Dr. Rosanne Welch is a writer and university professor of Humanities in the (IGE) Department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; and screenwriting for two MFA in Screenwriting programs (Cal State, Fullerton and Stephens College). Her current books include Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture (McFarland Publishing, 2017) and Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia and Document Collection (ABC-CLIO, 2017), which she co-edited with her CalPoly Pomona colleague and officemate, Dr. Peg Lamphier.
In her previous life, Welch was a television writer/producer with credits that include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences and Touched by an Angel and ABC NEWS/Nightline. 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.
In this episode, Leslie and Rosanne discuss 10 things Hollywood writers must know. For example, how to write what you emotionally know, how to work in a writer’s room, the do’s and don’ts of pitching, when to use a pitch deck and when it’s a horrible idea and much more.
Here we are. We’re talking about the importance of female creatives in A Star Is Born. For me, that’s really what it’s all about. I like to my begin my lectures about the fact that I would like to acknowledge that this event is happening on the traditional lands of the Tongva people. That’s what Los Angeles is and we should recognize that there were people here before us and we need to respect their history and they’re the people who still exist on this land. So I like to start with that. I learned that when I went to a conference in New Zealand and they start all their lectures that way and I thought that was quite beautiful. As you just said so I don’t need this. These are the shows that I’ve worked on. These are the books that I have written. The lecture we’re speaking on today is going to come up next year in the book. I also am on the editorial board for Written By magazine, which I happen to have a copy of right next to me. It’s free online. So the magazine of the Writers Guild. I recommend people read it and it always has interviews with movie writers or television writers and that’s really good. I also do book reviews for the Journal of Screenwriting. It’s a great place for new academics to get published. If there are books you feel like reviewing or you’d like a free copy of you can write a review for me. So Vicki will get you in touch with me if that’s interesting to you.
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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.
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.
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: …and she’s constantly reinventing herself. Like that one of my favorite things about her is the conversations that she had with women which are kind of like modern-day podcasts where it’s like let’s just get everybody together and just talk. You know.
Rosanne: Well that’s and that goes into the 1960s. Their rap sessions right? That’s it you know consciousness-raising and in every generation, like we often teach that the beginning of women’s right or whatever you know you go back to Mary Wollstonecraft right and then think about that’s England but here in America those same conversations are being had.
Tammy: Yeah Yeah and I and I feel like she had to do so much fighting and but or not even like necessarily fighting but just like to reaffirm her right to be in that room or to you know be working as a correspondent for Horace Greeley’s paper.
Host: I don’t know how you’ll feel — how you feel about this Rosanne but like do you think that’s a problem with a lot of shows in general, that they try to take an approach and just make it more like and it gets too outlandish that you don’t even believe it at a certain point.
Rosanne: I think that is. One of the words that everyone is tired of hearing around town is can it be edgier? Show me something I haven’t seen when in fact what really works is to watch people you care about go through believable situations and come out on the other side — find their way through it, That’s kind of what people look for when they’re watching a drama particularly. You want to see that other people have survived things that might be in your world. As you said before, people you know that we have in our families with addiction or issues of other kinds. People going through divorces. That’s a very dramatic thing for a teenager to see happen to their parents, even for someone in their 20s. I had a friend who her and her husband knew from the time the kid was about 12 they were got to get a divorce but they made the assumption that it would be bad to have divorced parents in high school. So they made a deal they’d wait till the kid was 18 and graduated. So here’s a kid who thought his family was perfectly normal and then you know they graduate from high school. Daddy and I are breaking up and it was like — so everything you believe to be true is all blown up. So that’s a legitimate experience for someone and I think if you just go deeper into those experiences and how people manage, that’s much more dramatic and interesting than oh my gosh, my daughter’s having an affair with the senator and now his you know chief of staff is sending a hitman to kill her so that it won’t ruin his political campaign. Ehhh. No, let me just see a kid get through his parents being divorced because that’s really tough and that’s going to connect me to that person for a long time.
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.
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:
Where am I going to find a piece of wood on Christmas Eve that only an angel can deliver that I can’t throw in the trash?
Audience: Christmas tree?
Rosanne: Close. That was the first thought. Christmas tree. Christmas tree is not spiritual. It’s not connected to the Christmas story.
Audience: Cross.
Rosanne: Cross is close but that’s Easter — that’s Easter but you’re close. What involves wood and Jesus and Mary and Joseph?
Audience: The Manger?
Rosanne: Thank you! So I got the idea while I was sitting around the table with everybody but I knew this guy didn’t like to be one-upped and I didn’t want him on my bad side because he helped sign my contract later right, but I got to get this idea out there but I can’t pretend to be smarter than him because that will not make him happy. So I sit there at a table of like 10 people and I got the idea and I thought well luckily I’m a pretty loud person. I’m considered Italian where I come from but clearly not here because my grandparents are from Sicily. So all of a sudden I just went — Uh!
Not the whole table but the guy sitting next to me went what and that’s all I needed was someone to ask me what I was thinking right? I was like oh I just I’ve been thinking about this problem and I had this idea but I don’t know if you’ll like it… Oh, what’s your idea? Well, what if the wood came from the manger and like four people around the table went oh yes and the guy who wrote the story was about to say no. I could see his face but when his colleagues all went yes. he was like oh yeah that’s a great idea. We should — okay that’s what we’ll do. So I wasn’t one-upping him. I was just accidentally having a moment and it allowed me to get my idea out. Now that sounds ridiculous but I got what I wanted out of it right? So you have to learn to read the room. How is it operating? Who are your — who are your allies in the room?
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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.
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: …and it got her all over the place.
Rosanne: It did and I often compare her — when i’m talking to students about her — I compare her to John Quincy Adams, right, who at 10 was translating his own father’s paperwork and knew five or six languages and he’s going to be like — in my opinion — our smartest president. So she’s on par with him but not given the opportunities.
Tammy: Exactly and even in her day she was known as the most widely read woman in America and she talked her way into the Harvard library even though she couldn’t actually attend Harvard you know and she made sure that she could get the education that she wanted. She must have had this like internal drive and curiosity that just kept her going throughout her life.
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 article discusses the past, present and future of screenwriting research from a somewhat personal viewpoint, being US and UK in its focus, partly because of my own lack of knowledge of the researchers in other countries in the ‘dark’ years. Yet the pioneering writers and, more recently, the creation of the Screenwriting Research Network and the Journal of Screenwriting have all encouraged the exchanging of ideas and the realization that there are many of us interested in the same subject. More recently the area has proven to be exciting and dynamic with a diverse range of high quality research from many countries.
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.
Script contributor Dr. Rosanne Welch shines a light on Jeanie MacPherson, a trailblazing screenwriter from the silent era who would eventually come to write a bulk of famed Hollywood mogul Cecil B. DeMille’s box office hits.
As with many other female Silent Era screenwriters Jeanie Macpherson began her career as an actress (appearing in over 147 films). Then she became a writer/director at Universal (writing 54 films) and eventually met Cecil B. DeMille, for whom she would write the bulk of his box office successes. In 1927, Macpherson became one of only three women, the other two being Mary Pickford and Bess Meredyth (more on her in a future column) who helped found the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (along with thirty-three male screenwriters). She was also a suffragette – and a pilot in those early days of aviation when, like the new world of motion pictures, even the skies were open to female trailblazers.
During every Residency Workshop the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting Executive Director, Dr. Rosanne Welch, joins with the Writers Guild Foundation to moderate a panel on a topic of interest to female writers. This year we planned one on Writing Diverse Families – but in the last day before our panel 2 panelists had to drop out due to… family duties. So we pivoted, realizing the panelists who were able to appear all had shows that involved 3 generational families lead by matriarchs.
Hence the title: It’s All Relative: Writing Matriarchs.
This gave us a chance to explore how these female TV writers have expanded depictions of the relationships between grandmothers, mothers and daughter over the years and how they’ve developed storylines that reflect the complexity and universality of these inescapable bonds. Panelists include Sheryl J. Anderson – Creator and Executive Producer, Sweet Magnolias; Lang Fisher – Co-creator and Executive Producer, Never Have I Ever; and Valerie Woods – Co-executive Producer, Queen Sugar. Everyone shared memories of their own family matriarchs and the inspiration they continue to provide each woman’s writing.
Due to Covid we recorded this panel live at the Jim Henson Studios where we host our Workshop in front of the live audience of MFA candidates.
If you go pre-90210 you’re going to find that teenagers were more often in comedies and more often in kind of doing silly things and very superficial things — getting a date — things like that and from 90210 on they had real lives and real things could happen to them and real problems happen to them and as you said continue through Euphoria exactly exactly. You don’t do a teen show these days that doesn’t look at their lives more in-depth. I guess that’s what I’m going to say.
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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