Screenwriting – Page 37 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

08 Stephen J. Cannell and Adam-12 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”

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

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

Stephen Cannell — who’s the first person I worked for as an assistant — they tell a great story when he was in the writer’s pool Universal. They came in for this show, Adam-12, they said we need an idea for the show. Who wants to write one and the first thing that came to him was — they’re policemen who rode around in a squad car all day — and his unique idea was, what if they got the squad car that was misbehaving — that had engine trouble and a flat tire and everything went wrong with the car. So the whole episode was about these men managing the tool of their job more than managing what the crime of the week was and that stood out in people’s minds. He was using the formula in a different way and that started to make people pay attention to him. So that he could leave and do other things.

For more information on the Screenwriting Research Network, visit

Follow me on Instagram

* 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!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

A Woman Wrote That – 23 in a series – Brave (2012), Writer, Brenda Chapman

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

MERIDA

I am Merida, firstborn descendant of Clan Dunbroch. And I’ll be shooting for my own hand!

Brave on IMDB
Brave on Wikipedia
Brenda Chapman on Wikipedia and IMDB
Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

Screenwriting Question 1: What if someone steals my idea?

@drrosannewelch

Question: What of someone steals my idea? ##screenwriting ##questions ##answers ##television ##film ##movies ##education

♬ Pieces (Solo Piano Version) – Danilo Stankovic

Read more about screenwriting with these books

* 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!
† Available from the LA Public Library

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Have questions about the craft and/or business of screenwriting for film and TV? Drop them in the comments! via TikTok [Video]

@drrosannewelch

Have ##questions about the ##craft and/or ##business of ##screenwriting for ##film and ##TV? Drop them in the comments and I’ll be happy to answer them!

♬ original sound – Dr. Rosanne Welch

Read more about screenwriting with these books

* 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!
† Available from the LA Public Library

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

18 Where Are The Women? from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (40 seconds)

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:

Kenny moved into The Incredible Hulk really the first superhero show on tv that ever survived and then he did “V” which was redone a few years ago and then he did Alien Nation which is where I met him. I worked on that show. So but in all these early drama rooms, there’s something missing. Who’s not in that picture? Audience: Any woman. Thank you. There you go. That’s the problem because most all these stories are being funneled through the minds of guys and you can’t blame a person for writing about what they know and what means something to them. That’s what writers do and that’s why a room wants as much inclusivity as possible right? So we don’t have any girls.

Watch this entire presentation

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

* 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!
† Available from the LA Public Library

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V4 Issue 3: And the beat goes on: The continuing influence of The Singing Detective by Glen Creeber

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

And the beat goes on: The continuing influence of The Singing Detective by Glen Creeber

From the 25 years of its original broadcast on British television in December 1986, this article aims to assess the continued influence of the British TV serial, The Singing Detective (BBC). It aims to clarify many of the major techniques employed in the programme and suggest ways in which its particular style and non-naturalistic aesthetic (with its roots dating back to the early 1960s) has influenced a whole generation of TV drama since. In particular, it will draw direct parallels between writer Dennis Potter’s work and serials such as Twin Peaks, Oz, Six Feet Under and The Sopranos, citing various sources that suggest these connections are more than just hypothetical. The American cable channel HBO (Home Box Office) will come under particular focus, with the author drawing links between its current remit to produce experimental and adult-themed drama and Potter’s own work. It will then investigate the state of contemporary British television drama and suggest why it arguably refuses to take as many risks as some of its American counterparts, citing various sources which suggest that contemporary British hard-hitting drama appears to have been forsaken for a plethora of heritage and period-based serials. In conclusion, it will argue that while the influence of The Singing Detective appears to have been profoundly significant elsewhere, its dramatic legacy is now surprisingly missing from British TV screens.

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.

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!

07 The Writer’s Voice 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”

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

Transcript

And I think that’s where we started to learn that, particularly in television, you had to find people with a defined voice and that is something you could build a show around and so when I define voice everyone has a slightly different concept but to me, it’s a simple matter of your opinion and the style in which you deliver it and that tells us your different voice and I think some of the shows I’m going to mention — it’s very clear they have very unique voices and that’s where they come from. So we started to recognize that the idea of the creator and television was the writer and that person should run the entire show themselves and should begin to gather about them a group of people who could mimic their voice while still keeping their own. That was the difficult job of television which is also still a difficult thing to teach students to write a spec script that sounds like, but doesn’t obliterate, your own voice, and that’s what you’re trying to do in the room, which again, is more chaotic than I would say.

For more information on the Screenwriting Research Network, visit

Follow me on Instagram

* 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!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

A Woman Wrote That – 22 in a series – Bring It On! (2000), Writer, Jessica Bendinger

TORRANCE

You’re a great cheerleader, Aaron, and you’re cute as hell, but maybe you’re just not ‘boyfriend’ material.

Bring It On! on IMDB
Bring It On! on Wikipedia
Jessica Bendinger on Wikipedia and IMDB
Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

17 The Bionic Woman from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (56 seconds)

Transcript:

And better than, that she was the last episode of the first season of this show and the studio killed her so that there’d be a great tragic ending and Kenny, who was a young writer then, said this is like the middle of the second wave of the feminist movement. You can’t kill the most engaging woman that you have had on your program and the network said yes we can. Nobody wants a love interest for the lead character because women want to imagine he’ll fall in love with them and they don’t want to get in some of the girl’s way. That’s rude, right? So they killed her and the mail — because there wasn’t yet email — that they got complaining that they had the audacity to kill the most accomplished woman who had ever appeared on that show meant that miraculously at the beginning of season two she wasn’t actually dead. They had bionically saved her and then she got her own program and Kenny became an Executive Producer of his own program because of his creativity because he had come up with that character. He now owned that character.

Watch this entire presentation

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

* 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!
† Available from the LA Public Library

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V4 Issue 2: Screenwriter Rafael Azcona, writing of his times by Julia Sabina Gutiérrez

Screenwriter Rafael Azcona, writing of his times by Julia Sabina Gutiérrez

The aim of this article is to introduce the screenwriter Rafael Azcona, a key figure in the development of Spanish cinema, to an international audience. And rather than analyse his screenwriting work as simply a writer, I wish to look on his work as a spatial screenwriter, a creator of unforgettable images, situations and places in which his stories play out and his characters become unique. The concept of ‘space’ in his work is in reference to the relationship between the character and what André Gardies has referred to as ‘the cinematic narrative in relation to space’ or ‘narrative space’.

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!