Video – Page 34 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

11 Even More On Beverly Hills 90210 from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

Watch the entire presentation – Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 here

Transcript:

So those characters became three-dimensional human beings for the five years he ran the show and then he left and a couple of people who mostly worked in — more that’s the word I want — more soap opera kind of things and I like soap operas. I don’t think they’re bad but they’re a different style and they turn the show into who is having sex with who each week but it stayed in the air for another three or four years because of the foundation, the love, for those original characters that the audience had. They just kept wanting to watch them even if the stories got less and less interesting and that’s the power of what he put together in those first two years. So truly believing and caring about those characters — which meant he truly believed and cared about the writing — the stories had to be real and I think that showed. That’s why I mean come on why do you guys still know what Beverly Hills 90210 is? You weren’t around in the 90s right but it’s been around and rerun. There’s a lot of other teenage shows but that one sticks right? There’s a reason for that.

It’s always fun to sit down with students and share stories about entering the television industry and how things work at all stages and I had that opportunity the other day.

Daniela Torres, a just-graduated (Congratulations!) student of the Columbia College Semester in LA program asked me to guest on a podcast she had recently begun hosting with another college student she met during her internship (good example of networking in action!).

We could have talked all morning (the benefit of a 3 hour class session) but we held it to about an hour and fifteen minutes or so. Hopefully, along the way I answered some questions you might have about how the business works. So often it amounts to working hard at being a better writer and gathering a group of other talented, hard-working people around you so you can all rise together.

Dr. Rosanne Welch is a television writer with credits that include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, ABCNEWS: Nightline and Touched by an Angel. She also teaches Television Writing and the Art of Film at San Jose State University.

Rosanne discusses what made shows like Beverly Hills 90210 compelling, what to do and not to do when attempting to pitch a show to broadcast or streaming, what most young writers neglect in their writing process, and much more!

The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.

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37 Working Well With Others 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:

Let me talk briefly about the kinds of things you learn in a room. One of the things you should take a class in is psychology because reading other people and managing how you deal with them — when you figure out their personalities either love you or don’t love you — but you have to work with them for the next three years because contracts are three years long. So you have to work around them. In this particular case. we were doing an episode about a gentleman, sadly, who was dying of AIDS and coming home for Christmas to tell his parents that he was both gay and dying of AIDS and what happened was the writer who was doing it was very fond of himself and didn’t like to be told anything was wrong with his stories, but your job in the room is to make all the stories as good as possible because if the show gets canceled you all lose your job. So I knew that he didn’t like criticism and he was higher on the hierarchy than I was right? He was a higher rank producer. I was still a co-editor or something like that at the time and I’m sitting in the room and his problem was — this is a story about angels who came into your life and told you how you were messing it up and please fix it — so the father was a violin maker and he’s going to give his son a violin he’d been working on since the boy was born. So that’s about 26 years and it was still not good and he really wanted to give the kid the violin because there was a metaphor that if you played violin again maybe he wouldn’t be gay. I’m not really sure I agree with that but anyway…

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24 Conclusion 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”

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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:

…and then there were many many stories in this one particularly, very quickly, there were people in the room who wanted to shoot down your ideas. Again reading the room and I had an idea about dealing with teenage young men who were fathers and lived in gangs and they had to make a commitment to their real family not their gang family. I knew that someone else in the room would not want me to have the extra script that year because that’s a nice chunk of money he would rather have. So my joke is I followed my executive producer into the bathroom because she was a woman and so was I and then I pitched her while we were washing our hands. So that when we walked back in the room, she already liked the idea and for someone else to shoot it down would be to say she had a bad idea and therefore I got whatever. So reading the room has always been a very important lesson. As well as remembering the doctors have power. Whenever you think about side characters, think about making them ethnic because that’s really important and then these are just the things that I learned from the room. You have to do research. You have to think about your nightmares. You have to speak up. I teach my female students this all the time. Please speak up. Don’t wait for the boys to give you a moment because they won’t and then I learned a lot and then I will briefly just say teachers make great writers because they do and collaboration doesn’t just happen in tv right because these guys collaborated on those films we have to recognize that so collaboration and chaos makes good quality presentations. Thank you.

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10 More On Beverly Hills 90210 from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 [Video]

Watch the entire presentation – Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 here

Transcript:

…and I always say Beverly Hills 90210 is an excellent study for people in how who the showrunner is makes a difference because that show was created as a pilot by Darren Starr who’s still famously writing pilots and then he left and the show was run, managed on a daily basis by Chuck Rosen. If you look at the pilot of 90210, it’s really a bunch of rich kids and fancy clothes hanging out at the beach having bonfires. There’s not a whole lot of meat to it. Two Ohio kid’s dad moves to town because he’s an accountant and he’s going to work in Beverly Hills and so their midwest values meet Beverly hills values and that’s all you get. Chuck took over and he was the child of a surgeon at Cedars-Sinai. He grew up in Beverly Hills. So those children became real three-dimensional human beings because one of the issues is how do you — how do you connect to a character that’s uber-rich. Like they have no problems because they’re rich and that’s what most people would think because we’re not all rich but he knew kids who had drug problems. He knew kids whose parents had drug problems and therefore weren’t there for them. So he looked at the fact that it doesn’t matter how much money you have, if there’s a problem in your family, it still makes you vulnerable and that is going to make an audience interested in you.

It’s always fun to sit down with students and share stories about entering the television industry and how things work at all stages and I had that opportunity the other day.

The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.

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36 My Own Writing Adventure from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video]

Transcript:

Touched by an Angel I spent a lot of time on. I actually started my career as a high school teacher at an all-girl academy which is funny because now I teach at an all-girl college and then I was a receptionist and then a writer’s assistant. So these are the stages of how you get into a writer’s room. Either you have to have a friend who’s a writer or you get an agent which is almost nearly impossible without having a job already or you become the friend to writers by getting a job working for them in some fashion. I actually know someone who got a job because he was the ski instructor to the writer’s wife and he gave the wife a script which she gave her husband and he liked it enough he hired the ski instructor to be a writer on his show. So however you can get in the face of writers is an important thing. That’s what internships are very good at. That’s what interviewing people — if you have a school newspaper or someplace you can get published with something or a blog and you offer to interview someone, you can make an introduction. That’s really an important thing. So I went through — all these are a bunch of shows I was an assistant on. Then I was a freelance writer, which is what we do in LA and then I was hired full-time on Touched by an Angel.

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23 Being True To Your Ideas 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”

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Transcript:

In this particular episode, I was doing a piece about a married couple that I were using their children as weapons during the divorce and I wanted that lesson to be don’t do that and I had to bring in memories of Mrs. Doubtfire because on my show I was afraid the answer would be don’t get divorced and that’s not an honest answer to young children whose parents are getting divorced. So happily when Robin Williams did this film he only agreed to do it if in the end the couple never got back together. Since he was a divorced man and he didn’t want to lie to his kids. So i took that lesson and I made sure that one of the parents was already remarried so I thought that was kind of fun but I had to go around the desires of my executive producer in order to make sure that I got what I wanted right? So you have to learn the people in the room.

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09 Beverly Hills 90210 from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 [Video]

Watch the entire presentation – Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 here

Transcript:

Host: Were you a writer? Were you a writer’s assistant in that?

Rosanne:I was a freelance writer on that. That was my very first script.

Host: Okay so wow yeah. How did you– how did you feel when you got like the um the chance?

Rosanne: That’s wonderful stuff. It’s wonderful stuff. It was because at the time I had a partner and she was the assistant to the executive producer of that show. So after reading four — count them — four spec scripts of ours, he finally agreed to let us pitch and so we came in and pitched and that was lovely. So she was much more comfortable in that room than I was because she knew everybody. She’d been there for two or three years at that point but you know I knew the gentleman in charge, Chuck Rosen was one of the quote-unquote good guys in town. A real — a sweetheart. He’d been on a show called Northern Exposure, which I adored. He’s an excellent writer — just and cared about the stories.

It’s always fun to sit down with students and share stories about entering the television industry and how things work at all stages and I had that opportunity the other day.

The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.

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The Importance of Endings

I had typed out one of those quotes I tend to use all the time –

“So much time and so little to do. Wait a minute. Strike that. Reverse it.”

— and in my habit I wanted to credit the writer of the quote, which we all know comes from the movie, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, adapted by David Seltzer from the book by Roald Dahl.

My question became “Did that line come from the book OR the film OR both?” I couldn’t find any clarification on that right away – but I did find this great NPR interview with Seltzer about how he changed the ending of the film because the director felt “It ends with the word, yippee? He said that’s not a screen play. That’s not a movie. You can’t do that” so Seltzer rewrote the ending to be this:

Mr. SELTZER: It ends with the word, yippee? He said that’s not a screen play. That’s not a movie. You can’t do that.

COHEN: So, what did you do?

Mr. SELTZER: I said, well, let me think about it. You know, how long do I have? He said, how long? We’re standing here. It’s $30,000 an hour. You tell me. And, I said, well, give me a second. And I think it was about 6 in the morning. And I walked down, literally, looked over the lake in Maine. I thought, what the hell am I going to do? My head space was totally out of this movie. I could barely remember what had led up to this but I thought, OK, it’s a fairy tale. It’s a children’s story, and how do children’s stories end? I don’t know. How could – how do they end? They end with, they all lived happily ever after. But that’s not good. That’s not what a screenwriter writes. And so I took a deep swallow and I went to the phone. I said, Mel, OK, listen carefully. They’re going up in the spaceship and looking at the ground disappear. And Willy Wonka announces to Charlie that the chocolate factory is his. Then, Willy Wonka looks at him and he says, but Charlie – in a very cautious voice – you do know what happened to the little boy who suddenly got everything he ever wanted, don’t you? And fear comes across Charlie’s face and he says, no, what? And Willy says, he lived happily ever after. And it was a long pause, and I thought my career as a screenwriter is over.

35 More on Margaret Nagle from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video]

Transcript:

She then moved into running a show called Red Band Society which only ran for one season and that’s a whole other conversation but I wanted to mention briefly because tone is something that we try to teach but it’s very difficult. It’s almost as difficult as style but if you go online which you can on youtube and look for the theme song the opening to this show Braccialetti Rossi which was done in Italy. They are both adaptations of a book. This show is so beautiful and magic and lovable and you just want to be with these children in their terminally ill part of this hospital and everybody’s wonderful. In this show, the opening shows what huge jerks every one of these children was before they got struck down with their disease. So I don’t really care if they die. The phone is all wrong. I need to love them and root for them and I find them being mean to each other. The one girl is this awful cheerleader who’s just and then she does so she got the tone wrong which fascinates me because when you are well practiced you don’t think that’s going to happen but that’s another show.

Watch this entire presentation

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22 Getting What You Want In The Room from How The Chaos Of Collaboration in the Writers Room Created Golden Age Television [Video]

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Transcript:

In all of them, I learned something about how a room should be run, and one of the first things I teach my students is that you have to — you should take a class in psychology. You need you need to know how to read a room and know how to behave in the room with people and that’s something that sometimes people don’t know. So it’s a silly thing but it’s true. This — on this episode, Smokescreen, we have two people, Roma Downey who is an Irish-American woman and Della Reese, who is an African-American woman. They would pretend to be other people in people’s lives. In this particular episode, Roma always did more work because she was younger and Della only worked three days a week because she was in her 70s. They were going to have Roma portray this gentleman’s lawyer and Della portray his maid and I understood how upsetting that would be to my African-American friends if yet another maid character was portrayed by an African-American woman. So I said we shouldn’t do that. What if we switched it and the problem was production, Della didn’t have many hours in the week to do that filming. So we could have ended the idea there but I was a little pushy then and and I wanted the movement and i suggested we ask her, would she be willing to work an extra day that week for the chance not to play a maid and guess what she said. Exactly.

For more information on the Screenwriting Research Network, visit

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* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs
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