Academic – Page 63 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

09 Studio Contract Writers from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (46 seconds)

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:

Men — because they were mostly men — worked in writer’s pools. So you got a contract with the studio to be a Universal writer and then people who ran different shows — so they’d be just like in England is today — one guy, again generally a guy, who was in charge of the show and that person would go into the writer’s pool and say “Who’s free this week? I need an episode of…Generally, it was these kinds of shows. Columbo is still kind of famous today. The NBC Mystery Movie was like that. So they go I need a Columbo who’s got an idea and somebody would raise their hand and go “I’ve got an idea” and then they would write next week’s Columbo right? So they were in a pool of writers. Out of that pool came these men who were icons of the 80s and early 90s and it was because of their originality that they began to stand out and I really can’t stress that enough.

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Event: ScriptChat with Dr. Rosanne Welch – Sunday, February 14, 2021 – 4PM PDT

I’m pleased to have been invited to be the guest on the weekly Twitter show #Scriptchat, hosted by editor Jeanne Veillette Bowerman.

On Sunday Februrary 14th at 4pm PDT we’ll be talking about behavior in a writers room, and the benefits of having an MFA in TV and Screenwriting.

If you haven’t checked in with their shows you should know that #Scriptchat brings the guests to the party so you can learn in a free, unbiased and respectful platform. Their #1 goal is to thoroughly enjoy spending an hour together every Sunday with writers working hard to improve and succeed, and they’re proud to have accomplished that time and time again, since 2009! – Rosanne

ScriptChat with Dr. Rosanne Welch – Sunday, February 14, 2021

Wednesday, February 10, 2021
At 4 PM PDT – 5 PM PDT
TOPIC: Working in / behavior in a writers room, & benefits of having an MFA #WritingCommunity

@RosanneWelch – ##screenwriter, TV writer, novelist & Exec Dir, @stephenscollege MFA In TV & #Screenwriting

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Event: Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting Open House – Wednesday, February 10, 2021

Wednesday, February 10, 2021
At 4 PM PDT – 5 PM PDT

Register Now

Explore the low-residency MFA in TV + Screenwriting with Executive Director Dr. Rosanne Welch. Our mission is to increase the impact of women and other under-represented voices in television and film. Our faculty and mentors include some of the best working writers in Hollywood, and our curriculum includes an in-depth look at the business side of TV and screenwriting.

The Civil War On Film – 17 in a series – Often these maids were related to their mistresses, as in the case of Sally Hemmings…

Supervision of the drudgery work done by enslaved women kept women of both positions in daily contact. Enslaved maids slept on pallets on the floors of their various mistresses’ rooms to be awoken whenever necessary through the night. Often these maids were related to their mistresses, as in the case of Sally Hemmings, maid and half-sister to Martha Jefferson on the Monticello plantation, which created complex relationships and widely reported whispers among women of both stations of life.

Movies profiled in this book:

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V4 Issue 1: The strange case of Ronald Tavel: Andy Warhol’s only screenwriter by J. J. Murphy

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 strange case of Ronald Tavel: Andy Warhol’s only screenwriter by J. J. Murphy

During the period 1963–1968, the Pop artist Andy Warhol turned his attention from painting and sculpture to film-making. Warhol gained attention for a series of notorious silent films – Sleep (1963), Empire, Blow Job and Eat (all 1964) – which early critics connected to minimalism and viewed as precursors to structural film. Warhol, however, confounded early admirers by collaborating with the writer Ronald Tavel on a number of sync-sound, more narrative films, beginning with Harlot (1964). The collaboration proved unlike any other between a director and screenwriter with Warhol incorporating the frustrations and tensions that often exist between screenwriters and directors as an essential part of the work.

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!

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47 More On Screenplays As Literature from Why Researching Screenwriters Has Always Mattered [Video] (51 seconds)

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Transcript:

In my family, we like A Christmas Carol — Dickens’ A Christmas Carol — and it’s been made into movies several times and for us, the best version is the one made by The Muppets because in that version Gonzo the muppet gives the action dialogue — the narration — that you would not see in any other version of the film but he narrates — he walks around town — as Dickens narrating. So you hear language that you miss in the other movies. So, to me, that’s what’s happening when people start reading actual screenplays. They’re seeing the craft as it exists on the page. Yes, of course, we’d like it made into a film and we want to see the beautiful vistas and we want to see actors who are wonderful but I just really need the story. That’s enough for me. That’s gonna make me feel something.

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A Note About This Presentation

A clip from my keynote speech at the 10th Screenwriters´(hi)Stories Seminar for the interdisciplinary Graduation Program in “Education, Art, and History of Culture”, in Mackenzie Presbyterian University, at São Paulo, SP, Brazil, focused on the topic “Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered.” I was especially pleased with the passion these young scholars have toward screenwriting and it’s importance in transmitting culture across the man-made borders of our world.

To understand the world we have to understand its stories and to understand the world’s stories we must understand the world’s storytellers. A century ago and longer those people would have been the novelists of any particular country but since the invention of film, the storytellers who reach the most people with their ideas and their lessons have been the screenwriters. My teaching philosophy is that: Words matter, Writers matter, and Women writers matte, r so women writers are my focus because they have been the far less researched and yet they are over half the population. We cannot tell the stories of the people until we know what stories the mothers have passed down to their children. Those are the stories that last. Now is the time to research screenwriters of all cultures and the stories they tell because people are finally recognizing the work of writers and appreciating how their favorite stories took shape on the page long before they were cast, or filmed, or edited. But also because streaming services make the stories of many cultures now available to a much wider world than ever before.

Many thanks to Glaucia Davino for the invitation.

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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!
† Available from the LA Public Library

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A Woman Wrote That – 13 in a series – Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

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

PRINCESS LEIA

Why, you stuck up, half-witted, scruffy-looking… nerf-herder.

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back on IMDB
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back on Wikipedia
Leigh Brackett on Wikipedia and IMDB
Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

08 Monkees Writers and History from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (1 minute)

Transcript:

I wrote this article for Written By which is about these writers and it was very interesting to go back and speak to them in their 80s about what their experience had been to write hippie characters in the 60s and it was all about how they shared stories. Some of them were more conservative. Some of them were already becoming hippies. Treva tells a funny story about her mother not understanding what it meant when she said she smoked pot. Her mother thought she was doing something in the kitchen. She didn’t divest her of that opinion right? So they all had a different attitude toward how they wrote but in one-hour dramas, things were done differently back in the day as everyone is fond of saying. They used writer pools. They would simply hire you under contract at a studio — Universal, Warner Brothers, Disney, whatever it was — and you literally sat on the line now that’s a that’s a pool of women typing. That’s how scripts were done before there were computers right? They had a bunch of women in a room. They had that ditto paper and you type and you get three copies with the little purple stuff and think about that. You’re doing that 24/7. If you’re doing Gone with the Wind, how many copies of that script do you have to consistently keep typing so that it’s ready.

Watch this entire presentation

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* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs
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The Civil War On Film – 16 in a series – As a producer interested in maximizing his profits, Selznick worked hard to head off any possible protest.

As a producer interested in maximizing his profits, Selznick worked hard to head off any possible protest. The NAACP took issue with the use of the n-word in the book, so the script used the word “freedmen” instead. Selznick also conceded to veterans of the Union army. In the book, Scarlett shoots one of Sherman’s soldiers after he menaces her with rape. In the film the soldier becomes a deserter who was going against Sherman’s orders to not harm citizens on the March to the Sea.

Movies profiled in this book:

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V4 Issue 1: ‘To make you see’: Screenwriting, description and the ‘lens-based’tradition by Adam Ganz

‘To make you see’: Screenwriting, description and the ‘lens-based’tradition by Adam Ganz

In this article I look at the descriptive writing in the screenplay, and link this to a tradition of ‘lens-based writing’, the precise visual description of phenomena observed through a lens for an audience unable to see what was described, which can be traced from the writing of Galileo and van Leeuwenhoek, through scientific and travel writing, to early fiction (with particular emphasis on Robinson Crusoe). I identify the most significant features of lens-based writing – the use of simple language and the separation of observation and deduction to communicate what has been seen through a simultaneous act of looking and framing, and show the similarities between this and screenwriting practice. I also make some observations about what this model can offer screenwriting research.

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!