Education – Page 83 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V10 Issue 1: Colonizing, decolonizing: Bad-faith liberalism and African space colonialism in Doris Lessing’s screenplay The White Princess By James Arnett

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

Colonizing, decolonizing: Bad-faith liberalism and African space colonialism in Doris Lessing’s screenplay The White Princess
By James Arnett

Although Doris Lessing frequently wrote about Africa over the course of her career, and her relationship to colonialism is undeniably critical, changing theoretical paradigms have complicated readings of her anticolonial critique. From a treasure trove of unpublished African material contained in her papers at the Harry Ransom Center Archives at the University of Texas, this article looks at one of her unpublished screenplays, The White Princess, as a complex and fraught attempt to generate an ethos of decolonization well in advance of its contemporary, post-postcolonial preeminence in twenty-first-century theoretical discourse. Lessing’s positing of a speculative future African recolonization of Britain would have emerged into a smattering of British speculative fictions of the late 1960s and 1970s that likewise imagined African colonialism, but did so, this article argues, hampered by a bad-faith liberalism. Despite the subversive potential of exploring inverted colonial dynamics, this article argues that Lessing ultimately cannot break free of generic conventions, political and theoretical limitations, or colonial discursive structures to achieve real decolonization work in The White Princess – although she may succeed elsewhere in her oeuvre.

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.

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31 Characters: Nyota Uhura, Star Trek from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 20 seconds)

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The Sisterhood of Science Fiction: A Walk Through Some Writers and Characters You (Should) Know And Love

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This one allowed me to riff on some of my favorite female science fiction writers across time, whether they be novelists or television writers. It also opened up a good conversation on what art we support and include in our lives – and what that art says to us and about us. — Rosanne

Transcript:

In terms of characters that we need to pay some attention to, if you don’t know the original Star Trek you should but you’ve seen some of these characters and memes all over the internet right? Nyota Uhura. It was a big deal. They’re putting an African-American woman in the future. Now there was some chit chat about the sexism going on because she was just answering the phone. She’s running the radio on the ship but she’s still on the ship on the main place and she often was involved in stories, but what’s really important about her character and why these two are connected in these pictures is that after the first season on the show, she was kind of like “I’m just answering the damn phone like I don’t really feel like I’m empowered very much I don’t really want to do this show anymore” and she was a big band singer, she could go back out on the road , sing, tour America, make money. I don’t need to do this cheesy science fiction show and then she met him at some event– I forget — some fundraising event and she said she kind of apologized for kind of how stupid her role was in the show and told him she was quitting so she’s proud of I want you to know I’m not gonna do this anymore and he was like “Oh no no no no. You have to stay. You are the only African-American who is seen in the future. You do not understand the power of little children looking up and saying okay we survive. She made it. I’ll make it. This is a big, big deal.

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Krista Dyson, Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting Alumni, wins Buffy for Best Documentary at the 2019 Tampa Bay Underground Film Festival

Congratulations Krista Dyson (Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting Class of 2018), co-producer on “When All That’s Left Is Love” which won the Buffy for Best Documentary at the 2019 Tampa Bay Underground Film Festival.

This feature-length documentary goes behind closed doors with Alzheimer’s caregivers. Dyson worked on the film while she was completing the MFA program.

“I feel like I earned two MFAs, between the writing program and the work I did on this project… Our goal was to allow the audience to truly understand what a complex and difficult situation exists for caregivers.”

Stephens College MFA Alums are Active Achievers!

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New Essay Published: The Twenty-First-Century Western: New Riders of the Cinematic Stage

Once again I’m happy to have co-written a chapter with editor Doug Brode. — Westward Ho! The Women!: Frontier Females in Postfeminist Films

Our first was collaboration came in The American Civil War on Film and TV: Blue and Gray in Black and White and Color – this one gave me a chance to analyze female characters in westerns produced after 2000.

Sadly, you’d think their new-ness would have made for more interesting, nuanced female characters but, as I say in the chapter, the most well-rounded, honest and real representations of females in westerns in the (supposedly) 21st century came from one of the youngest characters (Mattie Ross in True Grit) and from one of the animated characters, who is not even a female human, but a female lizard (Beans in Rango). And once again, as I am finding more and more, whether the screenwriter was female or male often made a difference.

Focusing on twenty-first century Western films, including all major releases since the turn of the century, the essays in this volume cover a broad range of aesthetic and thematic aspects explored in these films, including gender and race. As diverse contributors focus on the individual subgenres of the traditional Western (the gunfighter, the Cavalry vs. Native American conflict, the role of women in Westerns, etc.), they share an understanding of the twenty-first century Western may be understood as a genre in itself. They argue that the films discussed here reimagine certain aspects of the more conventional Western and often reverse the ideology contained within them while employing certain forms and clichés that have become synonymous internationally with Westerns. The result is a contemporary sensibility that might be referred to as the postmodern Western.

Drs. Rosanne Welch and Sarah Clark discuss “Monkees in a Ghost Town” on the Zilch Podcast’s Monkees 101 Series [Audio]

As you know I always LOVE talking television so when fellow Dr. Sarah Clark of Zilch Nation asked me a while back if I’d like to cohost an ongoing segment of Zilch where we analyze each of the 58 episodes of The Monkees — I jumped at the chance.

Even though I did a lot of this work in the book – I couldn’t cover all the episodes so this segment allows us to take one at a time and do our own critical studies and popular culture coverage.

Check out the current segment on the episode “Monkees in a Ghost Town” with all his homage to “Of Mice and Men”

Zilch! The Year in Review, Monkees News with Tim Powers & Christine Wolfe then “Monkees 101” does “Monkees in a Ghost Town” episode 7 of the series. See you next year!

Originally aired 12/20/19

We were born to love one another.

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Want to learn more about The Monkees? Buy Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture

A hit television show about a fictitious rock band, The Monkees (1966-1968) earned two Emmys–Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Directorial Acheivement in Comedy.

Capitalizing on the show’s success, the actual band formed by the actors, at their peak, sold more albums than The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined, and set the stage for other musical TV characters from The Partridge Family to Hannah Montana. In the late 1980s, the Monkees began a series of reunion tours that continued into their 50th anniversary.

This book tells the story of The Monkees and how the show changed television, introducing a new generation to the fourth-wall-breaking slapstick created by Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers.

Its creators contributed to the innovative film and television of 1970s with projects like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laugh-In and Welcome Back, Kotter. Immense profits from the show, its music and its merchandising funded the producers’ move into films such as Head, Easy Riderand Five Easy Pieces.

McFarland (Direct from Publisher) | Amazon | Kindle Edition | Nook Edition

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30 More On Jane Espenson from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (58 seconds)

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The Sisterhood of Science Fiction: A Walk Through Some Writers and Characters You (Should) Know And Love

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Transcript:

Likewise, she wrote many Buffy’s but one of the best is an episode called Earshot and Buffy’s all streaming for free on Facebook right now so you can watch. (Audience: I grew up watching that.) I Iove Buffy, I know. It’s really brilliantly written show. Earshot was a brilliant episode about Buffy who is the Vampire Slayer being cursed with the ability to hear what everyone is thinking — so mental telepathy and the problem is the cacophony in your head starts to make you crazy because if you can hear what everyone was thinking you couldn’t think your own thoughts and along the way — she’s in high school — she hears someone say “It doesn’t matter tomorrow by noon they’ll all be dead.” So now she knows she’s in a school with a shooter but who is it because she can’t pinpoint where the voice came from. So the whole episode is about trying to find the kid and of course, you trace the kid who looks the most bullied and seems to be the most stereotypically that kid. I’m not going to tell you you did it but — spoiler alert — it ain’t that kid right? So it’s really again excellently written episode using all the tropes of the era so Jane Espenson a pretty important writer.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V10 Issue 1: Creative resistance tactics in the work of English Canadian screenwriters by Kerry McArthur

Creative resistance tactics in the work of English Canadian screenwriters by Kerry McArthur

This article analyses how eight successful English Canadian screenwriters negotiate various norms of screenwriting practice, in particular the criteria for three-act structure, character development and closure as advocated by Hollywood. The writers discuss their interpretations of what they consider essential narrative elements in screenplay projects, while dismissing other edicts of the screenwriting industry. Analysis of interview transcripts reveals that most of these writers take their inspiration from their own experience of screenwriting and their interpretations of other screenplays and historic texts on narrative rather than from contemporary screenwriting textbooks. The focus for almost all of these screenwriters is on writing screen stories in original ways, rather than adopting standardized narrative directives, even when elements of these directives have their uses.

Get your copy and subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting Today!

Join me at the Screenwriting Research Network’s Annual Conference in Oxford, UK

* 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!

#MentorMonday 8 – Dawn Comer Jefferson – Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

Dawn Comer Jefferson is our Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting #mentormonday spotlight this week!

Dawn is an Emmy-nominated, award-winning writer. On television, Comer Jefferson wrote on the CBS family drama Judging Amy, served as writer/consulting producer on MTV’s teen drama, South of Nowhere, freelanced on the CBS hit NCIS, and developed a drama pilot at NBC Universal Studios. She was nominated for an Emmy for writing the Fox-animated family film, Our Friend, Martin, and for the last nine years has written Emmy-winning arts programming for PBS, performed at the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

As a non-fiction writer, Comer Jefferson has written about children, families and public policy issues for national print and online media including Garnet News, Working Mother, Fit Pregnancy Magazine and MomsRising, and her essays have been featured in the anthologies A Woman Alone (Seal Press) and Go Girl (Eighth Mountain Press). She adapted, produced and directed the eight-part NPR radio series adaptation of the biography Maggie’s American Dream, co-wrote the nonfiction book Three Ring Circus: How Real Couples Balance Marriage, Work, and Family, and the African American historical children’s fiction, The Promise.

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29 Jane Espenson from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 15 seconds)

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The Sisterhood of Science Fiction: A Walk Through Some Writers and Characters You (Should) Know And Love

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Transcript:

This lady I love. Jane Espenson. She got her start in Star Trek. Many women writers in television were first given a script on some version of Star Trek whether it was Deep Space 9 or The Next Generation. She’s been around a long time. She also worked on Buffy which is one of my favorite shows which is really particularly well-written. She created Warehouse 13 which I thought was an adorable show and a great interesting premise about all the objects in the world that were alien objects and when they passed through history they were hidden in a big warehouse. If they got stolen, people could take the powers of early people because they were inside the object. So, you know, Marilyn Monroe’s hairbrush made you sexy because it turned you into a platinum blonde and we couldn’t put that out in the world because there’d be way too much of that going on. Really cute interesting stuff. Of course, she also wrote the Battlestar Galactica. She wrote one of the best episodes of Once Upon A Time. It was called Red-Handed and it has to do with the real story of Red Riding Hood and werewolves and how those two stories converge and it’s just so brilliantly and it uses our biases about gender and power against us to not predict where it’s going. So it’s a really lovely interesting piece of writing. I think is in the third season.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V10 Issue 1: An insider perspective on the script in practice by Vincenzo Giarrusso

An insider perspective on the script in practice by Vincenzo Giarrusso

The machinations of industry, the exigencies of film funding and the producer’s prominent role in setting fiscal and marketing objectives for film production seem incongruous with scriptwriting as a generative creative practice in the filmmaking process. This article presents a case study that investigates the agency of creative practice from the insider perspective of a scriptwriter. In mobilizing the concept of the boundary object, the case links the problematic and transitional status of the script – as it passes out of the hands of the writer – to other roles under the control of filmmaking practitioners. In combining a practice-based reflexive narrative with theoretical observations, the article explores the processes and imperatives that mediate the script and scriptwriting as an embodied experience for the scriptwriter.

Get your copy and subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting Today!

Join me at the Screenwriting Research Network’s Annual Conference in Oxford, UK

* 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!