Education – Page 17 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

06 Captain Jack Harkness from Why Torchwood Still Matters with Dr. Rosanne Welch, San Diego Who Con 2021 [Video]

I recently presented a talk on Torchwood (Why Torchwood Still Matters) where I highlighted a few ways in which the show (airing from 2006 to 2011) came up with progressive and innovative ideas that are being used by other franchises today.

I always enjoy attending the SD (San Diego) WhoCon because the audiences are so well-informed on the Whoniverse and Whovians love Captain Jack and the crew that made this spinoff program so engaging.

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Transcript:

Of course, he invents Captain Jack who, you know let’s face it, he’s admitted a million times it’s really like his dream boy and then – everybody’s dream boy. Hello. Exactly and how can he not be right but he said – Russell has said several times – which I think is very important what he wanted to show on television were things he wished he’d seen as a child and what he’d never seen was two men be romantic with each other. Not like pornographic sex, romantic right? The fact that they could dance together in public and that was acceptable. Such an amazing – it doesn’t seem like that much but it’s that much right and it was to him because he’s writing from the perspective of the little boy that he once was and what wasn’t he shown. So really impressive to me how much they moved the needle forward in terms of gay representations. Of course, we’re talking about men here not necessarily women yet but you know you open one door, you start opening it a little bit more.

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10 More On A Special Issue on Women Screenwriters from In Conversation with Dr. Rosanne Welch and Intellect Books [Video]

Transcript:

Because I’m in the States I made sure we had an article on a show in Canada because in the States everyone kind of erases Canada just like you know northern states but obviously not right? They have beautiful tv productions and the shows they put out are very multicultural in fact and that’s part of their mandate from the government. Basically, you need to make sure that we’re seeing the whole of Canada. So it was really interesting. It was like okay we got all this – we got probably 120 abstracts – people were very anxious to be in this issue and we could only use eight or nine of them. So I’m really proud of that fact and I think that that’s something that you know if I was well I do teach classes but other people who do I would hope that they would find articles in there that they could use in their class to highlight these female screenwriters from all over. So that’s the goal and then on a regular basis, I edit the book reviews. So I’m always like someone wants to write a book review or they have a new book they want to tell me about I would gladly – I need more information. So that’s our process.

One of the benefits of attending conferences is that you can meet the editors from the companies that have published some of your books face to face. That happened at the recent SCMS conference where I met Intellect editor James Campbell and he invited me to be a guest on his InstagramLive show.

We chatted about my work with the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting, and then my work with co-editor Rose Ferrell on the Journal of Screenwriting’s special issue on Women in Screenwriting (Volume 11, Number 3) that came out recently and which featured articles about an international set of female screenwriters from Syria, Argentina, China and Canada (to name a few).

We even had time to nerd out on our own favorite classic films across the eras which brought up fun memories of Angels with Dirty Faces, Back to the Future, Bonnie and Clyde, and of course, all things Star Wars from the original 3 to The Mandalorian. It’s always so fun to talk to fellow cinephiles.

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With Intellect Books Editor James Campbell (@IntellectBooks)

Speaking with Dr. Rosanne Welch, Author, teacher, and television screenwriter. Today we cover everything from women in screenwriting to our favorite Jimmy Cagney movies and Friends.

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04 Joan Harrison & Jeannie Macpherson 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:

Joan Harrison as we think about Alfred Hitchcock and we’re gonna hear all more about her later. So I won’t go into it but let’s remember that we call them Hitchcock films but they were written by other people. Hitchcock is not a writer all right. she wrote Rebecca which got the academy award nomination and there’s also in the corner here just a little bit on John Michael Hayes who wrote several other Hitchcock films. I really hate the fact that directors get authorship but that’s another story. Look at this picture. Almost everybody can name Cecil B. DeMille whether you recognize him or not. If I say his name you’ve heard it a million times in film history. So you know Jeannie Mcpherson? Jeannie Mcpherson wrote almost all of the films that Cecil B. DeMille made that made money and when they stopped working together his films stopped making money but when he was giving an oral history later in life, she had already died. He said “She was not a good writer. She would bring in wonderful ideas but she could not carry a story all the way through. I carried the story” and his word is the last word we have on her career because she died too young for people to start doing oral histories and by the way she was a pilot too. That’s not from her acting. She was actually a pilot. She was his private pilot.

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05 Russell T Davies from Why Torchwood Still Matters with Dr. Rosanne Welch, San Diego Who Con 2021 [Video]

I always enjoy attending the SD (San Diego) WhoCon because the audiences are so well-informed on the Whoniverse and Whovians love Captain Jack and the crew that made this spinoff program so engaging.

RMW Rosanne Signature for Web

Transcript:

Now we know it was invented by Russell and Russell comes to us from Queer As Folk which was a huge sort of new thing and this starts in the UK before it even comes to the States and the States kind of ruined it. I don’t know if you see the English version it’s much better than the American version. It is trippy. Isn’t it sad? This sadly – I mean please, please, please, I never want an American version of Doctor Who and they’ve talked about it, and then they kind of kibosh it. Yeah, they’ve talked about it. It’s like oh no no no no no but so so we know that his career was built – I mean he starts in soap operas as we know and soap operas get disrespected but in fact some of the most innovative stuff happens on tv first in soap operas and that’s true in the States as well right? There were gay characters for the first time. There were interracial marriages for the first time. These happened on soap operas because only women were watching and they were stay-at-home mommies or wives and so who cares what they’re watching right? Nobody gave it a thought except that’s how then stories seeded into prime time right and we finally grow and like that. So he starts in soaps and he moves into Queer As Folk and then he moves into Doctor Who.

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09 A Special Issue on Women Screenwriters from In Conversation with Dr. Rosanne Welch and Intellect Books [Video]

Transcript:

Now the special issue we just did, I co-edited with Rose Farrell who’s at Edith Cowan University in Australia, and what I love about – we all come from this group called the Screenwriting Research Network, which meets internationally once a year, although not this year because of COVID. We were supposed to be in Oxford and we didn’t get to go but through that, we were just sitting around having a chat one day with the editor Craig Batty and I teased him because there’s always a special issue. There’s an issue on animation. There’s an issue in children’s films. I said why didn’t we ever do an issue on women and he stopped and he went, you could do it if you want. It’s like more work right but you want to see something done. Sometimes you just have to do it yourself. So then I was very smart because I knew how much work it would be and I called Rose and I said Rose do you want to do this with me and she was like oh what a great idea. So we did internationally this work you know going through zoom and going through our email and whatnot but she was the voice that said not only should this be about women but this should be about international women. We have published much about films in the UK and in the United States. What else can we find? So I’m really proud of the fact that you’ll find articles in there – a female writer from Syria – a female writer from Zimbabwe. We’ve got writers from Israel. We’ve got stories from Brazil. Peru. Argentina.

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With Intellect Books Editor James Campbell (@IntellectBooks)

Speaking with Dr. Rosanne Welch, Author, teacher, and television screenwriter. Today we cover everything from women in screenwriting to our favorite Jimmy Cagney movies and Friends.

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03 Teaching the History of Screenwriting from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

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”

03 Teaching the History of Screenwriting from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

Transcript:

I don’t teach the history of film. I teach the history of screenwriting because the history of film equals the history of directors which becomes a history of great men and great men are very unreliable narrators. They just are right? So let’s start with directors. Directors are terrible narrators. Alfred Hitchcock in his biographies has said that he learned everything he knew about making movies from a middle-aged American woman. He did not even name her, all right? He did not even name her which means she disappears in history but she was, in fact, Eve Unsell. Eve Unsell had been discovered by Beatrice DeMille, more than the mother to Cecil B. DeMille. She was, in fact, a screenwriter and a playwright and she helped many women get started in the business. Eve became a writer for Famous Players Laskey. She had her own production company – one of the earliest women to have her own production company – and she was so beloved by Famous Players Laskey – they sent her to England to right the mixed up studio they had started there and while in England she trained this young kid named Alfred what’s his name again. She told him everything she knew about making films and he can’t even remember to put her name in a book about him. That makes me crazy.

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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.

04 Other Interests from Why Torchwood Still Matters with Dr. Rosanne Welch, San Diego Who Con 2021 [Video]

I always enjoy attending the SD (San Diego) WhoCon because the audiences are so well-informed on the Whoniverse and Whovians love Captain Jack and the crew that made this spinoff program so engaging.

RMW Rosanne Signature for Web

Transcript:

One of my other fandoms is The Monkees and I have a whole book on The Monkees and about the fact that when I was a kid watching them as a child I would assume, looking back at it as a grown-up, that like all the women on the show must have been bimbos and cheerleaders and all the boys would hang out with them and when I looked at as an adult I discovered that every single girl they ever dated had a job and she was a girl who took care of herself and I thought, Is that a message that seeped into my brain when I was a kid? That if I wanted to marry a Monkee I had to be a woman of some substance of something. All right, so really I think messages do come to us. So, I think Torchwood had a lot of really good messages.

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08 More On Dorothy Parker and A Star Is Born from In Conversation with Dr. Rosanne Welch and Intellect Books [Video]

Transcript:

So she was writing what she knew, right? So, I think you can look into every version of that movie – and there have been four now – including the most recent, right, and see the ghost of her voice existing because the raw honesty of that experience – of feeling like how can I be with a man who the world was making feel less than me when I feel like we are equals but it’s going to eventually erode this relationship. That’s just really – and there are some lines from the first film – from 1937 – it was remade with Judy Garland in 1954 by Moss Hart who’s a famous Broadway playwright – but he, in his memoirs says that he used a lot of scenes verbatim because they were just so good there was no point to rewrite them. So, it’s wonderful to look for that sort of thing. So, if I was going to write about that movie, I don’t care that George Cukor directed the Judy Garland version. I care what voice – what writer’s voice do I see trace through that.

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With Intellect Books Editor James Campbell (@IntellectBooks)

Speaking with Dr. Rosanne Welch, Author, teacher, and television screenwriter. Today we cover everything from women in screenwriting to our favorite Jimmy Cagney movies and Friends.

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02 How Do We Get Forgotten? from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

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: My teaching philosophy is Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter and we need to pay more attention to them. So we’re back to what I’m originally talking about. How do we get forgotten in the books? Well, this is a lovely example not from screenwriting but from art. When this painting sold – the painting of David And Goliath – it was assumed to belong to Giovanni Francesco but in fact, it belonged to Artemisia and Artemisia Gentileschi is just now coming out as someone that we’re going to learn more about in the art world. So this happens to us all the time – it happens to women all the time.

(technical issues)

She painted that. Artemisia that’s her self-portrait. she painted David and Goliath. We’re doing this in all the different worlds and I think we need to pay attention to how we’re doing it in Hollywood.

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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