Photos – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

The live reading cast of “Mount Wilson” at @seriesfest runs through their tech rehearsal for tonight’s show. [Photos]

The live reading cast of “Mount Wilson” at @seriesfest runs through their tech rehearsal for tonight’s show.

Written by Adam Parker @wawparker , Misty Brawner, Betsy Leighton , Dr. Rosanne Welch

From SeriesFest…

Join us for the first public read of Mount Wilson, a drama pilot which follows Edwin Hubble, a rising astronomer, as he navigates his own web of lies as he works to disprove the theories of some of the greatest minds of the 20th Century. Hubble finds an unlikely alliance in Milton Humason, a maintenance worker at the Mount Wilson Observatory, who may just hold the key to the secrets of the Universe. Mount Wilson was written in partnership with the SeriesFest Writers Room Initiative and produced by Dilettante Productions and Unreal Media.

A Table Reading: “Mount Wilson: 4-hour mini-series based on a book about the life of Edwin Hubble” – SeriesFest 2022 – Denver, CO

I’m happy to announce the public table reading of a new script I’ve co-written with 3 alums of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting (Betsy Leighton, Misty Brawner, Adam Parker). We were all involved in a mini-writers room earlier last year to come up with the outline for a 4-hour mini-series based on a book about the life of Edwin Hubble (of Hubble Telescope fame) – and we did. Then the 4 of us wrote the pilot. Now we’ll all be attending the reading at the Gates Planetarium in Denver as part of SeriesFest.

In honor of that project Douglas and I recently visited Mt. Wilson once again in this almost-post pandemic world and took photos of things like Hubble’s desk, and the wooden ladder they used to reach the platform – and, of course, the 100-inch telescope from which he made his major discoveries about the galaxy.

What were these discoveries? Well, you’ll have to attend the table reading – or watch the series when it sells – to find out.

Dr. Rosanne Welch at Broadcast Educators Association (BEA) 2022

I attended my first Broadcast Educators Association (BEA) conference last weekend on the invite of Dr. Ed Fink, my former department chair, and greatly enjoyed hosting a pitchathon for graduation bachelor students interested in creating their own television shows.

My co-panelists included two fun colleagues who have become good friends – Jon Vandergriff (Stephens College) and David Morgassen (CSUF). We gave feedback on 9 different pitches and followed it up with a Q&A about the world of being a professional writer. The audience was so interested and engaged that after our session ended, we all grabbed a table together and kept talking until we closed the venue down for the night.

Meeting potential MFA candidates is one reason to attend events like this one – but mostly it’s to make new friends in the academic world and strengthen the friendships you’ve already created; to learn how they approach the teaching of screenwriting or media history and bring those ideas back to my own classrooms.

On this trip, I met professors from Illinois and Michigan and reconnected with folks I’ve worked with at CSUF and elsewhere. Having lunch and hashing over which films or television shows to teach and how to best help students learn to analyze these in order to improve their writing is the heart of such a conference. Meeting the students and hearing their ideas is the icing on the cake.

From Classroom To Writer’s Room with Dr. Rosanne Welch on In The Can w/Lucas Cuny [Audio]

It was a pleasure sitting down in front of some microphones with Lucas Cuny who now teaches Film, TV, and media full time at San Bernardino Valley College.

He also hosts this podcast interviewing people from those areas and he invited me to be the first guest of his second season.

We had the chance to chat about my background as well as the state of the media industry today – and I had the chance to relish the success of this former MFA candidate of mine. One of the best things about being a professor is seeing careers take off like Lucas’ has.

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Episode Description

Rosanne Welch is a screenwriter, author, professor, and all around iconoclast in the field of media education. She wrote on Beverly Hills 90210, written a book about The Monkees, but got her start as a teacher. Hear her journey from the classroom to the writers room.

Lucas Cuny and Dr. Rosanne Welch