Thanks to the gracious invitation from my Screenwriting Research Network colleague Paolo Russo – and a grant he was able to procure (and in the before-Covid time) I was able to spend a week at Oxford Brookes University working with the screenwriting masters students in Paolo’s course. At the culmination of the week, I gave this lecture on how writers rooms worked in the States.
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The last component of the Lost Cause, and perhaps the key component, is the cherished belief in happy slaves and sub-human African Americans in need of civilization and Christianity. Lost Cause adherents deny the immorality and cruelty of slavery and insist slavery was a benign and misunderstood institution.
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
The focus of this article will be on an examination of American television and film projects and their inceptions and/or receptions in various marketplaces. In addition, the article will explore some of the specific cultural differences around the world that may be of importance to screenwriters.
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.
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
In keeping with the binary nature of ideologies, the honorable Southern generals stand in contrast to venal, uncouth Northerners. The Lost Cause insists upon the illegitimacy of Abraham Lincoln’s election and his personal villainy as a backwoods barbarian, miscegenationist and all-purpose bad dude.
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
This article explores the changing nature of public policy in Ireland, 1994–2009, as it relates to film and scriptwriting practice. The dominant discourse in Irish cinema studies has centred around ideas of identity, national identity in particular with more recent studies branching off in the direction of genre studies, political economy and narrative studies. This article is framed, broadly speaking, within a political economy discourse, by way of exploring how Irish Film Board policy changed over a specific period as a result of internal and external factors, shaping a structure that would determine how Irish scriptwriters related to the wider field of film production. Through a survey of Irish Film Board policies, newspaper articles and annual reports, this article presents a general historical overview of an evolving film policy as it related directly to scriptwriting and script development. Against this backdrop, other questions surface about Irish cinema and scriptwriting practice, particularly questions centred on local/global issues.
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.
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
“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
As one of the most prominent racing pilots of her generation Jackie Cochran pioneered women’s aviation. The head of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) during WWII she oversaw over 1000 civilian female pilots who ferried planes from factories to port cities and later became the first woman to break the sound barrier on 18 May 1953. She originally learned to fly in order to expand her sales area.
In the 1960s, Cochran was a sponsor of the Mercury 13 program, an early effort to test the ability of women to be astronauts. Thirteen women pilots passed the same preliminary tests as the male astronauts of the Mercury program before the program was cancelled.[40][41][42][N 2] It was never a NASA initiative, though it was spearheaded by two members of the NASA Life Sciences Committee, one of whom, William Randolph Lovelace II, was a close friend of Cochran and her husband. Though Cochran initially supported the program, she was later responsible for delaying further phases of testing, and letters from her to members of the Navy and NASA expressing concern over whether the program was to be run properly and in accordance with NASA goals may have significantly contributed to the eventual cancellation of the program. It is generally accepted that Cochran turned against the program out of concern that she would no longer be the most prominent female aviator.[43]
On 17 and 18 July 1962, Representative Victor Anfuso (D-NY) convened public hearings before a special Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics[44] to determine whether or not the exclusion of women from the astronaut program was discriminatory, during which John Glenn and Scott Carpenter testified against admitting women to the astronaut program. Cochran herself argued against bringing women into the space program, saying that time was of the essence, and moving forward as planned was the only way to beat the Soviets in the Space Race. (None of the women who had passed the tests were military jet test pilots, nor did they have engineering degrees, which were the two basic experiential qualifications for potential astronauts. Women were not allowed to be military jet test pilots at that time. On average, however, they all had more flight experience than the male astronauts.) “NASA required all astronauts to be graduates of military jet test piloting programs and have engineering degrees. In 1962, no women could meet these requirements.” This ended the Mercury 13 program.[45] However, John Glenn and Scott Carpenter, who were part of the Mercury 7, also did not have engineering degrees when they were selected. Both of them were granted a degree after their flights for NASA. [46] [47]
Significantly, the hearings investigated the possibility of gender discrimination a two full years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 made that illegal, making these hearings a marker of how ideas about women’s rights permeated political discourse even before they were enshrined in law.[45]
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
This exploration is a continuation of my work on the ‘mental space of film genre’, a term I have coined to introduce a terminology to investigate the use of film genre for the screenwriter as he or she constructs a screenplay. Understanding this use of film genre may add to the screenwriter’s other technical skills such as knowledge of story structure and character construction. I have previously delineated the first two elements of the mental space of film genre in the second issue of the Journal of Screenwriting – schematic knowledge (the use of film genre as a framing device) and specific knowledge (the understanding of film genre the audience brings to the viewing of filmic narratives). This work will then focus on what I believe to be the important third element of the mental space of film genre – relevant knowledge.
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.
While any past event is vulnerable to the mythmaking of film, the Civil War might be the most contested event in American History. No national historical moment has been more written about (except perhaps World War II), argued over and romanticized than the so-called Irrepressible Conflict.
