Academic – Page 54 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V4 Issue 3: The pleasure of immersion: Some thoughts on how The Singing Detective sustains narrative by Anne Karpf

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 pleasure of immersion: Some thoughts on how The Singing Detective sustains narrative by Anne Karpf

This article argues that while Dennis Potter’s television drama series The Singing Detective is commonly celebrated for its multi-layered narrative and the post-modern way that it played with genre, another of its critical features has remained relatively neglected: the sustained narrative pleasure that it afforded. It suggests that Potter allowed viewers the deep immersive experience of realist TV drama and storytelling, even while he was experimenting with narrative, so providing a bridge between modernist and traditional forms, and rewarding viewers (who had to try and integrate the series’ different fragments and layers into some sort of quasi-cohesive narrative) with abundant dramatic gratification. Narrative, it claims, is not effaced, only displaced, partly onto the central character of Marlow, whose subjectivity unifies the fragmented narrative. Potter broke radically with the conventions of TV medical drama, and the painful experience of Marlow-as-patient acts as another binding agent.

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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The Civil War On Film – 30 in a series – “… some took issue with the way a movie about black soldiers focused on the regiment’s white colonel.”

Film critics universally embraced Glory as both a cinematic success and social justice tour de force. Leonard Maltin called it “breathtakingly filmed” and “faultlessly performed” (Maltin 2008). Historians liked the film nearly as much, though some took issue with the way a movie about black soldiers focused on the regiment’s white colonel, but most critics tempered their criticisms with some discussion of the need to make movies for diverse audiences.

Movies profiled in this book:

Where’s Her Movie? Activist, Mary Church Terrell – 19 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

Mary Church Terrell (born Mary Eliza Church; September 23, 1863 – July 24, 1954) was one of the first African-American women to earn a college degree, and became known as a national activist for civil rights and suffrage.^[1] She taught in the Latin Department at the M Street school (now known as Paul Laurence Dunbar High School)—the first African American public high school in the nation—in Washington, DC. In 1896, she was the first African-American woman in the United States to be appointed to the school board of a major city, serving in the District of Columbia until 1906. Terrell was a charter member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909) and the Colored Women’s League of Washington (1894). She helped found the National Association of Colored Women (1896) and served as its first national president, and she was a founding member of the National Association of College Women (1910) — Wikipedia

21 Buffy The Vampire Slayer 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:

Now. Lack of women. Ta-Da. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Thank god, although we’ve discovered in the states that Joss Whedon, who ran the show and got all kinds of points for being a feminist was, in fact, having sex with every other girl he could meet so apparently not such a feminist. His wife has now left him — ta-da — but I academically am going to interpret to you that the reason the program maintained its level of feminist theory was because of all the women who he hired in his writer’s room. So perhaps subconsciously he knew he was a jerk and he wasn’t going to interpret this right and he wanted to get a room full of people who could give him a real interpretation of what it was like to be a girl in high school who was othered — who was different in this way. So Buffy is a pretty breakthrough and I highly recommend that show

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V4 Issue 3: Chaos, culture and fantasy: The television plays of Howard Schuman by Leah Panos

Chaos, culture and fantasy: The television plays of Howard Schuman by Leah Panos

The single plays of American ex-pat playwright Howard Schuman produced for British television between 1973 and 1983 have received little critical attention. Written in a distinctly un-British madcap, non-naturalistic and often pulpy ‘B movie’ style, they centre around caricatured, hysterical and/or camp characters and make frequent references to popular culture. This article provides a general survey of Schuman’s plays and analyses his sensibility as a screenwriter, drawing extensively on material from interviews with the writer. The article’s particular focus is how and why different cultural forms including music, film and theatre are used and referred to in Schuman’s plays, and how this conditions the plays’ narrative content and visual and aural form. It also considers the reception of Schuman’s plays and their status as non-naturalistic dramas that engage heavily with American pop culture, within the context of British drama. Finally, it explores the writer’s relationship to style and aesthetics, and considers how his written works have been enhanced through creative design decisions, comparing his directions (in one of his scripts) with the realized play to reflect on the use of key devices.

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The Civil War On Film – 29 in a series – “…his attitude about the futility and ridiculousness of war comes from his own experiences as a child during World War II.”

Many film historians attribute anti-Vietnam war sentiment to Sergio Leone personally, but this is not particularly accurate. Leone is Italian and he wasn’t making films for the American market, at least not until United Artists approached his producer with a film deal, at which point the first two films in the trilogy had already been made. Leone’s attitude about the futility and ridiculousness of war comes from his own experiences as a child during World War II.

Movies profiled in this book:

10 Steven Bochco from How The Chaos Of Collaboration in the Writers Room Created Golden Age Television [Video]

With the full recording of “How The Chaos Of Collaboration in the Writers Room Created Golden Age Television”

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When the folks hosting the conference announced their theme as “Screen Narratives: Chaos and Order” the word ‘chaos’ immediately brought to mind writers rooms. I offered a quick history of writers rooms (the presentations are only 20 minutes long) and then quoted several current showrunners on how they compose their rooms and how they run them.

Transcript

Then, of course , we have Steven Bochco, who gave us — he, as was said in the keynote, the multi-level story, many characters with different goals. He brought that to television in a way that hadn’t existed before. Adam-12 is a very basic, two guys do cop things all day. This was now groups of people. Here we had the policemen with their own personal lives at home. Later will have LA Law. The lawyers with their own personal lives and NYPD Lue. So that was what Bochco brought to television.

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Where’s Her Movie? Actress, Maria Félix – 18 in a series

María de los Ángeles Félix Güereña, known as María Félix (Spanish: [maˈɾi.a ˈfeliks]; 8 April 1914 – 8 April 2002), was a Mexican film actress and singer. Along with Pedro Armendáriz and Dolores del Río, she was one of the most successful figures of Latin American cinema in the 1940s and 1950s. Considered one of the most beautiful actresses of Mexican cinema, her taste for the finesse and strong personality garnered her the title of diva early in her career.^[3] She was known as La Doña, a name derived from her character in the film Doña Bárbara (1943), and María Bonita, thanks to the anthem composed exclusively for her, as a wedding gift by her second husband, the Mexican composer Agustín Lara. She completed a film career that included 47 films made in Mexico, Spain, France, Italy and Argentina.^[4] She was also considered one of the most important female figures in the Golden Age of Mexican cinema. — Wikipedia

Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting will be at the 2021 True/False Film Fest, Columbia, Missouri, May 7-9, 2021

The Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting is hosting a booth at the True/False Film Fest taking place in Stephens Lake Park, Columbia, Missouri this May 7-9th.

Come out to meet us and find out how to Write – Reach – Represent the stories that need to be told.

20 More On Russell T Davies from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video]

Transcript:

This book here, I highly recommend if you like Doctor Who, but if you like writing, Benjamin Cook, the writer, the journalist asked Russell Davies in the last season of David Tennant’s era, could I email you across this year and just ask you questions like — what are you thinking of today and Russell was like sure and so it’s this it’s the collection of their emails as he wrote the last season. So you’ll start with something like well today I’m thinking what if water was deadly? I don’t know what to do with that but that’s on my brain today and a few weeks later it was — what if some astronauts were on Mars and Martian water was deadly and by the time you’re done we have an episode called Waters of Mars right? So he watched the progress and development of a story through these emails with Russell Davies.

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