writing – Page 6 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

15 Nice Guys and Allies from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

Nearly two years ago I had the pleasure of being invited to join a panel at the then upcoming SCMS (Society of Cinema and Media Studies) conference set for Seattle. As you know that was canceled due to Covid with the hopes of reconvening in Colorado in 2021. That became a virtual conference but our group decided to reapply our panel and we four were able to ‘meet’ on Zoom on Sunday and present: Writing Between the Lines: Feminist Strategies for Historical Absences, Cliché, and the Unreliable Narrator.

Here you can watch a clip from my part of the presentation,

“When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues in Oral Histories”

Transcript:

I very briefly want to be fair to all the lovely nice men in the world because they are –they do exist and they do credit the women in their lives. These husbands all – from Garson Kanin to Albert Hackett to John Gregory Dunn all credited their wives with equal or more work on all the projects they did together and you’ll recognize of course Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon having done these films which won them all Academy Award nominations and Garson always talks about how much of a writer Ruth was even though we as a culture remember her as an actress but he does complain about the fact that they call it George Cukor’s “Adam’s Rib” when in fact much of the direction was written into the script by Garson and Ruth. Having been theater people they understood exactly where they wanted the camera to go, So they get erased by Cukor. Albert and Francis, of course, are brilliant. They wrote for almost 50 years in Hollywood but when you look at the posters of their work it’s the director Frank Capra who essentially erases them from the picture. Their names are down here very tiny and here’s the crazy thing about that. They also in their career are going to write “The Diary of Anne Frank” for which they’re going to get the Pulitzer Prize. Capra don’t have no Pulitzer Prize but it’s called Frank Capra’s “It’s A Wonderful Life” right? No thank you. They also wrote Nick and Nora Charles the real “The Thin Man” which is Nick and Nora Charles. I’m talking fast because I want to use up all my time. I’m sorry and that’s normally put off on Dashiell Hammett who wrote the novel but if you look at the movie the couple in the movie is actually Francis and Albert.

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15 They Keep Killing Suzie…and Grace from Why Torchwood Still Matters with Dr. Rosanne Welch, San Diego Who Con 2021 [Video]

I recently presented a talk on Torchwood (Why Torchwood Still Matters) where I highlighted a few ways in which the show (airing from 2006 to 2011) came up with progressive and innovative ideas that are being used by other franchises today.

I always enjoy attending the SD (San Diego) WhoCon because the audiences are so well-informed on the Whoniverse and Whovians love Captain Jack and the crew that made this spinoff program so engaging.

RMW Rosanne Signature for Web

Transcript:

What they did in Torchwood they, of course, repeat when we come along to the Jodie Whittaker Doctor because they made you think we had a regular we didn’t have in the pilot. Right? That’s a trick that’s hard to get away with, but they made sure and wrote in a person who looked like they were part of the team and everything was happening and then they die in the pilot. And you’re like, whoa what happened?

They knew what they were doing. They knew they were killing the woman of color in that pilot, but they made sure she came back in Graham’s visions – right – he saw the visions of her and Ryan talks about her all the time. They even show The Doctor going to a funeral. How many people have died in the course of Doctor Who – I never once saw any of the Doctors go to a funeral. They respected her enough she stayed to go to her funeral. That’s how important that character is. So I think, I wouldn’t claim it as that but perhaps that is something they learned and they tried very hard not to do. Which I think is really interesting.

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Screenwriter Ruth Goodman: Her Instincts Made ‘The Heiress’ an Enduring Classic – Dr. Rosanne Welch, Script Magazine, July 2022

Ruth Goodman’s family had been involved in theatre even before her birth in 1908. Her father produced shows involving W. C. Fields and Jerome Kern. Those connections, and her education in New York and Paris, brought her jobs as a costume designer and story editor before marrying Augustus (Gus) Goetz on October 11, 1932, after having met onboard ship. Her mother disliked him, but Ruth described Augustus as enchantingly witty. Though a stockbroker when they met, he gave up finances and they began writing plays together, collaborating nearly exclusively throughout their career. Their most famous play, The Heiress, brought them to Hollywood.

Read Screenwriter Ruth Goodman: Her Instincts Made ‘The Heiress’ an Enduring Classic

Read about more women from early Hollywood

14 Obituaries Are Unreliable Narrators from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

Here you can watch a clip from my part of the presentation,

“When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues in Oral Histories”

Transcript:

To be fair, it does happen to male screenwriters sometimes. Nunally Johnson is the one who adapted ‘The Grapes of Wrath” and John Ford, who directed actually wrote in a book that he said, “You know people are credit this particular shot with my genius but you wrote it down in the scripts.” Right? And Nunally was like, ‘I don’t know who’s going get the attribution but I know I wrote it and that’s all that matters.” So, he didn’t particularly care but his name disappears so badly that obituary writers are terribly unreliable narrators. When Nunally Johnson’s wife died – she was the actress Dorris Bowden who played Rose O’Sharon in The Grapes of Wrath – they called it John Ford’s Grapes of Wrath and they said that she left acting after she married that film’s screenwriter. They took his name out of his wife’s obituary. Who’s more important in her death? Her husband or the guy who directed a movie she did fifty years ago? Clearly think about that and she herself was very proud of how John Steinbeck had talked about Nunally Johnson’s writing because he was so brilliant. So to erase him out of her obituary is ridiculous.

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14 Owen Harper from Why Torchwood Still Matters with Dr. Rosanne Welch, San Diego Who Con 2021 [Video]

I always enjoy attending the SD (San Diego) WhoCon because the audiences are so well-informed on the Whoniverse and Whovians love Captain Jack and the crew that made this spinoff program so engaging.

RMW Rosanne Signature for Web

Transcript:

…and then Owen was an interesting character. I mean he could be your bland white guy except he wasn’t a nice guy necessarily and they had to put up with him because of his talent and he had to learn and grow. So I think he was an interesting character. He’s not the most interesting of all of them. The fact that he had a relationship with Tosh says a little bit about him right? So it’s not the best character but he was you know i mean if he had to have a second white guy he was okay but here’s where i start thinking about the writing makes the show stand out.

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13 Women Writers To Remember from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

Here you can watch a clip from my part of the presentation,

“When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues in Oral Histories”

Transcript:

Selma Diamond. Brilliant writer back in the day. We know her more from being an actress on “Night Court” and being on many of the talk shows and Lucille Kallan found a way to stay in the history books because she became a novelist after she stopped writing television and I think she’s pretty brilliant. You can see this lovely picture of her. So pictures from back in the day do include the women but that’s not the one Vanity Fair chose to publish. She was memorialized a little bit in Neil Simon’s play although he took the two women and turned them into one female character. There are seven boys in this play and one girl. They couldn’t do two girls and six boys. Just thinking about how they could have arranged that right? They thought they were all the same. Even though almost any female tv writer that you meet will tell you that it was the existence of Sally Rogers that turned them into a tv writer and Sally Rogers is patterned after Selma and Lucille right because “The Dick Van Dyke Show” was the Sid Caesar Show. So the importance of those women disappears in history.

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STOP FORGETTING TO NAME THE WRITERS! by Dr. Rosanne Welch

STOP FORGETTING TO NAME THE WRITERS!

Once again I’ve had to email a film screening program about the blurb they posted about an upcoming screening and Q&A with the creators of a new film. Here’s the post I read:

When single father Max (John Cho) discovers he has a terminal disease, he decides to try and cram all the years of love and support he will miss with his teenage daughter Wally (Mia Isaac) into the time he has left with her. With the promise of long-awaited driving lessons, he convinces Wally to accompany him on a road trip from California to New Orleans for his 20th college reunion, where he secretly hopes to reunite her with her mother who left them long ago. A wholly original, emotional and surprising journey, Don’t Make Me Go explores the unbreakable, eternal bond between a father and daughter from both sides of the generational divide with heart and humor along for the ride. From Amazon Studios, #DontMakeMeGo will begin streaming July 15 globally only on Prime Video.

Why We Love It: Don’t Make Me Go is an emotional and beautiful exploration of the struggle between chasing your dreams or settling on the safe choices. Mia Isaac and John Cho’s chemistry is captivating in this one of a kind father-daughter road trip film. Bring tissues.

Here’s the email I had to send to the programmer:

I saw your announcement and wondered if Don’t Make Me Go is “A wholly original, emotional and surprising journey, Don’t Make Me Go explores the unbreakable, eternal bond between a father and daughter from both sides of the generational divide with heart and humor along for the ride” then WHY wasn’t the writer, Vera Herbert, invited to this live discussion? Or even mentioned in your post, which makes the reader assume that the director is a writer-director, giving them all the credit for what sounds like a film based on characters, situation, theme, and dialogue – none of which are under the auspices of a director.

As the Executive Director of an MFA in TV and Screenwriting, I subscribe to all your posts to see what events I might want to bring my MFA candidates to – but I only attend events that include writers. It’s an insult to not even name the writer. The auteur theory was invented years ago by French film reviewers who found it simpler to list directors since many were writer-directors and sometimes a film is written by 2 people which was unwieldy in a review. That’s why it exists and it’s a shame for film experts/programmers/educators to continue that practice. More women have written films than directed them (the Joan Harrison/Hitchcock team is an example) so it was another way to erase the creative work of women when we only mention directors. I would say “Please stop” but I’m tired of saying “Please”.

Dr. Rosanne Welch

13 Toshiko (Tosh) Sato from Why Torchwood Still Matters with Dr. Rosanne Welch, San Diego Who Con 2021 [Video]

I always enjoy attending the SD (San Diego) WhoCon because the audiences are so well-informed on the Whoniverse and Whovians love Captain Jack and the crew that made this spinoff program so engaging.

RMW Rosanne Signature for Web

Transcript:

The person of color they ended up with and did keep of course was Toshiko and here they did good and they made a small mistake or they fell into a stereotype. Certainly, they made her a regular. She has a sex life. She falls in love with an alien. So we’re going to go into omnisexual stuff too. So we’re continuing the idea of the show but she also falls in love with Owen. So you know she also falls in love with a human but usually your person of color – largely when that person is of Asian descent – never has a sex life. Never has a home family. It’s like they don’t exist except to be in the workplace. So I would say that the stereotype they fell into was of course she is our computer expert. Happens a lot. We just ran into a yet another new series in the UK called Annika and it’s the story of a female cop and one of her assistants – one of the other cops – is the actress who played Cho Chang in the Harry Potter series. Now she’s about 30 and she does computer stuff but she also works in the field. So we’ve seen her interrogate people. So they’ve moved beyond that stereotype. They started there and now we’ve seen them move beyond that. So I would say that’s maybe the one flaw with this character but they certainly gave her a three-dimensional life and that’s really all anybody’s asking for. If you’re going to include a character they shouldn’t just be there as window dressing. They should have a complete life right and that’s been an argument for a long time with people of color on different tv shows. They don’t go home to somebody. They’re just there hanging out with the white people helping them out and it’s kind of like no they have other people in their life. So Tosh had a sex life. She had love. She had desires and she went through on most of those. So I think she’s a pretty focused…

Audience: She got more action than Jack.

Rosanne: She did. She totally did which is you know that’s I think innovative.

Audience: That’s saying something.

Rosanne: Exactly.

Audience: Jack talks a good game.

Rosanne: Exactly

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What Is a Western? Gidget (1959) – Part Of The Series What Is A Western? Film Series – Autry Museum of the American West [Event]

I’m pleased to have been invited to give the introductory remarks before a showing of the 1959 Gidget film at the Autry Museum of the American West (in Griffith Park).

Join us on Saturday, August 6, 2022, at 1:30 PM. I’ll be giving a shortened version of the presentation I made when we attended the Screenwriting Research Network conference held in New Zealand a few years ago.

In a nutshell, I trace Gidget, the Little Girl with Big Ideas from its origins as a novel, its transformation into a film franchise, and then into a TV series. Along the way, we’ll discover how this one story created a new myth about how teenagers reinvented the West. — Rosanne

What Is a Western? Gidget (1959) – Part Of The Series What Is A Western? Film Series – Autry Museum of the American West

Saturday, August 6, 2022, 1:30 p.m.
The Autry: Wells Fargo Theater

Appropriate For: Families
Admission: Free for Autry Members | Museum Admission Included With Ticket
RSVP/Reservations: Reservations Recommended | Space Is Limited

RESERVE NOW

Considered to be the first of the “beach party” movies, this coming-of-age tale is based on the true story of Kathy Kohner and her experiences as a young woman in the then-niche and masculine sport of surfing. Widely credited with the mainstreaming of surfing culture in the United States, it also inspired many films and television series featuring the character of Gidget.

Introduced by Rosanne Welch, executive director, Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

Directed by Paul Wendkos | Starring Sandra Dee, James Darren, and Cliff Robertson

Screenplay by Gabrielle Upton | Based on a novel by Frederick Kohner

The What is a Western? Film Series explores the wide range of movies that can be considered Westerns, and the ways in which they shape our understanding of the American West. Each screening includes a guest lecturer who will introduce the film and explain its significance in the genre.

12 Photography can be an Unreliable Narrator from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

Here you can watch a clip from my part of the presentation,

“When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues in Oral Histories”

Transcript:

Photography can be an unreliable narrator to us. In this case, this is a famous photo of the writers of the Sid Caeser show. So I’ve flipped over to tv for a minute. Look at all these important men whose careers went on and on and on but when they took this picture Selma Diamond and Lucille Callan – the two women who were on Sid Caeser shows – had died. So they were not present for this photograph which goes down in history as the picture of the writers of these shows. If you don’t read the small print in the tiny bottom corner there you don’t notice that unpictured are the only two women that we could possibly credit. Billy Crystal was so excited about this when this happened he helped organize this Vanity Fair gathering. This is the long thing I won’t get into but he talks about how much he wants in life he would dream of being in that room and he names all the men and none of the women because he’s forgotten they exist right? That photograph allows us to forget that.

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