Books – Page 8 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

12 Fuller and Garibaldi 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

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: So she gets to Italy and like what is her assignment? To like write every week or just whenever she wants or…

Rosanne: Whatever dispatches. So because of course, we don’t have as fast communication as one would love. So you’ve got to get whatever you get when you get it. you have to get to a place where you can transmit that information in the midst of there’s little battles happening everywhere you know. She’s just in Reiti, which is right outside of Rome and that’s where Giuseppe Garibaldi — who is the man who united Italy right — that’s his thing and that’s where I came more modern-day.

Tammy: Ooo look at that.

Rosanne: Yeah I was actually…

Tammy: I feel like during this conversation you should just be like and this is the book I wrote and then this is the book…

Rosanne: Well this one I was asked to do a historical novel based on Garibaldi who is this hero in Italy for organizing and what happened was he and his wife Anita — who’s a Brazilian woman — because he left Italy. He went to Brazil. Tried to get some stuff happening in Brazil. Didn’t work. He failed but he learned so much and there were a ton of Italian people living in brazil and they knew that his goal was to unite Italy, their home country, and so his wife Anita came with him to do that and she’s another fascinating woman and the fact that she and Margaret are going to become friends because they become nurses together taking care of the soldiers who fall in this battle.

Tammy: Wow

Rosanne:…and that fascinates me.

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Dr. Rosanne Welch’s Chapter in Doctor Who – New Dawn: Essays on the Jodie Whittaker Era from Manchester University Press Now Available

I’m happy to announce the publication of Doctor Who New Dawn: Essays on the Jodie Whittaker Era for which I was invited to write a chapter.

My focus was on the delicate work showrunner/writer Chris Chibnall had to do in realizing this new Doctor so it’s called “She is Wise and Unafraid” Writing the First Female Doctor and a Diverse Universe for her to Protect.

I touch on the myriad decisions a showrunner makes in creating a character from costuming to sidekicks (called companions in the Whoniverse) to dialogue. I was excited to have been invited to contribute to this collection and proud to showcase the way screenwriters work.

I know academic books can be expensive but you can always ask your local or college library to order a copy for you to read!

Doctor Who – new dawn explores the latest cultural moment in this long-running BBC TV series: the casting of a female lead. Analysing showrunner Chris Chibnall and Jodie Whittaker’s era means considering contemporary Doctor Who as an inclusive, regendered brand. Featuring original interview material with cast members, this edited collection also includes an in-depth discussion with Segun Akinola, composer of the iconic theme tune’s current version. The book critically address the series’ representations of diversity, as well as fan responses to the thirteenth Doctor via the likes of memes, cosplay and even translation into Spanish as a grammatically gendered language. In addition, concluding essays look at how this moment of Who has been merchandised, especially via the ‘experience economy’, and how official/unofficial reactions to UK lockdown helped the show to further re-emphasise its public-service potential.

P.S. You can check out the trailer for Jodie’s upcoming 3rd season here:

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V6 Issue 1: From ‘What Can be Seen and Heard’ to ‘What Can be Sensed and Thought’: Almodovar’s moving textuality in the screenplay of Todo sobre mi madre/All about my Mother (1999) by Christian Abes

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

From ‘What Can be Seen and Heard’ to ‘What Can be Sensed and Thought’: Almodovar’s moving textuality in the screenplay of Todo sobre mi madre/All about my Mother (1999) by Christian Abes

A screenplay is a text in transit and in constant tension between the written and the audio-visual dimensions, resulting in a process of a great potentiality. Such a phenomenon can be perceived in Pedro Almodóvar’s screenwriting, in which a distinct idea of style and creative process emerges. The screenwriting of objectivity and exteriority gives way to a generous, dynamic and expressive text. This study highlights how the screenplay can be shaped within a peculiar and poetic textuality, mixing technical references with insight and more abstract comments, i.e. presenting itself simultaneously as a perceptual and as a conceptual text. What if the effects resulting from the audio-visual metaphors of Almodóvar’s screenplay for Todo sobre mi madre/All about my Mother (1999) were ‘present’ only in the screenplay? What if such deviation from classical rules engenders an experimental space within screenwriting that eventually expands the very idea of ‘screenplay’ itself?

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!

11 Underestimated? 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:

Rosanne: …and here’s the person to send in terms of what Horace Greeley may be thinking. I mean she knows how many languages? So she’s going to be comfortable anywhere and maybe a woman can get more information from people — can get into different parts of society right? A general — a military guy — maybe not.

Tammy: Because she’s not intimidating in a separate country where they don’t know all of the stuff that she knows. Like her reputation does not precede her. She’s just a woman. She’s in skirts.

Rosanne: Right.

Tammy: You know why don’t I tell her all my secrets you know.

Rosanne: Exactly. Exactly and you know but of course she’s also an excellent writer and that again is what he needs. You’re going to get there. You going to get the information quick. You’re going to give it to me so I can have it in the newspaper and that will I have the scoop right? It’s all about who gets the scoop first.

Tammy: Yeah well and so she’s documented as the first female like international correspondent and war correspondent right?

Rosanne: Exactly and again now she even parallels the transcendentalists we could parallel a little bit with the Algonquin round table because Dorothy Parker and Edna Ferber are just a couple of the only women allowed in that circle.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V5 Issue 3: ‘Want to Cook?’: Static and fluid layering in The Sopranos and Breaking Bad by Jeff Rush

‘Want to Cook?’: Static and fluid layering in The Sopranos and Breaking Bad by Jeff Rush

Neo-Baroque scholars argue that, because television serials build their story arc on episodic rather than linear structure, they feature the paradigmatic over the syntagmatic axis of story development. This article will extend that argument, claiming that, unlike three-act structure, serial story structure layers character against generic tropes and, as a result, limits character development. It will propose two such strategies for this layering: the static, where the trope remains the same, and the fluid, where the character moves from one trope to the other in the course of the story. In The Sopranos, the example of static layering, even though Tony Soprano pulls against the trope of the gangster don, he always returns to it. By contrast, in Breaking Bad, the example of fluid layering, Walter White is allowed to move through a series of tropes, evolving as a character as he does. However, the evolution is limited by the theme-and-variations style, which ultimately requires that subsequent variations play off of, and recapitulate, the initial theme.

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 Fuller and Italian Reunification 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:

Rosanne: My joke, I have Sicilian relatives that I visited and they always say, “Come there if you’re traveling in Europe because you see Greek ruins and Roman ruins” and you know mosques everybody, everybody invaded Sicily and took over at some point. So it’s like the whole world, in a nutshell, and my cousin’s actually a teacher of Sicilian literature and language and there are dictionaries that’ll give you the entire Italian language translated into Sicilian and it’s that much — that different.

Tammy: Love it.

Rosanne: Exactly and so what’s happening is is Margaret has read and heard about Mazzini, Giuseppe Manzini and he was a group called Young Italy and they wanted to create a union right? Which is what we did among all our various territories right? All our you know we became a union. So it was like getting a chance to live through our revolution to experience another country doing it.

Tammy: Wow yeah

Rosanne: …and I think that’s what drew her.

Tammy: Exactly because you’re seeing history like creating itself.

Rosanne: Exactly meeting the founders.

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New Book: Helen Keller: A Life in American History (Women Making History) Series by Meredith Eliassen, Edited by Dr. Rosanne Welch and Dr. Peg Lamphier

On the heels of Book #3 I’m proud to present Book #4 of the Women Making History Series that I am co-editing with my colleague Peg Lamphier.

We want to congratulate author Meredith Eliassen for all her hard work on bringing the life of Helen Keller to modern readers in a very modern way. We can’t wait to see the rest of the books in our series come to publication.

The Keller book is the last of this first batch while the others are still (as planned) in the writing stage. They include Sally Ride, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ida B. Wells, and Delores Huerta.

Talk about a wonderful line up of women who made history. It was so, sooo, sooooo hard to find under 100 women worthy of this project – and then we had to find the authors to bring them to life. That second part was easier since we had such a wealth of women writer friends to turn to. Read on!

Helen Keller: A Life in American History explores Keller’s life, career as a lobbyist, and experiences as a deaf-blind woman within the context of her relationship with teacher-guardian-promoter Anne Sullivan Macy and overarching social history. The book tells the dual story of a pair struggling with respective disabilities and financial hardship and the oppressive societal expectations set for women during Keller’s lifetime. This narrative is perhaps the most comprehensive study of Helen Keller’s role in the development of support services specifically related to the deaf-blind, as delineated as different from the blind.

Readers will learn about Keller’s challenges and choices as well as how her public image often eclipsed her personal desires to live independently. Keller’s deaf-blindness and hard-earned but limited speech did not define her as a human being as she explored the world of ideas and wove those ideas into her writing, lobbying for funds for the American Federation for the Blind and working with disabled activists and supporters to bring about practical help during times of tremendous societal change.

09 Why Italy? 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: Why does she go to Italy? What is going on and what is she excited about?

Rosanne: You know Italy — we forget because we had our founding right but in Italy, they were a scattering of different city-states basically up until we’re talking the 1860s is when this finally gets settled and it’s in the 1830s that this roiling begins. We should be all one country. Remember the roman empire. We owned the whole world. Now we can’t even own this little boot that’s part of us

Tammy: Right and Italy was all these like little like city-states and it wasn’t really the Italy that we know today.

Rosane: Austria owned some parts of it right and France owned some parts of it. Sicily was its own country. It was not part of Italy.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V5 Issue 3: The continuing story: Experiments with serial narrative in 1960s prime-time television by Caryn Murphy

The continuing story: Experiments with serial narrative in 1960s prime-time television by Caryn Murphy

This article examines innovations in prime-time narratives in US prime-time television in the 1960s, using archival evidence to trace the goals, concerns and conflicts of screenwriters and producers on series including The Defenders (CBS, 1961-65), The Fugitive (ABC, 1963-67), Peyton Place (ABC, 1964-69), and Dr. Kildare (NBC, 1961-66). During this decade, television writers and producers innovated in response to outside concerns regarding the content of popular episodic programmes, and as a method of encouraging audience engagement and habit viewership. Historical evidence demonstrates that prime-time writers specifically sought to make a distinction between prime-time continuing narratives and those that aired during the daytime hours, in order to elevate what they considered to be a new form of television storytelling.

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!

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V5 Issue 3: Unspoken Desires: Lore as case study on shadow narrative by Margot Nash

Unspoken Desires: Lore as case study on shadow narrative by Margot Nash

This article explores the concept of a shadow narrative lying under the surface of the main film narrative through a case study of the 2012 film Lore. The film is based on the second story in Rachel Seiffert’s book The Dark Room. It was adapted for the screen by British screenwriter Robin Mukherjee and Australian director and screenwriter Cate Shortland. I will search for the structure of this narrative through an analysis of key emotional scenes, moments or spectral traces when the unspoken desires of the protagonist, Lore, surface and take form, when subtext becomes text and nothing is ever the same again. Using film analyst Paul Gulino’s argument that most narrative films consist of eight major sequences, each between eight and fifteen minutes, I will break the film into eight sequences and then identify one key emotional scene in each sequence. I will then analyse the eight key scenes and discuss the development of Lore’s shadow or unspoken narrative of desire. Some of these key scenes re-imagine or extend narrative moments from the book, but most are new, created by the screenwriters in order to make visible the invisible transformation of character and to heighten themes introduced in the first story in the book and brought to a resolution in the third.

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!