On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch
Writing, Film, Television and More!
Presenting “When Women Write Horror” Talk
Cal Poly Pomona University Library
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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —
“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”
I presented this holiday lecture “When Women Write Horror” on Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. Researching the many, many women who have written horror stories – in novels, films and television – brought new names to my attention who I am excited to start reading. I hope you will be, too!
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Months of research when into the creation of the essays in “When Women Wrote Hollywood.” Here are some of the resources used to enlighten today’s film lovers to the female pioneers who helped create it.
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†
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DTLA Film Festival after our panel discussion, Privileged Characters: How to recognize and avoid implicit bias in your screenwriting.
Video of this panel coming soon
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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:
The other thing that’s cool about her — well she’s written many books — but Kindred is my favorite. A little chat about that from last week. She wanted to talk about race and she wanted to figure out a way to do that. So she chose the time-travel story and she took a modern-day African-American woman who without explanation — sort of like Narnia where they stumble into a wardrobe and bam they’re in a kingdom — we don’t need to know the machinations of how the time travel works. We don’t need to put dials in a car and drive the DeLorean down the street. We just walk into a room and oh my god now we’re in pre Civil War south and she’s a woman of African descent and she’s got to deal with now I’m in a place where they’re slaves and now she ends up being on the plantation where her ancestors were held in slavery and she comes up with you know drama. You want the big choice, the big question. She discovers that the way she could get back to her own future is she has to save the life of the plantation owner who owns her family on time for him to rape her great-great grandmother or she won’t exist yeah. There’s there’s a moral decision you gotta make in your lives right? But that’s a really fascinating and of course it allows her to have a discussion about what we don’t talk about in classrooms about the reality of slavery right? So this is a really fascinating book. It’s a one-off book. That’s good. She’s got a lot of you know series books so you can get involved in her writing and be busy for a while. That’s a great book to start with though. So I think Octavia Butler is of good attention for us.
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Its #femalefilmmakerfriday and this week we’re featuring a writer, producer, director who embodies all the values of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting program: Ava DuVernay! (IMDB)
DuVernay is a writer, producer, director and distributor of independent film.
Winner of the Emmy, BAFTA and Peabody Awards, Academy award nominee Ava DuVernay is a writer, director, producer and film distributor. Her directorial work includes the historical drama SELMA, the criminal justice documentary 13TH and Disney’s A WRINKLE IN TIME, which made her the highest grossing black woman director in American box office history. Based on the infamous case of The Central Park Five, her next project is entitled WHEN THEY SEE US and will be released worldwide on Netflix in May 2019. Currently, she is overseeing production on her critically-acclaimed TV series QUEEN SUGAR, her new CBS limited series THE RED LINE and her upcoming OWN series CHERISH THE DAY. Winner of the 2012 Sundance Film Festival’s Best Director Prize for her micro-budget film MIDDLE OF NOWHERE, DuVernay amplifies the work of people of color and women of all kinds through her non-profit film collective ARRAY, named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies. DuVernay sits on the advisory board of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, and chairs the Prada Diversity Council. She is based in Los Angeles, California.
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Applications for the 2020 Class of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting are now OPEN!
Deadline March 2020
Another #mentormonday, another Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting incredible mentor! This week we want to highlight Maria Escobedo (IMDB)!
Maria Escobedo is a film and television writer with credits including Grey’s Anatomy, Hulu’s East Los High and the indie film Rum and Coke, which she wrote and directed. She’s developed movies and pilots for Lifetime, Disney Channel, and Nickelodeon. She also has written for animated kids’ TV, including Dora the Explorer, Go Diego Go, Elena of Avalor, Special Agent Oso and Nina’s World, which earned her a Humanitas Award nomination. Escobedo is currently writing for Amazon’s If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, Netflix’s What-To-Doodles and Nickelodeon’s Santiago of the Seas. She also has developed original pilots for Amazon Kids. Escobedo served as chair of the Latino Writers Committee at the Writers Guild of America West for five years, and teaches writing at University of Southern California and California State University, Los Angeles.
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Highlighting the articles in the latest edition 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
Kurosawa to Kasdan: Storytelling influences
Brett Davies
Lawrence Kasdan is one of the most commercially successful screenwriters of the past forty years. In addition to writing Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and four episodes of the Star Wars saga, Kasdan has gained critical acclaim as the writer-director of seminal 1980s ‘baby-boomer’ films, such as The Big Chill (1983) and The Accidental Tourist (1988). Known for ‘genre-hopping’, it is perhaps Kasdan’s very versatility that has led to a marked lack of academic discourse on his work, as his eclectic canon – including westerns, neo-noir, sci-fi horror, comedy and romantic thriller – makes it problematic for scholars to establish prevalent patterns in his output. This article argues that one influence has remained constant throughout Kasdan’s career: the work of Akira Kurosawa. Examining three screenwriting elements – dialogue, protagonists, themes – the article will demonstrate how Kurosawa’s storytelling style has repeatedly informed Kasdan’s work, from his earliest screenplays (Kasdan said that ‘there’s a lot of Kurosawa in Raiders’) to his most recent, as The Force Awakens (2015) and Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) showed stylistic connections with Kurosawa’s films, beyond those already established by George Lucas’s original Star Wars (1977).
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.
Get your copy and subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting Today!
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After the DTLA Film Festival Panel
Moderating panels at local film festivals is a good way to highlight the great work of mentors like Maria Escobedo and to meet new possible mentors for MFA program like Peruvian filmmaker Donna Bonilla Wheeler. Here we are chatting after a panel on how Writers Can avoid implicit bias in their work at the DTLA film Festival in Los Angeles.
