Tag: women

Where’s Her Movie? Actress, Maria Félix – 18 in a series

“Where’s HER Movie” posts will highlight interesting and accomplished women from a variety of professional backgrounds who deserve to have movies written about them as much as all the male scientists, authors, performers, and geniuses have had written about them across the over 100 years of film.  This is our attempt to help write these women back into mainstream history.  — Rosanne

Where's Her Movie? Actress, Maria Félix - 18 in a series

María de los Ángeles Félix Güereña, known as María Félix (Spanish: [maˈɾi.a ˈfeliks]; 8 April 1914 – 8 April 2002), was a Mexican film actress and singer. Along with Pedro Armendáriz and Dolores del Río, she was one of the most successful figures of Latin American cinema in the 1940s and 1950s. Considered one of the most beautiful actresses of Mexican cinema, her taste for the finesse and strong personality garnered her the title of diva early in her career.[3] She was known as La Doña, a name derived from her character in the film Doña Bárbara (1943), and María Bonita, thanks to the anthem composed exclusively for her, as a wedding gift by her second husband, the Mexican composer Agustín Lara. She completed a film career that included 47 films made in Mexico, Spain, France, Italy and Argentina.[4] She was also considered one of the most important female figures in the Golden Age of Mexican cinema. — Wikipedia

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  1. Where’s Her Movie? Actress, Maria Montez – 12 in a series
  2. Where’s Her Movie? US Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Maria Sotomayor – 14 in a series
  3. Where’s Her Movie? Activist, Dolores Huerta – 17 in a series
  4. Where’s Her Movie? Astronomer, Margaret Harwood – 4 in a series
  5. Where’s Her Movie? Sculptor, Selma Burke – 15 in a series

A Woman Wrote That – 24 in a series – National Treasure (2004), Writer, Marianne Wibberley

This new “A Woman Wrote That” post is an echo of the Writers Guild campaign of a few years ago (“A Writer Wrote That”) where they noted famous movie quotes and credited the screenwriter rather than the director.  The difference here being that we will be posting lines from films written by female screenwriters.  Feel free to share! — Rosanne

A Woman Wrote That - 24 in a series - National Treasure (2004), Writer, Marianne Wibberley

RILEY

Anyone crazy enough to believe us isn’t gonna want to help.

Related posts:

  1. A Woman Wrote That – 23 in a series – Brave (2012), Writer, Brenda Chapman
  2. A Woman Wrote That – 22 in a series – Bring It On! (2000), Writer, Jessica Bendinger
  3. A Woman Wrote That – 20 in a series – Dirty Dancing (1987), Writer, Eleanor Bergstein
  4. A Woman Wrote That – 21 in a series – Bewitched (2005), Writer, Nora Ephron
  5. A Woman Wrote That – 17 in a series – Father of the Bride (1991), Writer: Nancy Meyers

Where’s Her Movie? Activist, Dolores Huerta – 17 in a series

“Where’s HER Movie” posts will highlight interesting and accomplished women from a variety of professional backgrounds who deserve to have movies written about them as much as all the male scientists, authors, performers, and geniuses have had written about them across the over 100 years of film.  This is our attempt to help write these women back into mainstream history.  — Rosanne

Where's Her Movie? Activist, Dolores Huerta - 17 in a series

Dolores Clara Fernández Huerta (born April 10, 1930) is an American labor leader and civil rights activist who, with Cesar Chavez, is a co-founder of the National Farmworkers Association, which later merged with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee to become the United Farm Workers (UFW).[1] Huerta helped organize the Delano grape strike in 1965 in California and was the lead negotiator in the workers’ contract that was created after the strike.[2]

Huerta has received numerous awards for her community service and advocacy for workers’, immigrants’, and women’s rights, including the Eugene V. Debs Foundation Outstanding American Award, the United States Presidential Eleanor Roosevelt Award for Human Rights[3] and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.[4] She was the first Latina inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, in 1993.[5][6]

Huerta is the originator of the phrase, “Sí, se puede“.[7] As a role model to many in the Latino community, Huerta is the subject of many corridos (Mexican or Mexican-American ballads) and murals.[8]

In California, April 10 is Dolores Huerta Day.[9]  — Wikipedia

Related posts:

  1. Women’s History Month – 20 in a series – Dolores Huerta
  2. Women’s History Month 6: Dolores Huerta
  3. Where’s Her Movie? Labor Activist, Anna LoPizzo – 8 in a series
  4. Where’s Her Movie? Activist, Claudette Colvin – 16 in a series
  5. Where’s Her Movie? Civil Rights Activist, Elizabeth Peratrovich – 5 in a series

Women Prefer Anita Loos: Celebrating the Female Screenwriters Who Came Before Us, Dr. Rosanne Welch, April 2021

Women Prefer Anita Loos: Celebrating the Female Screenwriters Who Came Before Us, Dr. Rosanne Welch, April 2021

I first found Anita Loos in her memoir A Girl Like I which sat on the sparsely covered “Hollywood History” shelf in my local library one summer. Reading her story showed me women had been masterful in the world of screenwriting, which taught me that they could – and would be again – even though it was the late 1970s and I could only name two female screenwriters. Nancy Dowd, who had won the Best Screenplay Oscar for Coming Home and Harriet Frank, Jr., who had been nominated for Norma Rae. (Watch future columns for more on their storied careers.)

If you’ve never heard of Anita Loos, now you have. Historians admit she “discovered the key to all good movie writing, a story to be seen rather than told” in her very first screen story The New York Hat. The 1912 film came from a very particularly female perspective being a social satire highlighting the hypocrisy of how gossip destroys women’s reputations (available on YouTube – go watch now!). Yet many male historians also dismiss Loos because they fell for the fragile little girl persona she created for herself, so necessary to prop up the egos of the men who bought her scripts. One could say Loos understood branding even before Mae West (whose writing career you will also read about in a future column).

Loos became one of the busiest writers of the silent period. By 1913 she had sold upwards of 40 scenarios writing for the biggest stars of the day including creating the swashbuckling persona of Douglas Fairbanks. She would go on to write over 140 films across her career with more being remade in her retirement. Loos is also known as the first literate screenwriter since she included dialogue in her silent film scenarios to make them more interesting for the directors to read and therefore more sellable.

Loos frequently had to use her alcoholic husband, John Emerson as a conduit to communicate with directors and other executives who balked at dealing with a woman on equal footing. This worked well to promote the idea they were a writing “team” and a happy couple, when in fact Loos did most all of the writing, including writing her signature novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, alone. This novel concerns the romantic adventures of two nightclub singers traveling to Paris to perform. It proved so popular it has never been out of print. Loos adapted Blondes as a film in 1928. Then she adapted it as a Broadway musical in 1949, cementing Loos as the writer who gave flappers respect as independent women and not floozies. (Most fans are familiar with the iconic 1953 film musical starring Marilyn Monroe. Charles Lederer did that adaptation).

Loos also worked behind the scenes to aid fellow females in their entry into the film world. For example, in 1920 Vanity Fair magazine fired their theatre reviewer, a young Dorothy Parker, for writing disparaging reviews of actresses whose producer husbands or boyfriends threatened to pull advertising from the magazine. Friends and fellow writers Robert Benchley and Robert Sherwood resigned the same day. Loos and another highly paid female screenwriter of the day, Frances Marion, both suggested to actress and producer Lillian Gish that she hire Parker for a film she was currently supervising that starred her sister, also named Dorothy. More on Dorothy Parker as a screenwriter next month!

Read the entire article, Women Prefer Anita Loos on the Script web site

Read about more women from early Hollywood


Related posts:

  1. Celebrating the Female Screenwriters Who Came Before Us by Dr. Rosanne Welch — Script Magazine, March 2021
  2. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 13: Anita Loos Rediscovered: Film Treatments and Fiction by Anita Loos, Creator of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, Cari Beauchamp, Mary Anita Loos
  3. Dr. Rosanne Welch Presents “When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues in Oral Histories” at SCMS 2021 [Video]
  4. When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – 5 in a series – The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912) – Wr: Anita Loos
  5. From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood Archives 28: Narrative ‘Confidence Games’: Framing the Blonde Spectacle in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925) and Nights at the Circus (1984)

A Woman Wrote That – 23 in a series – Brave (2012), Writer, Brenda Chapman

This new “A Woman Wrote That” post is an echo of the Writers Guild campaign of a few years ago (“A Writer Wrote That”) where they noted famous movie quotes and credited the screenwriter rather than the director.  The difference here being that we will be posting lines from films written by female screenwriters.  Feel free to share! — Rosanne

A Woman Wrote That - 23 in a series - Brave (2012), Writer, Brenda Chapman

MERIDA

I am Merida, firstborn descendant of Clan Dunbroch. And I’ll be shooting for my own hand!

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  1. A Woman Wrote That – 22 in a series – Bring It On! (2000), Writer, Jessica Bendinger
  2. A Woman Wrote That – 20 in a series – Dirty Dancing (1987), Writer, Eleanor Bergstein
  3. A Woman Wrote That – 21 in a series – Bewitched (2005), Writer, Nora Ephron
  4. A Woman Wrote That – 17 in a series – Father of the Bride (1991), Writer: Nancy Meyers
  5. A Woman Wrote That – 19 in a series – You’ve Got Mail (1998), Writer: Nora Ephron

Where’s Her Movie? Activist, Claudette Colvin – 16 in a series

“Where’s HER Movie” posts will highlight interesting and accomplished women from a variety of professional backgrounds who deserve to have movies written about them as much as all the male scientists, authors, performers, and geniuses have had written about them across the over 100 years of film.  This is our attempt to help write these women back into mainstream history.  — Rosanne

Where's Her Movie? Activist, Claudette Colvin - 16 in a series

Claudette Colvin (born Claudette Austin, September 5, 1939)[1][2] is a pioneer of the 1950s civil rights movement and retired nurse aide. On March 2, 1955, she was arrested at the age of 15 in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to give up her seat to a white woman on a crowded, segregated bus. This occurred nine months before the more widely known incident in which Rosa Parks, secretary of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), helped spark the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott.[3]

Colvin was one of five plaintiffs in the first federal court case filed by civil rights attorney Fred Gray on February 1, 1956, as Browder v. Gayle, to challenge bus segregation in the city. In a United States district court, she testified before the three-judge panel that heard the case. On June 13, 1956, the judges determined that the state and local laws requiring bus segregation in Alabama were unconstitutional. The case went to the United States Supreme Court on appeal by the state, and it upheld the district court’s ruling on November 13, 1956. One month later, the Supreme Court affirmed the order to Montgomery and the state of Alabama to end bus segregation. The Montgomery bus boycott was then called off. — Wikipedia

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  1. Where’s Her Movie? Civil Rights Activist, Elizabeth Peratrovich – 5 in a series
  2. Where’s Her Movie? Civil Rights Activist, Rose Matsui Ochi – 6 in a series
  3. Where’s Her Movie? US Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Maria Sotomayor – 14 in a series
  4. Where’s Her Movie? Abolitionist, Sojourner Truth – 11 in a series
  5. Where’s Her Movie? Labor Activist, Anna LoPizzo – 8 in a series

A Woman Wrote That – 21 in a series – Bewitched (2005), Writer, Nora Ephron

This new “A Woman Wrote That” post is an echo of the Writers Guild campaign of a few years ago (“A Writer Wrote That”) where they noted famous movie quotes and credited the screenwriter rather than the director.  The difference here being that we will be posting lines from films written by female screenwriters.  Feel free to share! — Rosanne

A Woman Wrote That - 21 in a series - Bewitched (2005), Writer, Nora Ephron

UNCLE ARTHUR

Do you want the long version or the short version? Keep in mind, the long version is in Aramaic.

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  2. A Woman Wrote That – 10 in a series – When Harry Met Sally (1989) by Nora Ephron
  3. A Woman Wrote That – 11 in a series – Sleepless in Seattle (1993)
  4. A Woman Wrote That – 20 in a series – Dirty Dancing (1987), Writer, Eleanor Bergstein
  5. A Woman Wrote That – 17 in a series – Father of the Bride (1991), Writer: Nancy Meyers

Dr. Rosanne Welch Presents “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Dr. Rosanne Welch Presents

Connections at conferences matter! Through the most recent SCMS, I met Vicki Callahan, whose film history focus right now is on Mabel Normand. When she learned I could put together a lecture on the importance of the female voice in the A Star is Born franchise she asked me to give that lecture to her master students.

It made for a great opportunity for me to hone the ideas I’m working on for a chapter on that franchise that I’m writing for a new book from Bloomsbury: The Bloomsbury Handbook Of International Screenplay Theory. It’s always nice when one piece of research can be purposed in other ways – and it’s always fun revisiting such a female-centric film franchise – one that drew the talents of such powerful performers as Janet Gaynor, Judy Garland, Barbara Streisand, and Lady Gaga.

Find out why in this lecture!

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Related posts:

  1. 26 Dorothy Parker and A Star Is Born from “When Women Wrote Hollywood” with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (55 seconds)
  2. Dr. Rosanne Welch Presents “When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues in Oral Histories” at SCMS 2021 [Video]
  3. 32 Characters: Uhura, Guinan, Star Trek from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 16 seconds)
  4. 31 Characters: Nyota Uhura, Star Trek from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 20 seconds)
  5. 36 Star Wars, Alien, and Women Characters from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute)

Where’s Her Movie? US Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Maria Sotomayor – 14 in a series

“Where’s HER Movie” posts will highlight interesting and accomplished women from a variety of professional backgrounds who deserve to have movies written about them as much as all the male scientists, authors, performers, and geniuses have had written about them across the over 100 years of film.  This is our attempt to help write these women back into mainstream history.  — Rosanne

Where's Her Movie? Us Supreme Court Justice, Sonia Maria Sotomayor - 14 in a series

Sonia Maria Sotomayor (Spanish: [ˈsonja sotomaˈʝoɾ];[1] born June 25, 1954)[2] is an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. She was nominated by President Barack Obama on May 26, 2009 and has served since August 8, 2009. Sotomayor is the first Hispanic and Latina member of the Court.[3][a]

 — Wikipedia

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  1. Where’s Her Movie? Actress, Maria Montez – 12 in a series
  2. From The Research Vault: My Beloved World by Sonia Sotomayor
  3. Where’s Her Movie? Computer Scientist, Margaret Hamilton – 9 in a series
  4. Where’s Her Movie? Abolitionist, Sojourner Truth – 11 in a series
  5. Where’s Her Movie? Astronomer, Margaret Harwood – 4 in a series

A Woman Wrote That – 20 in a series – Dirty Dancing (1987), Writer, Eleanor Bergstein

This new “A Woman Wrote That” post is an echo of the Writers Guild campaign of a few years ago (“A Writer Wrote That”) where they noted famous movie quotes and credited the screenwriter rather than the director.  The difference here being that we will be posting lines from films written by female screenwriters.  Feel free to share! — Rosanne

A Woman Wrote That - 20 in a series - Dirty Dancing (1987), Writer, Eleanor Bergstein

JOHNNY

Nobody puts Baby in a corner.

Related posts:

  1. A Woman Wrote That – 19 in a series – You’ve Got Mail (1998), Writer: Nora Ephron
  2. A Woman Wrote That – 17 in a series – Father of the Bride (1991), Writer: Nancy Meyers
  3. A Woman Wrote That – 18 in a series – The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Writer: Caroline Thompson
  4. A Woman Wrote That – 11 in a series – Sleepless in Seattle (1993)
  5. A Woman Wrote That – 10 in a series – When Harry Met Sally (1989) by Nora Ephron