Screenwriting – Page 26 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

03 Gertrude Berg From Women in Early TV for the American Women Writers National Museum [Video]

Many thanks to Janice Law of the American Women Writers National Museum who invited me to give a short talk on The Women of Early TV.

I enjoyed sharing the names and careers of women like Peg Lynch, Gerturde Berg, Selma Diamond and D.C. Fontana to the members who gathered on Zoom last Wednesday morning. There are so many more I could have talked about whose names don’t appear in mainstream books about the history of television so we have to learn who they are and carry those names forward ourselves. It’s one of the missions of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting – and has been one of my missions all my life.

RMW Rosanne Signature for Web

Transcript:

Gertrude Berg is a woman we need to know about. We think about early television. We think about diversity. In this case, it was considered quite diverse that there would be a Jewish family on television and so she wrote The Goldbergs, one of the earliest, again, sitcoms and these are the pile of scripts behind her because this ran as well on radio and then moved into television where she portrayed herself in the show right? So that’s a beautiful other thing. Long before they were Seinfeld in any of those other comics, she became the star of the show she also wrote. This impresses me because the double work involved in that is almost hard to explain and what’s really amazing about Molly Goldberg is in the 1940s she was voted the second most admired woman in America, right after the first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Imagine that was showing us the early power of television and how those stories can move into our lives and really be part of something. So I found that absolutely fascinating.

Many thanks to Janice Law of the American Women Writers National Museum who invited me to give a short talk on The Women of Early TV.

I enjoyed sharing the names and careers of women like Peg Lynch, Gerturde Berg, Selma Diamond and D.C. Fontana to the members who gathered on Zoom last Wednesday morning. There are so many more I could have talked about whose names don’t appear in mainstream books about the history of television so we have to learn who they are and carry those names forward ourselves. It’s one of the missions of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting – and has been one of my missions all my life.

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Women pioneers who created, produced or shepherded many of America’s most wildly popular, early television programs will be profiled by Dr. Rosanne Welch.

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Screenwriter Eve Unsell, Hitchcock’s Mentor Who Saved Universal’s European Operation — Dr. Rosanne Welch, Script magazine, December 2021

Born in Chicago in 1888 (or thereabouts, different sites report different dates), writer-producer Eve Unsell grew up in Caldwell, Kansas. After earning her undergraduate degree and working as a journalist for the Kansas City Post, she attended graduate school at Boston’s Emerson College for a year. There she studied drama and literature before heading to New York. After reading one of her short stories, theatrical agent Beatrice deMille (mother of Cecil and William) hired to work as what was then called a play reader and constructionist. During her career, Unsell accumulated nearly 100 credits as a screenwriter while writing for notable stars including Mary Pickford, Lon Chaney, Clara Bow, Baby Peggy and Jack Benny.

Read Screenwriter Eve Unsell, Hitchcock’s Mentor Who Saved Universal’s European Operation

Read about more women from early Hollywood

16 Joan Didion…from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

We bring in Joan and John. So in this third version, we’re going to have another female writer with her imprint on this movie. She’s going to change a few things. She is a journalist. She’s worked in New York. She’s worked out of Sacramento. She’s covered the hippie generation. She particularly wrote this lovely piece — a book called The White Album where she looked at the culture of her day and she studied The Doors. She was fascinated by The Doors and their popularity and the way that Jim Morrison just blew up in American culture right? She in fact called them the missionaries of apocalyptic sex right? Look at this beautiful picture of this young man right? Sadly he’s going to be one of the guys who dies young right. He’s going to join the Jimi Hendrix and you know that whole team of people that we’ve lost too young in life but now Joan is writing this new version and she’s going to make the new people rock and roll stars. So we’re going to move out of acting — move out of musical theater — we’re going to move into the rock world. So right away she’s patterning things on Jim Morrison. Look at this picture of Kris Kristofferson. This is Kris Kristofferson young. This is Jim Morrison. Look how close they are. You could almost mix them up right? So Joan immediately is having this vision of who is this new Norman Maine and because Norman is not such a cool name in the 70s, he’s John Norman Maine, right? So we’re going to make a little change.

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Connections at conferences matter! Through the most recent SCMS, I met Vicki Callahan, whose film history focus right now is on Mabel Normand. When she learned I could put together a lecture on the importance of the female voice in the A Star is Born franchise she asked me to give that lecture to her master students.

It made for a great opportunity for me to hone the ideas I’m working on for a chapter on that franchise that I’m writing for a new book from Bloomsbury: The Bloomsbury Handbook Of International Screenplay Theory. It’s always nice when one piece of research can be purposed in other ways – and it’s always fun revisiting such a female-centric film franchise – one that drew the talents of such powerful performers as Janet Gaynor, Judy Garland, Barbara Streisand, and Lady Gaga.

Find out why in this lecture!

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02 Peg Lynch from “VISIBLE STARS: Women in Early TV” for the American Women Writers National Museum [Video]

Many thanks to Janice Law of the American Women Writers National Museum who invited me to give a short talk on The Women of Early TV.

Transcript:

My teaching philosophy is that Words matter, Writers matter,. and Women Writers matter and they are far too often left out of the history books that we use to teach our incoming students. My school is Stephens College as Jen has so nicely told you and we teach a program in TV and Screenwriting — a master’s program — and I’m excited to say that we are all about representation on television and we’re going to see a little example of that in my presentation today. So let’s get to it. One of the first women — we credit her with inventing the sitcom which is a money maker for television for all these many, many years. Peg Lynch. She began in radio, as many of these women did, and she was writing short sketches — 10 and 15 minute sketches — called the Ethel and Albert Comedies and this is the first time she took sort of domestic life and made jokes out of it and put that on the media right? In this case, radio shows and eventually they became television shows and to her credit, she has 11,000 scripts. So think about that as if she was writing for a variety show if you will. It went on for many years. There were many many episodes. So she’s the first person who really got into the husband and wife having a chat and let’s make some jokes about how tough real-life can be. Often with the wife being a little smarter than the husband right? Being a step ahead of him but society allowed him to move forward and of course, that’s a pattern we’re gonna see repeated naturally in I Love Lucy.

Many thanks to Janice Law of the American Women Writers National Museum who invited me to give a short talk on The Women of Early TV.

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Women pioneers who created, produced or shepherded many of America’s most wildly popular, early television programs will be profiled by Dr. Rosanne Welch.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V6 Issue 2: Off goes the telly: Writer discourse on the Life on Mars franchise finales by Christine Becker

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

Off goes the telly: Writer discourse on the Life on Mars franchise finales by Christine Becker

The British original Life on Mars, the spin-off Ashes to Ashes, and the American remake of Life on Mars offered divergent endings to the same premise, and each series finale divided viewer opinion to varying degrees. This article discusses these three different endings and considers how the writers of each series framed explanations for their creative decisions in discourse surrounding the finales. The article’s analysis illustrates that the series writers strove to justify their narrative resolutions strategically at various points in each series run to account for potential public reaction and to frame their writing decisions as driven primarily by creative motivations, not industrial ones. As such, the article suggests that writers of television finales, particularly those that close off serialized shows, have more opportunity and pressure than ever before to enter into dialogue with emboldened audiences about the production process.

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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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!

15 1976…from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

1976 comes along and this is Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. So 54 or jump into 76. It’s kind of like once every generation there’s an interest and a need for this movie. Partially because female creatives, whether they be writers or actresses, see this as a great piece to work from and a great way to reflect on their moment in culture right? So this is a big fancy deal. Look at these great photographs. Let me tell you, this is going to be written by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunn. They are a married couple who write their own novels as you see here and work out of New York. They get hired to do this and Joan is going to have her own imprint on it. We’re going to see that in a second. I also want to highlight the fact that John Gregory Dunn wrote this marvelous book if you’ve never read it called Monster: Living Life Off the Big Screen. It’s about the writing of this film Up Close and Personal, which was meant to be the story of Jessica Savitch, an anchorwoman who died when she was high on cocaine and drove her car into a lake and drown and by the time they were done it had nothing to do with her at all and so this tells you the eight-year struggle to get the movie made out of the Disney company. It’s a really a good inside look at how writers and producers work with studios.

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52 Conclusion from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video]

Thanks to the gracious invitation from my Screenwriting Research Network colleague Paolo Russo – and a grant he was able to procure (and in the before-Covid time) I was able to spend a week at Oxford Brookes University working with the screenwriting masters students in Paolo’s course. At the culmination of the week, I gave this lecture on how writers rooms worked in the States.

Transcript:

…and if you don’t think novelists are writers who collaborate think about the fact that all these guys hung around with each other in a writer’s group and read stuff to each other and took notes from each other and made changes based on those notes. Those were writer’s rooms. The Eagle and whatever that pub is called I haven’t gotten to yet …that was a writer’s room right and from that room not only did we get those books. We got this collaboration. Phil Jackson is great. I love him. He’s brilliant. He does great stuff. He doesn’t do it alone. He’s just the guy who’s willing to do the interviews. His wife doesn’t care to do interviews. I don’t know what’s wrong with her but she’s making me crazy right because we’re forgetting that two women co-wrote this movie. That’s what makes it so much better for our times right? They got the best-adapted screenplay award. Two women and a guy made The Lord of the Rings into what it is. I think that’s really important. So who remembers what I said my teaching philosophy was

three things matter

Words matter, Writers matter, and Women Writers matter.

Thank you very much. You’re listening. This thing is good. All right and this is important to me. It’s not just what I know. It’s spreading that around this is my first graduating classroom at Stephen’s MFA. As I said it was an all-female college. So it’s about spreading the word. Writers are teachers with a giant podium. What’s your opinion of how this world should work? Put it out there and the bigger audience you get the more influence you get. Forget YoutTube and who does makeup well. Those aren’t influencers. People who tell stories — I seriously — they’re not — people who tell stories are influencers because stories teach us to feel and that’s what you get paid to do which I love. So again these are a bunch of books I use when I’m just thinking about putting this together. So if you’re interested in reading about showrunners, those are a bunch of books that do interviews with them, and of course, this is the bunch that I’ve written and that’s all I have to say. So I guess we’re doing a q a now right? so if people have questions, I am totally open to your things.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V6 Issue 2: Guest and returning writers in American television drama series: The two Davids by Tom Steward

Guest and returning writers in American television drama series: The two Davids by Tom Steward

The article uses two distinct historical case studies to argue in favour of the agency of guest writers and returning episode writers of American television drama series in terms of their ability to create thematically and stylistically distinctive episodes with an individual voice. In the first, I look at writer-director David Mamet’s episode of Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1980–1987) entitled ‘A Wasted Weekend’ and in the second I discuss several episodes written by writer-director-producer David Chase for The Rockford Files (NBC, 1974–1980). I explore the case studies in relation to existing critical literature on American television drama authorship and comparison to more recent examples of guest and returning episode writers. Using in-depth textual, script and production analysis, I argue that the tone, content and style of certain episodes of American television drama series are unique to the individual writer. I contend that the production roles of guest writer and returning episode writer, while different at different times, offer scope for writers to distinguish their work in American television. In addressing these particular screenwriting roles, I challenge the overemphasis on the production hierarchy in terms of critical accounts of creativity within American television drama and probe the exploitation of writers in cultural validations of television.

Get your copy and subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting Today!

* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!

14 What Changed?…from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

So let’s look at what changed. First, we’ve got to move her into it being a musical star because this is Judy Garland. She’s going to have to sing musical numbers in this particular remake. We’re still going to have our drunken actor and they’re going to marry and he’s going to be jealous. This is something that remains the same all the way until we get to Bradley Cooper and we’ll talk about why that changes. We’re going to have our Academy Award moment because musicals were things that earned Academy Awards back in the day of course. He’s going to commit suicide off-screen. He’s going to walk off into the ocean as the noble man that he is and she too will introduce herself as Mrs. Norman Maine. So these things remain exactly the same. When the Writer’s Guild arbitrates a script to decide who should get final credit, they look at all versions of a script. They have a blind group of writers who sign up to do this and they get the scripts –writer one, writer two, writer three. You don’t get any names and then you decide statistically how much of a percentage of this person’s original work made it to the end and that’s how they decide credit. So I am looking at this as if I’m arbitrating the various versions of this script to see how much credit Dorothy Parker still deserves. In this case, I think a lot right? They’re borrowing a lot of what she did.

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On The Writers of Casablanca

While it is fun to look back at this review of Casablanca from when it was released – before anyone knew it would become the classic it is and be voted one of the greatest screenplays of all times – it’s also a reminder of my pet peeve. The reviewer never once names the screenwriters – twins Julius Epstein and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch – in the whole review.

He mentions the producer and the director in the first paragraph. Yet he writes: “through these people, the story of Casablanca is told with expert intensity.” And about the love story, he says: “the triangle is intelligently developed.” And in praise of the director, he notes “the wealth of contributing material that was placed at his disposal” without ever acknowledging the writers who did all of that.

As a final coup de grace he names each of the heads of departments and their “long list of technical achievements”… but never once mentions the writers who envisioned it all – Julius and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch. So I am mentioning them many times in this rant. Jacob and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch created the Casablanca we still watch, love, and teach 80 years after it was written by Jacob and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch.

Read ‘Casablanca’: THR’s 1942 Review from the Hollywood Reporter