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

41 It Never Hurts to Ask from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video]

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:

…and to their credit, everybody in the room is kind of like “Oh duh yeah, why didn’t we think of that. Okay,” but a production problem. Della Reese was actually a minister in a church in Los Angeles and we filmed this in Utah. So she was given every Friday to fly back to LA to run her church for the weekend and then she’d come back Monday morning. So she didn’t work a day and a half of every week and so she couldn’t be in as many scenes as Roma Downey could. So immediately the supervising producer who’s in charge of scheduling shot that down and said “No we can’t do it,” and I thought damn, make me mad. I’m going to have to call my friend and say You’re going to hate this episode. Don’t watch it.” right and then I said “What if we asked Della if this particular week she would work a couple of extra days for the chance to play this character instead of that character” and they’re like “It can’t hurt to ask,” and you know to not play a maid she gave us another couple of extra days. So it was a move in the right direction right that had to be brought up. You have to think about it. Then you have to talk people into it. Persuasive speech is a good class to take if you want to be a writer in a writer’s room.

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40 Breaking Stereotypes from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video]

Transcript:

So, this other episode — it’s called Smokescreen — had to do with an African-American executive at a tobacco company who of course has to deal with the fact that he’s selling a product and kills people. There was going to be a lawsuit and originally — we have two angels — one was Roma Downey — who comes from Ireland — an Irish woman and one was Della Reese, a famous jazz singer who’s a woman of color. We always made the angels real people in people’s lives and that’s how they got to talk to you and try to — they never told you they were angels till the very end when everything would you know they could get you to change your mind — so the very first thing because people fall back on stereotypes all the time. It is far too easy to go to the stereotype and you have to learn to go beyond it. So they’re going to make Roma Downey the lawyer — the guest lawyer — and Della Reese the guest maid in this family and one of my best friends — this is a terrible phrase from Seinfeld happens to be African-American right. She’s not my only African-American friend but my best friend and I knew she would cringe if Della Reese played a maid. So I raised my little hand and I said wouldn’t it be cool if Della was the lawyer and Roma was the maid.

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39 Even More On Working Well With Others from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video]

Transcript:

Where am I going to find a piece of wood on Christmas Eve that only an angel can deliver that I can’t throw in the trash?

Audience: Christmas tree?

Rosanne: Close. That was the first thought. Christmas tree. Christmas tree is not spiritual. It’s not connected to the Christmas story.

Audience: Cross.

Rosanne: Cross is close but that’s Easter — that’s Easter but you’re close. What involves wood and Jesus and Mary and Joseph?

Audience: The Manger?

Rosanne: Thank you! So I got the idea while I was sitting around the table with everybody but I knew this guy didn’t like to be one-upped and I didn’t want him on my bad side because he helped sign my contract later right, but I got to get this idea out there but I can’t pretend to be smarter than him because that will not make him happy. So I sit there at a table of like 10 people and I got the idea and I thought well luckily I’m a pretty loud person. I’m considered Italian where I come from but clearly not here because my grandparents are from Sicily. So all of a sudden I just went — Uh!

Not the whole table but the guy sitting next to me went what and that’s all I needed was someone to ask me what I was thinking right? I was like oh I just I’ve been thinking about this problem and I had this idea but I don’t know if you’ll like it… Oh, what’s your idea? Well, what if the wood came from the manger and like four people around the table went oh yes and the guy who wrote the story was about to say no. I could see his face but when his colleagues all went yes. he was like oh yeah that’s a great idea. We should — okay that’s what we’ll do. So I wasn’t one-upping him. I was just accidentally having a moment and it allowed me to get my idea out. Now that sounds ridiculous but I got what I wanted out of it right? So you have to learn to read the room. How is it operating? Who are your — who are your allies in the room?

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Stephens College and Writers Guild Foundation Present The Panel Discussion — “It’s All Relative: Writing Matriarchs” [Video]

During every Residency Workshop the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting Executive Director, Dr. Rosanne Welch, joins with the Writers Guild Foundation to moderate a panel on a topic of interest to female writers. This year we planned one on Writing Diverse Families – but in the last day before our panel 2 panelists had to drop out due to… family duties. So we pivoted, realizing the panelists who were able to appear all had shows that involved 3 generational families lead by matriarchs.

Hence the title: It’s All Relative: Writing Matriarchs.

This gave us a chance to explore how these female TV writers have expanded depictions of the relationships between grandmothers, mothers and daughter over the years and how they’ve developed storylines that reflect the complexity and universality of these inescapable bonds. Panelists include Sheryl J. Anderson – Creator and Executive Producer, Sweet Magnolias; Lang Fisher – Co-creator and Executive Producer, Never Have I Ever; and Valerie Woods – Co-executive Producer, Queen Sugar. Everyone shared memories of their own family matriarchs and the inspiration they continue to provide each woman’s writing.

Due to Covid we recorded this panel live at the Jim Henson Studios where we host our Workshop in front of the live audience of MFA candidates.

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38 More On Working Well With Others from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video]

Transcript:

There was this violin and I kept sitting in the room thinking it took 26 years to make this violin and it’s really important. You give it to the kid soon. Throw it away and make a new one. Something’s wrong with the wood right? I said this is my problem is you know he said I’ll fix the problem. The angel will have given this guy the wood and therefore he can’t throw it away right? He’s like well 26 years and making his violin, the angel handed him a crap piece of wood okay? I need to start again. This is — I need a reason why you can’t throw this piece of wood away and it’s a Christmas episode. There’s only one piece of wood an angel can give me that I won’t throw away on Christmas eve. What is that?

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37 Working Well With Others from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video]

Transcript:

Let me talk briefly about the kinds of things you learn in a room. One of the things you should take a class in is psychology because reading other people and managing how you deal with them — when you figure out their personalities either love you or don’t love you — but you have to work with them for the next three years because contracts are three years long. So you have to work around them. In this particular case. we were doing an episode about a gentleman, sadly, who was dying of AIDS and coming home for Christmas to tell his parents that he was both gay and dying of AIDS and what happened was the writer who was doing it was very fond of himself and didn’t like to be told anything was wrong with his stories, but your job in the room is to make all the stories as good as possible because if the show gets canceled you all lose your job. So I knew that he didn’t like criticism and he was higher on the hierarchy than I was right? He was a higher rank producer. I was still a co-editor or something like that at the time and I’m sitting in the room and his problem was — this is a story about angels who came into your life and told you how you were messing it up and please fix it — so the father was a violin maker and he’s going to give his son a violin he’d been working on since the boy was born. So that’s about 26 years and it was still not good and he really wanted to give the kid the violin because there was a metaphor that if you played violin again maybe he wouldn’t be gay. I’m not really sure I agree with that but anyway…

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24 Conclusion from How The Chaos Of Collaboration in the Writers Room Created Golden Age Television [Video]

With the full recording of “How The Chaos Of Collaboration in the Writers Room Created Golden Age Television”

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When the folks hosting the conference announced their theme as “Screen Narratives: Chaos and Order” the word ‘chaos’ immediately brought to mind writers rooms. I offered a quick history of writers rooms (the presentations are only 20 minutes long) and then quoted several current showrunners on how they compose their rooms and how they run them.

Transcript:

…and then there were many many stories in this one particularly, very quickly, there were people in the room who wanted to shoot down your ideas. Again reading the room and I had an idea about dealing with teenage young men who were fathers and lived in gangs and they had to make a commitment to their real family not their gang family. I knew that someone else in the room would not want me to have the extra script that year because that’s a nice chunk of money he would rather have. So my joke is I followed my executive producer into the bathroom because she was a woman and so was I and then I pitched her while we were washing our hands. So that when we walked back in the room, she already liked the idea and for someone else to shoot it down would be to say she had a bad idea and therefore I got whatever. So reading the room has always been a very important lesson. As well as remembering the doctors have power. Whenever you think about side characters, think about making them ethnic because that’s really important and then these are just the things that I learned from the room. You have to do research. You have to think about your nightmares. You have to speak up. I teach my female students this all the time. Please speak up. Don’t wait for the boys to give you a moment because they won’t and then I learned a lot and then I will briefly just say teachers make great writers because they do and collaboration doesn’t just happen in tv right because these guys collaborated on those films we have to recognize that so collaboration and chaos makes good quality presentations. Thank you.

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36 My Own Writing Adventure from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video]

Transcript:

Touched by an Angel I spent a lot of time on. I actually started my career as a high school teacher at an all-girl academy which is funny because now I teach at an all-girl college and then I was a receptionist and then a writer’s assistant. So these are the stages of how you get into a writer’s room. Either you have to have a friend who’s a writer or you get an agent which is almost nearly impossible without having a job already or you become the friend to writers by getting a job working for them in some fashion. I actually know someone who got a job because he was the ski instructor to the writer’s wife and he gave the wife a script which she gave her husband and he liked it enough he hired the ski instructor to be a writer on his show. So however you can get in the face of writers is an important thing. That’s what internships are very good at. That’s what interviewing people — if you have a school newspaper or someplace you can get published with something or a blog and you offer to interview someone, you can make an introduction. That’s really an important thing. So I went through — all these are a bunch of shows I was an assistant on. Then I was a freelance writer, which is what we do in LA and then I was hired full-time on Touched by an Angel.

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23 Being True To Your Ideas from How The Chaos Of Collaboration in the Writers Room Created Golden Age Television [Video]

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Transcript:

In this particular episode, I was doing a piece about a married couple that I were using their children as weapons during the divorce and I wanted that lesson to be don’t do that and I had to bring in memories of Mrs. Doubtfire because on my show I was afraid the answer would be don’t get divorced and that’s not an honest answer to young children whose parents are getting divorced. So happily when Robin Williams did this film he only agreed to do it if in the end the couple never got back together. Since he was a divorced man and he didn’t want to lie to his kids. So i took that lesson and I made sure that one of the parents was already remarried so I thought that was kind of fun but I had to go around the desires of my executive producer in order to make sure that I got what I wanted right? So you have to learn the people in the room.

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35 More on Margaret Nagle from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video]

Transcript:

She then moved into running a show called Red Band Society which only ran for one season and that’s a whole other conversation but I wanted to mention briefly because tone is something that we try to teach but it’s very difficult. It’s almost as difficult as style but if you go online which you can on youtube and look for the theme song the opening to this show Braccialetti Rossi which was done in Italy. They are both adaptations of a book. This show is so beautiful and magic and lovable and you just want to be with these children in their terminally ill part of this hospital and everybody’s wonderful. In this show, the opening shows what huge jerks every one of these children was before they got struck down with their disease. So I don’t really care if they die. The phone is all wrong. I need to love them and root for them and I find them being mean to each other. The one girl is this awful cheerleader who’s just and then she does so she got the tone wrong which fascinates me because when you are well practiced you don’t think that’s going to happen but that’s another show.

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