Dr. Rosanne Welch – Page 15 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

26 The Companions and History from The Difficulties and Delicacies of Writing the First Female Doctor in 50+ years [Video] [Doctor Who]

It was great to be able to attend this year’s SD WhoCon in San Diego and present this lecture on “The Difficulties and Delicacies of Writing the First Female Doctor in 50+ years” in which I discuss how successful I think showrunner Christopher Chibnall was in making that transition.

It gave me a chance to talk about the creative work of a showrunner/screenwriter while also reconnecting to some friends we had met at this same convention some 3 years ago – and to talk about one of my favorite subjects – Doctor Who!

Transcript:

So to think about what’s a piece that even in the UK they need to remember their own history and always not the good parts right and the choices that were made. So what a perfect way to use Yaz and what a cool thing you want to see your grandmother’s wedding and then Oh gee it’s a wedding. It’s a wedding for Rose and these are places you shouldn’t haven’t been. So I think that’s a lovely bit and of course, I’m tracing that all the way back to the Original “Star Trek” which is the ultimate sci-fi on tv right, and this beautiful episode – which if you don’t know what you need to know – but won several science fiction awards back in the day by Harlan Ellison “The City on the Edge of Forever” right. Which is where Kirk falls in love with a woman and when they before – Joan Collins, exactly, before “Dynasty” – and then learns – spoiler alert – that she is she’s pushing for peace before World War II and if she succeeds Hitler will have time to rise and he will, in fact, take over the world. So she has to die and you’re like No No No No No, he’s never fallen in love – yeah it’s great. Very funny. Very funny and just the other day right William Shatner is now going to go up to space at the age of 90. Like wow. Amazing how TV affects things. Really it’s William Shatner. He’s just an actor from Canada but he’s Captain Kirk right?

Watch this entire presentation

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

17 Spoilers…or not from Why Torchwood Still Matters (2021) 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:

Rosanne: In terms of – I think again innovation – I think this was – I’ve not seen this in American show, right? This is not a thing. So I think it’s very cool that they got away with it twice and they get away with it because of being creative with their publicity and that the – I mean the UK is not that small but smaller than here – and the idea that they could go to the newspapers and say “Do us a favor don’t – you’re going to figure it out from the call sheets. You’re going to know these people don’t exist after a couple of episodes but let us do this. Let us have this surprise.” So both shows were put out with the extra character as if they’re a regular. This is the cast of this new show and you’re looking at it going well that makes perfect sense and even – especially the picture with The Doctor it’s like Oh you want to have the two flanking each side. It looks balanced. It looks perfect right and but they’re not. So they literally worked with the journalists and the people that they had to deal with which I think is cool. We don’t necessarily do that here. It’s all about breaking news. I just found out this character’s dying next week. Thank you for ruining it for everybody.

Audience: I don’t want spoilers.

Rosanne: Exactly. Exactly. I want a little book where they’re hidden in. Don’t tell me.

Audience: I don’t watch the social media at all because they ruin it.

Rosanne: Yeah. They totally do. I mean and I think that’s a problem. So it’s so interesting to me that the UK can sort of be tight enough that they’re all willing to get in on the act and I think they understand that’s what’s going to make the piece more popular. They want the piece to be more global and more people to pay attention. So this is a big deal. I can’t name an American show that got away with this right? So I think that’s pretty cool.

Watch this entire presentation

07 Women Writing Westerns from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

Host: You mention the Silent Era being this
really open, Wild West period of film writing.

If we sort of sketch a line across the 20th Century and now into the 21st Century how

did women’s opportunities kind of wax and
wane in different periods?

What new opportunities opened up?

What things were foreclosed?

How did those kind of trends go across the
history of film?

Rosanne: Wonderful.

Well.

first of all, of course, in the Silent Era
it was – everybody going at it and having

fun until there was too much money in it and
then the women segued out.

Again, they went into novels and literature
although a few people survived that period,

but they weren’t writing westerns.

right?

Except – as you all know from the Autry
Museum – Betty Burabge was writing Gene

Autry movies, right?

So there were some women.

Leigh Brackett – again who is coming in
handy when we’re talking about “Star Wars”

was a western novelist and write western serialization
and things.

So we have some women but it becomes a dude
thing, right, and then this is a problem for

writers all the time.

You get pigeonholed just like actors do.

Oh you did that one movie and your brilliant
at it?

We want you to do fourteen on the same movie.

It’s very few people who get to be William Goldman and do a variety of different things. You have to really reach that peak. So women – it wanes in movies. Although B Serial have a little more opportunity for them and then, yes, TV is invented.

The Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting is building a relationship with the Autry Museum of the American West since both organizations are devoted to bringing out more diverse and untold stories. Last year we were able to take our cohort of graduating MFA candidates to the museum’s theatre for a showing of Michael Wilson’s Salt of the Earth and we had plans to present a film of our choice this year – but of course the pandemic changed all that. Instead, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis asked me if I would sit for an interview about female screenwriters in the western genre and so “When Women Wrote Westerns” came to be a part of their “What Is a Western? Interview Series”.

I had a great time discussing so many wonderful women writers – from Jeanne MacPherson to D.C. Fontana to Edna Ferber to Emily Andras. If you love westerns I suggest you watch Josh’s other interviews covering everything from the work of Native Americans in Western movies to films in the western-horror hybrid. —

What this entire presentation

As part of a series exploring the significance of the Western genre and the ways in which the movies shape our understanding of the American West, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis interviews Professor Rosanne Welch about the women screenwriters of Hollywood and their contributions to the Western genre.

Find more information at the Autry Museum of the American West

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Powers Cameragraph projector, c. 1904-06, Hollywood Heritage Museum (Lasky-DeMille Barn) via Instagram [Photography]

From Curator, Richard Adkins…

“This is a Powers Cameragraph projector, c. 1904-06. It is without its original housing, which would have been a metal box not unlike the Powers projector that is on display to the right of this mechanism. It comes from the estate of Richard Nederhauser, a projectionist who later was in charge of all technical updates for the Metropolitan Theatre chain.”

Follow me on Instagram

Visit The Hollywood Heritage Museum

22 “Star Wars” from In Conversation with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

Transcript:

Rosanne:…and then, who doesn’t love “Star Wars?” I mean, I was a kid who, you know, was in line for the second one and, in fact, I was in high school or early college, I guess, when “The Empire Strikes Back” came out. Yeah and no one had ever ended a movie on a cliffhanger. Like that didn’t happen. Right? The movie should end and I remember sitting in the audience and Harrison Ford is all in the stuff and they’re taking him away and Luke is looking out the window right, and I’m looking at my watch going “This is going to be a really long movie. They’re going to have to save him really in a stupid fast way. This is..how are they going to…”and then slowly they walked to the window and it’s him and Leia and they’re sort of almost waving goodbye to the thing and I’m like “This is.. like your wasting time. Get to the rest of the rescue…” and then the movie ended and my brain wasn’t even thinking and I shouted some cuss words out loud in the theater. I mean you can’t end a movie like that and my friends were like “Rosanne. Sit down you’re embarrassing us.” “But but…”and I vowed to never see the other one because it would take 2 years to finish the story and you know, 2 years later, I was in line for the midnight movie the first time that it was going to show. I was like, ‘You can’t not tell me how this ends.”

Host: Genius that was.

One of the benefits of attending conferences is that you can meet the editors from the companies that have published some of your books face to face. That happened at the recent SCMS conference where I met Intellect editor James Campbell and he invited me to be a guest on his InstagramLive show.

We chatted about my work with the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting, and then my work with co-editor Rose Ferrell on the Journal of Screenwriting’s special issue on Women in Screenwriting (Volume 11, Number 3) that came out recently and which featured articles about an international set of female screenwriters from Syria, Argentina, China and Canada (to name a few).

We even had time to nerd out on our own favorite classic films across the eras which brought up fun memories of Angels with Dirty Faces, Back to the Future, Bonnie and Clyde, and of course, all things Star Wars from the original 3 to The Mandalorian. It’s always so fun to talk to fellow cinephiles.

RMW Rosanne Signature for Web

Watch this entire presentation

With Intellect Books Editor James Campbell (@IntellectBooks)

Speaking with Dr. Rosanne Welch, Author, teacher, and television screenwriter. Today we cover everything from women in screenwriting to our favorite Jimmy Cagney movies and Friends.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

16 Joan Didion & John Gregory Dunne 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:

Again, as I said, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne who wrote all these wonderful things together. John Gregory Dunne actually would have Joan go to meetings first because the men you work with in Hollywood, if you went to a meeting together would look at John while they talked. So, if they sent Joan alone and pretended John was sick one day the men got used to looking at her and then when they came together they looked at both of them. so, they were pretty brilliant about making sure she didn’t get forgotten in the writing process like that.

Watch this entire presentation

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Reading Leads to 6 Degree Games with Famous Names

Reading Leads to 6 Degree Games with Famous Names by Dr. Rosanne Welch

A funny thing happens when you read a lot of biographies – sometimes names you never heard of turn up in the lives of people who never met and you’re reminded that the 6 Degrees of Kevin Bacon game could be played in generations in the past (with different names of course).

Rachel Carson By U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service – This image originates from the National Digital Library of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service at this page This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing. See Category:Images from the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. http://training.fws.gov/history/carson/carson.html, Public Domain, Link

That’s what happened when I picked up William Souder’s biography of Rachel Carson On a Farther Shore. I had taught her book Silent Spring which reinvigorated the environmental movement in the 1960s so I wanted to know how she became a writer. As I was reading one of her influences was Hendrik Willem van Loon, a Dutch-American children’s book author, historian, and journalist (like Carson). He wrote The Story of Mankind in 1921 as a history of the world for children and won the first Newbery Medal in 1922. I’ve been reading Newberry Award winners all my life so it was fun to learn he won the first, but that’s not why I remembered his name.

Hendrik Willem van Loon By Underwood & Underwood – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3a02154. This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information., Public Domain, Link

That knowledge came from another biography I had delved into several years ago when I started teaching the History of Screenwriting. There I ‘met’ Frances Goodrich Hackett, co-screenwriter with her husband Albert of several classics including The Thin Man, Father of the Bride, It’s a Wonderful Life before winning both the Tony and Pulitzer Prize for the stage version of The Diary of Anne Frank. Then they adapted it into a film. Turns out Von Loon had been Goodrich’s second husband (Albert was her third and final since their marriage and writing partnership lasted over 50 years).

Frances Goodrich Hackett, By not known Fair use , Link

I love accidental finds like that. Carson was influenced by Von Loon to become a writer and Frances became one after she left him. Interesting that both of these women and their writings are now more well-known than he or his works when, at the time, he was the more famous.

Rosanne In Mr. DeMille’s Office , Hollywood Heritage Museum (Lasky-DeMille Barn) via Instagram [Photography]

Follow me on Instagram

Visit The Hollywood Heritage Museum

25 Referencing the History of the Show from The Difficulties and Delicacies of Writing the First Female Doctor in 50+ years [Video] [Doctor Who]

Transcript:

Now what you have to do when you’re taking over a franchise like this that’s been around forever and you’re the showrunner, you have to remember its history and I think you have to homage that to the new audiences. So that they feel like this is new but it’s also old, right? I’m still in a world I understand and I appreciate and for me, that’s demons of the Punjab because “Father’s Day” was such a beautiful episode for Rose. I know. Any time a character, of course, wants to go back and see a moment in history that they shouldn’t be tampering with and that’s the temptation of being in a TARDIS. You can do that. Should you do that? So I think it’s so cool that he could have done that with any of the characters right? Graham could have gone back to see something maybe that happened to him when he was younger. Obviously, Ryan could have gone back 10 years. He’s kind of young but I don’t know something might have happened when he was 12 that made him upset but he decided to have Yaz go back and to go back to a part of history that – again in the United States – the Partition – when did I ever learn about that in some high school history class. Barely right unless you did maybe Western Civ and even then they didn’t really get deep into it.

Watch this entire presentation

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

16 The “Bury Your Gays” Trope from Why Torchwood Still Matters (2021) 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

16 The

Transcript:

When I talk about Buffy The Vampire Slayer we get to the Tara/Willow relationship and that’s the first lesbian relationship on television and then – spoiler alert – Tara is killed and that is the beginning of the “Bury Your Gays” trope which went on for a few years, but then Emily Andras who does “Wynonna Earp” – if you haven’t seen that. it’s quite good, on SciFi and now it’s on Netflix – when she created her series she gave Wynonna a little sister named Waverly and she’s a lesbian who has a relationship with the local town sheriff and, the producer, Emily, promised to in the run of this show will either of those 2 women die. I will break this trope and, sure enough, you get to the end of the fourth season – the series finale – and it’s the ladies’ wedding. She’s gone all the way to that point. So, some people told her that’s a bad idea because we want the worry about our characters but because she promised they wouldn’t die she also got to be more innovative because she put them in some of the worst possible situations where you could never get out of and, as an audience member, you were like, ok, they can’t die. How – so you were equally involved. It wasn’t like well I know they can’t die. I don’t care. it was like, how are they going to get out of this? So the interactivity stayed. So, I would say that that is not – I don’t think that is “fridging.”

Watch this entire presentation

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS