Academic – Page 37 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

16 The Trip Home 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:

Rosanne: I mean it sounds like such a smart idea. I mean you know it is the classic let’s ride the Titanic because it’s the opening voyage and it’s going to be the coolest thing to do and you’re like no no no no no. Take the next boat.

Tammy: Exactly yeah and so I had mentioned, she had nightmares when she was a kid and these were nightmares that involved drowning and being subsumed in the waves and this is like a recurring idea in her life and even before she takes off she tells, I think one of her one of her poet friends, I’m gonna forget her name now but she tells this dream to one of her friends like the night before she leaves and she’s afraid of not surviving the trip and the trip is horrible right? I think the captain actually dies. So the first mate or whatever is in charge and he doesn’t really know how to read things like maps. He doesn’t really know about things like rocks.

Rosanne: Yes well the idea of the shoals and how close do you get and all those things…

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23 Production Company Influence from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

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

Transcript:

Host: Do most production companies, most executives, once the pilot is out there and people respond to it, do they normally just kind of back up after that. They’re like okay it seems like you’ve got a show on your hands. We’ll let you do it the way you want to do it.

Rosanne: It depends on your relationship with the network. Obviously, the kinds of people like Shonda Rhimes, as I mentioned, someone who’s got a track record like that can say I know what I’m doing leave me alone. Netflix basically promises that. That’s how they wooed people away from broadcast and cable. They’re like we promise not to give you notes. Just whatever you like to do, you go do it, and yay for you, right? So Ryan Murphy’s doing Pose and things like that. They’re not going to give a ton of notes. If you’re new, they might still because they’re trying to form what is going to be a sort of a Netflix brand. If you’re new in the network world or the cable world yeah you’ll get that kind of stuff for a little bit until you have a track record and can say I don’t — or you’ll still get notes but you have much more ability to say no can’t do that changes the trajectory of the show or that’s wrong for my character. Whatever those things are and that’s part of what I was saying about them earlier, you learn how to manage notes. You learn how to say all right I’ll give you this but I’m keeping that. Or we going to do this because we want this kind of an episode and if you don’t like it that’s too bad. Next week we’ll do this kind of episode which will you know smooth down some feathers if people have a problem with whatever storyline we gave last week. So your ability to be more autonomous grows as your career grows.

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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49 Speaking Up In The Writer’s Room 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 I really say that to the girls a lot because when I have my classes, often when I just open pitching up — anyone can start pitching their ideas — who’s first? We’ll go through a line of like four guys and then I have to stop and go “Does anyone notice anything odd right now?” and I promise you it will be a boy who says “None of the girls have pitched yet.” The girls haven’t even recognized that they are waiting their turn. No one will give you a turn. You have to take a turn or you won’t move as far as you like as fast as you like. So speaking of the big deal and I hate to say it but I learned how to cuss in a writer’s room because sometimes that was the only way to get attention. If I threw out a good four-letter word, all of a sudden everybody was looking at my section of the table which doesn’t make my mother very happy, but it was a silly thing right? So you have to think about managing yourself and managing the other people that you are around. That’s a big deal.

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From Classroom To Writer’s Room with Dr. Rosanne Welch on In The Can w/Lucas Cuny [Audio]

It was a pleasure sitting down in front of some microphones with Lucas Cuny who now teaches Film, TV, and media full time at San Bernardino Valley College.

He also hosts this podcast interviewing people from those areas and he invited me to be the first guest of his second season.

We had the chance to chat about my background as well as the state of the media industry today – and I had the chance to relish the success of this former MFA candidate of mine. One of the best things about being a professor is seeing careers take off like Lucas’ has.

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Episode Description

Rosanne Welch is a screenwriter, author, professor, and all around iconoclast in the field of media education. She wrote on Beverly Hills 90210, written a book about The Monkees, but got her start as a teacher. Hear her journey from the classroom to the writers room.

Lucas Cuny and Dr. Rosanne Welch

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V6 Issue 1: Cargo cults: Key moments in establishing screenwriting in the New Zealand Film Commission by Hester Joyce

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

Cargo cults: Key moments in establishing screenwriting in the New Zealand Film Commission by Hester Joyce

The New Zealand Film Commission (NZFC), a government-supported film industry funding agency founded in 1978, is directed ‘to encourage and also to participate and assist in the making, promotion, distribution and exhibition of films’. In the late 1980s the NZFC, in an attempt to capture a larger international audience for New Zealand-domiciled films, focused attention on screenwriting and screenplay development practices within the local industry. A rigorous training programme of seminar tours from Hollywood-industry script consultants, including seminars from Robert McKee and Linda Seger, followed. This article surveys key moments in this training process, the uptake of McKee and Seger’s screenplay analysis methods, and discusses the effects of these targeted initiatives on the screenwriting and development practices within the government-supported film industry through the late 1980s and early 1990s.

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!

10 Dorothy Parker’s Voice from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

Of course, she has tons of acerbic wit. That’s her thing and in many ways, this is a Shakespearean tragedy, as all her poems are. So I think all of that speaks to her as the major writer behind this version of the film. The other guys came in, they did some stuff but I don’t see evidence of their lives on screen in the way that I see hers. Lines in this piece that she’s written are so clearly things that could come out of her very own poems. I love all of these. This is probably my favorite. “His work was beginning to interfere with his drinking.” She was always very blase about alcoholism and it’s something that she suffered from herself. This is a great one when they put him in the asylum, you know for taking care of his drinking — “They have iron bars in the windows to keep out the draft.” I mean how sarcastic and snotty can you be when you’re trying not to admit you’ve been put in a place you can’t sign your way out of until you clean up and then the heartbreak comes out of this — “For every dream of yours that may come true, you’ll pay the price in heartbreak.” So even if you’re going to get what you want, you won’t have everything and that is kind of a message of her life right? She never quite got everything that she dreamed of.

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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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15 Fuller, History, and Back to America from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]

Watch this entire presentation

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: She’s right at the front lines. She’s doing all of these dispatches and then she’s also writing essentially the history of this very tight period right? So she goes like what was it like 1847 something like that. The quote that I read was from 1848…

Rosanne: …and her plan was to document the whole thing which would have been such an incredible (thing) from an American perspective and with this idea of we did it and now you’re doing it too and of course, Italy will complete this in 1860 which is when we’re breaking apart right? So it’s an interesting parallel history. Yeah, I think my biggest regret is I want — I wanted to read that book right and it’s gonna go down.

Tammy: Let’s talk about the most heartbreaking piece of this story because Margaret has been fighting her whole life to get recognized. She has done all the hard work. She’s literally shown up at the battlefield right and in addition to all of the work that she’s done for women, she’s also fought to have a beautiful marriage — that is a love marriage. It’s legal and she has a child which I you know as a as a woman you know we wouldn’t necessarily call her a feminist but I like of her day I think she was a pretty strong feminist and she might not have ever had that vision for herself. So she has this beautiful vision. She has a manuscript. She has like an 18-month-old child. She has a new husband and she says, “Why don’t I go back to America”, right?

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22 Bridgerton from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

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

Transcript:

For instance, Bridgerton came out of the blue and took everybody by surprise and it was like “Oh my god, Bridgerton. Oh my god, did you see Bridgerton?” and everybody’s talking about it, etc etc. I mean it had a little bit of a built-in audience because it’s based on a book series. So that’s why all the streamers and the networks, they’re desperate to take IP — intellectual property — because you bring in an audience, and then their just going to amplify that audience by making the film version of it — the tv version of it — the limited series version of it — and then they’re going to build and build, right? So they’re really interested in that and Bridgerton was a good example of how that works and then they added the Shonda Rimes sort of gloss to it and suddenly — I had never heard of the book series — I had never read the book series. I didn’t know it existed but I certainly knew Bridgerton existed and then I had to watch it because 3 or 4 people — and I’m not necessarily a fan of those kinds of romance dramas, but everybody said you’ve got to watch this so I gave it a shot. I gave it a first episode. I always try to give things a first episode as we were saying before and if it connects, I’ll go to the next one. Right? Sometimes even if the first doesn’t work I’ll give it a second one cause what I do know is when you are making a pilot you’ve gotten so many notes from the network and the production company and you’ve had to dance for so many people to make sure they all keep saying yes to you, then it’s not necessarily exactly what you originally wanted to do but once they say yes and you get on the air the next episode is going to look more like what you’ve always wanted. So, if it works on the second one then I will stick with it. If I don’t get it on the second one then I stop watching.

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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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V6 Issue 1: IEDs and a Jack-in-the-Box: The mystery of motivation in The Hurt Locker (2008) by Marshall Deutelbaum

IEDs and a Jack-in-the-Box: The mystery of motivation in The Hurt Locker (2008) by Marshall Deutelbaum

Though based upon his non-fiction article ‘The Man in the Bomb Suit’, published in Playboy in 2005, the dramatic structure of Mark Boal’s script for The Hurt Locker (2008) is eccentric, only revealing its true subject, the motivation of its central character for being a bomb technician, just before its ending. In comparison with the clarity of motivations in Paul Haggis’ script for In the Valley of Elah (2007), adapted by him from an earlier non-fiction essay by Boal that also takes place during the Iraq war, the script for The Hurt Locker deviates decidedly from the format of classical Hollywood narrative; because he lacks a clearly defined goal, the psychology and motivations of the central character remain obscure. Indeed a comparison of the final script with an earlier version readily illustrates how rigorously insights into the character’s motivations, and his self-awareness, were reduced. As a result, The Hurt Locker in its final version asks considerably more imaginative and intellectual engagement from its viewers than most commercial cinema.

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

48 Do Your Research and Speak Up There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video]

Transcript:

You have to always do research. You don’t know everything and you don’t have to but you have to be willing to look. I’ve got a whole lecture I do on the tv show Gidget from the 60s that I discovered every episode written by a woman treated the Gidget character like a real human being and every episode written by a male writer treated her like sort of a doofy, stupid girl and I thought they didn’t even go into reading the book that that show was based on to understand her mentality. Her dad was a college professor and she was studying literature in college. She’s not a ditz right but they didn’t even research that. So you have to really look into everything. You have to like research right? That is something a writer must do.

You have to speak up. You all are shy. I’ll give you that right? You don’t know me so it’s a new thing but you can’t be shy in the room. If you don’t open your mouth, what are they paying you for? You’re only going to write two episodes of a tv show that runs 13 episodes. You get two a year. All those other episodes is you talking. What makes this one better for this writer so we all keep employed next year? So you have to speak up.

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Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

* 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 from the LA Public Library

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