Our Executive Team is growing! I want to welcome Rosalie, the HFC Executive Assistant and Jackie, the HFC Director of Development. As many of you know, it takes a lot to drive this ship forward and with their help and expertise, we are striving to foster and showcase independent filmmakers in Hawaii and above all Make More Films!
Thanks Rosalie and Jackie for joining our team and making HFC your kuleana and ohana!
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
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..
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.
Every Monday we will be profiling a member of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting 2020 graduating class. This exciting, fresh crop of writers are the future of the industry and are going on to do BIG things, so get to know them now!
#MeetTheGraduatesMonday: Cierra Winkler
Cierra Winkler is a screenwriter and playwright from the Appalachian region of northeast Georgia. She is currently pursuing her MFA in TV & Screenwriting from Stephens College at Jim Henson Studios, where she’s been able to cultivate her love for creating Southern characters who defy stereotypes and bring authentic Southern voices to the screen. Cierra also enjoys telling female-driven epic adventures, and she’s even had the audacity to rewrite Homer in an epic reimaging of the Odyssey as told from Queen Penelope’s point of view.
In 2019 Cierra placed 2nd out of 400 pitches in Screencraft’s Pitchfest at the Atlanta Film Festival for her Odyssey-based feature screenplay Queen of Ithica. She was also a finalist in the 2019 Athena Film Festival’s Writer’s Workshop. Cierra is a member of the Atlanta Film Society and has been accepted into their Spring 2020 Production Academy, where she’ll be training for different positions within the Georgia film industry. Cierra will graduate from Stephens with her MFA in May 2020 and looks forward to what adventures in the film industry lie ahead!
Guest lecturer Pavel Jech, former Dean of FAMU, the Film and Television School of the Academy of the Performing Arts in Prague and currently at Chapman University, gave excellent insights into the craft of writing a short film screenplay at January’s MFA workshop.
Wherever you go, you find Monkees fans and the Denver Popular Culture Con was no different. Amid rooms full of caped crusaders and cosplay creations, I was initially not sure how many folks would attend a talk on a TV show from the 1960s – but happily I was met by a nice, engaged audience for my talk on Why the Monkees Matter – and afterward they bought books! What more could an author ask for?
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Transcript
Fandom matters on The Monkees. Zilch is a podcast where every couple of weeks they put out a podcast. Lots of information about the show. Interviews with the guys. Updates on what’s happening with them. I do a thing called Monkees 101 with another woman who’s a Ph.D. — we’re both PhDs and we take one episode at a time and sort of pick it apart. Find all the stuff that’s in it. Talk about what was happening in history at that moment and in the music world at that moment and it’s really kind of fun. They do a lot of really cool stuff. 7000 or 8000 people follow that one podcast. Just because of this fandom and it’s international. As I said, they’re in New Zealand right now. They were going to Australia. They’ve in Japan. They’re everywhere. I’ve met them. Because fandom even means like people with Ph.Ds want to pay attention to them. This was on their last tour that Davy — uh, no, Peter — and Micky did together. And that’s how fast I talk. That’s how much I have to say. I have a lot more to say, but that’s the prepared stuff. I thought if people wanted to chat or perhaps had questions about stuff I would be glad to answer them. What interests people about why The Monkees are still famous?
A hit television show about a fictitious rock band, The Monkees (1966-1968) earned two Emmys–Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Comedy.
Capitalizing on the show’s success, the actual band formed by the actors, at their peak, sold more albums than The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined, and set the stage for other musical TV characters from The Partridge Family to Hannah Montana. In the late 1980s, the Monkees began a series of reunion tours that continued into their 50th anniversary.
This book tells the story of The Monkees and how the show changed television, introducing a new generation to the fourth-wall-breaking slapstick created by Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers.
Its creators contributed to the innovative film and television of 1970s with projects like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laugh-In and Welcome Back, Kotter. Immense profits from the show, its music and its merchandising funded the producers’ move into films such as Head, Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces.
Claudia Puig, President of the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, came to January’s workshop to discuss the art of film critique as well as the current state of Diversity in Media. She also curates two film festivals and spoke about how to work the festival circuit to gain attention for your writing career.
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This one allowed me to riff on some of my favorite female science fiction writers across time, whether they be novelists or television writers. It also opened up a good conversation on what art we support and include in our lives – and what that art says to us and about us. — Rosanne
Transcript:
Moves us into the world of Buffy which is part horror/part sci-fi I would say blending and I think really finally a powerful woman though yes she does use weapons but it’s also about her inner strength and her buddy Willow who doesn’t have to be sexy she’s just a cool really smart girl. So we’re trying to get some more normal representations of women. However when they sell the box set, uhhh, that’s a pretty like it yeah, an overtly sexual pose that doesn’t really thrill me, but the series is pretty brilliant and she’s pretty powerful in it and there’s an ending to it — not gonna spoil it — but there’s a choice made in the last episode in terms of how men would take having to deal with their power issues and how a woman decides to save the day. — what she does and it’s a big interesting thing.
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One of the highlights of January’s Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting workshopcame in the form of a story structure seminar with screenwriting Jane Anderson (The Wife, Olive Kitteridge, The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio) held on the Henson soundstage. Her energy and honesty in discussing her work and her life in the business was greatly appreciated.
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
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.
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.
Every Monday we will be profiling a member of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting 2020 graduating class. This exciting, fresh crop of writers are the future of the industry and are going on to do BIG things, so get to know them now!
Get ready to meet another member of the 2020 Stephens Cohort: Wynne Racine! #MeetTheGradsMonday
Wynne Racine is a journalist who has spent much of her career writing for newspapers and television. For more than a decade she also produced a weekly, half-hour news program. Along the way, she owned a radio station formatted for kids (KKYD), wrote chapters for high school text books and was a regular contributor to a Russian magazine. Wynne entered the Stephens MFA program because she wanted to write a screenplay based on the life of her grandfather. With the help of Stephen’s mentors, that screenplay is now complete and, as of this writing, being considered by a major motion picture studio.