From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 20: Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir by Sheri Chinen Biesen

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 20: Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir by Sheri Chinen Biesen

Challenging conventional scholarship placing the origins of film noir in postwar Hollywood, Sheri Chinen Biesen finds the genre’s roots firmly planted in the political, social, and material conditions of Hollywood during the war. After Pearl Harbor, America and Hollywood experienced a sharp cultural transformation that made horror, shock, and violence not only palatable but preferable. Hard times necessitated cheaper sets, fewer lights, and fresh talent; censors as well as the movie-going public showed a new tolerance for sex and violence; and female producers experienced newfound prominence in the industry.

Biesen brings prodigious archival research, accessible prose, and imaginative insights to both well-known films noir of the wartime period―The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and Double Indemnity―and others often overlooked or underrated―Scarlet Street, Ministry of Fear, Phantom Lady, and Stranger on the Third Floor.

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From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 19: Algonquin Round Table Web Site

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 19: Algonquin Round Table Web Site

From The

“Don’t think I’m not incoheret.” — Harold Ross

This site is an extension of the research for The Algonquin Round Table New York: A Historical Guide by Kevin C. Fitzpatrick, foreword by Anthony Melchiorri. Published by Lyons Press, Hardcover, Dec. 2014, ISBN: 978-1-4930-0757-8.

“That is the thing about New York,” wrote Dorothy Parker in 1928. “It is always a little more than you had hoped for. Each day, there, is so definitely a new day.”

Now you can journey back there, in time, to a grand city teeming with hidden bars, luxurious theaters, and dazzling skyscrapers.

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02 About Dr. Rosanne Welch from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 12 seconds)

Watch this entire presentation

02 About Dr. Rosanne Welch from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered - Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 12 seconds)

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Transcript:

Thank you all very much. I apologize that I will speak in English because we do very bad in teaching languages in the United States. So this is the best that I can do, but I appreciate very much the translator who will help us all this evening. So thank you all for coming. We are here to talk about why researching screenwriters is important and I think it’s a very important thing. I’ve been teaching it for a while and I was, in fact, a screenwriter myself for a while. As a writer in Hollywood, I wrote for these television shows. You can see me in the little corner picture there quite a few years ago on “Touched by an Angel”, “Beverly Hills 90210”. These are the kind of programs from the United States that get traveled around the world and I teach my students now how important it is that they are finally being able to take in the stories from other countries and we’ll talk about the importance of streaming media and how that has allowed for that to happen as we move on.

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.


 

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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!
† Available from the LA Public Library

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 18: “Lillian Hellman: A ‘Difficult’, Villified Woman.”, NPR, Maureen Corrigan

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 18: “Lillian Hellman: A ‘Difficult’, Villified Woman.”, NPR, Maureen Corrigan

From The

“Difficult” is probably the most tactful word one could use in characterizing Lillian Hellman. If ever there were an author safer to meet through her art rather than in real life, she was the one. Born in New Orleans into a Jewish family, Hellman came of age in the Roaring ’20s, liberated by flappers and Freud. Hellman drank like a fish, swore like a sailor and slept around like, well, like most of the men in her literary circle, chief among them Dashiell Hammett, with whom she had an open relationship spanning three decades. She was, recalled one observer, a “tough broad … the kind of girl who can take the tops off bottles with her teeth.”

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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!
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01 Introduction from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute)

Watch this entire presentation

01 Introduction from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered - Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute)

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

 

Transcript:

Thank you all very much. I apologize that I will speak in English because we do very bad in teaching languages in the United States. So this is the best that I can do, but I appreciate very much the translator who will help us all this evening. So thank you all for coming. We are here to talk about why researching screenwriters is important and I think it’s a very important thing. I’ve been teaching it for a while and I was, in fact, a screenwriter myself for a while. As a writer in Hollywood, I wrote for these television shows. You can see me in the little corner picture there quite a few years ago on “Touched by an Angel”, “Beverly Hills 90210”. These are the kind of programs from the United States that get traveled around the world and I teach my students now how important it is that they are finally being able to take in the stories from other countries and we’ll talk about the importance of streaming media and how that has allowed for that to happen as we move on.

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

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 17: After the Thin Man. Wrs: Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, and Dashiell Hammett. Dir: Van Dyke W. S. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1936, USA 112 mins.

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.

After the Thin Man. Wrs: Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, and Dashiell Hammett. Dir: Van Dyke W. S. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1936, USA  112 mins.

After the Thin Man. Wrs: Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, and Dashiell Hammett. Dir: Van Dyke W. S. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1936, USA  112 mins.

From The

After the Thin Man is a 1936 American comedy film directed by W. S. Van Dyke and starring William Powell, Myrna Loy, and James Stewart. A sequel to the film The Thin Man, the film presents Powell and Loy as Dashiell Hammett’s characters Nick and Nora Charles. The film also features Elissa Landi, Joseph Calleia, Jessie Ralph, Alan Marshal, and Penny Singleton (billed under her maiden name as Dorothy McNulty).

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

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

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44 Conclusion from

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Transcript:

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

From The

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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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.

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

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Women Scenario Writers 0000

Women Scenario Writers 0001 Women Scenario Writers 0002

Women Scenario Writers 0003 Women Scenario Writers 0004

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Read and download for free for Archive.org


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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.

Watch this entire presentation

43 Susan Harris and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason from

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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.

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

…or via Amazon…

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

Bookshop.org

* 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