presentation – Page 3 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

14 What Changed?…from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

So let’s look at what changed. First, we’ve got to move her into it being a musical star because this is Judy Garland. She’s going to have to sing musical numbers in this particular remake. We’re still going to have our drunken actor and they’re going to marry and he’s going to be jealous. This is something that remains the same all the way until we get to Bradley Cooper and we’ll talk about why that changes. We’re going to have our Academy Award moment because musicals were things that earned Academy Awards back in the day of course. He’s going to commit suicide off-screen. He’s going to walk off into the ocean as the noble man that he is and she too will introduce herself as Mrs. Norman Maine. So these things remain exactly the same. When the Writer’s Guild arbitrates a script to decide who should get final credit, they look at all versions of a script. They have a blind group of writers who sign up to do this and they get the scripts –writer one, writer two, writer three. You don’t get any names and then you decide statistically how much of a percentage of this person’s original work made it to the end and that’s how they decide credit. So I am looking at this as if I’m arbitrating the various versions of this script to see how much credit Dorothy Parker still deserves. In this case, I think a lot right? They’re borrowing a lot of what she did.

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Connections at conferences matter! Through the most recent SCMS, I met Vicki Callahan, whose film history focus right now is on Mabel Normand. When she learned I could put together a lecture on the importance of the female voice in the A Star is Born franchise she asked me to give that lecture to her master students.

It made for a great opportunity for me to hone the ideas I’m working on for a chapter on that franchise that I’m writing for a new book from Bloomsbury: The Bloomsbury Handbook Of International Screenplay Theory. It’s always nice when one piece of research can be purposed in other ways – and it’s always fun revisiting such a female-centric film franchise – one that drew the talents of such powerful performers as Janet Gaynor, Judy Garland, Barbara Streisand, and Lady Gaga.

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13 1954 Credits…from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

Where, first of all, let’s look at these credits. One of the things I want to make point of so here’s Moss Hart. He takes full credit for the screenplay but it is based on the one that Dorothy did with Alan and Robert right? So this is how our credits read properly. What’s interesting about this is he says when he’s asked during his rewrites about some things he did not change at all and he didn’t for this very reason. He felt they were perfect the way they were. They were perfect the way she wrote them. He could not top those lines. So the 1954 version is still an echo and a mimic of Dorothy Parker in my opinion based on Moss Hart’s confession. If you want to put it that way and Moss Hart if you’ve never read Act One, this is his autobiography of growing up poor in New York, working in some summer camps that are very much like dirty dancing summer camp, and eventually making it on Broadway. It’s quite a good book if you’re interested in that period. Of course, the joke is how much of it is true and how much did he elaborate on. We will never really know. There is then obviously a real biography of him if you are interested but here’s the man who’s rewriting this version of A Star Is Born, so I will say though it is written solely by a man, it is a man relying on and reusing the words of a woman’s. The female imprint is still highly there in this version.

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51 Teacher Make Good Writers from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video]

Thanks to the gracious invitation from my Screenwriting Research Network colleague Paolo Russo – and a grant he was able to procure (and in the before-Covid time) I was able to spend a week at Oxford Brookes University working with the screenwriting masters students in Paolo’s course. At the culmination of the week, I gave this lecture on how writers rooms worked in the States.

Transcript:

For me, teachers make good writers. Right? Obviously Icatered this to where I have come and been happy to be. I actually — went too fast — this was my facebook post the other day. I don’t like a lot of words on the screen but I couldn’t resist this because I’ve never been to Oxford before.

So I found this little church just off Wharton Road where he was once a congregant and I had to find the picture and send it back to my husband and the cat just found me which I thought was cute but seriously I mean how long has the guy been dead and I’m still fascinated by the things he wrote? They still mean something to me and my family. Likewise, writers make good teachers.

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12 Here Comes Judy…from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

1937. Huge Movie. It winds awards. It has everyone paying attention. Janet Gaynor is a very important actress. So, it’s a big deal. 1954 comes around. There is a movie we can remake and remember that in the era when they were remaking these films, there were no DVDs. There was no streaming. The film was done after it played in a theater for 2 weeks or 10 weeks — however successful it was. You would never see that film again. 1954. There’s no TV reruns of that film. That’s it. If your mother saw it in ’37, that’s it. Nobody has seen it since then. So remaking a movie made some sense. So, we’re going to come into this with a guy named Moss Hart. He’s a very famous Broadway playwright. He worked with George S. Kaufman, but he also worked on his own and he is invited to come and re-do this for Judy Garland as the star and it’s going to be a comeback film. She’s had trouble (Oh no) with drugs and alcohol AND it’s affected her career. So she needs a big vehicle and this is recognized as a showpiece for a female performer, but she’s Judy Garland, so we’ve got to change something.

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50 Collaboration Is Required from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video]

Transcript:

What I hope you learned from me today is that a writer’s room requires collaboration. It’s always about sharing and talking with the other people to make the product better and participation. You can’t just sit in a corner. You have to be part of that conversation or your perspective will not be included and that’s bad for you and anybody else who looks like you. It’s your job to represent when you’re in the room. So you need to be able to do that. Plus I love this quote of Einstein’s — Imagination. You’re selling your imagination. Who gets to do that? What job do you get to do that in except writing? I think that is the coolest thing in the world.

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11 More on Dorothy Parker’s Voice from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

I think you’ll notice also in the lines here, this is a great bit —

“How’s your luck?

There wasn’t any.

Maybe you don’t do it right. No, take Danny McGuire here. He knows the ropes, don’t you, Danny?

Sure. Had ’em around my neck for years.”

She’s always thinking about suicide. Sadly. She’s always thinking about ways to kill yourself and this is best evidenced in this poem that she’s famous for. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it before. You’re probably reading it to yourself right now, so I shall not read it out loud but it is quite brilliant, and look what she’s focusing on and that’s her “resume.” Think about the title and think about the words there and how they come across inside A Star Is Born.”

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49 Speaking Up In The Writer’s Room from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video]

Transcript:

…and I really say that to the girls a lot because when I have my classes, often when I just open pitching up — anyone can start pitching their ideas — who’s first? We’ll go through a line of like four guys and then I have to stop and go “Does anyone notice anything odd right now?” and I promise you it will be a boy who says “None of the girls have pitched yet.” The girls haven’t even recognized that they are waiting their turn. No one will give you a turn. You have to take a turn or you won’t move as far as you like as fast as you like. So speaking of the big deal and I hate to say it but I learned how to cuss in a writer’s room because sometimes that was the only way to get attention. If I threw out a good four-letter word, all of a sudden everybody was looking at my section of the table which doesn’t make my mother very happy, but it was a silly thing right? So you have to think about managing yourself and managing the other people that you are around. That’s a big deal.

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10 Dorothy Parker’s Voice from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

Of course, she has tons of acerbic wit. That’s her thing and in many ways, this is a Shakespearean tragedy, as all her poems are. So I think all of that speaks to her as the major writer behind this version of the film. The other guys came in, they did some stuff but I don’t see evidence of their lives on screen in the way that I see hers. Lines in this piece that she’s written are so clearly things that could come out of her very own poems. I love all of these. This is probably my favorite. “His work was beginning to interfere with his drinking.” She was always very blase about alcoholism and it’s something that she suffered from herself. This is a great one when they put him in the asylum, you know for taking care of his drinking — “They have iron bars in the windows to keep out the draft.” I mean how sarcastic and snotty can you be when you’re trying not to admit you’ve been put in a place you can’t sign your way out of until you clean up and then the heartbreak comes out of this — “For every dream of yours that may come true, you’ll pay the price in heartbreak.” So even if you’re going to get what you want, you won’t have everything and that is kind of a message of her life right? She never quite got everything that she dreamed of.

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48 Do Your Research and Speak Up There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video]

Transcript:

You have to always do research. You don’t know everything and you don’t have to but you have to be willing to look. I’ve got a whole lecture I do on the tv show Gidget from the 60s that I discovered every episode written by a woman treated the Gidget character like a real human being and every episode written by a male writer treated her like sort of a doofy, stupid girl and I thought they didn’t even go into reading the book that that show was based on to understand her mentality. Her dad was a college professor and she was studying literature in college. She’s not a ditz right but they didn’t even research that. So you have to really look into everything. You have to like research right? That is something a writer must do.

You have to speak up. You all are shy. I’ll give you that right? You don’t know me so it’s a new thing but you can’t be shy in the room. If you don’t open your mouth, what are they paying you for? You’re only going to write two episodes of a tv show that runs 13 episodes. You get two a year. All those other episodes is you talking. What makes this one better for this writer so we all keep employed next year? So you have to speak up.

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09 Parker, Grandmothers, and Husbands from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

Okay. Here’s where I find Dorothy Parker’s female focus coming to us. It begins with this grandmother. A female character has the money to give her granddaughter what she needs to follow her dream. That’s a big deal. Thinking that a woman in that period — who is now some 50 years older than the woman starring in the film — could have agency and could choose to give the money and trust her granddaughter when her own parents are not trusting her. I think that relationship is so key. That maternal relationship is a very big deal. Dorothy Parker’s mother died when she was quite young. I think she was 9 or 10. She didn’t like her stepmother but she liked her grandmother. So clearly that’s represented in this piece. Also even though Esther seems a little weak and fluffy at some points, she certainly stands up for herself when she needs to right? In this, we see Norman is a very desperate and envious guy. Some of what we read about Alan Campbell, he was desperate to succeed. He was desperate to be famous. After they divorced and he couldn’t get a job screenwriting, a producer literally said to him “Look, get back together with the old lady. She’s the one we want. Together we’ll hire you.” Imagine how humiliating that would be for someone and not man or woman but I want to be talented. I want to be recognized as someone of quality but I can’t be without attaching myself to this other person.

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