Tag: resources

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 44: Jane Murfin at the Women Film Pioneers Project

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

From The

As a woman who wrote or cowrote over sixty produced films, a producer who championed strong female roles, and a Hollywood insider with a career spanning over three decades, Jane Murfin may be one of the most prolific but least known writers of the 1920s and ’30s.

Jane Murfin was born Jane Macklem in Quincy, Michigan. Her first marriage, in 1907, to lawyer James Murfin, lasted less than five years, but Jane adopted his surname and would use it—excluding the brief period in the late 1910s when she and Jane Cowl used the pseudonym Allan Langdon Martin—throughout her life. Although the 1910 US Census records list her as living as a housewife in Michigan with her lawyer-husband James, according to Murfin family correspondence from 1967, Jane moved shortly after to New York City while her husband remained in Michigan. According to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, James eventually became a school regent, after a long career teaching law, and even has a gate on the grounds named after him.

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† When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry†

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Related posts:

  1. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 33: “Elinor Glyn.”, Denise Cummings , Women Film Pioneers Project. Columbia University
  2. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 16: “Ida May Park.” Women Film Pioneers Project. Center for Digital Research and Scholarship, 27 Sept. 2013
  3. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 36: Reclaiming the Archive: Feminism and Film History
  4. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 21: The Progressive Silent Film List
  5. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 29: Eighty Odd Years in Hollywood: Memoir of a Career in Film and Television by John Meredyth Lucas

When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – 10 in a series – Ben Hur (1907), Wr: Gene Gauntier

When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies - 10 in a series - Ben Our (1907), Wr: Gene Gauntier

Ben Hur is a 1907 American silent drama film set in ancient Rome, the first screen adaptation of Lew Wallace’s popular 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Co-directed by Sidney Olcott and Frank Oakes Rose, this “photoplay” was produced by the Kalem Company of New York City, and its scenes, including the climactic chariot race, were filmed in the city’s borough of Brooklyn.[5][a]

While this film is significant for being the first motion-picture adaptation of Wallace’s novel, its production also served as a landmark case of copyright infringement by an early American film studio. In 1908 Kalem was successfully sued for representing parts of Wallace’s book on screen without obtaining permission from the author’s estate. Copies of the film, which survive, are now in the public domain and are readily available for free viewing online in the collections of various digital archives and on streaming services. — Wikipedia

More about Alice Guy Blaché

Buy “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Today!

† When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry†

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

Help Support Local Bookstores — Buy at 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

Related posts:

  1. When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – 8 in a series – Blue Jeans (1917) Wr: June Mathis
  2. When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – 3 in a series – The Captive (1915) Wr: Jeannie MacPherson
  3. 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.
  4. When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – 5 in a series – The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) – Wr: Anita Loos
  5. When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – 6 in a series – La Fee aux Choux | The Cabbage Fairy , Wr: Alice Guy Blaché (1896)

29 Screenwriters Are Important from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (52 seconds)

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29 Screenwriters Are Important from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered

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Transcript:

But we always knew that writers were important — if not the most important — because, if the directors were so important — when we had the Blacklist, 9 out of 10 of those people were writers. It wasn’t the director’s philosophy that we were afraid of showing the world. It was the writer’s philosophy. It was their ideas about poverty and what it was like in America and how we needed to fix it. That’s what scared the big guys and that’s why they all went to prison, right? They aren’t directors. They’re writers. Yeah, they all went to prison for about 10 months because they wouldn’t give names of fellow communists and it didn’t even matter that nobody cared. Half of them weren’t — some were communists and it’s legal for them to be a communist in the United States, but they were mostly all writers. So we know that writers are deeply important because it’s the stories that matter because those were the things that changed people, right? That’s what fascinates me.

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!
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  1. 04 Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (1 minute 5 seconds)
  2. 19 Nunnally Johnson and John Ford from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (51 seconds)
  3. 06 Stories Are Important! from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (51 seconds)
  4. 27 The Writers Guild from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (51 seconds)
  5. 05 Do You Know Who Wrote Your Favorite Films? from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (51 seconds)

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 43: COMEDY OUTLOOK SADDENS SPEWACK (1960) – The New York Times

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

COMEDY OUTLOOK SADDENS SPEWACK; Calls Times ‘Unfortunate’ for the Writer of Humor — Cites ‘Method’ School as ‘Grim’
By Louis Calta

Available in facsimile version on the NY Times web site.

Buy “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Today!

† When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry†

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Help Support Local Bookstores — Buy at 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

Related posts:

  1. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 19: Algonquin Round Table Web Site
  2. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 23: Satire and Melodrama in a Newspaper Play Entitled “Clear All Wires”, New York Times
  3. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 07: “Frederica Sagor Maas, Hollywood’s ‘Shocking Miss Pilgrim'” The Forward.
  4. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 22: Latitude in Mass-Produced Culture’s Capital: New Women and Other Players in Hollywood, 1920-1941
  5. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 09: “Eve Unsell in New York.” Film Daily 6 August 1936

When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – 9 in a series – Suspense (1913) Wr: Lois Weber

When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies - 9 in a series - Suspense (1913) Wr: Lois Weber

Suspense 1913 film shot

Suspense is a 1913 American silent short film thriller directed by Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley. Weber also wrote the scenario and stars in the film with Valentine Paul. The film features early examples of a split screen shot[1] and a car chase. The Internet Movie Database lists Lon Chaney as having an unconfirmed and uncredited brief role;[2] however, this is disputed by silentera.com, which states “Despite attributions to the contrary, Lon Chaney does not appear in the film.”[3][4][5]

A print of the film is preserved at the film archive of the British Film Institute.[6]

A servant leaves a new mother with only a written letter of notice, placing her key under the doormat as she leaves. Her exit attracts the attention of a tramp to the house. As the husband has previously phoned that he is working late, the wife decides not to ring back when she finds the note but does ring back when she sees the tramp. Her husband listens, horrified, as she documents the break-in and then the tramp cuts the line. The husband steals a car and is immediately pursued by the car’s owner and the police, who nearly but don’t quite manage to jump into the stolen car during a high-speed chase. The husband manages to gain a lead over the police but then accidentally strikes a man smoking in the road and checks to see that he is okay. Meanwhile, the tramp is breaking into the room where the wife has locked herself and her baby, violently thrusting himself through the wood door, carrying a large knife. At that moment the husband arrives, pursued by the police. As the husband runs towards the home, the police fire warning shots into the air, panicking the hobo. He runs down the stairs, to be met by the husband at the front door. After a short struggle, he overpowers the hobo, who is then grabbed by the police. The husband runs upstairs, everything is explained, and all is forgiven as the couple embrace. — Wikipedia

More about Alice Guy Blaché

* 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

Buy “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Today!

† When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry†

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

Help Support Local Bookstores — Buy at 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

Related posts:

  1. Chase Thompson, Writer, “Writing Around Lois Weber” from When Women Wrote Hollywood
  2. When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – 7 in a series – “it” (1927, Wr: Eleanor Glyn
  3. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 12: Lois Weber in Early Hollywood by Shelley Stamp
  4. When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – 2 in a series – Lady of the Night (1925): Story By Adela Rogers St. Johns
  5. When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – First in a series – Fanchon, the Cricket by Frances Marion

28 Screenwriting Education Flaws from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (56 seconds)

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28 Screenwriting Education Flaws from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered

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Transcript:

So all of that unequal credit leads us not to be paying attention enough to writers as we should. Which is why they need to be studied more now. Also, I think education which was supposed to help us didn’t in the very beginning right? The earliest film school was a Moscow Film School but these guys immediately started to teach the history of film as if it was the history of directors which made it the history again of great men and that way of teaching has gone down and to when I studied this for my Ph.D. I didn’t learn about any of these women. I knew about them from my childhood because I’d read their memoirs and I knew they existed but none of my textbooks mentioned any of them. So I began to unearth their names and have my students research them so that we could eventually build a library of works about them right? So schools weren’t helping until now you can see this little turn you know more and more people are doing that.

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Related posts:

  1. 19 Nunnally Johnson and John Ford from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (51 seconds)
  2. 06 Stories Are Important! from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (51 seconds)
  3. 26 The Great Depression from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (45 seconds)
  4. 27 The Writers Guild from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (51 seconds)
  5. 05 Do You Know Who Wrote Your Favorite Films? from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (51 seconds)

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 42: Interpretations, a book of first poems (1912) by Zoë Akins

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

Buy “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Today!

† When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry†

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

Help Support Local Bookstores — Buy at 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

Related posts:

  1. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 39: A Conversation With Lillian Hellman: A still unfinished woman via Rolling Stone
  2. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 40: Women Screenwriters: An International Guide by Jill Nelmes and Jule Selbo
  3. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 22: Latitude in Mass-Produced Culture’s Capital: New Women and Other Players in Hollywood, 1920-1941
  4. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 41: Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930-1939 by Tino Balio
  5. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 19: Algonquin Round Table Web Site

When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – 8 in a series – Blue Jeans (1917) Wr: June Mathis

When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies - 8 in a series - Blue Jeans (1917) Wr: June Mathis

Perry Bascom comes to the town of Rising Sun, Indiana, to take charge of the sawmills which have for years been managed by his father’s best friend, Col. Henry Clay Risener. His father’s half-brother, Jack, has brought the name into disrepute in the town, so he (Perry) decides to be known as Jim Nelson. Perry sees June, who has been sent away from the poorhouse. He shares his lunch with her and protects her from the attentions of Ben Boone, the political bully of the town. — IMDB

Blue Jeans is a 1917 American silent drama film, based on the 1890 play Blue Jeans by Joseph Arthur that opened in New York City to great popularity. The sensation of the play was a dramatic scene where the unconscious hero is placed on a board approaching a huge buzz saw in a sawmill, later imitated to the point of cliché.[1][2]

Prints survive at several archives including the George Eastman House Motion Picture Collection.[3][1] — Wikipedia

More about Alice Guy Blaché

* 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

Buy “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Today!

† When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry†

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

Help Support Local Bookstores — Buy at 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

Related posts:

  1. 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.
  2. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 33: Blood and Sand. Wr: June Mathis, Dir: Fred Fred Niblo, Paramount Pictures, 1922, USA 80 mins.
  3. When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – 7 in a series – “it” (1927, Wr: Eleanor Glyn
  4. When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – First in a series – Fanchon, the Cricket by Frances Marion
  5. When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – 3 in a series – The Captive (1915) Wr: Jeannie MacPherson

27 The Writers Guild from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (51 seconds)

Watch this entire presentation

27 The Writers Guild from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered

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

 

Transcript:

Because what the writers learned was that everyone took a pay cut except IATSE — is the union for the people who work on the set– and that had come from Broadway and they did not take a pay cut because they had a 3-year union contract and it couldn’t be taken away and that’s when the writers said Yeah, we need a union. That’s a great idea. Let’s start a union and they started a couple of versions and it wasn’t until the 1950’s when the current union — the one that does that magazine I mentioned — existed and it had existed since then and that’s protected writers by making sure that credits match on the screen. In the early days, a producer could put the credit for the film to his girlfriend simply because he wanted to make some money. You had no right to credit on your own film. So the Guild, that was one of the major things they did as well as pensions, benefits, and things like that.

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Related posts:

  1. 19 Nunnally Johnson and John Ford from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (51 seconds)
  2. 23 Edna Ferber and New York Writers from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (1 minute 8 seconds)
  3. 04 Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (1 minute 5 seconds)
  4. 06 Stories Are Important! from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (51 seconds)
  5. 05 Do You Know Who Wrote Your Favorite Films? from Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered [Video] (51 seconds)

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 41: Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930-1939 by Tino Balio

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

The advent of color, big musicals, the studio system, and the beginning of institutionalized censorship made the thirties the defining decade for Hollywood. The year 1939, celebrated as “Hollywood’s greatest year,” saw the release of such memorable films as Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and Stagecoach. It was a time when the studios exercised nearly absolute control over their product as well as over such stars as Bette Davis, Clark Gable, and Humphrey Bogart. In this fifth volume of the award-winning series History of the American Cinema, Tino Balio examines every aspect of the filmmaking and film exhibition system as it matured during the Depression era.

Buy “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Today!

† When Women Wrote Hollywood: Essays on Female Screenwriters in the Early Film Industry†

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

Help Support Local Bookstores — Buy at 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

Related posts:

  1. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 12: Lois Weber in Early Hollywood by Shelley Stamp
  2. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 23: Satire and Melodrama in a Newspaper Play Entitled “Clear All Wires”, New York Times
  3. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 27: Feminism and the Female Author: The Not So Silent Career of the Woman Scenarist in Hollywood—1896–1930 by Donna R. Casella
  4. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 40: Women Screenwriters: An International Guide by Jill Nelmes and Jule Selbo
  5. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 34: Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood by Karen Ward Mahar