Screenwriting Research Network – Page 13 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

06 The Universal Studios Writers Pool 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

But one-hour dramas did not involve writer’s rooms in the beginning and I find that very fascinating because we rely on them now, but they did not in fact — they literally had writer pools and if you were running a show — so you were the creator of the show — you would walk down the hallway to the pool, of course, that’s the typing pool, and it was a bunch of guys not too many women involved at that time and you would say I need an episode of Columbo. Who’s free this week and that person would have to come up with an episode of Columbo. The NBC Mystery Movie was a perfect example of that because every Sunday there was a different one of these shows. They weren’t a weekly show and so you had some time to prepare it. So you’d walk down the street and say I don’t know which of these shows would we need this next week and that’s — so writer’s rooms took freelance ideas and you didn’t sit in the room and break the story together and that has been something that’s evolved over time I think is interesting. In this writer’s pool at Universal, which contributed to that show, were all these men who became the show runners of the second golden age of television and they all are men whose shows have run on television incessantly.

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Dr. Rosanne Welch and Intellect Editor James Campbell Talk Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting, The Journal of Screenwriting, and Other Work [Video] (1 hour)

One of the benefits of attending conferences is that you can meet the editors from the companies that have published some of your books face to face. That happened at the recent SCMS conference where I met Intellect editor James Campbell and he invited me to be a guest on his InstagramLive show.

We chatted about my work with the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting, and then my work with co-editor Rose Ferrell on the Journal of Screenwriting’s special issue on Women in Screenwriting (Volume 11, Number 3) that came out recently and which featured articles about an international set of female screenwriters from Syria, Argentina, China and Canada (to name a few).

We even had time to nerd out on our own favorite classic films across the eras which brought up fun memories of Angels with Dirty Faces, Back to the Future, Bonnie and Clyde, and of course, all things Star Wars from the original 3 to The Mandalorian. It’s always so fun to talk to fellow cinephiles.

With Intellect Books Editor James Campbell (@IntellectBooks)

Speaking with Dr. Rosanne Welch, Author, teacher, and television screenwriter. Today we cover everything from women in screenwriting to our favorite Jimmy Cagney movies and Friends.

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05 The Monkees 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 did a whole book on The Monkees and they had one of the first writer’s rooms in a sort of a kid’s show sitcom and so I had the chance to meet with and interview all these writers back in about three years ago who were all in their late 70s and so heard about their stories of how the room operated. It was very important to have a female. It was the first sitcom that had a femle on staff and so she added a perspective. So it started the idea that we need inclusion in our rooms. We need to hear all the different perspectives. I thought that was pretty cool. So that’s the book and the article that I wrote for Written By.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V4 Issue 2: The screenwork as palimpsest by Rosamund Davies

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

Don’t Look Now: The screenwork as palimpsest by Rosamund Davies

The development of the screen idea is a dynamic, interactive process, involving a range of documents and collaborators. This article will consider the extra layer that adaptation from prose fiction to script adds to this process. Taking as my example the short story by Daphne du Maurier, Don’t Look Now, adapted for the screen by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant and subsequently directed by Nicolas Roeg (1973), I will focus in particular on the adaptation of narrative voice, from short story to screen: examining narration strategies in the short story, screenplay drafts and film, and the relationship between them. My discussion will explore the relevance of Ferrer and Groden’s notion of the creative process as an ‘always virtually present’ background process, of which each element of text and avant-texte constitutes but one manifestation. It will also introduce the figure of the palimpsest, considering how it might illuminate an understanding of the screenwork as constructed through the various layers that have contributed to its genesis, producing a multiple rather than a singular entity.

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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Dr. Rosanne Welch and Intellect Editor James Campbell Talk The Journal of Screenwriting and Others – Instagram Live – Wed, March 24, 2021, 10am PDT

JOIN US!

Instagram Live – Wed, March 24, 2021, 10am PDT

on the Intellect Instagram Account

I’ll be joining Intellect editor James Campbell this Wednesday the 24th for his Instagram Live segment.

We’ll be discussing the Special Issue of the Journal of Screenwriting that I co-edited with Rose Ferrell which covered international Women in Screenwriting.

We’ll also be talking about how and why to write for journals and how to use them in your courses.

04 The Comedy 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

In terms of the history of writer’s rooms, comedy always sort of had them and we know that going back into the early days of the George Burns and Gracie Allen Show. He had a team of writers including his brother who worked with him. So comedy always knew that it needed a group. It was as if they knew the sitcom was an outgrowth of standup comedy or those vaudeville acts they had all been in. Of course, we love The Dick Van Dyke Show taught many people in America — many females in America — you could write for television because there was a female character writing of television, right, in the ’60s. So that taught us we had a place in this business which is a good thing. Neil Simon worked in early TV comedy shows and so he then glamourized that in his play so that’s a way that people learn about writer’s rooms. They see it operate and this was a room that included very famous men. Larry Gelbart who did M*A*S*H. Woody Allen who we can say other things about these days.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V4 Issue 2: Unknown spaces and uncertainty in film development by Margot Nash

Unknown spaces and uncertainty in film development by Margot Nash

This article examines a discovery-driven process to script development as opposed to a formula-driven one. It is an investigation into the uncertain nature of the creative process in general, and the all-pervasive quest for certainty in film development in particular. Development strategies that value a discovery-driven process are few and far between, as are strategies to explore the gaps, or elisions, within a screenplay where subtext thrives, yet these are transformative spaces that invite an active and creative response. In this article I engage in practice-based research as a writer/director and as a teacher, and investigate two particular areas of film development. The first is early-stage script development where ideas are still struggling to find form; the second is latter-stage script development where a screenplay is refined in order to create spaces where others might respond imaginatively. I advocate risk taking, and the use of unconventional models, in order to create new spaces for students to explore their creativity, and I examine the ‘unknown’ and the ‘uncertain’ as active spaces, both for a screenwriter developing new work and for those who engage creatively with a screenplay as it transforms into a film. I argue that gaps or spaces within a screenplay offer opportunities for directors, actors, key creative crew and eventually an audience to actively participate, and that a development process that values the unknown offers the screenwriter a gateway to adventure and innovation. Screenwriting textbooks rarely enter the unknown and uncertain spaces of creativity yet, as many artists (albeit working in less-expensive mediums) seem to know instinctively, it is within the interplay of the known and the unknown, of passion and reason, and of logic and intuition – that creativity lies.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V4 Issue 2: Tracing the voice of the auteur: Persona and the Ingmar Bergman Archive by Anna Sofia Rossholm

Tracing the voice of the auteur: Persona and the Ingmar Bergman Archive by Anna Sofia Rossholm

This article discusses the Ingmar Bergman Archive, a donation by Bergman himself, mainly consisting of notebooks, manuscripts, production documents and letters, as well as the screenwriting process behind the film Persona (1966). The study approaches the digital manuscript archive as an interface that lends itself to an understanding of the artwork as continuous movement of transformation across media, an understanding that also links to aesthetical ideas on the relations between words and images expressed in Bergman’s cinematographic work. The study opens with a discussion of these issues and continues with a reading of the self-reflexive film Persona in order to examine how the explicit reflections on the mediation are negotiated across notebook drafts and scripts. The different phases in the process of creation – from notes and drafts to script versions and film – reflect on the transitory nature of the text as well as drawing on the specificities of each form of expression.

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Rosanne presents to Oxford Brookes University Students in transatlantic creative education exchange

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!

03 Managed Chaos 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

So that’s kind of my philosophy. I really don’t like the auteur theory and neither do a lot of other writers. This particular quote comes to us from the gentleman who gave us, in America, Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan. So I want to talk about writer’s rooms and his is considered one of the most organized so perhaps the less chaotic but still what happens in the room has its own form of chaos. So I think it’s really interesting that he is willing to defend the idea that writers are more important than directors. He’s certainly got an Emmy to prove he’s an important writer but I appreciate very much what he had to say. The room is about making people as comfortable as possible and this can be a difficult task but it’s the task of the executive producer or the showrunner to make sure that the people in the room are open to sharing as many of their interesting ideas as possible right? So chaos but managed chaos. You have to allow for much conversation but you’re the one managing what’s being said so you don’t run off on a tangent and of course Vince was brilliant at that.

For more information on the Screenwriting Research Network, visit

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