Academic – Page 61 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

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

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

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.

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.

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:

01 Introduction 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”

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

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

Always good to see everybody here. We’re all like on different time schedules so I’m still — I think it’s three in the morning in Los Angeles but that’s okay. Yes, we’re going to talk about this concept of chaos in writers’ rooms, which are really run in chaos, at least the ones in the United States. Just a quick background on who I am. I was in the business for several years. I wrote Picket Fences, Beverly Hills 90210 — which is a show that won’t die because they just did a live show or is just a little crazy and Touched By An Angel for a long time. So this is where I came from in television. This is what I’ve done in academia and writing. My favorite new book is a collection of essays written by many of my students about female screenwriters from the early days and giving us their backgrounds so I’m all about finding more women that we can write about and talk about in our classes. I think that’s important. I’m also the book review editor of the Journal of Screenwriting so if you have any books you’d like to review please let me know. I’d love to get you a free copy and get your review in the journal and also I’m on the editorial board for the Written By Magazine, which is the magazine of the Writers Guild of America. You can access that for free digitally online if you go to writtenby.com or go to wga.org and they’ll have a link to it, but every month we do interviews with either a film person or a television person or whole writer’s room from a show and I think it’s a great way to bring guest stars into a classroom from all over the world. Again, they’re obviously Americans although I interviewed Russell Davies several years ago so we do have some other folks come on into the magazine but it’s pretty cool.

For more information on the Screenwriting Research Network, visit

Follow me on Instagram

* 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!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

A Woman Wrote That – 16 in a series – Gilmore Girls, Wr: Amy Sherman-Palladino

This new “A Woman Wrote That” post is an echo of the Writers Guild campaign of a few years ago (“A Writer Wrote That”) where they noted famous movie quotes and credited the screenwriter rather than the director. The difference here being that we will be posting lines from films written by female screenwriters. Feel free to share! — Rosanne

MICHEL

People are particularly stupid today. I can’t talk to any more of them.

Gilmore Girls on IMDB
Girlmore Girls on Wikipedia
Amy Sherman-Palladino on Wikipedia and IMDB
Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

Where’s Her Movie? Computer Scientist, Margaret Hamilton – 9 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

Margaret Heafield Hamilton (born August 17, 1936) is an American computer scientist, systems engineer, and business owner. She was director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo program. She later founded two software companies—Higher Order Software in 1976 and Hamilton Technologies in 1986, both in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Hamilton has published more than 130 papers, proceedings and reports about sixty projects and six major programs. She is one of the people credited with coining the term “software engineering”.[1]

On November 22, 2016, Hamilton received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from president Barack Obama for her work leading to the development of on-board flight software for NASA’s Apollo Moon missions. — Wikipedia

11 Style + Opinion=Writer’s Voice from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (22 seconds)

Transcript:

Everything that’s written that’s remembered is because you learned something while you were watching it. It might be that friends matter which is really the theme of all of the Harry Potter movies let’s admit it. That’s all you learned from those movies. They were quite fun but that’s a pretty good theme. In life, friends matter. Themes are universal. So this is my opinion but I think, generally speaking, people find this the opinion.

Watch this entire presentation

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Dr. Rosanne Welch Joins Panel on Monkees Books with Plastic EP Live [Video] (54 minutes)

Many thanks to Fred Velez for telling me about Daniel Sam and his fun internet Monkees talk show — followed by thanks to Dan for inviting me onto this discussion of all the great Monkees books out there. I enter the chat at the 15 minute mark in the video. — Rosanne

On Tuesday February 16th, 2021, the Plastic EP TV Facebook Live Monkees Discussion Panel held a literary discussion on Monkees Books.

Participants included:

Fred Velez
Charles Rosenay
Ed Reilly
Michael A Ventrella
Mark Arnold
Natalie A Palumbo
Special Guest, Dr. Rosanne Welch, Author of Why The Monkees Matter

Get your copy today!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

“Pickering’s Harem”, Henrietta Swan Levitt, Edwin Hubble, and More on Women in Science

Research on Edwin Hubble lead me to learn more about this set of female mathematicians – and in that wonderful way the synergy of the world seems to work they were then discussed on a UK comedy game show starring Sandy Toksvig – and I learned even more!

Henrietta Swan Levitt figured out how to measure the distance from the earth of pulsating stars. Edwin Hubble then used her calculations to discover the Milky Way. One of the game show guests asks when she gets credit and the answer is – only anecdotally from Hubble reminding people of her work. Why you might ask? For two reasons…

Public Domain, Link

First, Levitt was part of what was nicknamed Pickering’s Harem. Edward Pickering ran the Harvard Observatory and found his male employees who analyzed data from the skies incompetent and slow so one day he said, “My maid could do it better.” The male staff said “Go ahead” so Pickering did hire a slew of women and as they worked so well he hired more women. Annie Jump Cannon manually classified 350,000 stars in her career. Yet, in that way misogyny takes over, rather than call them fellow mathematicians or astronomers, the women became… Pickering’s Harem. I also learned that this lead to the Harem effect — a phenomenon where male executives hire female assistants as they are cheaper and work harder. The jokes of these game show celebrities reminded me of the misogyny of naming the women Pickering’s Harem. We didn’t call the men of the Mercury project “Jackie Kennedy’s consorts”. I mean what a way to demean a set of highly educated women.

The Second reason Henrietta Swan Levitt did not receive full credit for her discovery is that Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler DID want to nominate Levitt for the 1926 Nobel Prize for Physics – but she had died 4 years earlier and the Prize can’t be awarded posthumously (I wonder what male thought up that dumb rule – and why?). Thankfully, Hubble always mentioned Levitt – but textbooks do not necessarily. At the end of the segment the host then covers the many lies Hubble told in his lifetime as a means of polishing his less than elegant background.

Amazing what you can learn from a UK game show.

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V4 Issue 1: expensive words, cheap images: ‘Scripting’ the adapted screenplay by Alex Munt

expensive words, cheap images: ‘Scripting’ the adapted screenplay by Alex Munt

This article explores ‘scripting’ the adapted screenplay for budget film models, including microbudget features, DIY film-making and creative practice-led research. It highlights the lack of attention given to the adapted screenplay in the field of adaptation studies, and works with notions of intermediality, and transmediality, to privilege the screenplay as the primary site for creative interaction in the adaptation process. In the context of small-scale, budget film-making practices the focus is towards modes of scripting that rely on working with images, both as part of the screenplay form/format and more directly, in ‘writing’ with moving images, with the screenplay situated within production. This article argues that in consideration of the adapted screenplay, for budget film-making, the relationship between words and images is realigned. The impact of digital media culture together with the advance of digital film-making will accelerate this. Two case studies are presented. The first is Mala No he (1985), the debut feature film of Gus Van Sant, based on the novella by Walt Curtis. The second is LBF (2011), the author’s own debut feature film, based on the novel Living Between Fucks (2006) by Cry Bloxsome. This article aims to engage screenwriting researchers, independent/budget film-makers and creative arts practitioners.

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!