Dr. Rosanne Welch – Page 34 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

02 Peg Lynch from “VISIBLE STARS: Women in Early TV” for the American Women Writers National Museum [Video]

Many thanks to Janice Law of the American Women Writers National Museum who invited me to give a short talk on The Women of Early TV.

I enjoyed sharing the names and careers of women like Peg Lynch, Gerturde Berg, Selma Diamond and D.C. Fontana to the members who gathered on Zoom last Wednesday morning. There are so many more I could have talked about whose names don’t appear in mainstream books about the history of television so we have to learn who they are and carry those names forward ourselves. It’s one of the missions of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting – and has been one of my missions all my life.

Transcript:

My teaching philosophy is that Words matter, Writers matter,. and Women Writers matter and they are far too often left out of the history books that we use to teach our incoming students. My school is Stephens College as Jen has so nicely told you and we teach a program in TV and Screenwriting — a master’s program — and I’m excited to say that we are all about representation on television and we’re going to see a little example of that in my presentation today. So let’s get to it. One of the first women — we credit her with inventing the sitcom which is a money maker for television for all these many, many years. Peg Lynch. She began in radio, as many of these women did, and she was writing short sketches — 10 and 15 minute sketches — called the Ethel and Albert Comedies and this is the first time she took sort of domestic life and made jokes out of it and put that on the media right? In this case, radio shows and eventually they became television shows and to her credit, she has 11,000 scripts. So think about that as if she was writing for a variety show if you will. It went on for many years. There were many many episodes. So she’s the first person who really got into the husband and wife having a chat and let’s make some jokes about how tough real-life can be. Often with the wife being a little smarter than the husband right? Being a step ahead of him but society allowed him to move forward and of course, that’s a pattern we’re gonna see repeated naturally in I Love Lucy.

Many thanks to Janice Law of the American Women Writers National Museum who invited me to give a short talk on The Women of Early TV.

I enjoyed sharing the names and careers of women like Peg Lynch, Gerturde Berg, Selma Diamond and D.C. Fontana to the members who gathered on Zoom last Wednesday morning. There are so many more I could have talked about whose names don’t appear in mainstream books about the history of television so we have to learn who they are and carry those names forward ourselves. It’s one of the missions of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting – and has been one of my missions all my life.

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Women pioneers who created, produced or shepherded many of America’s most wildly popular, early television programs will be profiled by Dr. Rosanne Welch.

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The Monkee’s Michael Nesmith, 1942- 2021

Facebook is fleeting so when I heard that Mike Nesmith of The Monkees had passed away this morning I posted this short tribute along with the link to his audition for the show:

This is how I will remember Mike, another hopeful young performer who came to Hollywood, hit the heights so many others only dream of, and became the ‘father’ figure on a show that eschewed authority figures. RIP Mike Nesmith.

But there is more to say (heck, I discovered there was a whole book’s worth). In Monkees fan circles I call myself a Mickey girl as Dolenz was my major childhood crush from the show. What I recognized in the character of Mike (all the actors used their real names on the show which proved to make their career lives post the show a bit more difficult) was the strength and balance he brought to the show. Part of that came from being among the older (and taller) of the 4 actors and part from his having been in the military for a short time – and he was the only then-married member of the band.

Just as Davy Jones brought his bit of vaudevillian Broadway to the show, Peter Tork brought a bit of peace-loving hippie and Mickey Dolenz brought his Marx Brothers madcap-ed-ness, Mike brought what one producer defined as a “Will Rogers kind of country and western figure” to the show – and to their concerts through his songwriting. I wonder what would have happened if back then actors also contributed writing to their TV shows as some do today… What sort of adventures would Mike have added to the story of those 4 fictional boys who dreamed of being famous when he lived that dream…?

27 Queen Charlotte from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

Watch the entire presentation – Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 here

Transcript:

Queen Charlotte was so popular they’re doing a prequel about queen charlotte’s life because she is reportedly to be the first queen who was a woman of color in England but it wasn’t widely known right? So that’s the piece that you can go back into and really dig through and we’ll see where that goes. I don’t know. I just read this the other day but that’s another example of wow that was so popular now the Netflix is like how can I mine this more. They already know they’re going to do seven more limited series because each of the children in the Bridgeton family is going to have their own six-hour love story right? Those are what all the books are. So each book is going to have its own limited series and they’re like but how else can we mine this intellectual property. Oh, let’s go backwards and do a prequel on this character who’s not part of the other books but we’ll do you know so that’ll be whatever they discover both historically and then whatever fictional thing they lay on top of that.

It’s always fun to sit down with students and share stories about entering the television industry and how things work at all stages and I had that opportunity the other day.

Daniela Torres, a just-graduated (Congratulations!) student of the Columbia College Semester in LA program asked me to guest on a podcast she had recently begun hosting with another college student she met during her internship (good example of networking in action!).

We could have talked all morning (the benefit of a 3 hour class session) but we held it to about an hour and fifteen minutes or so. Hopefully, along the way I answered some questions you might have about how the business works. So often it amounts to working hard at being a better writer and gathering a group of other talented, hard-working people around you so you can all rise together.

Dr. Rosanne Welch is a television writer with credits that include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, ABCNEWS: Nightline and Touched by an Angel. She also teaches Television Writing and the Art of Film at San Jose State University.

Rosanne discusses what made shows like Beverly Hills 90210 compelling, what to do and not to do when attempting to pitch a show to broadcast or streaming, what most young writers neglect in their writing process, and much more!

The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.

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21 The Husband from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]

In researching and writing my book on Giuseppe and Anita Garibaldi and the unification of Italy (A Man Of Action Saving Liberty: A Novel Based On The Life Of Giuseppe Garibaldi) I re-discovered the first American female war correspondent – Margaret Fuller — who I had first met in a college course on the Transcendentalists. I was once again fascinated by a life lived purposefully.

Then I found Tammy Rose’s podcast on the Transcendentalists – Concord Days – and was delighted when she asked me to guest for a discussion of Fuller’s work in Italy as both a journalist – and a nurse. — Rosanne

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Concord Days sends love to Margaret Fuller on the anniversary of her death in 1850.

The conversation focuses on Margaret’s exciting days in ITALY!

Dr. Rosanne Welch takes us through her adventures and enthusiastically reminds us what she was like when she was living her best life!

Transcript:

…But she (Anita Garibaldi) knew that she had created her children and that she lived a life of love. Which is true of Margaret as well. She found a man, as you said earlier, that she could love who loved her for who she was and didn’t expect her to give that up in order to be his wife, and that had to be crazy because he was an Italian, right? He’s from an earlier era. We’re not even talking about feminism in Italy at the time. So that fact that he was open to that..he is a fascinating character that we, of course, lost any chance to understand more deeply through her.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V6 Issue 2: Off goes the telly: Writer discourse on the Life on Mars franchise finales by Christine Becker

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

Off goes the telly: Writer discourse on the Life on Mars franchise finales by Christine Becker

The British original Life on Mars, the spin-off Ashes to Ashes, and the American remake of Life on Mars offered divergent endings to the same premise, and each series finale divided viewer opinion to varying degrees. This article discusses these three different endings and considers how the writers of each series framed explanations for their creative decisions in discourse surrounding the finales. The article’s analysis illustrates that the series writers strove to justify their narrative resolutions strategically at various points in each series run to account for potential public reaction and to frame their writing decisions as driven primarily by creative motivations, not industrial ones. As such, the article suggests that writers of television finales, particularly those that close off serialized shows, have more opportunity and pressure than ever before to enter into dialogue with emboldened audiences about the production process.

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.

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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!

15 1976…from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

1976 comes along and this is Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. So 54 or jump into 76. It’s kind of like once every generation there’s an interest and a need for this movie. Partially because female creatives, whether they be writers or actresses, see this as a great piece to work from and a great way to reflect on their moment in culture right? So this is a big fancy deal. Look at these great photographs. Let me tell you, this is going to be written by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunn. They are a married couple who write their own novels as you see here and work out of New York. They get hired to do this and Joan is going to have her own imprint on it. We’re going to see that in a second. I also want to highlight the fact that John Gregory Dunn wrote this marvelous book if you’ve never read it called Monster: Living Life Off the Big Screen. It’s about the writing of this film Up Close and Personal, which was meant to be the story of Jessica Savitch, an anchorwoman who died when she was high on cocaine and drove her car into a lake and drown and by the time they were done it had nothing to do with her at all and so this tells you the eight-year struggle to get the movie made out of the Disney company. It’s a really a good inside look at how writers and producers work with studios.

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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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01 Introduction from “VISIBLE STARS: Women in Early TV” for the American Women Writers National Museum [Video]

Many thanks to Janice Law of the American Women Writers National Museum who invited me to give a short talk on The Women of Early TV.

Transcript:

Well good morning everybody. I am going to dive right in so that we have a chance to get started. So I’m going to share my screen and you’re going to be able to see some photographs of some of these most wonderful women who are part of early Hollywood and early television and to me, they’re the people that we’re here to talk about right? So one of the beautiful things we have to do is look at who came before us. I teach a class in tv and screenwriting and I want people to recognize the people on whose shoulders we stand. So today we’re going to talk about the women of early tv. There are many more women to love than just Lucy. She’s the only one we hear about. She’s done some good work and we want to talk about that but we want to speak to all these other women who are so important. A little background on me very quickly. I’m a television writer. I worked on these programs. Touched by an Angel. Beverly Hills 90210 and Picket Fences which was a marvelous show and I also did a little documentary work with ABC News Nightline. So very excited about that. I’m also very happy with the fact that these are books that I have written. Particularly this one is about women in early Hollywood screenwriters and that interests me very much. So of course this is also an Encyclopedia on Women in American History and the Arts. It’s a four-volume set we put out a couple of years ago and we won a couple of awards from National Library Associations so we’re happy about that. I’m also on the board — the editorial board — for the Journal of Screenwriting and Written By magazine which is the magazine of the Writers Guild where we interview certain tv writers every week and also movie writers and it is free online at writtenby.org, if you’re interested in reading about people in the arts these days in the media arts.

Many thanks to Janice Law of the American Women Writers National Museum who invited me to give a short talk on The Women of Early TV.

Watch this entire presentation

Women pioneers who created, produced or shepherded many of America’s most wildly popular, early television programs will be profiled by Dr. Rosanne Welch.

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26 Controversy Scares Broadcasters from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

Watch the entire presentation – Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 here

Transcript:

Controversy scares broadcasters because it of course the word broad means they need the biggest audience possible because they’re selling advertising time and promising the biggest eyeballs on your ads. So if you do something controversial they’ll get less viewers and then the ad people will want to pay them less. So they have a bigger you know a bigger obligation to make the advertisers to not scare the audience away. Which is why you get stuff that’s much more progressive on cable and then eventually in streaming.

It’s always fun to sit down with students and share stories about entering the television industry and how things work at all stages and I had that opportunity the other day.

The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.

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52 Conclusion from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video]

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.

Transcript:

…and if you don’t think novelists are writers who collaborate think about the fact that all these guys hung around with each other in a writer’s group and read stuff to each other and took notes from each other and made changes based on those notes. Those were writer’s rooms. The Eagle and whatever that pub is called I haven’t gotten to yet …that was a writer’s room right and from that room not only did we get those books. We got this collaboration. Phil Jackson is great. I love him. He’s brilliant. He does great stuff. He doesn’t do it alone. He’s just the guy who’s willing to do the interviews. His wife doesn’t care to do interviews. I don’t know what’s wrong with her but she’s making me crazy right because we’re forgetting that two women co-wrote this movie. That’s what makes it so much better for our times right? They got the best-adapted screenplay award. Two women and a guy made The Lord of the Rings into what it is. I think that’s really important. So who remembers what I said my teaching philosophy was

three things matter

Words matter, Writers matter, and Women Writers matter.

Thank you very much. You’re listening. This thing is good. All right and this is important to me. It’s not just what I know. It’s spreading that around this is my first graduating classroom at Stephen’s MFA. As I said it was an all-female college. So it’s about spreading the word. Writers are teachers with a giant podium. What’s your opinion of how this world should work? Put it out there and the bigger audience you get the more influence you get. Forget YoutTube and who does makeup well. Those aren’t influencers. People who tell stories — I seriously — they’re not — people who tell stories are influencers because stories teach us to feel and that’s what you get paid to do which I love. So again these are a bunch of books I use when I’m just thinking about putting this together. So if you’re interested in reading about showrunners, those are a bunch of books that do interviews with them, and of course, this is the bunch that I’ve written and that’s all I have to say. So I guess we’re doing a q a now right? so if people have questions, I am totally open to your things.

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20 What Might Have Been? from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]

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Concord Days sends love to Margaret Fuller on the anniversary of her death in 1850.

The conversation focuses on Margaret’s exciting days in ITALY!

Dr. Rosanne Welch takes us through her adventures and enthusiastically reminds us what she was like when she was living her best life!

Transcript:

Tammy: Exactly because I think she was coming back to participate in a lot of the early feminist or like women’s like Suffrage movements and she was scheduled to speak at — what is it — Seneca Falls maybe.

Rosanne: Seneca Falls because again Lydia Marie Child who she knew in her childhood right becomes a big leader of that. One of the founders of that event and of course she’d want Margaret Fuller. I mean, my god she’s world-known. She’s world-traveled. She’s the perfect example of what women can accomplish if they are not given the rules and requirements that society was forcing on them. Exactly what Seneca Falls was meant to counteract.

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