Education – Page 138 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

11 Gidget On Television from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto [Video] (0:58) – Dr. Rosanne Welch – SRN Conference 2017

Transcript:

So then we come to the television show, which stars Sally Field. This was her first major job. She’d never done a film or anything large before, so she is the active character in every episode which is the thing that we do in television so maybe that helped Ruth bring the story back to being about Gidget’s decisions. I don’t know, but I am sure that contributed to it and later in her career Flippen is going to write these other “plucky” women. That Girl being the first single woman on television to live without her parents and have a career. We always think about Mary Tyler Moore who did that but it was That Girl who did it first and her career was acting so that wasn’t taken quite seriously but she lived on her own. She supported herself, right? And Bewitched who, of course, had the power of magic and always ended up saving the day for her husband and I would say maybe see the Brady girls had some power in their lives — they brought Davy Jones into their world, so that’s a big deal. So I think it’s interesting that she always wrote female characters that are well remembered.

At this year’s 10th Annual Screenwriting Research Network Conference at Otago University in Dunedin, New Zealand I presented…

“How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto by Accident (and How We Can Get Her Out of it): Demoting Gidget: The Little Girl with Big Ideas from Edgy Coming of Age Novel to Babe on the Beach Genre Film via Choices made in the Adaptation Process.”

It’ a long title, as I joke up front, but covers the process of adapting the true life story of Kathy Kohner (nicknamed ‘Gidget’ by the group of male surfers who she spent the summers with in Malibu in the 1950s) into the film and television series that are better remembered than the novel. The novel had been well-received upon publication, even compared to A Catcher in the Rye, but has mistakenly been relegated to the ‘girl ghetto’ of films. Some of the adaptations turned the focus away from the coming of age story of a young woman who gained respect for her talent at a male craft – surfing – and instead turned the focus far too much on Kathy being boy crazy.

Along the way I found interesting comparisons between how female writers treated the main character while adapting the novel and how male writers treated the character.

Gidget

Dr. Rosanne Welch

Dr. Rosanne Welch teaches the History of Screenwriting and One-Hour Drama for the Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting.

Writing/producing credits include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, ABCNEWS: Nightline and Touched by an Angel. In 2016 she published the book Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop; co-edited Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia; and placed “Transmitting Culture Transnationally Via the Characterization of Parents in Police Procedurals” in the New Review of Film and Television Studies. Essays appear in Torchwood Declassified: Investigating Mainstream Cult Television and Doctor Who and Race: An Anthology. Welch serves as Book Reviews editor for Journal of Screenwriting and on the Editorial Advisory Board for Written By magazine, the magazine of the Writers Guild.

Watch Dr. Welch’s talk “The Importance of Having a Female Voice in the Room” at the 2016 TEDxCPP.

The Screenwriting Research Network is a research group consisting of scholars, reflective practitioners and practice-based researchers interested in research on screenwriting. The aim is to rethink the screenplay in relation to its histories, theories, values and creative practices.

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01 Generation and Regeneration from Gender Diversity in the Who-niverse with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1:01)

Watch this entire presentation: Gender Diversity in the Who-niverse: Paving the Way for a Lady Doctor with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (36:58)

For her 5th Doctor Who lecture to the CPP community, Dr. Rosanne Welch discusses how society – and the show’s writing staff – prepared the audience for a major change in this 50-year franchise – the creation of the first Lady Doctor!

Transcript:

Whether you know new Who or old Who we’re going to talk about a kind of a combination of both of them and looking particularly at how gender has been portrayed and what I think works on the show and why the show has lasted so long. we all know it started in 1963 and so it survived because, if you don’t know Doctor Who, I imagine you do, but if you don’t writers invented the act of regeneration which was a brilliant idea because in the first few years their lead actor got sick and the whole show was going to have to be cancelled and the writers didn’t want to lose their jobs so they smartly sat around the room and said “How can we save this?” and suddenly somebody — and they don’t remember who it was now — said, “Hey, our lead character’s an alien. How about when he dies he doesn’t really die. He just regenerates into another body and then we can hire another actor and we can all keep our jobs?” and the network was agreeable to that and they did it and of course, as we know, they’ve done it and done it and done it over the years.

Follow Dr. Welch on Twitter and Instagram
https://twitter.com/rosannewelch – http://instagram.com/drrosannewelch

Dr. Rosanne Welch

Dr. Rosanne Welch teaches the History of Screenwriting and One-Hour Drama for the Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting.

Watch Dr. Welch’s talk “The Importance of Having a Female Voice in the Room” at the 2016 TEDxCPP.

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10 Gidget Grows Up from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto [Video] (0:44) – Dr. Rosanne Welch – SRN Conference

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Transcript:

This one was written largely by Gabrielle Upton and we have the Gidget who needs help and has to ask and is always worried about things and she cries which is always the thing that girls go to when they have to be dramatic. When we get over to this one, which is co-written with Katherine and Dale Eunson again she’s in college. Suddenly her vocabulary has popped up. the woman knew three-syllable words that she used with her friends as a normal and casual as you could be. She quotes Shakespeare and Dante’s Inferno because her father is a professor of literature so that’s the culture of her home, which is actually true and she is very proud of her independence in that film. So as Ruth Brooks Flippen gets ahold of the character, she starts to mold her back into who she was in her original book.

At this year’s 10th Annual Screenwriting Research Network Conference at Otago University in Dunedin, New Zealand I presented…

Along the way I found interesting comparisons between how female writers treated the main character while adapting the novel and how male writers treated the character.

Gidget

Dr. Rosanne Welch

Dr. Rosanne Welch teaches the History of Screenwriting and One-Hour Drama for the Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting.

Watch Dr. Welch’s talk “The Importance of Having a Female Voice in the Room” at the 2016 TEDxCPP.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Gender Diversity in the Who-niverse: Paving the Way for a Lady Doctor with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (36:58)

Follow Dr. Welch on Twitter and Instagram
https://twitter.com/rosannewelch – http://instagram.com/drrosannewelch

Dr. Rosanne Welch

Dr. Rosanne Welch teaches the History of Screenwriting and One-Hour Drama for the Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting.

Watch Dr. Welch’s talk “The Importance of Having a Female Voice in the Room” at the 2016 TEDxCPP.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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09 Writers and Story on the Gidget Movies from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto [Video] (0:55) – Dr. Rosanne Welch – SRN Conference

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Transcript:

I also noticed when watching all the movies — first of all, the girl playing Gidget changed in every film. So it wasn’t even like we cared that she had to be the same woman. She was just this image and the boy stays the same. James Darrin plays Moondoggie in all three of these films. So it turns out to be a trilogy about the life of a boy who surfs and has an everchanging girlfriend with the same name. This is not at all what I expected to find when I came to this and he sings music. So then we get Ruth Brooks Flippen who shows up and Ruth, she writes a bit of Gidget Goes Hawaiian and she does Gidget Goes to Rome. The second one is kind of silly and dumb. I’m hoping that means the studio had choices about what got done and when it was successful enough she had more of her own power in the third sequel where suddenly Gidget’s in college. She reads books again, just like the actual first book and she makes more interesting decisions.

At this year’s 10th Annual Screenwriting Research Network Conference at Otago University in Dunedin, New Zealand I presented…

Along the way I found interesting comparisons between how female writers treated the main character while adapting the novel and how male writers treated the character.

Gidget

Dr. Rosanne Welch

Dr. Rosanne Welch teaches the History of Screenwriting and One-Hour Drama for the Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting.

Watch Dr. Welch’s talk “The Importance of Having a Female Voice in the Room” at the 2016 TEDxCPP.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Reading, Writing and Resources from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

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Reading, Writing and Resources from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

A recording of my presentation at this year’s University Film and Video Association (UFVA) 2017 conference.

Transcript:

That’s NOT all folks. In my classes I make them read books — so they review books that are about writing and there are a ton of them, but I make these pretty little pictures because they’re fun. I love Doctor Who. I’ve done a lot of stuff on Doctor Who. This is a great book. Basically, a journalist (Benjamin Cook) connected with Russell T Davies who was producing the first five years of the remake — first seven years — and he said, “Can I email you anytime you have — and just say ‘What are you thinking about? and you just give me a quick answer'” So it’s a series of email, which makes it easy for kids to read even though it’s a very thick book and he will say things like “Well, today I had the idea, what if water was like acid and it killed people?”and about 5 pages later — ‘I wonder if it’s the water on another planet, like Mars?”and 2 chapters later he has written an entire script called ‘The Waters of Mars” and there’s a copy of the script and you can see the genesis from the idea all the way through and then he discusses production, because he was the executive producer. He’ll talk about “I got this guest star. Oh no, she pulled out. I need to rewrite the character to suit this person.” It gives you a real understanding of what the job is to be a writer in television. Obviously, John Gregory Dunne. All those guys, but I think they should always read one book and find many of them tell me they haven’t read a book in a long time and/or this is the longest book I’ve ever read, but they generally tend to like them if you force them to do it. I think that is a good assignment and I also make them write a paper on one famous screenwriter from any of the eras I talk about. I don’t just do silents. I start with them but of course, I move through the modern day so they pick someone and again I put up the encyclopedia because I think all university libraries should have a copy of it. It’s put out by a friend of mine. So I think that’s a really cool thing. It always brings me back to, it’s all about remembering the ladies. We need to teach as much of that as possible and get past all the stuff that hasn’t been settled years ago and that’s why Ido what I do.

Books Mentioned In This Presentation

Follow Dr. Rosanne Welch

Twitter: https://twitter.com/rosannewelch
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drrosannewelch/

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Kate Fuglei and Dr. Rosanne Welch – The Mentoris Project Book Launch Party And Reading

Kate Fuglei and Dr. Rosanne Welch

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The Mentoris Project Book Launch Party And Reading With Dr. Rosanne Welch

I was deeply honored to be asked to read a section of my novel America’s Forgotten Founding Father (on the life of Filippo Mazzei) at the launch party for the entire Mentoris Book Project, which includes over 30 books about famous Italians and Italian Americans. At the Italian Cultural Institute in Westwood over a hundred family and friends gathered to celebrate this new publishing venture created by Robert Barbera under the umbrella of his Barbera Foundation. The evening also offered the chance to meet the director of the Italian Cultural Institute, Valeria Rumori and her cultural attache, Leonilde Callocchia.

A selection of Mentoris Project Books Now Available

See a complete collection of Mentoris Project Books

08 More on comparing The Book To The Movies from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto – Dr. Rosanne Welch – SRN Conference

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Transcript:

In the book, she makes all the decisions about her own life as I said, including whether or not to have sex with a really cute surfer. In the movie, her boyfriend makes all the decisions about whether or not they’ll be together and I didn’t even think about that until I watched all the sequels and I kept waiting and it was always him breaking up with her and her waiting for him to come back to her. I thought Oh this is just a disaster and sad and scary in many ways. This really struck me, too. In the book, this is her conclusion. Her definition of who she is. “The summer with Jeff could have been just a dream, but with the board and the sun and the waves it was for real. Maybe I was just a woman in love with a surfboard. It’s a simple as that.” That’s literally the thesis of her own book. In the movie, it was getting pinned by her boyfriend which was the absolute ultimate moment in her life. I mean you can’t water it down any more than that. It fascinates me and yet this is mythology that is known about Gidget and it’s not her true story at all — which really makes me sad.

At this year’s 10th Annual Screenwriting Research Network Conference at Otago University in Dunedin, New Zealand I presented…

Along the way I found interesting comparisons between how female writers treated the main character while adapting the novel and how male writers treated the character.

Gidget

Dr. Rosanne Welch

Dr. Rosanne Welch teaches the History of Screenwriting and One-Hour Drama for the Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting.

Watch Dr. Welch’s talk “The Importance of Having a Female Voice in the Room” at the 2016 TEDxCPP.

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Encyclopedia of Women in American History named to the 2018 Outstanding References Sources List by Reference and User Services Association (RUSA), a division of the American Library Association

More great news for our ABC-CLIO Encyclopedia on Women in American History — Rosanne

Encyclopedia of Women in American History named to the 2018 Outstanding References Sources List by Reference and User Services Association (RUSA), a division of the American Library Association

Encyclopedia of Women in American History, edited by Dr. Rosanne Welch and Dr. Peg Lamphier, has been named to the 2018 Outstanding References Sources List, an annual list selected by experts of the Collection Development and Evaluation Section (CODES) of the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA), a division of the American Library Association.

The Outstanding Reference Sources Committee was established in 1958 to recommend the most outstanding reference publications published the previous year for small and medium-sized public and academic libraries. The selected titles are valuable reference resources and are highly recommended for inclusion in any library’s reference collections.

Find it on Amazon.com

Dr. Rosanne Welch and Dr. Peg Lamphier

Representation Matters from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

Watch this entire presentation

Representation Matters from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

A recording of my presentation at this year’s University Film and Video Association (UFVA) 2017 conference.

Transcript:

So I think it’s really important to give voice to these women through teaching this. Representation matters. This is one of my favorite Facebook memes going around right now. For children of today, this is a huge deal, right? When I was a kid Luke was the Jedi. We didn’t know until a later movie that Leia could be and she never got to be. Like, wait a minute. Why isn’t she as good as him? Why didn’t Obi-Wan find her? So, it’s important for kids to see that and finally, I like to teach silent films because I always tell them, as academics. or as writers, we’re standing on the shoulders of the people came before us. We need to credit them with being in the world first and giving us the foundation to build upon. That’s important to me.

Books Mentioned In This Presentation

Follow Dr. Rosanne Welch

Twitter: https://twitter.com/rosannewelch
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drrosannewelch/

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