On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch – Writing, Film, Television and More!

Another Wonderful SRN Conference On the Books – Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK

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Another Wonderful SRN Conference On the Books

It’s been a minute as we settled in back home after all the lovely things that happened at the latest Screenwriting Research Network conference held at Oxford Brookes University.

Doug and I spent our first week in Europe visiting our Catania cousins, which is always a joy and deserves pages and pages of details – but this is a blog about the conference, so… back to Oxford.

After that great week in Sicily, we flew to Oxford to hang out with another great group of people, SRN colleagues from all across the world – Australia, New Zealand, Finland, Mexico, Brazil, Spain, Romania — too many places to name. All screenwriting professors and practitioners presenting papers that expanded our curricula, helping us bring the many new things we learn back to our own MFA candidates.

My Australian friend and colleague Rose Ferrell and I won the Best Book award for our Shaping Global Cultures Through Screenwriting: Women Who Write Our Worlds. The presence of several of our chapter authors among the membership (and in attendance at the conference) made that presentation even more enjoyable: Joanne Tindale, Kath Dooley, Armando Fumagalli, Karen Jeynes, Juan Carlos Carillo, to name a few in attendance. The judges of the Book Award had this to say about the book:

“Bringing together an outstanding collection of international scholarship, the volume examines the profound influence of women screenwriters in shaping culture, history, and storytelling across generations and national cinemas. By foregrounding voices that have too often been overlooked, the collection expands the scope of screenwriting studies while offering fresh perspectives on authorship, creativity, and global impact. The judges remarked that the volume is a landmark contribution to the field, distinguished by its scholarly rigor, international breadth, and compelling demonstration of the central role women screenwriters have played in shaping both cinema and culture.”

Then I moderated the Annual General Meeting where we announced other awards, including a Lifetime Award for Ian Macdonald, who founded the SRN originally. He was on hand to receive all the kudos from the crowd who were enjoying the fruits of that idea as it has grown stronger and stronger each year. I can’t wait to gather with all these lovely folks again next year when the SRN conference is hosted in Mexico City at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and the Universidad Panamericana.

Introducing Clueless at the Autry Museum of Western Heritage with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

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On Saturday, August 8 I had the pleasure of being the guest academic and providing the introduction to a screening of “Clueless” (written by Amy Heckerling) in the newly renovated theatre. of the Autry Museum of the American West.

In my short talk, I covered the comparison between Cher, the lead character of Clueless, and Jane Austen’s Emma, showing how Heckerling’s film is a solid example of the female gaze.

I also touched on how Heckerling embedded her own progressive ideas into her main character, from the fact that her high school was named for abolitionist and Transcendentalist Bronson Alcott to Cher’s comment on immigration: “It does not say RSVP on the Statue of Liberty.” Pretty forward-thinking for a film made in 1995.

Get “Clueless” on Blu-ray

Emma by Jane Austen

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My Mother Always Told Me Busy People Get Things Done – They Also Have Fun!

I guess it’s a sign I’m involved in a lot of projects since on a recent September weekend when I was:

Giving a presentation on Susan Harris at the Screenwriting Research Network conference at Oxford Brookes University.

I could also have been:

On a panel talking about my book at the Monkees Convention in Connecticut celebrating 60 years of The Monkees TV show

• At the Los Ángeles Silent Film Festival celebrating my book on the female screenwriters of the Silent Era

At a book launch in Prague for Stories of the Holocaust: Art for Healing and Renewal, in which I have a chapter celebrating the writing team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett and their work adapting The Diary of Anne Frank into a Pulitzer Prize-winning play and then their Oscar-winning film.

Along the way, I gave email advice to an author for our Women Making History series at Bloomsbury and set up a lunch with another writer for after I returned. And, of course, I graded things online whenever I was sitting somewhere (airport, hotel, cousin’s house).

Why does one work on so many projects? Largely, because not everything comes to fruition, so that means that often more things happen at the same time, and you might as well jump in and enjoy the ride when they do. It was a pretty fun month.

Rosanne’s Presentation on Television Writer-Genius Susan Harris [Video]

Rosanne’s Presentation on Television Writer-Genius Susan Harris

At the 2026 international Screenwriting Research Network conference held at Oxford Brookes University in Oxford, UK, I had the privilege of giving a presentation based on my Introduction to my upcoming book The Works of Susan Harris (To be published around March 2028).

I walked the audience through her career from freelancing for All in the Family to Maude, where she wrote the still timeless 2 parter where the 43-year-old Maude decided to have an abortion. Then I covered her groundbreaking storytelling on SOAP and, of course, The Golden Girls.

There is so much more to say – so you can watch this video from the conference and then keep an eye out for the book!

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Rosanne has a chapter in New Screenwriting Collection: About Dorothy Parker and A Star is Born

Rosanne has a chapter in a New Screenwriting Collection: About Dorothy Parker and A Star is Born

Available in Hardback and eBook at Bloomsbury | Bookshop.org | Amazon

It was lovely to fly home from a week of visiting cousins in Cleveland to find our mail deliverer had dropped off a copy of the latest book containing a chapter I wrote. Once again, it’s the Screenwriting Research Network for the win, since it was a meeting with the 2 editors – Andrew Kenneth Gay and Ann Igelstrom – at one of our wonderful conferences several years ago that made it possible. We ended up talking over the tea break or lunch, who remembers, about our research, and I ended up talking about one of my favorite early female screenwriters – Dorothy Parker – and Voila! They invited me to turn that conversation into a chapter. And if you look at the other chapters and the international array of authors writing them, you’ll see how honored I am to be among them.

My chapter is called “Dorothy Parker: The Creative Genius Behind the Film Franchise “A Star is Born”. I’ve been researching, reading and writing about Parker’s foray into Hollywood since writing my dissertation on “Married with Screenplay: A Study Of Married Screenwriting Teams And The Films They Wrote” which covered the careers and filmography of Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell, Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, and Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin.

I hope you enjoy reading about the genius of Dorothy Parker – sometimes students don’t know that the most recent version of Star is Born, starring Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, is the 3^rd remake of the 1937 original – and that the original did not include music at all.

As always, such academic texts are pricey – meant for libraries mostly – so if you’d like to read it, ask your college or local library to buy a copy, and then you’ll be providing it to all the other patrons of those libraries.

The Bloomsbury Handbook of Global Screenplay Theory offers a comprehensive introduction and overview of screenplay theory as applied in the analysis of numerous screenplays from an international, multi-author perspective, including both leading and emerging scholars in the field. Each section includes 6-8 case studies of theory applied in the analysis of a landmark screenplay.

The sections are divided thematically, with sections addressing the Screenplay as Narration and Focalisation, the Screenplay as Narrative Structure, the Screenplay as Cinematic Language and the Screenplay as Creative Practice. With both theorists and practitioners contributing to this volume, the focus is on the actual screenplay as opposed to analysis of the final film. The essays contribute to a new era in screenplay theory, providing valuable insights not only into the particular screenplays under analysis but also into the range of ways in which such analysis can be approached, representing a wide range of theoretical perspectives. – Bloomsbury.com

Empowered Women Ran in Her Family and Her Heroines: The Screenwriting Career of Tess Slesinger – Dr. Rosanne Welch, Script Magazine, May 2026

Though Tess Slesinger wrote only 12 films her contribution to classic Hollywood screenwriting and adaptation deserves focus. Born on July 16, 1905 to Jewish parents of Hungarian-Russian heritage, Slesinger grew up with three older brothers on New York’s Upper West Side. Her father worked in the garment world and her mother, Augusta Slesinger went from being a welfare worker to becoming a psychoanalyst and helping found the New School for Social Research. Slesinger learned talents from both of her parents’ professions to fuel her career writing short stories and eventually screenplays.

Read Empowered Women Ran in Her Family and Her Heroines: The Screenwriting Career of Tess Slesinger

Read about more women from early Hollywood

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Rosanne and Rose’s New Book on the Kraszna-Krausz Photography and Moving Image Book Awards List

I’m proud to announce that my latest book – co-edited by my Australian colleague Rose Ferrell – Shaping Global Cultures through Screenwriting: Women Who Write Our Worlds – has been longlisted for the Kraszna-Krausz Photography and Moving Image Book Awards. This award “recognises individuals or groups of individuals who, in the opinion of the Judges, have made an outstanding original or lasting contribution to the art and practice of photography or the moving image through the medium of the book.“

Two winning titles are selected: one in the field of photography and one in the field of the moving image (including film, television, and digital media).

You can see the Kraszna-Krausz longlist announcement here to check out our competition. Shaping Global Cultures through Screenwriting is also being presented at Photo London this week as part of the longlist.

Exciting!

From the Pasadena Playhouse to Warner Brothers, Paramount, and Disney: The Screenwriting Journey of Catherine Turney – Dr. Rosanne Welch, Script Magazine, April 2026

Though writer Catherine Turney was born (in 1906) and raised in Chicago, she and her parents moved to Pasadena in her later teens and that made all the difference. At the age of 20, Turney began working for the School of Theatre at the Pasadena Playhouse where she eventually attended. Turney graduated in 1931 and immediately began working on a play. Bitter Harvest, the story of the controversial relationship between Lord Byron and his sister Augusta Leigh. It marked Turney as a writer of substance with an ability to adapt classics.

Various sources claim that director Dorothy Arzner at MGM then hired Turney to adapt an unpublished novel by Ferenc Molnár’ into a vehicle for Joan Crawford. In the end the The Bride Wore Red credits went to Tess Slesinger and Bradbury Foote. It was typical in the studio system – and before the existence of the Writers Guild – for several writers to be assigned the same project and the producer would decide who received credit in the end.

Read From the Pasadena Playhouse to Warner Brothers, Paramount, and Disney: The Screenwriting Journey of Catherine Turney

Read about more women from early Hollywood

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Dr. Welch Interviewed for New Documentary on Gene Stratton Porter

On Tuesday, April 14th, our backyard became a studio with lights, a camera, and the action being me being interviewed about what work was like for women in early Hollywood.

Emmy award-winning documentarian Todd Gould, whose other PBS documentaries involve Indiana-based stories of people and events that influenced the world, including Ernie Pyle and Gennett Records,

is working on a new documentary covering the life of environmentalist, novelist, and filmmaker Gene Stratton Porter. Gould is hoping to shed light on this early female film pioneer, who was also an extremely successful author of fiction and nonfiction works, nature photographer, environmental activist and feminist who worked with the suffrage movement.

By Gspmemorial – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Link

When he contacted me, it was maddening to learn there was yet another woman from the early 1900s whose name I had never seen in history books, yet she had the prescience to recognize that making movies of her books would increase their value so she built a film studio in Hollywood to do exactly that. At the same time, she was calling for caring for our environment long before Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring in 1962. Gene was out photographing birds and nature, and drawing attention to our effect on the planet 50 years earlier.

Gould and his local crew set up in our plant-filled backyard as he wanted a natural setting for as many of his interviews as possible. Then we chatted about the many ways women helped found Hollywood, how tough that work was, and how the studio system mitigated women’s progress in the industry, which is one explanation for why so many people don’t know women like Gene Stratton Porter. Thanks to Todd’s documentary, soon they will, and I’m very proud to play a small part in bringing her work – and the work of many other early female screenwriters to greater audiences.

The documentary is slated to premiere in November 2026 (probably sometime around Thanksgiving time)

How Screenwriter Dudley Nichols Adapted Stagecoach – Dr. Rosanne Welch – Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

I was pleased to be invited to make the Introductory Remarks before a screening of 1939’s Stagecoach, written by Dudley Nichols precisely for the opportunity to highlight the importance of screenwriting.

While director John Ford is often the focus of discussions about the film, it is the work Nichols did in adapting a terse short story by Ernest Haycox that makes the film stand out. Nichols expanded the backgrounds of and connections between all of the characters, thus creating a strong ensemble structure that many films have followed ever since.

Learn more in my short lecture.