Academic – Page 164 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

07 Terry Nation, Doctor Who and MacGyver from Gender Diversity in the Who-niverse [Video] (0:50)

Watch this entire presentation: Gender Diversity in the Who-niverse: Paving the Way for a Lady Doctor with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (36:58)

For her 5th Doctor Who lecture to the CPP community, Dr. Rosanne Welch discusses how society – and the show’s writing staff – prepared the audience for a major change in this 50-year franchise – the creation of the first Lady Doctor!

Transcript:

Later in the era of Doctor Who we get Terry Nation and Terry Nation is a really cool writer. He invented the Daleks. So without him, we wouldn’t have the world’s coolest villains, right? We wouldn’t be able to “Exterminate” any time we wanted. So I think that’s really cool, but what’s excellently interesting to me about Terry Nation as a writer is that he also invented this character, Sara Kingdom and she’s a secret agent who changes sides to work with the Doctor. She’s a bad girl who uses her badness to help the good guy. So that was a concoction of Terry Nation’s in the early days of the show and then you’re asking yourself “why is this old picture of MacGyver up there?” How did this one thing affect another, exactly? Terry Nation came from England and over to the states to work in America in television and he helped create MacGyver.

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Dr. Rosanne Welch

Dr. Rosanne Welch teaches the History of Screenwriting and One-Hour Drama for the Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting.

Writing/producing credits include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, ABCNEWS: Nightline and Touched by an Angel. In 2016 she published the book Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop; co-edited Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia; and placed “Transmitting Culture Transnationally Via the Characterization of Parents in Police Procedurals” in the New Review of Film and Television Studies. Essays appear in Torchwood Declassified: Investigating Mainstream Cult Television and Doctor Who and Race: An Anthology. Welch serves as Book Reviews editor for Journal of Screenwriting and on the Editorial Advisory Board for Written By magazine, the magazine of the Writers Guild.

Watch Dr. Welch’s talk “The Importance of Having a Female Voice in the Room” at the 2016 TEDxCPP.

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Myself and Peg Lamphier (in background) at Cal Poly Pomona Golden Leaves presentations via My Instagram

Myself and Peg Lamphier (in background) at Cal Poly Pomona Golden Leaves presentations at Cal Poly Pomona University Library.

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A History of Screenwriting 59 – Screenwriting (Behind the Silver Screen Series) by Andrew Horton (Editor), Julian Hoxter

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Screenwriters often joke that “no one ever paid a dollar at a movie theater to watch a screenplay.” Yet the screenplay is where a movie begins, determining whether a production gets the “green light” from its financial backers and wins approval from its audience. This innovative volume gives readers a comprehensive portrait of the art and business of screenwriting, while showing how the role of the screenwriter has evolved over the years.

Reaching back to the early days of Hollywood, when moonlighting novelists, playwrights, and journalists were first hired to write scenarios and photoplays, Screenwriting illuminates the profound ways that screenwriters have contributed to the films we love. This book explores the social, political, and economic implications of the changing craft of American screenwriting from the silent screen through the classical Hollywood years, the rise of independent cinema, and on to the contemporary global multi-media marketplace. From The Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone With the Wind (1939), and Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) to Chinatown (1974), American Beauty (1999), and Lost in Translation (2003), each project began as writers with pen and ink, typewriters, or computers captured the hopes and dreams, the nightmares and concerns of the periods in which they were writing.

As the contributors take us behind the silver screen to chronicle the history of screenwriting, they spotlight a range of key screenplays that changed the game in Hollywood and beyond. With original essays from both distinguished film scholars and accomplished screenwriters, Screenwriting is sure to fascinate anyone with an interest in Hollywood, from movie buffs to industry professionals. — Amazon.com

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* 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!
† Available at the LA Public Library

Waiting for my turn via My Instagram

Waiting for my turn

Cal Poly Pomona Golden Leaves presentations at Cal Poly Pomona University Library.

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Afterparty at the Cal Poly Pomona Golden Leaves presentations at Cal Poly Pomona University Library via My Instagram

Afterparty at the Cal Poly Pomona Golden Leaves presentations at Cal Poly Pomona University Library.

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16 Men Writing Gidget from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (0:57)

16 Men Writing Gidget from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto with Dr. Rosanne Welch

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Transcript:

But then you switch over and get an episode written by a gentleman and you see, basically, she wants to by this car of one of the surfers on the beach so she has the ability to go back and forth without bugging her friends for a ride. She decides to go to shop class at the school to learn how to take care of the car before she buys it where these things are all annoying to me.

“When a woman clamors about being equal to men, sometimes giving them exactly what they want convinces them they don’t want it.”

That’s the teacher’s way of getting her to quit the class and he spends the entire episode giving her terrible dirty, heavy, awful jobs in the auto shop so that she will quit. She never does, but at the very end she comes up with this message. She got the car fixed because she stood outside and looked helpless and that was the lesson she learned in an episode written by a man. So as far as I’m concerned they took character a few steps backward in the midst of this growth period and I think that’s so sad.

At this year’s 10th Annual Screenwriting Research Network Conference at Otago University in Dunedin, New Zealand I presented…

“How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto by Accident (and How We Can Get Her Out of it): Demoting Gidget: The Little Girl with Big Ideas from Edgy Coming of Age Novel to Babe on the Beach Genre Film via Choices made in the Adaptation Process.”

It’ a long title, as I joke up front, but covers the process of adapting the true life story of Kathy Kohner (nicknamed ‘Gidget’ by the group of male surfers who she spent the summers with in Malibu in the 1950s) into the film and television series that are better remembered than the novel. The novel had been well-received upon publication, even compared to A Catcher in the Rye, but has mistakenly been relegated to the ‘girl ghetto’ of films. Some of the adaptations turned the focus away from the coming of age story of a young woman who gained respect for her talent at a male craft – surfing – and instead turned the focus far too much on Kathy being boy crazy.

Along the way I found interesting comparisons between how female writers treated the main character while adapting the novel and how male writers treated the character.

Gidget

Dr. Rosanne Welch

Dr. Rosanne Welch teaches the History of Screenwriting and One-Hour Drama for the Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting.

Watch Dr. Welch’s talk “The Importance of Having a Female Voice in the Room” at the 2016 TEDxCPP.

The Screenwriting Research Network is a research group consisting of scholars, reflective practitioners and practice-based researchers interested in research on screenwriting. The aim is to rethink the screenplay in relation to its histories, theories, values and creative practices.

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Myself, Peg Lamphier and author, Terrence Young discuss his book, Heading Out: A History of American Camping after the Cal Poly Pomona Golden Leaves presentations at Cal Poly Pomona University Library

Myself, Peg Lamphier and author, Terrence Young discuss his book, Heading Out: A History of American Camping after the Cal Poly Pomona Golden Leaves presentations at Cal Poly Pomona University Library.

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Display in Special Collections at Cal Poly Pomona Library via My Instagram

Display on myself, my editing partner, Peg Lamphier and other women doing important work in Special Collections at Cal Poly Pomona Library.

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06 Barbara Is 1st Strong Female Character from Gender Diversity in the Who-niverse [Video] (0:25)

Watch this entire presentation: Gender Diversity in the Who-niverse: Paving the Way for a Lady Doctor with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (36:58)

Transcript:

So this was their invention, and I think it’s important to recognize that from the very beginning barbara is not a housewife

She’s not passive. She’s not boring

She’s a teacher who is very excited about these adventures she chooses to go on them

And she learns along the way she often lectures the doctor the older man

About how he should be behaving in the other worlds that they visit so we started with a strong woman. Let’s just remember that

Follow Dr. Welch on Twitter and Instagram
https://twitter.com/rosannewelch – http://instagram.com/drrosannewelch

Dr. Rosanne Welch

Dr. Rosanne Welch teaches the History of Screenwriting and One-Hour Drama for the Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting.

Watch Dr. Welch’s talk “The Importance of Having a Female Voice in the Room” at the 2016 TEDxCPP.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Dr. Rosanne Welch presents at Cal Poly Pomona’s Golden Leaves Presentation [Video] (5:21)

Thanks to the librarians at CalPoly Pomona for another fun afternoon listening to all my colleagues who have published books this year at the annual Golden Leaves Ceremony. This year I enjoyed sharing a reading from my new novel, Filippo Mazzei America’s Forgotten Founding Father, the story of an Italian-American patriot who owned the plantation next door to Thomas Jefferson – but chose not to own slaves. Rather he worked at establishing a vineyard with the help of other Italian immigrants (whose children and grandchildren helped populate Virginia according to records kept at Monticello).

Alongside Jefferson, Mazzei wrote articles in support of the Revolution and is now credited with coining the phrase “All Men are Created Equal”, which Jefferson found so inspiring he added it to his Declaration. As the Revolutionary War waged on, Jefferson and other Founding Fathers asked Mazzei to return to Europe and solicit funds, weapons and other support from the leading countries of Europe, which he gladly did, though it separated him from the beloved country he had adopted.

It is my hope that the more people who hear my talks and read this novel, the more will learn to add Mazzei’s name to the list of folks who helped found our country.

The Golden Leaves

Since 1986, the Golden Leaves program has celebrated those members of the Cal Poly Pomona campus community (faculty, staff, students, alumni and retirees) who have authored or edited a book* in the preceding year. The Golden Leaves program is funded by the University Library.

Each year books published by Cal Poly Pomona authors are on display in the Library during the month of April. The Golden Leaves program is celebrated annually at the University Library in conjunction with National Library Week.

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