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.
JAN ZILLIACUS was the daughter of the pioneer American film director Laurence Trimble, owner of Jean, the Vitagraph dog, who won international fame long before Rin-Tin-Tin.
“Father wanted six boys and all he got was this miserable girl,” she said. “So he treated me like a boy. He gave me no quarter at all. I was breaking horses at the age of 10 and 11. I was very strong. I didn’t go to school properly – I had tutors from time to time. But somebody had to be chased by wolves, and the actresses didn’t like the idea.”
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† Available from the LA Public Library
Highlighting the articles in the past editions of the Journal of Screenwriting, of which I am the Book Reviews Editor. Hopefully these abstracts will entice you to did a little deeper into the history and future of screenwriting. — Rosanne
This article draws upon the research currently undertaken for my doctoral thesis and is meant to act as a complementary study of Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin’s partnership on If. (1968), following Charles Drazin’s 2008 article for the Journal of British Cinema and Television, If before If. Charles Drazin (2008: 318) highlights the idea of a creative dynamic underlying the working partnership between Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin on If., as well as in the subsequent projects they developed together. The following article aims to uncover the nature of the creative dynamic suggested by Drazin’s article by looking at both the personal and the artistic dimensions that the working relationship assumed. The aim is to highlight the distinctiveness of their collaboration in the cinema; the article will show that in the course of this collaborative work they realized their artistic potential through an exchange of expertise, and that their collaboration helped to bring about an alternative approach to the conventional opposition between screenwriter and director, especially when it comes to claiming authorship over a film.
The Journal of Screenwriting is an international double-blind peer-reviewed journal that is published three times a year. The journal highlights current academic and professional thinking about the screenplay and intends to promote, stimulate and bring together current research and contemporary debates around the screenplay whilst encouraging groundbreaking research in an international arena. The journal is discursive, critical, rigorous and engages with issues in a dynamic and developing field, linking academic theory to screenwriting practice.
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Transcript:
Stories have always transmitted culture. If we go far back to the cave paintings of many ancient cultures, to Gilgamesh, to the griots of Africa, we have always used stories to move forward our culture, right, and movies are just the most current version of doing that.
So why do we forget who the storytellers are? That doesn’t make any sense to me, right, and I think there are some reasons that we can fix both in our own casual discussions of films and in the teaching that people might do about what is important, right? One of the first things I discovered in my research is this issue of unreliable narrators. Often we find when people are interviewed to discuss films they chose not to credit anyone who will take away their own fame.So this is one of the most egregious quotes. Alfred Hitchcock, who everyone seems to recognize — you say that you’re watching a Hitchcock film — but he did not write any of his films. He had many other writers who worked for him. This photograph is a woman named Eve Unsell and she’s from the early 1920s in Hollywood. At one point, she was sent to England to work in the studio there and she trained this young man who knew nothing about how films were made and when he wrote about her in his biography, he didn’t mention her name so you could research her. He only said “a middle-aged American woman.” He wrote her out of history as nothing but a middle-aged woman and yet she taught him everything he knows. So, in fact, his movies are Eve Unsell movies but we don’t think that way.
A Note About This Presentation
A clip from my keynote speech at the 10th Screenwriters´(hi)Stories Seminar for the interdisciplinary Graduation Program in “Education, Art, and History of Culture”, in Mackenzie Presbyterian University, at São Paulo, SP, Brazil, focused on the topic “Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered.” I was especially pleased with the passion these young scholars have toward screenwriting and it’s importance in transmitting culture across the man-made borders of our world.
To understand the world we have to understand its stories and to understand the world’s stories we must understand the world’s storytellers. A century ago and longer those people would have been the novelists of any particular country but since the invention of film, the storytellers who reach the most people with their ideas and their lessons have been the screenwriters. My teaching philosophy is that: Words matter, Writers matter, and Women writers matte, r so women writers are my focus because they have been the far less researched and yet they are over half the population. We cannot tell the stories of the people until we know what stories the mothers have passed down to their children. Those are the stories that last. Now is the time to research screenwriters of all cultures and the stories they tell because people are finally recognizing the work of writers and appreciating how their favorite stories took shape on the page long before they were cast, or filmed, or edited. But also because streaming services make the stories of many cultures now available to a much wider world than ever before.
Many thanks to Glaucia Davino for the invitation.
* 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
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.
With the perspiring assistance of Thomas Mitchell, who acts like a steam locomotive, the Spewacks have tossed another one of those melodramatic lampoons at the newspaper profession in “Clear All Wires,” put on at the Times Square last evening. It is brisk, noisy, extravagant and funny in “The Front Page” and “Broadway” tradition.
* 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
Highlighting the articles in the past editions of the Journal of Screenwriting, of which I am the Book Reviews Editor. Hopefully these abstracts will entice you to did a little deeper into the history and future of screenwriting. — Rosanne
The article focuses on the invisible role of the screenwriter and makes observations about the screenwriter’s part in the process of writing a screenplay together with a director. By studying the two examples of the collaboration between the screenwriter and poet Tonino Guerra with the directors Michelangelo Antonioni and Andrei Tarkovsky, the intention is to follow the ways in which authorship is both constituted and shared in such a liaison. I observe how the craft of the screenwriter is understood in relation to the different aspects of his task. By focusing on the case study around the writing of the film Nostalghia/Nostalgia (1983), I also consider how responsibility in developing these aspects is shared between screenwriter and director during different phases of a screenwriting process: in gathering ideas, sketching, building the story structure, writing drafts, rewriting and completing the final draft.
The Journal of Screenwriting is an international double-blind peer-reviewed journal that is published three times a year. The journal highlights current academic and professional thinking about the screenplay and intends to promote, stimulate and bring together current research and contemporary debates around the screenplay whilst encouraging groundbreaking research in an international arena. The journal is discursive, critical, rigorous and engages with issues in a dynamic and developing field, linking academic theory to screenwriting practice.
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
Transcript:
I apologize for the long quote but I am very appreciative when actors recognize the work of writers and so Frances McDormand said this when she won her Oscar basically she said of the writer Martin McDonagh, He did not sketch a blueprint. That’s an insult to a screenplay. He didn’t string together a few words. He wrote and meticulously crafted a tsunami of a story and then he let the actors play there. So she immediately was crediting the writer in a way that many people do not. I believe the stories are important because they transmit our culture around the world. Again, United States has had a corner on that market for far too many years and now we’re beginning to see other stories permeate our culture and that’s only been a good, beneficial thing for us.
A Note About This Presentation
A clip from my keynote speech at the 10th Screenwriters´(hi)Stories Seminar for the interdisciplinary Graduation Program in “Education, Art, and History of Culture”, in Mackenzie Presbyterian University, at São Paulo, SP, Brazil, focused on the topic “Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered.” I was especially pleased with the passion these young scholars have toward screenwriting and it’s importance in transmitting culture across the man-made borders of our world.
To understand the world we have to understand its stories and to understand the world’s stories we must understand the world’s storytellers. A century ago and longer those people would have been the novelists of any particular country but since the invention of film, the storytellers who reach the most people with their ideas and their lessons have been the screenwriters. My teaching philosophy is that: Words matter, Writers matter, and Women writers matte, r so women writers are my focus because they have been the far less researched and yet they are over half the population. We cannot tell the stories of the people until we know what stories the mothers have passed down to their children. Those are the stories that last. Now is the time to research screenwriters of all cultures and the stories they tell because people are finally recognizing the work of writers and appreciating how their favorite stories took shape on the page long before they were cast, or filmed, or edited. But also because streaming services make the stories of many cultures now available to a much wider world than ever before.
Many thanks to Glaucia Davino for the invitation.
* 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
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.
When Your Urge’s Mauve, [go to] the Cafe Intemational on Sunset Boulevard. The location offered supper, drinks, and the ability to watch boy-girls who necked and sulked and little girl customers who … look like boys.
The 1940 guidebook How to Sin in Hollywood offered tourists this description of a commercial establishment that they could see when they visited the Holly-wood area. On the opposite page, a cartoon featured two women in tuxedos above the caption “the little girl customers.”‘ One smoked a cigar and both wore prominent lipstick The description and cartoon presented images of women in the Los Angeles area who defied the culture’s gender and sexual norms.
* 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
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
Transcript:
I think that’s what we should remember but we don’t and I think we realize it without realizing it because when you talk about movies to your friends you don’t say, “I loved the camera angle in scene seven.” No! You quote dialogue. You quote the lines from your favorite movies whether they’re Pixar or Disney or The Princess Bride. You know the dialogue and that is the work of the writer. That’s the person you should credit but often when I start a class I have students list their two or three favorite films and then who directed those films and then I ask them who wrote that film and they very often cannot name the person who wrote the film they adore. How can you want to be a writer if you don’t remember the writers yourself. So I think that’s a really important thing for us to remember.
A Note About This Presentation
A clip from my keynote speech at the 10th Screenwriters´(hi)Stories Seminar for the interdisciplinary Graduation Program in “Education, Art, and History of Culture”, in Mackenzie Presbyterian University, at São Paulo, SP, Brazil, focused on the topic “Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered.” I was especially pleased with the passion these young scholars have toward screenwriting and it’s importance in transmitting culture across the man-made borders of our world.
To understand the world we have to understand its stories and to understand the world’s stories we must understand the world’s storytellers. A century ago and longer those people would have been the novelists of any particular country but since the invention of film, the storytellers who reach the most people with their ideas and their lessons have been the screenwriters. My teaching philosophy is that: Words matter, Writers matter, and Women writers matte, r so women writers are my focus because they have been the far less researched and yet they are over half the population. We cannot tell the stories of the people until we know what stories the mothers have passed down to their children. Those are the stories that last. Now is the time to research screenwriters of all cultures and the stories they tell because people are finally recognizing the work of writers and appreciating how their favorite stories took shape on the page long before they were cast, or filmed, or edited. But also because streaming services make the stories of many cultures now available to a much wider world than ever before.
Many thanks to Glaucia Davino for the invitation.
* 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
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.
The Progressive Silent Film List is a growing online collection of information on more than 23,400 silent and sound films produced from 1888 through the end of 1929. Selected silent films produced in other countries after 1929 are also listed.
The Progressive Silent Film List listings are accessed through the filmographies and indexes provided below, or you may use Google to SEARCH the entire Silent Era website, including the PSFL listings.
* 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
Highlighting the articles in the past editions of the Journal of Screenwriting, of which I am the Book Reviews Editor. Hopefully these abstracts will entice you to did a little deeper into the history and future of screenwriting. — Rosanne
Through analysing appropriations of Aristotelian dramatic theory within interactive digital narratives (Laurel 1991, Hiltunen 2002, Mateas and Stern 2005), this article assesses the merits of Aristotle’s Poetics in providing a basis for an interactive screenwriting poetics. From the six components of tragedy (plot, character, thought, diction, melody, spectacle) to mimesis and catharsis, these concepts are examined for their value in a new media context. The hierarchy of the components is challenged and new formal and material causative relations are explored, using the interactive drama Faade (Mateas and Stern, 2005) as an example. With new dramatic configurations emerging (such as spatial plotting and narrative architecture), the question posed is – to what degree can Aristotelian thought really aid the interactive screenwriting process? If this approach can not yield substantial results, what is the alternative?
The Journal of Screenwriting is an international double-blind peer-reviewed journal that is published three times a year. The journal highlights current academic and professional thinking about the screenplay and intends to promote, stimulate and bring together current research and contemporary debates around the screenplay whilst encouraging groundbreaking research in an international arena. The journal is discursive, critical, rigorous and engages with issues in a dynamic and developing field, linking academic theory to screenwriting practice.
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