In this scene, and these are quotes from Bradley Cooper as he was making the film he’s being interviewed right, he says he’s on stage trying to support her but his demons won’t let him right? So we still have the debacle but it’s not because he wants to ruin her night. He’s trying to be there to support her and then it’s embarrassing and terrible and sad and also he says that at the end of the movie, she’s just starting right and what she’s going to create is going to be bigger than what we’ve seen prior. That means her movie isn’t this movie — that her movie is the next one which will never be made. That means this is the Jackson Maine story and that’s not what I signed up for. I signed up for the star — the female star — being born. So I think that’s a huge change that he as a male writer has brought to this franchise. You look at the writing credits, right? So if Bradley wrote it with this guy Will Fetters. If you go to the Writers Guild when you have time when it’s open again in the library, they have a copy of the first draft and if you read it to compare to the film that you saw in 2019 you will be shocked because it is not brilliant. It is this guy who’s an Academy Award winner for Forrest Gump and I think he has two Academy Awards, Eric Roth who came in to do the rewrite that really molded the piece but he’s taking the ideas that Bradley Cooper had which are to focus more on Jackson Maine’s character. They base themselves on the Moss Heart screenplay, right? So by the time we’re done with this Dorothy’s name has finally disappeared entirely even though all the bones of it are really still there and really still her if you ask me.
Watch this entire presentation
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.
I enjoyed sharing the names and careers of women like Peg Lynch, Gertrude 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.
Transcript:
…and those programs include some very very popular shows. The Andy Griffith Show — still in reruns today as well and something that we know in television history for a million reasons including the fact that this young man grew up to be Academy Award-winning director Ronnie Howard right? So this was an amazingly iconic show that people still recognize and reference today. Obviously The Mod Squad — very fresh and new thing for the 60s. So she had a good eye — Lucille Ball had a good eye for what would sell and what was progressive and moving forward right? Isn’t that interesting? She captured both the past and the present in the ideas that she put forward and of course, Mannix was just basically an iconic detective show. However, also think about the progressiveness of it. His “girl Friday” was an African-American woman and she was a working woman, right? Who had a real position in his company and she was very intrinsic to what he did. So that’s a pretty amazing step forward again all coming out of Lucy’s creative ideas. Yes to this no to that. These are the shows she said yes to including, I like to say, a little show called Star Trek right?
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, Gertrude 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.
Watch this entire presentation
Women pioneers who created, produced, or shepherded many of America’s most wildly popular, early television programs will be profiled by Dr. Rosanne Welch.
If you haven’t seen this short 3 minute ‘featurette’ where Mike Flannagan explains the impetus for writing the show “Midnight Mass”, it’s worth your time.
Most importantly, he discusses how he started writing the script in 2010 (so it took 11 years to become what it became); that he thought it would be a movie first until he realized how deep the story should be; and that it came from a scary “what if” question he had in his own life.
This short conversation is a great look into the mind of a writer (even if you haven’t watched the show and might not even intend to because horror scares you….the lessons are all still evident in this conversation).
Now I tend to call this the Bradley Cooper version and as Jacob asked me”Do I like it?” I like it to the extent that I like the bones of this story but because a male wrote it, and had two other male screenwriters rewrite him, it becomes his story. It becomes the Jackson Maine story. We have much more focus on his character, his backstory, and while giving a female superstar one name seems modern, in many ways it erases part of her own history. What is her actual last name right? A female character without a last name is not one who’s been thought through all the way, I would say in reading a script. So in this case, we focus so much on his backstory. So much about his own family. It’s his brother that’s part of the story. So much is more about the star who’s dying than the star who is being born in this movie. She doesn’t really have the same agency. Certainly not that Barbra Streisand gave her character. Really not that we had out of Julie or Janet either.
Watch this entire presentation
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.
I enjoyed sharing the names and careers of women like Peg Lynch, Gertrude 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.
Transcript:
The trick about Lucy is that most people think she was just an actress and a comedian and a funny person but maybe if you read Desi Arnaz’s book you’ll learn that she actually was one of the first women to run a television production studio and that was Desilu — obviously a combination of Desi’s name and Lucy’s name. They started that company to run I Love Lucy. He was quite brilliant. We have to give him some props. He was the person who thought we should film this program not put it on earlier versions of tape which disappeared. Which is also why we don’t know some early women in the business because their work disappeared but because Desi was smart enough to say let’s put this on film and let our production company own the product, they of course then were one of the first shows to rerun and that was a moneymaker for them as they randomly ran as we know many many years but lucy was the Vice President. Imagine that. They invented the company together. He’s the president. She’s the vice president. Why aren’t they co-presidents? Nobody asked that question because men were supposed to have the higher title right and yet she was Lucy right? She’s the engine behind all of this. Her job was particularly to do the creative work. He did the business work and he was brilliant at that we want to give him all the props he deserves but she made the choices about what other programs their production company would support.
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, Gertrude 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.
Watch this entire presentation
Women pioneers who created, produced, or shepherded many of America’s most wildly popular, early television programs will be profiled by Dr. Rosanne Welch.
I enjoyed sharing the names and careers of women like Peg Lynch, Gertrude 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.
Transcript:
Madeline Pugh is not a woman who is forgotten in the books because she wrote for, of course, the most iconic woman on television, Lucille Ball and Madeleine Pugh was at the very beginning of Lucille Ball’s television career and stayed with her all the way through each of the three major shows she was ever a star of. You’ll notice here very tiny on her chair. It said Madeline Pugh Girl Writer. Imagine that. She is not a girl at this stage in her career. She is a grown woman who has a good history behind her of writing radio programs and then moving into this world. She co-wrote with this gentleman Bob Carroll whom she never married. They were just writing partners which was marvelous. She had her own personal life. She, in fact, married a man who had three children and eventually left Hollywood for a while and then decided she missed it and they as a whole family moved back and she continued. so Madeline Pugh is a huge, huge person in the history of television. She’s one of the few who might show up in a book because if you talk about The Lucille Ball Show you must talk about Madeline. One of the things madeleine did was as they wrote gags or the particular physical comedy that they would expect Lucy to do, Madeline would perform those tricks first. She would have to see if they were safe and they were doable and in fact, were they really funny when you saw them finished. So she was both sort of a side performer and of course a writer on the show. So I think Madeline Pugh is someone you should never forget as well as of course Lucille Ball.1
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, Gertrude 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.
Watch this entire presentation
Women pioneers who created, produced, or shepherded many of America’s most wildly popular, early television programs will be profiled by Dr. Rosanne Welch.
I enjoyed sharing the names and careers of women like Peg Lynch, Gertrude 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.
Transcript:
However, those two ladies were so important to the creation of Rose Marie — this character on the beloved Dick Van Dyke Show. This is one of the most important characters really in television history and many many female tv writers today will tell you that they knew this job was possible because they saw her do it on the fictional Dick Van Dyke Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show was a fictionalization of the staff writing for Sid Caesar right? Carl Reiner’s character is meant to be a personification of that. So these are the typical gentlemen who worked for him and she is a representation of Lucille and Selma Diamond sort of wrapped together. A woman who never got married right? Couldn’t find a guy. This is a very stereotypical vision of a career gal as they would say back in the day but she inspired many many women all the way up through Tina Fey and I think it’s always important to think about the power of television. One of my favorite stories has nothing to do with tv writers but to do with a Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who says she learned that she could be a lawyer someday by watching Perry Mason as a child. She learned that lawyers existed and that it was a job that required college and so she did well in school so that she could move forward and look she’s on the Supreme Court today. So television has a lot of power and the visuals women see on television are very very important to the ideas. You have to see it so that you can be it right? So Rose Marie stands for a lot of things — a representation of the women who truly did come before her and an inspiration to the women who came after.
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, Gertrude 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.
Watch this entire presentation
Women pioneers who created, produced, or shepherded many of America’s most wildly popular, early television programs will be profiled by Dr. Rosanne Welch.
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.
Transcript:
…and here’s the problem. See all these men that we’re seeing in the pictures. All these men are who are remembered for writing for Sid Caesar. You’ve got Carl Reiner. You’ve got Woody Allen. You’ve got Larry Gelbart, who’s going to go on to do M*A*SH for us. These men are icons of comedy. When they came together to be recognized both Lucille and Selma had passed away. So when it was time to take this photograph, this is what people will remember about the writers of these classic iconic early comedies. They will not remember that women were on board for those things. The other sad thing to realize is this is still the visual of what a writing staff looks like on a late-night comedy show. When Stephen Colbert’s show won the Emmy a few years ago, there’s one female writer among the 13 male writers on that show. It is an issue that is still with us today in television. So we have to think about it, but sadly because this is such a great photograph, people will forget way down here it says not pictured the two ladies who didn’t happen to be able to be there that day.
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.
Watch this entire presentation
Women pioneers who created, produced or shepherded many of America’s most wildly popular, early television programs will be profiled by Dr. Rosanne Welch.
Whenever I plan one of the Writers Guild Foundation panels that I host during our MFA Workshop I look for things I’m interested in hearing more about. As I’ve enjoyed a few historical pieces recently it made sense to do a panel of writers in that genre.
Whether the show takes place in 18th century England or the American suburbs of the 1960s, we ask TV writers and producers about their process for researching various eras, the creative decisions behind stories about real-life people and events, their experiences adapting from novels and literary works, and other lessons learned while writing in the genre.
Panelists:
Amberia Allen – Writer and Story Editor, The Wonder Years
Danielle Berrow – Writer and Executive Story Editor, Outlander
Robbie Macdonald – Writer and Executive Producer, Dickinson
Stay tuned for more panelist announcements!
Moderated by Dr. Rosanne Welch, Director of Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting.
Panel starts at 4:00pm Pacific time.
Space is limited so RSVP now. After signing up, you’ll receive information on how to access the Zoom panel.
If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us at events@wgfoundation.org.
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
Regular characters in episodic television series do not change, develop or transform. At least this is the way these characters are commonly understood. In television series, the plot focuses on episodic adventures, and the core cast of characters are seen as fairly rigid actants that facilitate those adventures. These apparently static characters of television series are generally understood in contrast to characters in television serials, who do transform over the course of episodes, seasons and years. This view can be found readily in popular discourse as well as writing manuals and scholarly treatises. But there is more to character change in television series. We can also see how characters in television series do change in different ways, displayed chiefly through character action and plot structure. Three kinds of character change on-screen are identified in this article: experiencing significant life events; expressing intense emotions, and displaying contrasting behaviours. Textual analysis of popular crime dramas and sitcoms demonstrates how characters in television series do change continually.
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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