Category: Speaking

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 I think that writing what you know emotionally is an important thing to think about because you have to be comfortable doing that to be a writer. Tennessee Williams, who is a famous American playwright, once said that writers write from the first — the emotions of the first six years of their lives. Which I kind of thought was like, how do you make that up and then I look back at a bunch of scripts I’ve written in my life and I have this recurrent theme which is telling men that they should be good fathers — that raising — that having a child doesn’t make you a man — raising a child makes you a man. I’ve used that line several times accidentally in different scripts. My dad left when I was six. So either Tennessee Williams was right or that’s a nice coincidence. I don’t know but that’s an important thing to remember. You don’t just have to write the history of the life you’ve led. It’s the history of the emotions you’ve lived. That can bring you anywhere right because JK Rowling didn’t go to Hogwarts. She doesn’t do magic but she understood being lonely as a child right.

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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:

Bruce Miller. He’s running The Handmaid’s Tale and there’s a whole lot of questions about that. He’s a guy and he’s running the handmaid’s tale, but he had the best take on the story. One of the things people will tell you in writing is to write what you know and you think that means write the experiences you’ve had but you can’t just write that or you’d be done right? So that’s where research comes in. So what do you actually know? What you know are the emotions you’ve had in your life. That’s what you know and anyone can recognize emotions of abandonment and fear and loneliness and all those things and bruce miller happened to come up with the best version of a pilot based on this novel of all the other people that they brought in.

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

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:

Let’s think about what happens inside a writer’s room. By the way, that’s not a bad book right there. A couple of really important showrunners in America right now and what they have to say about it right? Nahnatchka Khan is Fresh Off The Boat. I don’t know if that’s in England or not. It’s the story of an Asian American family immigrating to the United States. It was based on a famous chef in New York. He wrote a memoir. Now they turned it into a tv show. It’s a comedy. It’s quite fun and so obviously she came in she wanted people who were different. She was smart enough to know she needed people who understood being on the outside looking in because the theme of the show was how do you assimilate without losing the heritage you came in with. That’s the big question, right? So it’s a really, really important new show. It’s about the third season now.

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