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

05 Women Writers Matter from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (27 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:

Women writers have always mattered. They certainly matter to me but we do not teach them very often and that’s a choice of the people who put classes together 50, 60, 80 years ago and didn’t mention the women. So I mention them a lot. These are women that you should know. These are women from American film history. There are women in English film history equally important. Hopefully, you’re having that covered in your classes.

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04 Down With The Auteur Theory from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (54 seconds)

Transcript:

Writers. Really. Matter. I think it’s really true The Auteur Theory — and I don’t want to pick on the French — hopefully, there’s no one french in here — I’m picking on you — not my probably looking at your French friend, right — many people are now tearing down the Auteur Theory because it’s ridiculous. The director is not the only person responsible for why a film works. It has always begun with a writer. Yes, it moves to a director but that’s a collaboration and we made a mistake. Some people have written about the fact that in the early days of film critique critics couldn’t go through two or three names of writers so they went to the director’s name because it was the only one person named and slowly that became the idea of who the auteur was right? It’s not true. Vince Gilligan, very famous in America for Breaking Dad. Really considered one of our best showrunners — one of our best television writers — pretty much says it and I agree with him.

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03 Why Writers Matter from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (41 seconds)

Transcript:

Likewise, writers are important. Writer comes before director when people are writer-directors because writers are more important. You cannot direct nothing. You cannot direct some people walking around a room right? Somebody has to say why they’re there and what they’re doing. So writers are very important and women writers — well this is one of my reasons why writers are important too — when you talk to friends about a movie you love, you do not generally say “remember the camera angle in scene five.” You say “remember the dialogue.” You quote dialogue to your friends. That’s the writer. That’s why the writer is more important. That’s why more people should want to be writers.

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

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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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.

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There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American Television]: from Freelancing to Writers Rooms [Video] (52 minutes)

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Rosanne is part of a virtual Bucharest Symposium in Screenwriting and Literature

I spent a lovely and engaging morning in the company of several international screenwriting academics discussing teaching online thanks to being invited to this virtual Bucharest Symposium in Screenwriting and Literature by Tudor Voican, PhD, WallachiaIFF Jury President.

The invitation arrived in my email inbox and almost looked like a fake – until I saw the names of the other participants and knew them to be pretty stellar in their fields. So I said yes. We’ll meet online each Sunday for 3 Sundays to make 20 minute presentations to each other and share our knowledge.

Though I would have loved to actually fly to what Tudor calls “the legendary land of Principe Vlad III Drăculea aka Vlad the Impaler, Voivode of Wallachia” but for now I am outside on the patio using our built-in Zoom background.

Staged review – Michael Sheen and David Tennant get meta via The Guardian

Why are the Brits so much better about creativity in challenging technological times – AND at making fun of themselves? In this short Zoom-filmed set of 15 minute shorts we find Tennant and Sheen (of Good Omens) playing exaggerated versions of themselves as two actors who are forced to rehearse an upcoming play (Pirandello’s “6 Characters in Search of an Author”) on Zoom due to the lockdown. — Rosanne

It is not, overall, a great time to be an actor. Or a director, or a musician, or a writer for the stage or indeed almost anyone involved in the creative arts. The practical effects of the pandemic – and its gross mismanagement – on planned productions (postponed indefinitely), theatre finances (which depend on packed, not socially distanced, houses) and freedom to gather, rehearse, collaborate and generate ideas are already being felt, but their ramifications have hardly begun.

Individual actors have found ways to continue to provide entertainment and add to the cultural conversation (Samuel West, for example, began a series of beautiful and restorative poetry readings requested by followers on his Twitter account, to which more and more actors have added their voices as the weeks have passed), but the brightest chink of light in the darkness so far, and reaching the widest audience, has been offered by the small screen.

Read Staged review – Michael Sheen and David Tennant get meta via The Guardian

Screenwriting Research Network Conference 2020 – Oxford, UK – September 9-12, 2020

Of all the conferences I attend, the Screenwriting Research Network conference has been the most valuable in both information I attain from the many panels – there are always too many to see and too little time to see them. (SMILE) But also from the connections I have made which have brought international guest speakers to my MFA program and new colleagues for me to collaborate with on articles, special issues of our journal – and books! And I have been able to help publish several of the alums of my program as the Book Reviews Editor of our Journal of Screenwriting.

Yes, the conferences are typically held overseas, so travel can be costly, but they have also given my family the excuse to see Dunedin, New Zealand, Porto, Portugal, Milan, Italy and Leeds, England so the money has been well spent.

Most importantly, if you can’t make Oxford 2020 – I hope you mark your calendars for Missouri 2022 (on the beautiful campus of Stephens College).

From the Screenwriting Research Network…

The 13th annual International Conference of the Screenwriting Research Network (SRN 2020) will be hosted by Oxford Brookes University in the UK, on Wednesday 9 through Saturday 12 September.

The Conference is organized by the Film Studies Research Unit with the support of the School of Arts of Oxford Brookes University through Quality-Related (QR) research funding. The main location of the Conference will be at Headington Campus. Oxford is well known for its history, culture and academic tradition.

In order to ensure timely notification of shortlisted delegates and subsequent travel planning, please note the deadline for the submission of all proposals/abstracts by 15 December 2019.
We will keep updating the website with useful information about the conference in the forthcoming months, so keep coming back!

Essential information
Calendar (summary of deadlines)

Submissions of abstracts by: 15 December 2019

Shortlisting/notification of acceptance by: End of January 2020

Early-bird registration: From early March until 31 May 2020

Regular registration by: 15 July 2020

Late registration by: 25 August 2020

Conference: 9-12 September 2020

Submissions via email and contact: info@srn2020.com

Keynotes speakers and special guests to be announced in early 2020

First Screenwriting Research Network Executive Council Meeting

I’m so honored to be a part of this international group of screenwriting academics – who plan by far the best conference I’ve ever attended each year. — Rosanne

First meeting of new Executive Council yesterday – spanning 18 time zones!!! Got the ball rolling for the new academic year and picked up suggestions from last month’s AGM. Minutes to follow soon on the SRN website.

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