood

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

* 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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

24 The Beatles, Hendrix, and The Monkees from “Why The Monkees Matter: Even 50 Years Later [Video] (1 minute 7 seconds)

Enjoy This Clip? Watch this entire presentation and Buy Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture

From Denver Pop Culture Con 2019.

Wherever you go, you find Monkees fans and the Denver Popular Culture Con was no different. Amid rooms full of caped crusaders and cosplay creations, I was initially not sure how many folks would attend a talk on a TV show from the 1960s – but happily I was met by a nice, engaged audience for my talk on Why the Monkees Matter – and afterward they bought books! What more could an author ask for?

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

Transcript

Speaking of The Beatles, as I said they actually did know each other. They hung out with each other. They respected each other. When Davy Jones died there was a clip of Paul McCartney and he was doing a little ‘Here They Come” bit and going you know I remember them I liked them. It was so cool. So they were respected by lots of people. Peter himself attended the Monterey Pop Festival with Micky Dolenz who’s not in this picture. Again behind him is Janis Joplin as we said but also at the Pop Festival is when they met this young, really great guitar player who they invited to come along as the opening act to their concerts the next season and his name was Jimi Hendrix and they thought he was so flamboyant and so much of a character that it would match the characters they were playing. Except after about 6 or 7 concerts he quit because all the kids were doing was yelling please bring Davey onstage and they didn’t recognize the quality of Jimi Hendrix. So he left. He was never angry at them and they were friends and obviously, sadly he died just a couple of years later. There’s some great footage — photographs of them sitting in hotel rooms together riffing and playing and again all respecting each other’s work. So I think that’s really cool.

Buy Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture

A hit television show about a fictitious rock band, The Monkees (1966-1968) earned two Emmys–Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Directorial Acheivement in Comedy.

Capitalizing on the show’s success, the actual band formed by the actors, at their peak, sold more albums than The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined, and set the stage for other musical TV characters from The Partridge Family to Hannah Montana. In the late 1980s, the Monkees began a series of reunion tours that continued into their 50th anniversary.

This book tells the story of The Monkees and how the show changed television, introducing a new generation to the fourth-wall-breaking slapstick created by Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers.

Its creators contributed to the innovative film and television of 1970s with projects like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laugh-In and Welcome Back, Kotter. Immense profits from the show, its music and its merchandising funded the producers’ move into films such as Head, Easy Riderand Five Easy Pieces.

McFarland (Direct from Publisher) | Amazon | Kindle Edition | Nook Edition

Want to use “Why The Monkees Matter” in your classroom?

Order Examination Copies, Library and Campus Bookstore orders directly from McFarland

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

38 Elaine May from “When Women Wrote Hollywood” with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (53 seconds)

Part of the California State University, Fullerton Faculty Noon Time Talks at the Pollak Library.

Watch this entire presentation

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

Transcript:

Elaine May is another name that’s fallen out of history and shouldn’t. Now we’re in the 70s. Elaine I think is a brilliant writer. Heaven Can Wait wouldn’t be what it was. Warren Beatty got tons of focus for that but she wrote it. She came out of doing nightclub things with Mike Nichols. They were Nichols in May and they wrote all their routines. It was like a traveling SNL sketch. You probably still know who Mike Nichols is, but Elaine May has fallen out of history because at a certain point she started directing. Which is cool, but she directed a movie called Ishtar which lost a ton of money and she was never given a directing job again. I can name you many a man who has directed a film that lost a ton of money and somehow they still got a second and a third and a fourth job. Elaine Mae was never given the right to direct a film again. Her writing is brilliant and as you know she still continued writing she did Primary Colors.

Buy a signed copy of when Women Wrote Hollywood

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

* 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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

23 Music and The Monkees from “Why The Monkees Matter: Even 50 Years Later [Video] (1 minute 9 seconds)

Enjoy This Clip? Watch this entire presentation and Buy Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture

From Denver Pop Culture Con 2019.

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

Transcript

But part of what made them last, we all know, it’s the TV show and it’s the music. The music mattered very much to them. There was, of course in the beginning, the first two albums. The first two up there More Of The Monkees and The Monkees, they sang everything. They played nothing. Not their fault. It was played by The Wrecking Crew who were the band that played The Beach Boys albums for the Beach Boys. They played for lots of famous bands in the day. It’s just that people got very angry that The Monkees were famous so quickly because they had a TV show, and so they got a bad reputation, but because of that reputation, the third album Headquarters is entirely them. Every song is written by one of the four of them. Every tune is sung by all of them and all the instrumentation is all of them. They have nothing else. That is to prove they could do it. That album was second the entire summer of 68. The first album all summer was Sgt. Pepper’s. That’s not too shabby. If you think about it, if there wasn’t Sgt. Pepper they would have been number one the whole summer. So that’s how much the music mattered. It’s a pretty good album. There’s quite a lot of good music on that album.

Buy Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture

A hit television show about a fictitious rock band, The Monkees (1966-1968) earned two Emmys–Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Directorial Acheivement in Comedy.

Capitalizing on the show’s success, the actual band formed by the actors, at their peak, sold more albums than The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined, and set the stage for other musical TV characters from The Partridge Family to Hannah Montana. In the late 1980s, the Monkees began a series of reunion tours that continued into their 50th anniversary.

This book tells the story of The Monkees and how the show changed television, introducing a new generation to the fourth-wall-breaking slapstick created by Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers.

Its creators contributed to the innovative film and television of 1970s with projects like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laugh-In and Welcome Back, Kotter. Immense profits from the show, its music and its merchandising funded the producers’ move into films such as Head, Easy Riderand Five Easy Pieces.

McFarland (Direct from Publisher) | Amazon | Kindle Edition | Nook Edition

Want to use “Why The Monkees Matter” in your classroom?

Order Examination Copies, Library and Campus Bookstore orders directly from McFarland

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Mentoris Project Podcast: The Faithful: A Novel Based on the Life of Giuseppe Verdi with Author, Collin Mitchell

Read The Faithful: A Novel Based on the Life of Giuseppe Verdi

Listen Now

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Subscribe Via iTunes | Google Play | TuneIn | RSS

The rule of power in Europe is changing…

Born in Italy at the tumultuous end of France’s influence in Europe, Giuseppe Verdi went on to become the world’s most recognizable name in opera.

Set against the rise of the Italian states in the middle of the nineteenth century, The Faithful depicts an artist bedeviled by his role not just as a composer, but as an unassuming icon of the Italian Unification and the birth of modern Italy.

Through chance encounters in gilded Milanese salons and the hushed politics of the Italian opera, we experience the struggles of a man conflicted by his role as an artist and by his commitment to a country yearning for independence.

About the Author

Collin Mitchell is a graduate of UC Santa Barbara, with a degree in Comparative Literature and Film Studies. Originally from the Bay Area, he now resides in Los Angeles.

Follow @mentorisproject on Instagram

Visit the Mentoris Project for more!

Also from the Mentoris Project

Want to use these books in your classroom? Contact the Mentoris Project!`

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 11: Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Screenplay. Wr: June Mathis. Dir. Fred Niblo, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1925 USA 142 mins.

By Unknown – impawards.com, Public Domain, Link

Watch Ben Hur (1925) on Hoopla (Free)

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ is a 1925 American silent epic adventure-drama film directed by Fred Niblo and written by June Mathis based on the 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ by General Lew Wallace. Starring Ramon Novarro as the title character, the film is the first feature-length adaptation of the novel and second overall, following the 1907 short.

In 1997, Ben-Hur was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” — Wikipedia

Buy “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Today!

†

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

* 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

37 “Girl Writer” from “When Women Wrote Hollywood” with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 6 seconds)

Part of the California State University, Fullerton Faculty Noon Time Talks at the Pollak Library.

Watch this entire presentation

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

Transcript:

Then, of course, we were talking about Nora Ephron but before we get Nora Ephron — that’s her mother Phoebe Efron — was a film writer in Hollywood in the 50s with her husband right but she’s the one who gave her daughter the phrase “Everything is copy.” Whatever’s happening in your life write it down that’s gonna be good in a movie someday, right? So Phoebe did all these films we’re looking at here. They did largely adaptations of musicals but they were very — Phoebe and Henry Efrain. This is Nora when she was in college. She got herself a sweatshirt that said Girl Writer because she worked at a newspaper and that’s what they were. They weren’t junior writers. They weren’t journalists. They were the girl writers who wrote the girl stuff for the newspaper, right. Do she just blazoned that on her chest and said fine Then I’ll be a girl writer right? I think it’s cute because you notice when we move into the television world that’s Madeline Pugh who wrote almost all of the I Love Lucy’s together with her male partner Bob Carol who she wasn’t married to and she called herself a girl writer. That’s all you were back in the day even though you invented Lucy for heaven’s sakes.

Buy a signed copy of when Women Wrote Hollywood

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

* 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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS