LA/Los Angeles – Page 17 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

18 Jane Espenson & Marti Noxon from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 9 seconds)

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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!

Transcript:

I’m also really excited about TV shows as you can see and because TV affects more people — because more people are exposed to it — and so I like to think about who are the women in television and what stories are they putting out there. This is our modern literature in many ways and these ladies, Jane Espenson and Marti Noxon were pivotal to a show that took horror and used it to flip all the gender stereotypes that could possibly flip in one one-hour program and that program is… Buffy the Vampire Slayer right. So we generally attribute the show to Joss Whedon and that is true and that is fine and he did write the pilot and he did show run and managed the show. We have since come to find that he was a me-too kind of guy and we don’t need to talk about him that much anymore. So then the question is how could the show have been so feminist with that mind behind it? Well, turns out these ladies were on staff and I believe when you look at the episodes they wrote it was the soul of Marti Noxon and Jane Espenson which gave us the true stories that last in the Buffy realm.

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17 Margaret Atwood from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (58 seconds)

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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

Transcript:

What works I think best is when you blend horror and social commentary. As I’ve sort of been examining as we go through. Obviously, The Handmaid’s Tale and Margaret Atwood also falls into that world looking at a future that is horrific for one particular gender, which happens to be chicks right? This is not a great world to grow up in and she just, some 25 years later, came up with the sequel, Testaments, which is different from the television show. The TV show stopped –the first season stopped at the end of the book and then the people on the show had to create the rest of that. She’s like “No no no. This is where I thought the story was going.” So, as an author, she has the power to say “No this is where I wanted those characters to be not whatever you guys are doing on a weekly basis. So I think it’s really interesting to compare that to the later seasons of the show. I love her early picture and then her current while the CBS while the Emmys are going on. So Margaret’s been writing for a long time. It’s a very long illustrious career writing horror.

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16 More On Toni Morrison and Beloved from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (31 seconds)

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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

Transcript:

This ghost comes back into her life after the Civil War is over, because what an awful thing — I didn’t want my children to live as slaves, so I killed her and then the war ended and then there was no slavery anymore and she could have lived and now that guilt is the haunting that’s in her mind forever. So it a really, really, powerful story. Taking the haunted house from kind of pop culture-y goofy to Oh My God, serious literature. That, as well, won a Pulitzer Prize — which is pretty huge.

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15 Toni Morrison and Beloved from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute)

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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

Transcript:

In our class, we go from Shirley Jackson, We deal with probably the most respected haunted house story in American literature — which is Beloved by Toni Morrison, who passed away just earlier this year because what she’s doing is using, again, like Pauline Hopkins, the history of slavery and what those ghosts are for all of our society right because it’s the story of a woman — based on a true story — a woman who did not want her children to grow up in slavery so she ran away with them and when the master almost captured them, she wanted to kill her children rather than make them live as slaves but she only succeeded in killing one of them before the rest were recaptured and now she lives with a ghost of the little girl who is named Beloved because that’s the only thing she could afford to put on the tombstone. Instead of Dearly Beloved it’s just Beloved.

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14 Beetlejuice from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 16 seconds)

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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

Transcript:

For me what’s interesting is other haunted house books and films — Beetlejuice being one of the more famous ones and now we’re looking at the influence here of a female actress coming into a piece because this film was written by Michael McDowell and Warren Skerin but because we have Geena Davis, who today is in charge of the Geena Davis Women in Hollywood faction — she made sure that her character had power. She had some agency inside the film. It’s about a couple that gets killed on their honeymoon and they go into hell and they meet Beetlejuice and what’s interesting is that the end they have to get rid of him. She’s the one who kills him. Not the husband. Not the male character. It’s the female character who does the thing that gets rid of the bad guy. So she saves the day and I think it’s adorable at the end of the film there’s a little human girl who can see the ghosts and they have a party not because she met a boy because she got an A in her math test. That’s a girl idea. This is what we celebrate. We don’t sully the boys come and go like buses right but the a in the math test that’s a hot thing. We’re happy about that. So you can see the influence of the female voice in this story — in this haunted house story. So I think that’s rather cool.

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13 The Amityville Horror from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (32 seconds)

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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

Transcript:

The idea of a haunted house and what we do with haunted houses led us to probably the most famous horror house – changed house — book then film series – The Amityville Horror. Written by a guy so right I’m not doing guys today too much however it’s kind of interesting to say that the dude’s book was proven to be an entire fake. He gave a story about a family that had actually lived in this house and what had happened and then eventually the family came forward and said “Yeah, we just did that for the money. None of that really happened. We made it all up.” So it kind of undermined the whole concept.

Watch Now: Creative Career Kickstart: Catching and Pitching Panel – ASU Film Spark Program [Video] (1 hour 15 minutes)

For a few years running my colleague Warren Lewis has asked me to be a panelist for the semi-annual Film Spark event for ASU (Arizona State University) discussing pitching on a panel and then listening and giving notes to students during an afternoon pitchathon.

This year, due to our sheltering at home during the virus the event used Zoom so for the first time they recorded the hour long panel – and here it is.

We were each asked to give advice based on the stories of our best and worst pitches, which provided a few good laughs and hopefully a lot of good advice.

“Name Screenwriters” says Dr. Rosanne Welch in Letter to Los Angeles Times

Because I believe that you can’t change things unless you challenge them, whenever I see a newspaper article about a film where the writer uses the director’s possessive (as in “Spielberg’s Lincoln) and never mention the writer (which in that case was Pulitzer Prize-winning Tony Kushner – Spielberg has never won a Pulitzer Prize), I try to write a letter to the editor explaining the mistake.

Often they print them. Once my letter appeared alongside a letter with a similar point, written by the author of one of our History of Screenwriting textbooks (who has come to speak to our students during Workshop – Tom Stempel).

This morning the LA Times published this letter. — Rosanne

To the editor: Your editorial elevated “compelling storytelling” as a quality that makes a movie great, but when listing examples of noteworthy films — “Lawrence of Arabia,” “The Shining” and “Vertigo” — you used the director’s possessive to identify the films, not once mentioning the writers (both novelists and screenwriters).

“Lawrence of Arabia” came to screens thanks to the book by T.E. Lawrence, which was adapted by screenwriters Robert Bolt and the blacklisted Michael Wilson. “The Shining” came from the mind of prolific novelist Stephen King, whose book was adapted by Stanley Kubrick and Diane Johnson, with Kubric directing. “Vertigo” is based on the novel “D’entre les morts” by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, which was adapted by Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor.

I’ve never understood why newspaper writers forget to name screenwriters when discussing movies. It seems an absurd example of internalized artistic oppression.

How can I be able to teach up-and-coming screenwriters their own value if journalists keep naming films as the property of the directors?

Rosanne Welch, Van Nuys

The writer is executive director of Stephens College’s master of fine arts program in TV and screenwriting.

12 The Haunting of Hill House from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (50 seconds)

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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

Transcript:

You probably know her more from the show that is currently on Netflix. However this show is not the book at all. It is based upon ideas in the book right? So Netflix is pretty smart. It’s based on the idea that a family grew up in this house and now as adults what’s wrong with their lives that they trace back to these moments in their childhood. So it’s a little bit like a haunted This Is Us, basically, but again with Stephen King, he really believes that the show is quite good and that she would like it and that’s a high praise from him because he thinks she is the greatest science fiction excuse-me horror writer in the United States. So I think it’s pretty cool that you can sample that and then go back and read the book and see where they got the ideas from. Imagine just taking that book and going “How do I do this differently right?” for TV. So Shirley Jackson, a very very big name.

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Learn More About the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting with this Open House Session [Video]

Thanks to the wonderful women of the Stephens College advancement office who arranged a Virtual Open House for our MFA.

This gave us the chance to meet potential students (and a few who had already been accepted) and answer questions about how the program operates.

It’s always fun to engage with people and share our enthusiasm about the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting – and nowadays part of the fun of Zooming is checking out other folks’ backgrounds whether they are virtual (are they using the TARDIS of the Golden Gate Bridge) or their real office bookshelves. (Hey – I have that same book on my bookshelf!).

If you have any questions that weren’t answered during this Open House, send them directly to me at rwelch@stephens.edu and I’ll be glad to answer them.

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