Television – Page 11 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

01 Introduction from “VISIBLE STARS: Women in Early TV” for the American Women Writers National Museum [Video]

Many thanks to Janice Law of the American Women Writers National Museum who invited me to give a short talk on The Women of Early TV.

I enjoyed sharing the names and careers of women like Peg Lynch, Gerturde Berg, Selma Diamond and D.C. Fontana to the members who gathered on Zoom last Wednesday morning. There are so many more I could have talked about whose names don’t appear in mainstream books about the history of television so we have to learn who they are and carry those names forward ourselves. It’s one of the missions of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting – and has been one of my missions all my life.

Transcript:

Well good morning everybody. I am going to dive right in so that we have a chance to get started. So I’m going to share my screen and you’re going to be able to see some photographs of some of these most wonderful women who are part of early Hollywood and early television and to me, they’re the people that we’re here to talk about right? So one of the beautiful things we have to do is look at who came before us. I teach a class in tv and screenwriting and I want people to recognize the people on whose shoulders we stand. So today we’re going to talk about the women of early tv. There are many more women to love than just Lucy. She’s the only one we hear about. She’s done some good work and we want to talk about that but we want to speak to all these other women who are so important. A little background on me very quickly. I’m a television writer. I worked on these programs. Touched by an Angel. Beverly Hills 90210 and Picket Fences which was a marvelous show and I also did a little documentary work with ABC News Nightline. So very excited about that. I’m also very happy with the fact that these are books that I have written. Particularly this one is about women in early Hollywood screenwriters and that interests me very much. So of course this is also an Encyclopedia on Women in American History and the Arts. It’s a four-volume set we put out a couple of years ago and we won a couple of awards from National Library Associations so we’re happy about that. I’m also on the board — the editorial board — for the Journal of Screenwriting and Written By magazine which is the magazine of the Writers Guild where we interview certain tv writers every week and also movie writers and it is free online at writtenby.org, if you’re interested in reading about people in the arts these days in the media arts.

Many thanks to Janice Law of the American Women Writers National Museum who invited me to give a short talk on The Women of Early TV.

I enjoyed sharing the names and careers of women like Peg Lynch, Gerturde Berg, Selma Diamond and D.C. Fontana to the members who gathered on Zoom last Wednesday morning. There are so many more I could have talked about whose names don’t appear in mainstream books about the history of television so we have to learn who they are and carry those names forward ourselves. It’s one of the missions of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting – and has been one of my missions all my life.

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Women pioneers who created, produced or shepherded many of America’s most wildly popular, early television programs will be profiled by Dr. Rosanne Welch.

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52 Conclusion from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video]

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 if you don’t think novelists are writers who collaborate think about the fact that all these guys hung around with each other in a writer’s group and read stuff to each other and took notes from each other and made changes based on those notes. Those were writer’s rooms. The Eagle and whatever that pub is called I haven’t gotten to yet …that was a writer’s room right and from that room not only did we get those books. We got this collaboration. Phil Jackson is great. I love him. He’s brilliant. He does great stuff. He doesn’t do it alone. He’s just the guy who’s willing to do the interviews. His wife doesn’t care to do interviews. I don’t know what’s wrong with her but she’s making me crazy right because we’re forgetting that two women co-wrote this movie. That’s what makes it so much better for our times right? They got the best-adapted screenplay award. Two women and a guy made The Lord of the Rings into what it is. I think that’s really important. So who remembers what I said my teaching philosophy was

three things matter

Words matter, Writers matter, and Women Writers matter.

Thank you very much. You’re listening. This thing is good. All right and this is important to me. It’s not just what I know. It’s spreading that around this is my first graduating classroom at Stephen’s MFA. As I said it was an all-female college. So it’s about spreading the word. Writers are teachers with a giant podium. What’s your opinion of how this world should work? Put it out there and the bigger audience you get the more influence you get. Forget YoutTube and who does makeup well. Those aren’t influencers. People who tell stories — I seriously — they’re not — people who tell stories are influencers because stories teach us to feel and that’s what you get paid to do which I love. So again these are a bunch of books I use when I’m just thinking about putting this together. So if you’re interested in reading about showrunners, those are a bunch of books that do interviews with them, and of course, this is the bunch that I’ve written and that’s all I have to say. So I guess we’re doing a q a now right? so if people have questions, I am totally open to your things.

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51 Teacher Make Good Writers from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video]

Transcript:

For me, teachers make good writers. Right? Obviously Icatered this to where I have come and been happy to be. I actually — went too fast — this was my facebook post the other day. I don’t like a lot of words on the screen but I couldn’t resist this because I’ve never been to Oxford before.

So I found this little church just off Wharton Road where he was once a congregant and I had to find the picture and send it back to my husband and the cat just found me which I thought was cute but seriously I mean how long has the guy been dead and I’m still fascinated by the things he wrote? They still mean something to me and my family. Likewise, writers make good teachers.

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50 Collaboration Is Required from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video]

Transcript:

What I hope you learned from me today is that a writer’s room requires collaboration. It’s always about sharing and talking with the other people to make the product better and participation. You can’t just sit in a corner. You have to be part of that conversation or your perspective will not be included and that’s bad for you and anybody else who looks like you. It’s your job to represent when you’re in the room. So you need to be able to do that. Plus I love this quote of Einstein’s — Imagination. You’re selling your imagination. Who gets to do that? What job do you get to do that in except writing? I think that is the coolest thing in the world.

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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!
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Why Torchwood Still Matters with Dr. Rosanne Welch (Complete), San Diego Who Con 2021 [Video]

I recently presented a talk on Torchwood (Why Torchwood Still Matters) where I highlighted a few ways in which the show (airing from 2006 to 2011) came up with progressive and innovative ideas that are being used by other franchises today.

I always enjoy attending the SD (San Diego) WhoCon because the audiences are so well-informed on the Whoniverse and Whovians love Captain Jack and the crew that made this spinoff program so engaging.

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49 Speaking Up In The Writer’s Room from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video]

Transcript:

…and I really say that to the girls a lot because when I have my classes, often when I just open pitching up — anyone can start pitching their ideas — who’s first? We’ll go through a line of like four guys and then I have to stop and go “Does anyone notice anything odd right now?” and I promise you it will be a boy who says “None of the girls have pitched yet.” The girls haven’t even recognized that they are waiting their turn. No one will give you a turn. You have to take a turn or you won’t move as far as you like as fast as you like. So speaking of the big deal and I hate to say it but I learned how to cuss in a writer’s room because sometimes that was the only way to get attention. If I threw out a good four-letter word, all of a sudden everybody was looking at my section of the table which doesn’t make my mother very happy, but it was a silly thing right? So you have to think about managing yourself and managing the other people that you are around. That’s a big deal.

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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!
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From Classroom To Writer’s Room with Dr. Rosanne Welch on In The Can w/Lucas Cuny [Audio]

It was a pleasure sitting down in front of some microphones with Lucas Cuny who now teaches Film, TV, and media full time at San Bernardino Valley College.

He also hosts this podcast interviewing people from those areas and he invited me to be the first guest of his second season.

We had the chance to chat about my background as well as the state of the media industry today – and I had the chance to relish the success of this former MFA candidate of mine. One of the best things about being a professor is seeing careers take off like Lucas’ has.

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Episode Description

Rosanne Welch is a screenwriter, author, professor, and all around iconoclast in the field of media education. She wrote on Beverly Hills 90210, written a book about The Monkees, but got her start as a teacher. Hear her journey from the classroom to the writers room.

Lucas Cuny and Dr. Rosanne Welch

On The Writers of Doctor Who: Maxine Alderton and The Haunting of the Villa Diodati

While preparation for some lectures I was giving at the San Diego Who Con (a small and friendly, all vaxxed and masked politely convention celebrating the English sci-fi drama Doctor Who) I researched how the new showrunner, Chris Chibnall, turned the 50 year old character into a female (long story unless you know the show).

That lead me to researching the writers he chose for the last two seasons to bring more diverse stories to the show.

On The Writers of Doctor Who: Maxine Alderton and The Haunting of the Villa Diodati

One such story, The Haunting of the Villa Diodati, written by Maxine Alderton, involved meeting Mary Woolstencroft on the weekend of inventing Frankenstein. For that I found this post about the importance of writing soaps and how, because so many women do it, it has often been dismissed as lesser writing – but in fact, of course, it is not. I think it is yet another area of bias against female writers that needs to be quashed.

Maxie Alderton joins the world of Doctor Who this Sunday, far from her usual stomping ground of Emmerdale. But as the architect of some of the soap opera’s most innovative and exciting episodes of the past decade, she’s a name to watch

At first glance Maxine Alderton, writer of The Haunting of Villa Diodati, seems like a strange fit for Doctor Who. After all, of the new writers to join the Doctor Who team this season, she easily has the least background in science fiction and fantasy. And her main track record so far has been across the Yorkshire Dales for popular soap opera Emmerdale. But as soon as you scratch the surface she quickly emerges as an exciting and dynamic writer. One showing every sign of bringing something very special to Doctor Who indeed.

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48 Do Your Research and Speak Up There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video]

Transcript:

You have to always do research. You don’t know everything and you don’t have to but you have to be willing to look. I’ve got a whole lecture I do on the tv show Gidget from the 60s that I discovered every episode written by a woman treated the Gidget character like a real human being and every episode written by a male writer treated her like sort of a doofy, stupid girl and I thought they didn’t even go into reading the book that that show was based on to understand her mentality. Her dad was a college professor and she was studying literature in college. She’s not a ditz right but they didn’t even research that. So you have to really look into everything. You have to like research right? That is something a writer must do.

You have to speak up. You all are shy. I’ll give you that right? You don’t know me so it’s a new thing but you can’t be shy in the room. If you don’t open your mouth, what are they paying you for? You’re only going to write two episodes of a tv show that runs 13 episodes. You get two a year. All those other episodes is you talking. What makes this one better for this writer so we all keep employed next year? So you have to speak up.

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All About The Almighty Johnsons with the Fake Geek Girls Podcast – Episode 165 [Audio]

As we’ve all been advised, if you put something out on the internet folks will stumble over you and your work and offer you new opportunities.

That happened last month when Melissa Banks, who co-hosts the Fake Geek Girls podcast found an essay I had written and recorded to my blog in 2015 (How the Female Characters in The Almighty Johnsons were Misused – and how that likely lead to the early end of a great series…).

It’s about a New Zealand show called The Almighty Johnsons and my opinion had to do with how I felt the writers had done a disservice to the female characters on the show. So here in 2021 Melissa and her co-host were planning an episode around the show, found my essay and asked for permission to quote it, which I happily gave.

If you know the Almighty Johnsons this whole episode will be of interest; if not my quote comes into the conversation here at 1:18:25 when they Introduce to the section on gender in the show and then at 1:19:22 – when they begin using my quotes.

Listen to All About The Almighty Johnsons with the Fake Geek Girls Podcast – Episode 165

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