Event: When Women Wrote Hollywood presentation for the Empire State Center for the Book – Tuesday, March 9, 2021 – 7 pm EST

Event: When Women Wrote Hollywood presentation for the Empire State Center for the Book - Tuesday, March 9, 2021 – 7 pm EST

Tuesday, March 9, 2021 – 7 pm EST

MFA Executive Director Dr. Rosanne Welch will give a Zoom presentation on “When Women Wrote Hollywood” for the Empire State Center for the Book, the New York State affiliate of the Library of Congress Center for the Book. This event begins at 7 p.m. Eastern/6 p.m. Central on Tuesday, March 9, and is free and open to the public. 

Dr. Welch will discuss many highly successful female screenwriters of early Hollywood and explain why they don’t appear in most mainstream histories of the era.

Join the Zoom Call — Passcode: 120524

Visit Empire State Center for the Book Web Site

Rosanne and front window display of “When Women Wrote Hollywood” before reading and Signing event at Skylark Bookshop

Dr. Rosanne Welch Joins Panel on the Monkees TV Show with Plastic EP Live [Video] (49 Minutes)

Dr. Rosanne Welch Joins Panel on the Monkees TV Show with Plastic EP Live [Video] (49 Minutes)

Monkees Top 5 TV Shows With Plastic Ep And A Panel Of Special Guests

Get your copy today!

Where’s Her Movie? Singer, La Lupe – 10 in a series

“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

Where's Her Movie? Singer, La Lupe - 10 in a series

Lupe Victoria Yolí Raymond (23 December 1936 – 29 February 1992),[1][2] better known as La Lupe, was a Cuban singer of bolerosguarachas and Latin soul, known for her energetic, sometimes controversial performances. Following the release of her first album in 1961, La Lupe moved from Havana to New York and signed with Tico Records, which marked the beginning of a prolific and successful career in the 1960s and 1970s. She retired in the 1980s due to religious reason Wikipedia

Dr. Rosanne Welch Speaks at the 2021 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference – Thursday, March 18, 2021 [Event]

Rosanne is speaking at the 2021 SCMS Conference on Thursday, March 18, 2021. If you are attending the conference virtually, please tune into this collection of excellent presentations on the “unreliable narrator” and more.

Dr. Rosanne Welch Speaks at the 2021 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference - Thursday, March 18, 2021 [Event]

V14 Writing Between the Lines: Feminist Strategies for Historical Absences, Cliché, and the Unreliable Narrator

THURSDAY, MARCH 18
SESSION E – 12:00 PM Central Time

  • Chair: Christina Lane, University of Miami
  • Co-Chair: Vicki Callahan, University of Southern California
  • Vicki Callahan, University of Southern California, “Still Looking for Mabel Normand”
  • Philana Payton, University of Southern California, “Eartha Kitt vs. Eartha Mae: Black Women, Self-Fragmentation, and the Politics of Hollywood Stardom”
  • Rosanne Welch, Stephens College, “When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues in Oral Histories”
  • Christina Lane, University of Miami, “Alternative Writing Strategies: Notes on Discovering the ‘Women Who Knew’ Joan Harrison”

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Teaching one of my 3 classes today for Cal Poly Pomona via TikTok [Video]

@drrosannewelch

##Teaching one of my 3 ##classes today for Cal Poly Pomona. This has been my classroom for the last year, like so many others. *DW (from Rosanne’s Prod)

♬ Pieces (Solo Piano Version) – Danilo Stankovic


Teaching one of my 3 classes today for Cal Poly Pomona via TikTok [Video]

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12 Describing Your Characters from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (1 minute)

12 Describing Your Characters from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (1 minute)

 

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:

All right, so. what I wanted to do for about half a minute is describe this woman. Visually describe this character. Her name is Erin Brockovich. You may or may not have seen this movie all right. So we might know something about her from the movie but visually — and she’s Julia Roberts, you can tell — quickly how would you describe her if you’re writing that action line in your script? If nothing else, think of three adjectives. We always start with that. Style comes from what you do in the action lines because the dialogue has to sound like your characters but the action lines sound like you alright. Shy doesn’t work in the writers’ room. If you don’t have an idea, I’ll stop paying you a contract and you go home. I always tell my students when they have to pitch, you better have an idea right away because you’re turning down $38,000 because if there’s a new script and we need one done next week and you don’t do it your friend just got that much money. That’s a lot of money to turn down because you’re too shy to open your mouth. So school is when you practice not being shy.

Watch this entire presentation

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† Available from the LA Public Library

“A Man Of Action Saving Liberty: A Novel Based On The Life Of Giuseppe Garibaldi” – 25 in a series

While Anita, the abbess and Margaret managed the medical care of the soldiers, Giuseppe rode into Rome to attend the National Assembly with the dream of seeing Rome finally declared a republic. He soon learned that politics takes longer than battle and requires a different set of talents and strategies.

Get your copy of A Man Of Action Saving Liberty Today!

Coming Soon: A chapter in a new book, Doctor Who: New Dawn: Essays on the Jodie Whitaker Era

There are many exciting steps along the way to having a chapter you’ve written about a beloved television show accepted into a book collection.

  • First you see the Call for Submissions, have an idea and send in an abstract.
  • Then they tell you they like your idea and want to include it in their collection.
  • Then you write the chapter and they send back minimal notes.
  • Then (that’s today) they send you the artwork for the cover and you smile all over again knowing other fans of the show will be reading your ideas as they consider the importance of the show to our culture. 

Coming Soon: A chapter in a new book, Doctor Who: New Dawn: Essays on the Jodie Whitaker Era

All those steps (except the cover page) happened recently on a couple of upcoming collections I’m contributing to but the other day this cover came along for Doctor Who: New Dawn: Essays on the Jodie Whitaker Era and I couldn’t be more excited that a show I originally watched on PBS back in Ohio and followed all these years then made their lead character a female and then I had the chance to write about how a writer could go about making such a culturally important change.

My essay is entitled ‘She is wise and unafraid’: writing the first female Doctor and a diverse universe for her to protect

The book itself will be out later this year!

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V4 Issue 1: The unseen collaborator: Breaking down art to create modern narratives by Marie Regan

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 unseen collaborator: Breaking down art to create modern narratives by Marie Regan

This article proposes a new way of looking at the screenwriting process and at the pedagogical instruction of screenwriting. It proposes an alternative to the industrial model of screenwriting – one that allows for the possibility of creating film scripts that might lie on the borders of narrative. Starting with a research process, this method uses the deconstruction of an art source to develop the writer’s point of view in hopes of creating modern works of unusual complexity and resonance. Citing examples from Bach, Munch and Melville, and films by Francois Girard, Peter Watkins and Claire Denis, the article suggests a method for screenwriters using the limit of an original artwork’s form to generate a unique narrative structure, and building on that structure by bringing the writer’s own contemporary perspective to the content concerns. It contends that this process works to renew the writer’s connection to form and, by working with an artwork the writer admires, pushes the writer into deeper engagement with her own point of view.

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V4 Issue 1: The unseen collaborator: Breaking down art to create modern narratives by Marie Regan


Journal of Screenwriting Cover

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. 

Get your copy and subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting Today!



* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!

The Civil War On Film – 20 in a series – …Americans’ ideas about who qualified as heroes of the Civil War.

The Civil War On Film - 20 in a series - ...Americans’ ideas about who qualified as heroes of the Civil War. 

As the twenty-first century began to mature, so too did Americans’ ideas about who qualified as heroes of the Civil War. While conflicts over taking down statues of old Confederate generals roiled southern cities, artists around the country started making art that glorified the anti-Confederates, and films were no different. This climate bred Free State of Jones, the story of a Confederate army deserter who organizes his own interracial militia of formerly enslaved people and lower-income farmers, all dedicated to ending the war, though for differing reasons.

Movies profiled in this book: