Screenwriting – Page 45 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

We need this message… via Instagram

Great TV and Movies are built around the theme, you have to have friends. You have to have friends you can trust.

Look how powerful that has been. We need that message.

We go to movies and television shows – we go to stories – to learn that message.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V3 Issue 2: Storytelling in Bhutanese cinema: Research context and case study of a film in development by Shohini Chaudhuri, Sue Clayton

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

Storytelling in Bhutanese cinema: Research context and case study of a film in development by Shohini Chaudhuri, Sue Clayton

Screenwriter and director Sue Clayton and academic Shohini Chaudhuri consider storytelling structures in Bhutan, a country that has, until recently, been relatively culturally isolated but is now moving towards entering the global stage. As in the rest of South Asia, the dominant cinematic model in Bhutan is that of Bollywood, yet Buddhism, the oral tradition and supernatural beliefs form a rich repertoire of stories that screenwriters of the emerging film industry are increasingly attempting to mine. In this article, we show how cinematic storytelling in Bhutan functions as a kind of ‘secondary orality’ through our analyses of an earlier international co-production Travellers and Magicians (2003), two local DV films, and the film project that Clayton is developing in dialogue with Bhutanese writers, Jumolhari. We argue that Bhutan’s Buddhist, animist and oral traditions challenge and transform classically established cinema conventions of story structure, decentring individual human subjectivity as the controlling force and producing an altogether different kind of hero’s journey.

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!

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

A Woman Wrote That – 10 in a series – When Harry Met Sally (1989) by Nora Ephron

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

HARRY

Men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.

When Harry Met Sally on IMDB
When Harry Met Sally on Wikipedia
Nora Ephron on Wikipedia and IMDB
Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

Where’s Her Movie? Civil Rights Activist, Rose Matsui Ochi – 6 in a series

“Where’s HER Movie” posts will highlight interesting and accomplished women from a variety of professional backgrounds who deserve to have movies written about them as much as all the male scientists, authors, performers, and geniuses have had written about them across the over 100 years of film. This is our attempt to help write these women back into mainstream history. — Rosanne

Ochi broke barriers as the first Asian American woman to serve as a Los Angeles Police Commission member and as an assistant U.S. attorney general

she particularly cherished her contributions to the successful campaigns to win recognition and redress for the mass incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II — including her and her family.

from The Los Angeles Times

05 Women Writers Matter from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (27 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:

Women writers have always mattered. They certainly matter to me but we do not teach them very often and that’s a choice of the people who put classes together 50, 60, 80 years ago and didn’t mention the women. So I mention them a lot. These are women that you should know. These are women from American film history. There are women in English film history equally important. Hopefully, you’re having that covered in your classes.

Watch this entire presentation

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† Available from the LA Public Library

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V3 Issue 2: Female fantasy and postfeminist politics in Nora Ephron’s screenplays by Roberta Garrett

Female fantasy and postfeminist politics in Nora Ephron’s screenplays by Roberta Garrett

The article examines and re-evaluates Nora Ephron’s screenplays; it argues that Ephron’s popularity with female viewers, and her association with the derided category of ‘chick-flicks’, has caused critics to overlook her important contribution to female screenwriting in the last twenty years. Since the late 1980s, Ephron has created a number of highly successful mainstream, popular screenplays that skilfully articulate and express the conflicting pressures experienced by young women, while still offering a positive view of ‘feminine’ culture. Through an analysis of key features of Ephron’s romantic comedies – such as the characteristics of the Ephron heroine, the use of parallel narrative and the symbolic significance of mother/daughter relationships, the article argues that Ephron’s narratives offset specific negative cultural stereotypes of single and professional women from the 1990s and noughties through a sympathetic, feminist-influenced approach to contemporary gender roles, expectations and courtship rituals. Ephron’s screenplays offer an uplifting vision of feminine culture and attributes in which patriarchal attitudes are countered and defeated by the optimism, resourcefulness and integrity of the female heroine.

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!

The Civil War On Film – 13 in a series – Movies that make dubious historical claims can provide rich opportunities for learning…

Movies that make dubious historical claims can provide rich opportunities for learning. Each of the movies we chose for this volume do a different kind of work and were ‘big’ enough films that they are still widely available should a reader chose to watch them. We also tried to pick films that covered a wide swath of film history or were representative of a certain type of Civil War movie. Most importantly, each film allows for a discussion of different facets of Civil War history.

Movies profiled in this book:

A Woman Wrote That – 9 in a series – Klondike Annie by Mae West (1936)

ROSE “THE FRISCO DOLL”

When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I’ve never tried before.

Klondike Annie on IMDB
Klondike Annie on Wikipedia
Mae West on Wikipedia and IMDB
Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

“Writers are important” via Instagram

Writers are important.

Writer comes before director when people are writer-directors because writers are more important. You cannot direct some people walking around a room.

Somebody has to say why they’re there and what they’re doing.