Screenwriting – Page 33 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V5 Issue 1: The ‘De Santis case’: Screenwriting, political boycott and archival research by Paolo Russo

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

The ‘De Santis case’: Screenwriting, political boycott and archival research by Paolo Russo

In the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s writer-director Giuseppe De Santis was the most successful Italian film-maker worldwide, thanks to box-office hits like the Oscar-nominated Riso amaro/Bitter Rice (1949). However, endless rows with producers, distributors and censorship soon forced him into professional exile until his creative voice was completely silenced. Over the years De Santis denounced a systematic boycott against him because of his social and political commitment. All scripts needed the central government film office approval; this system enforced a form of pre-emptive censorship by controlling the writing and packaging process. This article unveils the findings of comprehensive research conducted at the De Santis Fund in Rome. While De Santis’s official filmography lists only one title in the last 33 years of his life, his archive contains dozens of treatments and full scripts (and the film-maker’s correspondence) adding up to a total of almost 50 projects that were never made. The materials analysed here not only allow a thorough re-write of De Santis’s career, but also shed light on the intricate relations between politics and the Italian film industry in the post-war years.

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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16 Vida 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

In the case of this show on Starz, Vida, it’s the story of three LatinX women in Los Angeles who had moved away but come home when their mother dies and they discover that they’ve inherited a bar and the bigger discovery is that they’ve co-inherited it with their mother’s lesbian lover. So, now they’ve learned their mother’s a lesbian and they own a bar and they’re living in a part of LA that is going under gentrification. The entire show is staffed by female LatinX writers and so having a room that is entirely inclusive of the people on the show has been very special to them. Whether or not they are missing other perspectives, I can’t say, but that’s an experience that’s making it an open place for them to tell their stories, which is very important. Queen Sugar is a director-led writer’s room. Ava Devernay, who’s done several films, she now ran the show, she created it and she brought in a team of writers who are in charge. So now she’s — everything comes from the visual with her and you have to start with the visual when you tell a story. She has hired someone else to run the room, but they’re thinking of her desire as they do it. So that’s important.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V5 Issue 1: Screenwriting without typing – the case of Calamari Union by Raija Talvio

Screenwriting without typing – the case of Calamari Union by Raija Talvio

The first part of this article is a practice-based case study of the making of the film Calamari Union (1985), a Finnish cult classic written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki. I was the film editor of this film as well as of several other features and short films by Kaurismäki in the 1980s. From the point of view of screenwriting research, Calamari Union offers a thought-provoking example: it is a feature-length fiction film that was made entirely without a formal screenplay. In the case study I examine the effects of this method in the production and post-production of the film. In the second part of the article I discuss the definitions of a ‘screenplay’ and screenwriting in the context of alternative film-making practices, and the reasons for and consequences of the choice of such practices. I will also briefly visit the question of authorship in cinema and reflect on the birth of stories.

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A Woman Wrote That – 30 in a series – Sleepless in Seattle (1993)

This new “A Woman Wrote That” post is an echo of the Writers Guild campaign of a few years ago (“A Writer Wrote That”) where they noted famous movie quotes and credited the screenwriter rather than the director. The difference here being that we will be posting lines from films written by female screenwriters. Feel free to share! — Rosanne

ANNIE

“Destiny is something that we’ve invented because we can’t stand the fact that everything that happens is accidental.”

Sleepless in Seattle on IMDB
Sleepless in Seattle on Wikipedia
Nora Ephron on Wikipedia and IMDB
Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

15 The Operation of a Writer’s Room Part 2 from How The Chaos Of Collaboration in the Writers Room Created Golden Age Television [Video]

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Transcript

…and she tells a lovely story about one scene in which she had two — this is, of course, about the pre— the days of the Czar — and so you have lovely rich people fencing. Two lovely young men having a fencing match — a practice — and at the end of it they take off their attire and they put on their nice shirts with the lace and they walk away. And the men in her writing room — the Russian men — said “well, the scene is over when we know who won the match,” and she said “No, this is a soap opera. The scene is over when the women see their chests.” So, she was teaching them what you need inside a soap opera. So they wanted a teaching writer’s room and that’s what she was able to provide.

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On Screenwriting: The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Title IV, and Today [Essay]

Working on this chapter about how the life of Ruth Bader Ginsburg was adapted for the screen in On the Basis of Sex, I was reminded of the interview scene in the pilot of The Mary Tyler Moore Show where Lou Grant asks her if she’s married and what religion she is.

In 1970 those questions were illegal thanks to Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But RBG had graduated in 1959 so the Act had not been around to help her. She was turned down because she was a woman and because she was Jewish – despite achievements like graduating first in her class and the distinction of being the first woman to work on two major law reviews: the Harvard Law Review and Columbia Law Review.

Then I did some searching on the MTM script and found this article about how, though the scene was written in 1970 by James Brooks and Allan Burns, it is still relevant today. Fascinating statistics between now and then including the fact that by 2017 in 38 percent of heterosexual marriages, women outearn their husbands.

3 ways ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’ pilot is still relevant today from the Washington Post

After Mary Tyler Moore’s death Wednesday, I watched the pilot episode of “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” Though the show was revolutionary for its time for its portrayal of a single woman, working in journalism and living alone — I didn’t expect it to hold up all that well. Forty-seven years after the pilot aired, there are parts that are certainly retro. Louis “Lou” Grant (Edward Asner), for example, flat-out tells Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore) during a job interview: “I figured I’d hire a man for it, but we can talk about it.” But there’s a lot in that first episode that’s still relevant for single women today.

Read 3 ways ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’ pilot is still relevant today

And watch the scene if you don’t know it…

Dr. Rosanne Welch Talks Worry and Wonder in Screenwriting on the Courier 13 Podcast [Audio] [Video]

It’s always fun to sit down with students and share stories about entering the television industry and how things work at all stages and I had that opportunity the other day.

Daniela Torres, a just-graduated (Congratulations!) student of the Columbia College Semester in LA program asked me to guest on a podcast she had recently begun hosting with another college student she met during her internship (good example of networking in action!).

We could have talked all morning (the benefit of a 3 hour class session) but we held it to about an hour and fifteen minutes or so. Hopefully, along the way I answered some questions you might have about how the business works. So often it amounts to working hard at being a better writer and gathering a group of other talented, hard-working people around you so you can all rise together.

Listen to the audio version of this podcast

Dr. Rosanne Welch is a television writer with credits that include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, ABCNEWS: Nightline and Touched by an Angel. She also teaches Television Writing and the Art of Film at San Jose State University.

Rosanne discusses what made shows like Beverly Hills 90210 compelling, what to do and not to do when attempting to pitch a show to broadcast or streaming, what most young writers neglect in their writing process, and much more!

The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.

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14 The Operation of a 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 wanted to talk about what it’s like. What’s the “operation” of a writer’s room and I love that this game is, of course, based on Rick & Morty, a TV show. So, we’re blending TV into all these other mediums now. You have to think about what kind of writer’s room you’re working. There are different kinds we’ve had experience with. My friend, Lisa Seidman, is a writer from Los Angeles. Some Russian producers came to Los Angeles. They wanted a woman –a person — who had written soap operas — both afternoon and evening soap operas — who could speak Russian and who had been a screenwriting teacher, because they wanted that person to move to Russia for a few years, start the show, Anastasia, Poor Anastasia, and teach a writing room how it should work. So that she could then leave and they could manage it themselves.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V5 Issue 1: Writing with images: The Film-Photo-Essay, the Left Bank Group and the pensive moment by Andrew Taylor

Writing with images: The Film-Photo-Essay, the Left Bank Group and the pensive moment by Andrew Taylor

This article is focused on the film-photo-essay form. The first part of the article is a narrative account of my experiments ‘writing with images’ in the early and mid-2000s, using (the then) new digital tools to make film-photo-essays. My account reflects on how the change from analogue to digital affected my approach to photography, film-making and writing with images. I then look at the case study of Siberia (2009), an illustrated script that was written following my experimentation with the film-photo-essay form. The second part of this article is a more general enquiry into the film-photo-essay form and work that combines cinema and photography. I discuss the contemporary interest in work that falls on a spectrum between photography and cinema; often referred to as ‘still/moving’. I then focus on the ‘Left Bank Group’, whose work often combined cinema, photography and the literary and philosophical essay. Examples from the ‘cine-writing’ of Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda and Chris Marker highlight how Raymond Bellour’s idea of the ‘pensive moment’ is apt in relation to their work. I argue that still/moving forms allow more space for audience interaction and emotional response than conventional narrative cinema; and in a world saturated with information and cluttered with images, there is an important place for new pensive hybrid art forms.

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“Hidden Figures” and Breaking The Myth of the Blockbuster Movie

In researching a chapter on the film Hidden Figures (for a new book on Women’s History on Film) I was happy to read this clip that supports the fact that there IS an audience for films that are not explosion-packed blockbuster tentpoles meant for young male audiences…. But I was really taken aback when I learned that while the studio allotted 25 million to Hidden Figures… that same year they had allotted 125 million to a movie no one even remembers…Monster Trucks. When, oh, when, will THAT craziness end?

In an article in The Atlantic by David Sims:

“In its first weekend of wide release, Hidden Figures defied tracking numbers and for the subsequent four-day Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday weekend, Hidden Figures increased its gross, making $26 million and staying at number one, holding off the expansion of La La Land and Paramount’s broad-skewing children’s adventure Monster Trucks. And yet Monster Trucks is a patently silly piece of kids entertainment about a young man who finds a squid-like monster living in his truck. It stars Lucas Till, hardly an A-lister (though he had a small role in the recent X-Men movies), and cost $125 million to make—$100 million more than Hidden Figures. Devoting such a large budget to a film with little brand recognition that was basically guaranteed to get terrible reviews was quickly regarded as a disastrous decision. Viacom, the company that owns the Monster Trucks studio Paramount Pictures, took a $115 million write-down in earnings last September in anticipation of its failure (it opened to a lackluster $15 million last weekend). This is what Hollywood’s emphasis on big-budget films with “broad appeal” inevitably leads to: hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on toy-focused action films with no real audience. For the cost of Monster Trucks, Paramount could have made five Hidden Figures—smaller films, focused on telling grounded stories to fill a market gap that studios continue to ignore. That Hidden Figures’s success has to serve as a lesson to Hollywood in 2017 is ridiculous, but the lesson is nonetheless there to be learned. Audiences are hungry for films that look beyond the movie industry’s narrow worldview. It’s time to start delivering them.”

All I can say about that is its fodder for every writer out there pitching a new project to shut down any executive’s questions about audience numbers. And writers need all the fodder they can find to fight back when they know they are correct.

Dr. Rosanne Welch