research – Page 29 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

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Pretty brilliant and then everyone loves Breaking Bad right, but among the Emmys the show got one was by a woman Moira Walley-Beckett got an Emmy for writing the Ozymandias episode of Breaking Bad. So as much as we love Vince Gilligan and he’s quite marvelous and the show is truly his piece of art, Moira got the Emmy for it, right? So we need to think about that and that I think is where I will stop because there’s a lot of women writing today , thank goodness and I’m happy to see that but we must remember to look for who the writers are and then extra specially, if they happen to be women, tell people about them. Tell them about their work. Have them watch it. That would be a lovely thing. Thank you for coming.

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.

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From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 16: “Ida May Park.” Women Film Pioneers Project. Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, 27 Sept. 2013

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 16: “Ida May Park.” Women Film Pioneers Project. Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, 27 Sept. 2013

The 1916 Motion Picture News Studio Directory credits Los Angeles native Ida May Park with twelve years of stage experience as a “leading woman in support of well-known stars” and with screen experience at Pathé and the Universal Film Manufacturing Company, where she was then employed as a scenario writer (134). Park flourished at Universal, where she wrote forty-four films, half of them feature length, between 1914 and 1919. Before 1917, Park’s husband, Joseph De Grasse, directed almost all of the films she wrote. In 1917, Park began directing her own scenarios and, according to a 1918 story in the Universal Weekly, a newspaper for exhibitors, editing them as well (29). She crafted a total of eleven features by this method in a scant two years. Park is important to understand as part of a strong creative presence that we now refer to as “Universal Women,” those who between 1912 and 1919 were promoted from acting or writing to directing and were credited on at least one hundred and seventy titles, a cohort that included Ruth Ann Baldwin, Cleo Madison, Ruth Stonehouse, Lois Weber, and Elsie Jane Wilson (Cooper 17, Denton 50). Park and De Grasse left Universal in the spring or summer of 1919 for reasons as yet unknown. On September 12, the Los Angeles Times reported that Lew Cody and manager-producer Louis J. Gasnier had signed her to direct motion pictures in which Cody would star (16). She made one such title, and, with De Grasse, directed two features for Andrew J. Callaghan Productions in 1920.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 1: After the typewriter: the screenplay in a digital era by Kathryn Millard

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

After the typewriter: the screenplay in a digital era by Kathryn Millard

This article aims to contribute to contemporary debates about screenwriting as a process of developing the screen idea; about the ways in which formatting conventions from an earlier era of cinema may restrict innovation in screenwriting; and about shifting practices of screenwriting in a digital era in which images and sound play a potentially more significant role. Additionally, it questions the use of terms such as blueprint to describe the relationship between the screenplay and the proposed film that it represents. The article draws on the author’s body of practice-led research as a writer and director of feature films and documentaries, as well as histories of screenwriting, film production, comics and the graphic arts.

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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Found Treasure – Some Of The Women Who Wrote Hollywood – Screenland Magazine, 1931

While many film historians and teachers still don’t know the name of many of these marvelous female screenwriters from Hollywood’s Golden era, research shows they existed. It’s the job of this generation of scholars to bring these names into the larger conversation.

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43 Susan Harris and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason from “When Women Wrote Hollywood” with Dr. Rosanne Welch

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

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Transcript:

Of we move further, a lot of people know The Golden Girls, and hopefully, they know Maude and all these lovely shows. That’s who gave those shows to us. Susan Harris is my favorite TV writer. The longest TV running career. All of the stuff iconic. All of the stuff beloved and people don’t think about her name. She wrote the entire first 2 seasons of Soap herself — no staff. She wrote every episode for 2 seasons and that’s in the days of doing 35 episodes, not 23 or 22 or 12, which is the new reality, right? So Susan is pretty brilliant. Linda Bloodworth-Thomason created Designing Women which I also think is quite a brilliant show and she wrote the first full season of that herself. She’d won an Emmy nomination for her first freelance episode which was an episode of M*A*S*H and it was her and a partner and they were the first people to go into the M*AS*H writing offices –they were 2 women — and they said: “What happens to Hot Lips on the nights when Frank’s not around?” Because she was an officer, which means she couldn’t fraternize with all the other nurses because they were not officers. So she’s lonely in her place all night and it was a study of loneliness and how awful her life was because she could have no friends and she couldn’t share her story with anybody back home because she was having an affair with a married man. So they focused on that and they got an Emmy nomination for looking at the honest emotions of that previously comedic character. They gave her the fullness that made her become a lead on that show.

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From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 15: Peace Begins At Home by Clara Beranger

THE GREAT DESIRE of individuals in every country of the world is for peace and security. We have discovered that the cessation of war does not automatically mean the establishment of peace.

Within a wide circle of acquaintances and friends, I have found that the only persons who have achieved true inner peace and serenity are those who believe in God and try to live according to the moral principles embodied in the Bible. They recognize the truth that peace begins at home. They know that in order to extend peace from the home to the world they must cultivate habits that create peace. At the same time they must free themselves from old habits that cause inharmony and dissension.

Because I believe that every one of us can and should be a link in the chain of world peace, I have attempted to set forth in these chapters certain common human faults and to present the spiritual means by which they can be changed to character traits conducive to individual and world well-being.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V3 Issue 1: ‘To see a script’: Jean-Luc Godard’s re-envisioning of screenwriting in Passion (1982) and Scénario du film Passion by Jill Murphy

‘To see a script’: Jean-Luc Godard’s re-envisioning of screenwriting in Passion (1982) and Scénario du film Passion by Jill Murphy

In the film Passion (1982) and its video scenario, Scénario du film Passion (1982), Jean-Luc Godard attempts to re-envision the conventional script by placing an emphasis on visual rather than verbal forms. In this article, I examine Godard’s development of narrative through image in Passion and his description of this process in Scénario du film Passion. In addition, I consider the concurrent emphasis he places on the visualization of narrative in the diegetic film around which the storyline of Passion is based. To contextualize the process of narrative construction that Godard applies in the films considered in the article, I present some earlier examples of his screenwriting practice that illustrate how Godard’s screenwriting evolved towards an image-based approach..

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42 Lucille Kallen and Selma Diamond from “When Women Wrote Hollywood” with Dr. Rosanne Welch[Video] (1 minute 2 seconds)

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

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Transcript:

Lucille Kallen worked in a lot of those early sketch shows — Your Show Of Shows and things like that with Sid Caesar. She’s a really cool lady. I like this quote. She kind of falls out of the history but her work on that show plus this woman, Selma Diamond, who more people know as an actress from a show called Night Court, but Selma and Lucille were writers on Your Show Of Shows and when the writers created The Dick Van Dyke Show that’s who Sally Rogers is. She’s a composite of those two ladies right because they understood there was always one lady in those kinds of shows and she’s always a single lady who can’t find a guy and all that nonsense and that was true of both Lucille and Selma. They were unmarried. When Neil Simon wrote Laughter on the 23rd Floor which was the story of writing for the Sid Caesar show. This is what he had to say about Lucille — actually, Mel Tolkin said this. So she’s doing all the work but she’s not telling people about it. Women have to learn to tell their own stories so that we are remembered in history.

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From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 14: My Secret Mother: Lorna Moon by Richard de Mille

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† Available at Los Angeles Public Library

The adopted son of Cecil B. de Mille traces the life of his biological mother, a screenwriter during the silent film era, and the privileged but uneasy youth he enjoyed in Hollywood while being kept in the dark about his origins.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V10 Issue 3: From dialogue writer to screenwriter: Pier Paolo Pasolini at work for Federico Fellini by Claudia Romanelli

From dialogue writer to screenwriter: Pier Paolo Pasolini at work for Federico Fellini by Claudia Romanelli

Pier Paolo Pasolini was a poet, novelist, essayist and filmmaker who also worked as a screenwriter for some of the most important Italian directors including Mario Soldati, Mauro Bolognini and Bernardo Bertolucci, to name a few. While Pasolini’s poems, novels and films are widely studied, his work as a screenwriter has not attracted much critical attention. This is partly because Pasolini tended to collaborate with directors whose artistic tastes were very different from his own, making it difficult to understand what he could possibly bring to the films on which he worked. The fact that he took his first steps in the screenwriting teams for which Italian cinema was famous has also contributed to downplay his screenwriting activity. One such example is his contribution to Federico Fellini’s screenplays. Fellini first approached Pasolini because he wished to revise the dialogue in Le notti di Cabiria, which he thought lacked the authentic feel of the language spoken in the Roman slums where the film took place. Although critics have always assumed that Fellini discarded Pasolini’s revisions to his scripts, archival sources tell a different story, revealing Pasolini’s key contribution to Fellini’s work and his eagerness to leave a lasting impression on it.

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Tag: research

44 Conclusion from “When Women Wrote Hollywood” – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (39 seconds)

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 16: “Ida May Park.” Women Film Pioneers Project. Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, 27 Sept. 2013

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 1: After the typewriter: the screenplay in a digital era by Kathryn Millard

Found Treasure – Some Of The Women Who Wrote Hollywood – Screenland Magazine, 1931

43 Susan Harris and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason from “When Women Wrote Hollywood” with Dr. Rosanne Welch

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 15: Peace Begins At Home by Clara Beranger

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V3 Issue 1: ‘To see a script’: Jean-Luc Godard’s re-envisioning of screenwriting in Passion (1982) and Scénario du film Passion by Jill Murphy

42 Lucille Kallen and Selma Diamond from “When Women Wrote Hollywood” with Dr. Rosanne Welch[Video] (1 minute 2 seconds)

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 14: My Secret Mother: Lorna Moon by Richard de Mille

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V10 Issue 3: From dialogue writer to screenwriter: Pier Paolo Pasolini at work for Federico Fellini by Claudia Romanelli