Category: Research

Transcript:

I had a partner in my early days and we got a job on “Beverly Hills 90210” because she was the assistant on that show and then we got a job on “Picket Fences” because I had met Jeff Melvoin who was the producer of that but I’d met him four years earlier as an assistant on a different show and so then I had to wait until he got a high enough level job that he – you know – could invite me to do a freelance and then I spent seven years on a show called “Touched by an Angel” which ran for 10 years and was a – we sometimes say in Hollywood it’s when they back up the money truck because you need residuals and all those things that don’t exist in streaming. So the business finances are changing as well. There will be more jobs that pay less. They still pay more than being a high school English teacher though but there won’t be residuals. Which a lot of people relied on residuals for many many years.

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Host: Speaking of screenwriting technique, I feel I should ask you to tell us a little bit more about your career as a practicing screenwriter. Yeah, what have you been working what what what have you worked on, and are you working on anything at the moment?

Rosanne: Yes I come out of the world of –  I came out in LA from Cleveland. I was a kid from Cleveland and I moved out here for the purpose of working in television and had to do the whole – I was an English teacher – high school – that was my out of college job and luckily I got hired on as a writer’s assistant because I could spell, which was the funny joke like I could clean up their spelling which I thought was funny. So I was an assistant for probably about five years and everyone and when I tell students that they sort of cringe because they think they’re going to get the job and then they’ll get hired as a writer and they have to say you know it’s about networking. It’s about meeting people and then meeting people who like the things you’ve written. You have to write a lot of spec scripts and keep showing them to people who are willing to read them. They have to decide the stuff is good enough and then they’ll offer you a freelance script. That’s one season. You’re still the assistant while you’re doing that and then if they think it’s good enough and the show doesn’t get canceled they’ll offer you, perhaps, a staff –  you know it’s all so much of that as part of it. I would get offered scripts on shows for the second season and it would cancel at the end of the first season. So not only are you scrambling for a job to pay the rent but you now lost that hope and so you’re in a new place with new people. You convince them you’re pretty good. They give you a freelance on their show and the next season they’re canceled.

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Host: Didn’t you write a book on westerns?

Rosanne: I’ve written chapters in some books on westerns yes – on women and how women are portrayed in westerns. One of them actually yeah one of them had to do with westerns from the 20th – from 2000 to the modern day and the scary thing was you assume the women would be more powerful and more have their own sort of agency but the most powerful woman I found in a movie from the 2000s to now was in “Rango” and she’s a little animated –– what is she –– I forget –– she’s like some lizard or something her name is Beans and she is the most empowered woman I found in any of the western and “Rango’s” beautifully written film. It’s just so hilarious, plays on all the western tropes, and yet actually tells a heartfelt story. I often have students watch that movie because the very first half hour the Rango character narrates the process of writing a script. He literally says that when this is my midpoint. I wonder what I’ll do from this point on. I mean it’s hilarious. It’s like you have to know screenwriting technique to get the inside jokes in that movie but yeah.

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Host: Your own writing is more on TV so what did you make of “The Mandalorian” speaking of “Star Wars.” Have you managed to watch that?

Rosanne: Yes. Yes. My son was the first one to check it out. I am fine with the new right? I’m such an old “Star Wars” fan that I don’t appreciate the prequels. I don’t ever need to see those again. The next three were fine. I’m debating how much I love them or not really I mean because I’m so tied to the first three but so I wasn’t sure about “The Mandalorian.” I didn’t rush to see it but my son who’s 22 did and he was like you’ve got to see this –  it’s and we’re both –  I mean I’m the one who of course introduced him to “Star Wars” and would sit on the couch and watch “The Empire Strikes Back” over and over again when he was you know a toddler. So on his word I said okay. Check it out and of course, what’s lovely about that is it’s a western. It’s a western and westerns are pretty cool. I like westerns. I’ve seen a bunch of them…

Host: …they’re my favorite genre.

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Rosanne:…and then, who doesn’t love “Star Wars?” I mean, I was a kid who, you know, was in line for the second one and, in fact, I was in high school or early college, I guess, when “The Empire Strikes Back” came out. Yeah and no one had ever ended a movie on a cliffhanger. Like that didn’t happen. Right? The movie should end and I remember sitting in the audience and Harrison Ford is all in the stuff and they’re taking him away and Luke is looking out the window right, and I’m looking at my watch going “This is going to be a really long movie. They’re going to have to save him really in a stupid fast way. This is..how are they going to…”and then slowly they walked to the window and it’s him and Leia and they’re sort of almost waving goodbye to the thing and I’m like “This is.. like your wasting time. Get to the rest of the rescue…” and then the movie ended and my brain wasn’t even thinking and I shouted some cuss words out loud in the theater. I mean you can’t end a movie like that and my friends were like “Rosanne. Sit down you’re embarrassing us.” “But but…”and I vowed to never see the other one because it would take 2 years to finish the story and you know, 2 years later, I was in line for the midnight movie the first time that it was going to show. I was like, ‘You can’t not tell me how this ends.”

Host: Genius that was.