Education – Page 54 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

02 Writers Matter from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (1 minute 3 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:

I do teach at Stephens College which is located in Missouri but we teach low-residency so they do everything online but they come to Hollywood — which is where I live — for 10 days twice a year and that’s a lovely thing. It’s at the Jim Henson Studios so there’s Kermit saying hi to you when you come in. Very lovely and very welcoming to see Kermit every morning. I have a teaching philosophy which is pretty simple. Words matter. Writers matter. Women writers matter. Thank you very much. Yes Indeed. We haven’t thought about women a lot over the years and I do. One of the things I think we need to think about — this is a Facebook post that I saw the other day and – how words can be misused. So I don’t want to get too political on you. I’m coming from a place where there’s a lot of politics going on, as you can imagine, but think about how these words were misused right? Take a little second. Your brain will wrap around the mistake in these words. Think about it you could have written that a different way but they had an opinion they wanted to put out, right, so words are important.

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The Civil War On Film – 10 in a series – …Thomas Ince’s films cemented the Plantation Myth.

While D. W. Griffith is the most famous early Civil War filmmaker, Thomas Ince’s films cemented the Plantation Myth. Unlike Griffith, Ince had his family roots in New England, though he fell under the pro-southern spell early in his filmmaking career.

Movies profiled in this book:

Panel Discussion: Act Two: Transitioning to TV Writing from Other Careers – Wed, January 13, 2021 – 4pm PST – RSVP Today!

I’m proud to announce the next panel I’m moderating with the Writers Guild Foundation for our Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting — Act Two: Transitioning to TV Writing from Other Careers

The WGF may have hit a pause on our live events, but thanks to technology, we’re aiming to provide more access to advice and knowledge from film and TV writers while we’re all social distancing. Over the last few months, we’ve been hosting free Zoom panels about craft and all things relevant to writers.

For this session, we team up with Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting for a discussion on transitioning to TV writing from other careers. Learn how our panel of TV writers and producers made the jump to television, how their previous experiences inform their writing, and how that lens impacts their approach in the writers room.

Panelists:

Zoanne Clack, M.D., MPH – Executive Producer, Grey’s Anatomy. Former career: Emergency room physician
Rashaan Dozier-Escalante – Staff Writer, SEAL Team. Former career: Senior Physical Security Analyst for federal agencies, U.S. Army Reserve veteran
Calaya Michelle Stallworth, Ph.D – Executive Story Editor, Fear of the Walking Dead. Former career: English professor at Spelman College, publishing
Moderated by Dr. Rosanne Welch, Director of Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting.

Panel starts at 4:00pm Pacific time.

Space is limited so RSVP now. After signing up, you’ll receive information on how to access the Zoom panel.

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us at events@wgfoundation.org.

For anyone who was unable to RSVP for the panel, we will record and post it at a later date.

40 The Almighty Johnsons from New Zealand from Why Researching Screenwriters Has Always Mattered [Video] (1 minute 12 seconds)

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Transcript:

This is actually a program from New Zealand. Who knew New Zealand made television, but I have my students write spec scripts — speculative scripts — which are their own versions of a show that already exists to teach the art of copying, because if you’re going to write television you have to copy what exists and then you make your own story, but you have to know how the characters sound. So, I have them pitch ideas from programs they are watching, but they have to write a United States show because that’s what the people are going to read in the United States. This young man pitched an episode of this show because he saw it on Netflix and he didn’t even realize it wasn’t from the United States. he didn’t even notice that they were using city names from New — he didn’t know what New Zealand was really, but the TV showed him and I stay that we learn the mythology of other cultures. This is a show about Norse mythology. the young boys on the program discover that they are the re-born versions of Norse gods and their goal is to get together with the other Norse gods and eventually go back to heaven together and rule the world. It’s adorable and I wouldn’t have heard about it except for Netflix.

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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.

* 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!
† Available from the LA Public Library

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Where’s Her Movie? Astronomer, Margaret Harwood – 4 in a series

“Where’s HER Movie” posts will highlight interesting and accomplished women from a variety of professional backgrounds who deserve to have movies written about them as much as all the male scientists, authors, performers, and geniuses have had written about them across the over 100 years of film. This is our attempt to help write these women back into mainstream history. — Rosanne

Observatory Photo By Versageek – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

from Wikipedia…

After graduating college, she worked at the Harvard Observatory and taught in private schools in the Boston area. In 1912, an astronomical fellowship was created for women to work at Maria Mitchell Observatory; Harwood was the first recipient of the fellowship, receiving $1,000.[2][3] In 1916, at 30 years old, Harwood was named director of Mitchell Observatory, and worked there from 1916 until her retirement in 1957.[2] Her specialty, photometry, involved measuring variation in the light of stars and asteroids, particularly that of the small planet Eros. A member of the American Astronomical Society and Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society, she traveled widely in Europe and the United States. She was the first woman to gain access to the Mount Wilson Observatory, the world’s largest observatory at the time.[4]

In 1917, she discovered the asteroid 886 Washingtonia four days before its formal recognition by George Peters.[5] At the time, “senior people around her advised her not to report it as a new discovery because it was inappropriate that a woman should be thrust into the limelight with such a claim”.[6][7] However, Harwood did send her photographs of her discovery to Peters for him to include in his study of the asteroid’s orbit.[6] In 1960, an asteroid discovered at Palomar, was named in her honor, 7040 Harwood.[6][3]

01 Introduction from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American Television]: from Freelancing to Writers Rooms [Video] (1 minute)

Transcript:

As Paolo said — so I won’t spend a lot of time on it — these are the shows –these are the books I’ve done. Sorry. Largely a big Doctor Who fan. Any Doctor Who fans in the house. Really we’ll talk a little bit about the writing of that. It’s quite a brilliant show, I think. These are most of the things I’ve done. Also, love Torchwood has also been quite well done. I am the book review editor, so if you’re Masters students — when you graduate — you can email me, and if there’s a book you’d like to have for free — because they don’t pay you to write in journals — you can review the book and I’ll have it sent to you so you can do that and it’s a credit for you so it’s a lovely thing and Written By Magazine is the magazine of the Writers Guild. You can read this online for free if you go to writtenby.com. You go to WGA, which is our website for the Writer’s Guild, and every two months or so it comes out. Always interviews with writers and showrunners, movie film writers, people like that, so it’s really I think an excellent thing it’s like having a guest speaker come to you and very in-depth interviews, right? We’ll talk about some of them that I’ve done over time.

Watch this entire presentation

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

* 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!
† Available from the LA Public Library

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Join our low-residency MFA in TV and Screenwriting at the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting — Apply Now

Join our low-residency MFA in TV and Screenwriting to share in our mission of bringing more female and underrepresented voices into mainstream media.

Apply Now

The Civil War On Film – 9 in a series – The earliest films were pro-Union…

Between 1908 and 1910 filmmakers released seventy Civil War films, and another hundred by 1916. The earliest films were pro-Union, or at least featured a Union victory, but in 1909 southern theater owners began to complain about Northern bias. Filmmakers saw a market for pro-southern movies.

Movies profiled in this book:

Where’s Her Movie? Painter, Artemisia Gentileschi – 3 in a series

An Italian Baroque painter, Gentileschi began her careet at the age of 15, gained an international clientele, and was the first woman to become a member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence (in the 1620s).

She is now considered one of the most accomplished seventeenth-century artists.

A Woman Wrote That – 5 in a series – Sense and Sensibility by Emma Thompson (1995)

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

COLONEL BRANDON: “Give me an occupation, Miss Dashwood, or I shall run mad.”

Sense and Sensibility Script

Sense and Sensibility on IMDB
Emma Thompson on Wikipedia and IMDB
Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting