From a lovely interactive TARDIS console on display at #sandiegowhocon
On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch
Writing, Film, Television and More!
I had a great time a speaking on Why Torchwood Still Matters at San Diego Whocon.
Previous, on-site, presentation at Oxford Brookes
Thanks for our meeting at a Screenwriting Research Network conference almost 10 years ago Dr. Paolo Russo (of Oxford Brookes University) and I have been able to engage in a few transatlantic creative exchanges.
He’s come to speak on Italian Neo-realism to my MFA candidates and I had the pleasure of visiting with his masters candidates (in person! when that was still possible) and giving them notes on their drama series treatments.
This week I’ll be doing that again on Zoom with the help of Shannon Dobson Fopeano, my Graduate Assistant in the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting. Paolo and I are both interested in expanding the reach of this cross-ocean collegiality in the future!
Took a much-needed getaway to drive out to Malibu today and breathe the ocean air.
Found an empty spot to sit, stare, and photograph.
Munched on a takeaway lunch from Neptune’s Net, which is doing business via drive thru. I got my favorite, scallops, so all was right with the world. 😄
I’m happy to announce that the historical novel I wrote about the life of Giuseppe Garibaldi is about to be published on October 1st, 2020.
You can Pre-Order the Kindle edition NOW for only 99¢ until October 1, when the price becomes $9.99.
I took on this story because I wanted to learn more about the history of the country of my grandparents’ birth but I gained so much more in researching the man who united the country, which I thought would be a largely white male-centered story.
Guiseppe Italiano
I discovered a cast list of other brilliant characters beginning with Garibaldi’s amazing Brazilian bride, Anita. She helped plan military strategy and rode into battle beside him while pregnant.
Photos taken during our trip to the Museo del Risorgiomento, Italian Reunification Museum, Milano, Italy
I discovered Andrea Aguyar, a formerly enslaved man who fought for freedom alongside Giuseppe and Anita so bravely they named him godfather to their children.
I discovered Cristina Trivulzio, a noblewoman from Milan who had had a child out of wedlock, an act that scandalized her upper-class society who found herself offering battlefield nursing assistance wherever needed.
And I rediscovered my favorite (and the only major female) Transcendentalist, Margaret Fuller, the American journalist sent to Italy by the New York Tribune in 1846 as its first foreign correspondent – male or female – who with Anita and Cristina witnessed the ongoing carnage caused by the siege of Rome in the makeshift hospital they helped create.
I deeply enjoyed discovering all these people and writing their story as it’s a story of struggle for a greater good that gives me the chance to wonder why I never learned all this in school…
I promised to clean my desk before a full semester of online learning began… and I did. See? There’s room for my cat Spotted Leaf (named after a character in the Erin Hunter series of books about cats who live in the woods – Warriors). Spot (as we call her for short) enjoys hearing me talk to students about everything from films to fiction. Maybe in one of her past 9 lives she was a humanities professor, too!
Many thanks to the many great MFA mentors who are doing double duty as mentors to this year’s Athena TV Lab. You can find them on the last two lines of this (now familiar) Zoom grid (starting on the 3rd tier/4th spot): Dawn Comer Jefferson, Jon Vandergriff, Rashaan Dozier-Escalante (also alumna of the MFA Class of 2018), Amy Straus, and Laura Brennan. And there are 2 MFA alums here, too (Sydney Haven and Pam Winfrey).
The Athena Film Festival Virtual Writers Lab
The Athena Film Festival at Barnard College Virtual Writers Lab is for emerging women writers who have not had a feature-length narrative script produced within the past 10 years. Writers must submit a screenplay that includes a woman or women characters in a leadership role or position at the center of the story. Scripts must be feature-length narratives (between 80 and 120 pages).
The Athena Film Festival at Barnard College Virtual Writers Lab provides women identified storytellers with training, skills, and a robust supportive network. Participants will have several one-on-one mentoring sessions with experienced screenwriters as well as peer-to-peer and group sessions.
The Athena Film Festival at Barnard College Virtual Writers Lab will also include industry events where participants will learn about how to navigate the industry as well as a keynote conversation from an established filmmaker. Past panels have included: The Fluidity of Writing, How Does Representation Work, and The Art of Pitching and past keynotes have come from Gina Prince-Bythewood and Kat Candler.
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.
I’m happy to post this ebook of papers presented at the10th Screenwriter Stories Seminar: Screenplay-X at the Université Presbytériènne Mackenzie in São Paulo, Brazil.
I gave the opening lecture entitled, “Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered” which appears here in English, though the rest of the papers (naturally) are in Portuguese. It was an honor to be asked to do the lecture and privilege to spend time with Professor Glaucia Davino and her students who made me feel very welcome in their city.
Words matter. Writers matter and women writers matter in this world. It is important to consider writers because the word writer comes before the word director when you describe a filmmaker who can do two things. They are writer-directors, they are not director-writers. That tells us something. The vision of a movie cannot exist without the screenplay. A director cannot direct nothing. There must be an idea. There must be a philosophy. There must be a theme. There must be a story. This proves that the writer is of equal importance. We must remember writers have to be equal partners and I think we realize that without realizing it. When people talk about movies to their friends they don’t say “I loved the camera angle in scene 7.” They quote dialogue from their favorite movies whether they are from a Pixar film or a Disney one, they quote the dialogue and that is the work of the writer. That’s the person who should be given credit, yet often at the start a class I ask students to list their two or three favorite films, who directed those films and who wrote that film. They very often cannot name the person who wrote the film they claim to adore. How can you study to be a writer if you don’t remember writers yourself? Hence the reason to study Screenwriting. Hence researching screenwriters has always mattered.
When actors Frances McDormand won her Oscar for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri she said of the screenwriter Martin McDonagh, “He did not sketch a blueprint. That’s an insult to a screenplay. He didn’t string together a few words. He wrote, meticulously crafted, a tsunami, and then he allowed his troupe of actors to surf it into the shore.” (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/sag-awards-three-billboards-takes-top-honors-at-a-show-women-took-center-stage-1076726) She credited the writer in a way that many people do not.
Stories – and therefore screenplays and therefore screenwriters — are important because they transmit culture around the world. The United States has had a corner on that market for far too many years but now we’re beginning to see other stories permeate our culture, a good and beneficial thing for a country made of immigrants and the ancestors of immigrants. Stories have always transmitted culture far back to the cave paintings of many ancient cultures, through Gilgamesh, and the griots of Africa. Humans have used stories to move culture forward. Movies are the most current version of doing that so why do we forget to study the storytellers? Now is the time to fix this glaring omission both in casual discussions of films and in academia.
Read and Download The Entire Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered Presentation in PDF Format
Watch the the entire presentation here
Photos from the event