Speaking – Page 72 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

Writers Have Been Lost In Film History from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

A recording of my presentation at this year’s University Film and Video Association (UFVA) 2017 conference.

Transcript:

So why are we studying this? Because I believe and we can prove that writers have been lost in the history of film. If you look at this, what do we call know? We all know this movies is by who? Frank Capra! Right? Right. Look at this — no, no, no, — Screenplay by Frank Capra. You can’t read this from there. I can barely read this from here. This movie which plays perennially at Christmas a million times was written by them. Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett. A married screenwriting time that worked for 35 years together until she died. They were the highest paid screenwriting team and they’re nothing to sneeze at because they got a Pulitzer for the play, The Diary of Anne Frank and then they adapted it into a film and it kills me that children — they know Anne Frank. They know It’s a Wonderful Life and they know Frank Capra.

Books Mentioned In This Presentation

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01 Introduction from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto – Dr. Rosanne Welch – SRN Conference 2017 [Video]

01 Introduction from How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto – Dr. Rosanne Welch – SRN Conference 2017

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Transcript:

Hi everybody! It’s so wonderful to have you here. I’m going to be talking about a book and a film and a television series and I think the trajectory from serious to bubblegum back to slightly serious is what’s interesting to me and it’s all about the adaptation of something and how the true person’s story can get lost along the way and I believe TV allows a chance to tell longer stories — you can tell a hundred hours in the life of a person instead of two hours and so I think we’re going to end up discovering that TV was the better place for this story to house itself.

At this year’s 10th Annual Screenwriting Research Network Conference at Otago University in Dunedin, New Zealand I presented…

“How Gidget Got Into the Girl Ghetto by Accident (and How We Can Get Her Out of it): Demoting Gidget: The Little Girl with Big Ideas from Edgy Coming of Age Novel to Babe on the Beach Genre Film via Choices made in the Adaptation Process.”

It’ a long title, as I joke up front, but covers the process of adapting the true life story of Kathy Kohner (nicknamed ‘Gidget’ by the group of male surfers who she spent the summers with in Malibu in the 1950s) into the film and television series that are better remembered than the novel. The novel had been well-received upon publication, even compared to A Catcher in the Rye, but has mistakenly been relegated to the ‘girl ghetto’ of films. Some of the adaptations turned the focus away from the coming of age story of a young woman who gained respect for her talent at a male craft – surfing – and instead turned the focus far too much on Kathy being boy crazy.

Along the way I found interesting comparisons between how female writers treated the main character while adapting the novel and how male writers treated the character.

Gidget

Dr. Rosanne Welch

Dr. Rosanne Welch teaches the History of Screenwriting and One-Hour Drama for the Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting.

Writing/producing credits include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, ABCNEWS: Nightline and Touched by an Angel. In 2016 she published the book Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop; co-edited Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia; and placed “Transmitting Culture Transnationally Via the Characterization of Parents in Police Procedurals” in the New Review of Film and Television Studies. Essays appear in Torchwood Declassified: Investigating Mainstream Cult Television and Doctor Who and Race: An Anthology. Welch serves as Book Reviews editor for Journal of Screenwriting and on the Editorial Advisory Board for Written By magazine, the magazine of the Writers Guild.

Watch Dr. Welch’s talk “The Importance of Having a Female Voice in the Room” at the 2016 TEDxCPP.

The Screenwriting Research Network is a research group consisting of scholars, reflective practitioners and practice-based researchers interested in research on screenwriting. The aim is to rethink the screenplay in relation to its histories, theories, values and creative practices.

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Teaching Character and Structure from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

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Teaching Character and Structure from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch

A recording of my presentation at this year’s University Film and Video Association (UFVA) 2017 conference.

Transcript:

I think when you teach slient films and early films of course your teaching character because that is where all these archetypes came from. Yes, we can go back to France and we can go back to Aristophanes. They came from way back then, but on the film they came from this time period and we find all these characters in these early films.Sometimes in more simplistic ways which helps students understand how to back to the simple part of their story — who wants what and what’s getting in their way and you see that in this sort of film. You can teach structure in teaching silent films because we all know the purpose of having 3 acts is because you had reels and you had 1 reel and then 2 reels and then 3 reels and began to write in terms of that. It was also Paul Gulino’s sequence approach which is just about each reel. You have 8 reels, 8 sequences. They visualize, ‘Oh, this is why they do it this way because they had to to — oh, I get it!” It helps students understand the history of this profession. I love that Warren calls it a profession because that is what it is.

Books Mentioned In This Presentation

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Dr. Peg Lamphier and Dr. Rosanne Welch present their talk, “Why this should be the last lecture you should sit through!” as part of the Last Lecture Series at Cal Poly Pomona

Dr. Peg Lamphier and Dr. Rosanne Welch present their talk, “Why this should be the last lecture you should sit through!” as part of the Last Lecture Series at Cal Poly Pomona.

Complete video of this Talk coming soon.

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Silent Films and Diversity from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

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Silent Films and Diversity from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch

A recording of my presentation at this year’s University Film and Video Association (UFVA) 2017 conference.

Transcript:

Teaching Silent Films allows you to teach diversity again because there were filmmakers of all colors and ethnic backgrounds. Much of that work has been lost. Some of it is findable. Oscar Micheaux was one of the people I found for my students. He was a hugely successful African-American writer/director and he also wrote novels and he translated his novels into films. One of them is called Within Our Gates and it’s free on YouTube as well and he looked at middle class African-Americans talking in the 1910’s and presented them to the audience in ways that other movies were not and I thin kit’s important for them to know his work in line with Cecil B. DeMille and D. W. Griffith and all those other guys because they’re not the only men – they’re not the only people who are around but if you look at film history classes that’s all they’ve learned and that really bothers me.

Books Mentioned In This Presentation

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Dr. Peg Lamphier and Dr. Rosanne Welch present their talk, “Why this should be the last lecture you should sit through!” as part of the Last Lecture Series at Cal Poly Pomona.

Dr. Peg Lamphier and Dr. Rosanne Welch present their talk, “Why this should be the last lecture you should sit through!” as part of the Last Lecture Series at Cal Poly Pomona.

Complete video of this Talk coming soon.

and Follow

Dr. Peg Lamphier and Dr. Rosanne Welch present their talk, “Why this should be the last lecture you should sit through!” as part of the Last Lecture Series at Cal Poly Pomona.

Dr. Peg Lamphier and Dr. Rosanne Welch present their talk, “Why this should be the last lecture you should sit through!” as part of the Last Lecture Series at Cal Poly Pomona.

Complete video of this Talk coming soon.

and Follow

Dr. Peg Lamphier and Dr. Rosanne Welch present their talk, “Why this should be the last lecture you should sit through!” as part of the Last Lecture Series at Cal Poly Pomona.

Dr. Peg Lamphier and Dr. Rosanne Welch present their talk, “Why this should be the last lecture you should sit through!” as part of the Last Lecture Series at Cal Poly Pomona.

Complete video of this Talk coming soon.

and Follow

Silent Films Are Important from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch

Watch this entire presentation

Silent Films Are Important from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch

A recording of my presentation at this year’s University Film and Video Association (UFVA) 2017 conference.

Transcript:

So, I think it’s really important to teach silent films because we’re teaching the screenwriters that the visual is important. Much as I love the words more, you do have to think about how they’re shown and, of course, these are visuals that show is the emotion of the moment and I think that they are really beautiful. So, it’s fun for the students — I totally agree with Warren — to have this heritage in their life, to understand that this all came before them. That’s very, very important.

Books Mentioned In This Presentation

Follow Dr. Rosanne Welch

Twitter: https://twitter.com/rosannewelch
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drrosannewelch/

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Dr. Peg Lamphier and Dr. Rosanne Welch present their talk, “Why this should be the last lecture you should sit through!” as part of the Last Lecture Series at Cal Poly Pomona.

Dr. Peg Lamphier and Dr. Rosanne Welch present their talk, “Why this should be the last lecture you should sit through!” as part of the Last Lecture Series at Cal Poly Pomona.

Complete video of this Talk coming soon.

and Follow