Conference – Page 5 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

01 Introduction From Jeanne to Suso to Julie to Spike: How Jeanne Macpherson’s Manual on Screenwriting Influenced Italian Realism which Influenced Black Independent Film in the U.S. [Video]

Transcript:

…The woman I’m going to start with is Jeannie McPherson who is also a famous silent film screenwriter of that period. As famous as Marion was in her own day. Forgotten much in the history books because she wrote for Cecil B. Demille. She wrote all the films that he made that made money. She was also one of his three mistresses and so textbooks tell you she was his mistress and they forget the part where she wrote the movies that made him money. Yes. So I love Jeannie and I borrowed this title from this play which I love “Vanyan and Sonya and Masha and Spike.” It just seemed to suit me perfectly but I wanted to credit the author. I did not make up the title. I’m Rosanne Welch. I am working with Stephens College which is in Missouri but we run our MFA programs in Los Angeles. So it confuses everybody because I live in LA. I don’t live in Missouri. Our theme of our program is Write, Reach and Represent which of course suits everything that everyone’s been talking about today. I’m very excited about that. My background is that I came from being a television screenwriter and wrote on all these shows and then came into Academia and was like how are people learning how to do this because not everybody’s very good at it and then I’ve written on these various Books. Thank you for mentioning “When Women Wrote Hollywood” which has chapters on Jeannie and many of these other women we can talk about. I also am the book review editor for “The Journal Of Screenwriting” so if you want to review a book – you have a book that needs reviewing – let me know because we always need more reviews all right. So that’s a good thing and we’re here doing Global Screenwriting.

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At the recent Screenwriting Research Network conference in Vienna, I gave this talk titled “From Jeanne to Suso to Julie to Spike: How Jeanne Macpherson’s Manual on Screenwriting Influenced Italian Realism which Influenced Black Independent Film in the U.S.”

In the talk, I trace the ways a manual about screenwriting by silent film writer Jeanne Macpherson influenced Suso Cecchi d’Amici who began to utilize Macpherson’s ideas and became the queen of Italian neorealism screenwriting in Europe. Then those Italian neo-realist screenwriters in turn inspired the Los Angeles School of Black Independent Film Makers (the L.A. School). In turn, such as Charles Burnett, Billy Woodberry, Haile Gerima, and Julie Dash and their ideas fueled Spike Lee. Finally, when he became the first Black man to head the jury at the Cannes Film Festival (where Suso had once served) his choice of films influenced yet another generation of screenwriters.

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From Jeanne to Suso to Julie to Spike: How Jeanne Macpherson’s Manual on Screenwriting Influenced Italian Realism which Influenced Black Independent Film in the U.S. (Complete)

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On-board our first flight with complimentary champagne. What a way to start our journey! via Instagram [Photography]

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Dr. Rosanne Welch speaks during Screenwriting Research Network Roundtable in Vienna via Instagram [Photography]

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Screenwriting Research Network Conversation #2 – Memories of Our Previous International Conferences [Video]

In my role as the Secretary for the Executive Council of the SRN (Screenwriting Research Network) I was happy to be asked to act as host for the second SRN Conversation – a chance to talk with folks who have planned a couple of our earlier conferences around the world.

I spoke with organizers JJ Murphy of the Madison, Wisconsin 2013 conference and Kathryn Millard and Alex Munt of the Sydney 2012. The SRN Conversations allow us to create an archive of the history of the group and inform new members about all the opportunities gained from attending our conferences.

All their info will help me in planning SRN 2023 on my home campus at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri.

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A Table Reading: “Mount Wilson: 4-hour mini-series based on a book about the life of Edwin Hubble” – SeriesFest 2022 – Denver, CO

I’m happy to announce the public table reading of a new script I’ve co-written with 3 alums of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting (Betsy Leighton, Misty Brawner, Adam Parker). We were all involved in a mini-writers room earlier last year to come up with the outline for a 4-hour mini-series based on a book about the life of Edwin Hubble (of Hubble Telescope fame) – and we did. Then the 4 of us wrote the pilot. Now we’ll all be attending the reading at the Gates Planetarium in Denver as part of SeriesFest.

In honor of that project Douglas and I recently visited Mt. Wilson once again in this almost-post pandemic world and took photos of things like Hubble’s desk, and the wooden ladder they used to reach the platform – and, of course, the 100-inch telescope from which he made his major discoveries about the galaxy.

What were these discoveries? Well, you’ll have to attend the table reading – or watch the series when it sells – to find out.

Dr. Rosanne Welch at Broadcast Educators Association (BEA) 2022

I attended my first Broadcast Educators Association (BEA) conference last weekend on the invite of Dr. Ed Fink, my former department chair, and greatly enjoyed hosting a pitchathon for graduation bachelor students interested in creating their own television shows.

My co-panelists included two fun colleagues who have become good friends – Jon Vandergriff (Stephens College) and David Morgassen (CSUF). We gave feedback on 9 different pitches and followed it up with a Q&A about the world of being a professional writer. The audience was so interested and engaged that after our session ended, we all grabbed a table together and kept talking until we closed the venue down for the night.

Meeting potential MFA candidates is one reason to attend events like this one – but mostly it’s to make new friends in the academic world and strengthen the friendships you’ve already created; to learn how they approach the teaching of screenwriting or media history and bring those ideas back to my own classrooms.

On this trip, I met professors from Illinois and Michigan and reconnected with folks I’ve worked with at CSUF and elsewhere. Having lunch and hashing over which films or television shows to teach and how to best help students learn to analyze these in order to improve their writing is the heart of such a conference. Meeting the students and hearing their ideas is the icing on the cake.

01 Introduction from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

Nearly two years ago I had the pleasure of being invited to join a panel at the then upcoming SCMS (Society of Cinema and Media Studies) conference set for Seattle. As you know that was canceled due to Covid with the hopes of reconvening in Colorado in 2021. That became a virtual conference but our group decided to reapply our panel and we four were able to ‘meet’ on Zoom on Sunday and present: Writing Between the Lines: Feminist Strategies for Historical Absences, Cliché, and the Unreliable Narrator.

Here you can watch a clip from my part of the presentation,

“When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues in Oral Histories”

Transcript: That was marvelous and I’m so excited about this panel because we’re all talking a little bit about everything which is really nice. Yes, love men. Don’t want to pick on men. Married to a man. Have a son but there you go. We’re going to talk about how men forget women in the archives. First, I would like to acknowledge that I am speaking from the traditional lands of the Tongva people and I want to respect their elders and their people that came before us. This was the ground of Los Angeles all the way out to the Catalina islands and I think it’s something worth people studying. Very briefly about me. I was a television writer for 20 years. So I wrote on 90210 and Picket Fences and Touched by an Angel. Currently, I’m kind of using words from my book When Women Wrote Hollywood which is about the early silent screenwriters – female screenwriters – and how they have been forgotten. I also am the book review editor for the Journal of Screenwriting. So if you ever want to write a review or have a book that needs reviewing, let me know because I’d love to do that and I’m on the editorial board for Written By magazine which I always suggest people read. It is free digitally online about every six weeks the Writer’s Guild comes out with it and there are some wonderful interviews with movie star – movie writers and tv writers. So that’s kind of the world I’m in. I am the executive director of the Stephens College TV and Screenwriting MFA and our mantra is Write, Reach and Represent because I think that’s what writing is all about. The school is actually in Missouri but it’s a low residency program so people come to LA and we work at the Jim Henson Studios. So talk about Mabel Normand who worked at Charlie Chaplin studios with him. This was originally Charlie Chaplin Studios before A&M Records and Jim Henson. So it’s a beautiful piece of Hollywood memorabilia.

Our intrepid panel leader, Christina Lane (author of Phantom Lady – the new biography of writer-producer Joan Harrison) kept us connected across the time. Other panel participants included Philana Payton (UCLA) who is researching the memoirs of Eartha Kitt and Vicki Callahan (USC) who covered the career of Mabel Normand. I was happy to highlight the many female screenwriters whose histories were left on the cutting room floor thanks to the unreliable narrators of their work who included directors, film reviewers, and husbands – all who left the female writers out of their own memories.

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New Presentation: “She is Wise and Unafraid”: Writing the 1st Female Doctor and a Diverse Universe for her to Protect, Screenwriting Research Network Conference 2021, Oxford, UK

For this year’s SRN (Screenwriting Research Network) conference – which had to be online due to the continuing pandemic – I presented a short discussion of the chapter I wrote for a new book an old favorite show – Doctor Who.

The book is called Doctor Who New Dawn: Essays on the Jodie Whittaker Era and my chapter is titled “She is Wise and Unafraid,”: Writing the 1st Female Doctor and a Diverse Universe for her to Protect.”

I cover the ways in which I believe executive producer/showrunner Chris Chibnall used the tools of his writing trade to create the first female Doctor in the show’s over 50-year history. Those included casting and costuming, dialogue and diversity. In my opinion, Chibnall made a promise to diversify the show on all levels (not just by changing the gender of the lead character) and by hiring a diverse slate of writers who created stories under his direction I believe he kept that promise.

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15 The Operation of a Writer’s Room Part 2 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

…and she tells a lovely story about one scene in which she had two — this is, of course, about the pre— the days of the Czar — and so you have lovely rich people fencing. Two lovely young men having a fencing match — a practice — and at the end of it they take off their attire and they put on their nice shirts with the lace and they walk away. And the men in her writing room — the Russian men — said “well, the scene is over when we know who won the match,” and she said “No, this is a soap opera. The scene is over when the women see their chests.” So, she was teaching them what you need inside a soap opera. So they wanted a teaching writer’s room and that’s what she was able to provide.

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