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

15 The Operation of a Writer’s Room Part 2 from How The Chaos Of Collaboration in the Writers Room Created Golden Age Television [Video]

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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 she tells a lovely story about one scene in which she had two — this is, of course, about the pre— the days of the Czar — and so you have lovely rich people fencing. Two lovely young men having a fencing match — a practice — and at the end of it they take off their attire and they put on their nice shirts with the lace and they walk away. And the men in her writing room — the Russian men — said “well, the scene is over when we know who won the match,” and she said “No, this is a soap opera. The scene is over when the women see their chests.” So, she was teaching them what you need inside a soap opera. So they wanted a teaching writer’s room and that’s what she was able to provide.

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14 The Operation of a Writer’s Room 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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Transcript

I wanted to talk about what it’s like. What’s the “operation” of a writer’s room and I love that this game is, of course, based on Rick & Morty, a TV show. So, we’re blending TV into all these other mediums now. You have to think about what kind of writer’s room you’re working. There are different kinds we’ve had experience with. My friend, Lisa Seidman, is a writer from Los Angeles. Some Russian producers came to Los Angeles. They wanted a woman –a person — who had written soap operas — both afternoon and evening soap operas — who could speak Russian and who had been a screenwriting teacher, because they wanted that person to move to Russia for a few years, start the show, Anastasia, Poor Anastasia, and teach a writing room how it should work. So that she could then leave and they could manage it themselves.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V5 Issue 1: Writing with images: The Film-Photo-Essay, the Left Bank Group and the pensive moment by Andrew Taylor

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

Writing with images: The Film-Photo-Essay, the Left Bank Group and the pensive moment by Andrew Taylor

This article is focused on the film-photo-essay form. The first part of the article is a narrative account of my experiments ‘writing with images’ in the early and mid-2000s, using (the then) new digital tools to make film-photo-essays. My account reflects on how the change from analogue to digital affected my approach to photography, film-making and writing with images. I then look at the case study of Siberia (2009), an illustrated script that was written following my experimentation with the film-photo-essay form. The second part of this article is a more general enquiry into the film-photo-essay form and work that combines cinema and photography. I discuss the contemporary interest in work that falls on a spectrum between photography and cinema; often referred to as ‘still/moving’. I then focus on the ‘Left Bank Group’, whose work often combined cinema, photography and the literary and philosophical essay. Examples from the ‘cine-writing’ of Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda and Chris Marker highlight how Raymond Bellour’s idea of the ‘pensive moment’ is apt in relation to their work. I argue that still/moving forms allow more space for audience interaction and emotional response than conventional narrative cinema; and in a world saturated with information and cluttered with images, there is an important place for new pensive hybrid art forms.

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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“On The Basis Of Sex” and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s Harvard Classmates

Working on a chapter about the film On the Basis of Sex which is a biopic based on the early life and career of Supreme Court associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg I came across this podcast that researched the other 8 women who were part of her Harvard Law School class of 1956.

If you’ve seen the film (and you should because it’s good!) or read much about the Justice you’ll have heard the story of how the Dean of the law school invited them along with some male students to his house for dinner. Then he asked each of the women in the class to stand up and explain why she’s at Harvard, taking the place of a man.

Ugh!

We all know Ginsburg’s career was such a skyrocket that it put that jerk in his place – but then some journalists thought about researching those other 8 women to see how their careers went – and they started a podcast about the women’s lives.

I love finds like this!

Read more about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg in the book series I am editing — Women Making History from ABC-CLIO.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life in American History (Women Making History) by Nancy Hendriks

Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life in American History explores Ginsburg’s path to holding the highest position in the judicial branch of U.S. government as a Supreme Court justice for almost three decades. Readers will learn about the choices, challenges, and triumphs that this remarkable American has lived through, and about the values that shape the United States.=

Ginsburg, sometimes referred to as The Notorious RBG or RBG was a professor of law, a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, an advocate for women’s rights, and more, before her tenure as Supreme Court justice. She has weighed in on decisions, such as Bush v. Gore (2000); King v. Burwell (2015); and Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), that continue to guide lawmaking and politics. Ginsburg’s crossover to stardom was unprecedented, though perhaps not surprising. Where some Americans see the Supreme Court as a decrepit institution, others see Ginsburg as an embodiment of the timeless principles on which America was founded.

“Hidden Figures” and Breaking The Myth of the Blockbuster Movie

In researching a chapter on the film Hidden Figures (for a new book on Women’s History on Film) I was happy to read this clip that supports the fact that there IS an audience for films that are not explosion-packed blockbuster tentpoles meant for young male audiences…. But I was really taken aback when I learned that while the studio allotted 25 million to Hidden Figures… that same year they had allotted 125 million to a movie no one even remembers…Monster Trucks. When, oh, when, will THAT craziness end?

In an article in The Atlantic by David Sims:

“In its first weekend of wide release, Hidden Figures defied tracking numbers and for the subsequent four-day Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend, Hidden Figures increased its gross, making $26 million and staying at number one, holding off the expansion of La La Land and Paramount’s broad-skewing children’s adventure Monster Trucks. And yet Monster Trucks is a patently silly piece of kids entertainment about a young man who finds a squid-like monster living in his truck. It stars Lucas Till, hardly an A-lister (though he had a small role in the recent X-Men movies), and cost $125 million to make—$100 million more than Hidden Figures. Devoting such a large budget to a film with little brand recognition that was basically guaranteed to get terrible reviews was quickly regarded as a disastrous decision. Viacom, the company that owns the Monster Trucks studio Paramount Pictures, took a $115 million write-down in earnings last September in anticipation of its failure (it opened to a lackluster $15 million last weekend). This is what Hollywood’s emphasis on big-budget films with “broad appeal” inevitably leads to: hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on toy-focused action films with no real audience. For the cost of Monster Trucks, Paramount could have made five Hidden Figures—smaller films, focused on telling grounded stories to fill a market gap that studios continue to ignore. That Hidden Figures’s success has to serve as a lesson to Hollywood in 2017 is ridiculous, but the lesson is nonetheless there to be learned. Audiences are hungry for films that look beyond the movie industry’s narrow worldview. It’s time to start delivering them.”

All I can say about that is its fodder for every writer out there pitching a new project to shut down any executive’s questions about audience numbers. And writers need all the fodder they can find to fight back when they know they are correct.

Dr. Rosanne Welch

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V5 Issue 1: Screenwriting and emotional rhythm by Ian David

Screenwriting and emotional rhythm by Ian David

Recent advances in neuroscience have begun to unravel the part played by emotion in decision-making and creativity. All storytellers rely on emotion, but the screenwriter, conveying the essential narrative and technical information required to make a film, carries a unique burden. Screenplays must act as a bridge from the author to the audience, describing the narrative’s capacity to evoke emotion through action and image. In discussing a screenplay, the narrative is usually assessed in terms of its characters, plot, subplots, theme, dialogue, tone, style, etc. Yet, emotion, the quality that determines the screenplay’s (and ultimately the film’s) overall effect, is often poorly understood. This paper proposes Emotional Rhythm – that subliminal sequence of emotions underpinning all the dramatic components – as a means of evaluating the screenplay’s potency as it relates to the construction of the narrative.

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13 Something’s missing in writer’s rooms 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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Transcript

Something’s missing in these early writer’s rooms. What’s — who’s not in that picture? Audience: Women. Uh-hum. it’s kind of obvious, you know, so we had these shows that we admire greatly but they didn’t have a female perspective. Hello? They were missing and their opinion is missing and I think that’s a problem. But then along came Buffy and Buffy had a staff that included many female writers — some of whom are now credited with giving it the feminist bent that it had. Joss Whedon may have started the show but now we also know that — like Woody Allen — there are things we don’t like about him. So it seems it was the women on the staff who maintained that feminist idea right up to the point where they credited the first lesbian couple on television, Tara and Willow — and that was a big step in American television. So, Buffy’s a big step. Now, here we have a room for Orange is the New Black, which has many females, but it’s missing something different. Audience: People of color. A person of color, exactly, and yet the show itself was filled with women of color as characters. So, again, we have to address that issue. We’re not getting all the perspectives we can.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V5 Issue 1: Where are you from? Place as a form of scripting in independent cinema by J. J. Murphy

Where are you from? Place as a form of scripting in independent cinema by J. J. Murphy

Large-budget Hollywood studio productions generally prefer a high level of fabrication in creating a film’s setting, either through the building of sets or through special effects, because it gives the production team greater control. Yet that’s often been less true of indie films historically. For a variety of reasons, the setting or location of independent films often becomes a central part of the scripting of a film. It is obviously cheaper to use what already exists in reality rather than to attempt to create a location through set design or art direction. Beyond issues of budget, however, my interest here is in exploring how ‘place’ can actually function as a key element in the scripting process, especially one that is rooted in visual storytelling, by taking into account the myriad ways that a film’s setting can contribute to and enhance the narrative beyond the use of generic, decorative or touristic locations. Using examples drawn from independent cinema, the article argues that place can have an intrinsic, integrative, stylistic, structural, conceptual and thematic function.

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TikTok Response to comment from @itsmeimgarbage : Polly Platt [Video]

@drrosannewelch

Response to @itsmeimgarbage : Polly Platt ##screenwriting ##movies ##history ##women ##lastpictureshow ##film

♬ original sound – Dr. Rosanne Welch

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A Woman Wrote That – 28 in a series – The Birdcage (1996), Witten by Elaine May

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

ALBERT

There’s no need to get hysterical. All I have to remember is I can always get more toast.

- The Birdcage on IMDB
- The Birdcage on Wikipedia
- Elaine May on Wikipedia and IMDB
- Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting