@drrosannewelch ##Teaching one of my 3 ##classes today for Cal Poly Pomona. This has been my classroom for the last year, like so many others. *DW (from Rosanne’s Prod)
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Category: Video
12 Describing Your Characters from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (1 minute)
![12 Describing Your Characters from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (1 minute)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/rmw-oxford-brookes-12.png)
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:
All right, so. what I wanted to do for about half a minute is describe this woman. Visually describe this character. Her name is Erin Brockovich. You may or may not have seen this movie all right. So we might know something about her from the movie but visually — and she’s Julia Roberts, you can tell — quickly how would you describe her if you’re writing that action line in your script? If nothing else, think of three adjectives. We always start with that. Style comes from what you do in the action lines because the dialogue has to sound like your characters but the action lines sound like you alright. Shy doesn’t work in the writers’ room. If you don’t have an idea, I’ll stop paying you a contract and you go home. I always tell my students when they have to pitch, you better have an idea right away because you’re turning down $38,000 because if there’s a new script and we need one done next week and you don’t do it your friend just got that much money. That’s a lot of money to turn down because you’re too shy to open your mouth. So school is when you practice not being shy.
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01 Introduction from How The Chaos Of Collaboration in the Writers Room Created Golden Age Television [Video]
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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
Always good to see everybody here. We’re all like on different time schedules so I’m still — I think it’s three in the morning in Los Angeles but that’s okay. Yes, we’re going to talk about this concept of chaos in writers’ rooms, which are really run in chaos, at least the ones in the United States. Just a quick background on who I am. I was in the business for several years. I wrote Picket Fences, Beverly Hills 90210 — which is a show that won’t die because they just did a live show or is just a little crazy and Touched By An Angel for a long time. So this is where I came from in television. This is what I’ve done in academia and writing. My favorite new book is a collection of essays written by many of my students about female screenwriters from the early days and giving us their backgrounds so I’m all about finding more women that we can write about and talk about in our classes. I think that’s important. I’m also the book review editor of the Journal of Screenwriting so if you have any books you’d like to review please let me know. I’d love to get you a free copy and get your review in the journal and also I’m on the editorial board for the Written By Magazine, which is the magazine of the Writers Guild of America. You can access that for free digitally online if you go to writtenby.com or go to wga.org and they’ll have a link to it, but every month we do interviews with either a film person or a television person or whole writer’s room from a show and I think it’s a great way to bring guest stars into a classroom from all over the world. Again, they’re obviously Americans although I interviewed Russell Davies several years ago so we do have some other folks come on into the magazine but it’s pretty cool.
For more information on the Screenwriting Research Network, visit
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11 Style + Opinion=Writer’s Voice from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (22 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:
Everything that’s written that’s remembered is because you learned something while you were watching it. It might be that friends matter which is really the theme of all of the Harry Potter movies let’s admit it. That’s all you learned from those movies. They were quite fun but that’s a pretty good theme. In life, friends matter. Themes are universal. So this is my opinion but I think, generally speaking, people find this the opinion.
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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!
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Dr. Rosanne Welch Joins Panel on Monkees Books with Plastic EP Live [Video] (54 minutes)
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Many thanks to Fred Velez for telling me about Daniel Sam and his fun internet Monkees talk show — followed by thanks to Dan for inviting me onto this discussion of all the great Monkees books out there. I enter the chat at the 15 minute mark in the video. — Rosanne
On Tuesday February 16th, 2021, the Plastic EP TV Facebook Live Monkees Discussion Panel held a literary discussion on Monkees Books.
Participants included:
- Fred Velez
- Charles Rosenay
- Ed Reilly
- Michael A Ventrella
- Mark Arnold
- Natalie A Palumbo
- Special Guest, Dr. Rosanne Welch, Author of Why The Monkees Matter
Get your copy today!
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“Pickering’s Harem”, Henrietta Swan Levitt, Edwin Hubble, and More on Women in Science
Research on Edwin Hubble lead me to learn more about this set of female mathematicians – and in that wonderful way the synergy of the world seems to work they were then discussed on a UK comedy game show starring Sandy Toksvig – and I learned even more!
Henrietta Swan Levitt figured out how to measure the distance from the earth of pulsating stars. Edwin Hubble then used her calculations to discover the Milky Way. One of the game show guests asks when she gets credit and the answer is – only anecdotally from Hubble reminding people of her work. Why you might ask? For two reasons…
Public Domain, Link
First, Levitt was part of what was nicknamed Pickering’s Harem. Edward Pickering ran the Harvard Observatory and found his male employees who analyzed data from the skies incompetent and slow so one day he said, “My maid could do it better.” The male staff said “Go ahead” so Pickering did hire a slew of women and as they worked so well he hired more women. Annie Jump Cannon manually classified 350,000 stars in her career. Yet, in that way misogyny takes over, rather than call them fellow mathematicians or astronomers, the women became… Pickering’s Harem. I also learned that this lead to the Harem effect — a phenomenon where male executives hire female assistants as they are cheaper and work harder. The jokes of these game show celebrities reminded me of the misogyny of naming the women Pickering’s Harem. We didn’t call the men of the Mercury project “Jackie Kennedy’s consorts”. I mean what a way to demean a set of highly educated women.
The Second reason Henrietta Swan Levitt did not receive full credit for her discovery is that Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler DID want to nominate Levitt for the 1926 Nobel Prize for Physics – but she had died 4 years earlier and the Prize can’t be awarded posthumously (I wonder what male thought up that dumb rule – and why?). Thankfully, Hubble always mentioned Levitt – but textbooks do not necessarily. At the end of the segment the host then covers the many lies Hubble told in his lifetime as a means of polishing his less than elegant background.
Amazing what you can learn from a UK game show.
49 Appreciating The Voice Of The Writer from Why Researching Screenwriters Has Always Mattered [Video] (1 minute 2 seconds)
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Transcript:
So now, in reading screenplays, people can appreciate the voice of the writer in a way they were never able to before. So we see this movement going on which is very important to me. Again, why does this matter? Because we stand on the shoulders of all the people who came before us in this business. We owe them understanding who they are and what they had to offer. In my mind, we have to honor them the same way he honors his ancestors in this movie. That’s what we’re all about if you ask me. So when i teach in this program, this is why these words mean something to me. WRITE, so you can REACH other people and REPRESENT the cultures and the stories that have not been told before. That, to me, is something that we should be very excited about. That’s why researching screenwriters has always mattered. I’m Rosanne Welch I approve this message. Thank you very much.
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A Note About This Presentation
A clip from my keynote speech at the 10th Screenwriters´(hi)Stories Seminar for the interdisciplinary Graduation Program in “Education, Art, and History of Culture”, in Mackenzie Presbyterian University, at São Paulo, SP, Brazil, focused on the topic “Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered.” I was especially pleased with the passion these young scholars have toward screenwriting and it’s importance in transmitting culture across the man-made borders of our world.
To understand the world we have to understand its stories and to understand the world’s stories we must understand the world’s storytellers. A century ago and longer those people would have been the novelists of any particular country but since the invention of film, the storytellers who reach the most people with their ideas and their lessons have been the screenwriters. My teaching philosophy is that: Words matter, Writers matter, and Women writers matte, r so women writers are my focus because they have been the far less researched and yet they are over half the population. We cannot tell the stories of the people until we know what stories the mothers have passed down to their children. Those are the stories that last. Now is the time to research screenwriters of all cultures and the stories they tell because people are finally recognizing the work of writers and appreciating how their favorite stories took shape on the page long before they were cast, or filmed, or edited. But also because streaming services make the stories of many cultures now available to a much wider world than ever before.
Many thanks to Glaucia Davino for the invitation.
* 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
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48 Directing On The Page from Why Researching Screenwriters Has Always Mattered [Video] (1 minute 3 seconds)
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Transcript:
…And that’s very important why, when we’re teaching screenwriting — It’s funny. People who come from a directing background like to teach that writers shouldn’t “direct on the page.” Don’t say things about where the camera should go. Don’t say how the actor is feeling. Don’t talk casually. But in fact, most of the screenwriters who sell and win Oscars are people whose voice is so recognizable. Aaron Sorkin sounds like Aaron Sorkin in everything he does. Every single piece of action is as if you are sitting there talking to him. Right? William Goldman did that. most of the big names — Nora Ephron — who was a major American female screenwriter. Their personality comes through in the lines and they do tell the director “I need this. I need this closeup. I want this moment. This is exactly what needs to happen here. Those are the screenplays that do sell because a person at a studio has to read the thing and envision the movie. If they don’t see it. They don’t buy it and they don’t make it. So that piece of advice has never worked for me.
Watch this entire presentation
A Note About This Presentation
A clip from my keynote speech at the 10th Screenwriters´(hi)Stories Seminar for the interdisciplinary Graduation Program in “Education, Art, and History of Culture”, in Mackenzie Presbyterian University, at São Paulo, SP, Brazil, focused on the topic “Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered.” I was especially pleased with the passion these young scholars have toward screenwriting and it’s importance in transmitting culture across the man-made borders of our world.
To understand the world we have to understand its stories and to understand the world’s stories we must understand the world’s storytellers. A century ago and longer those people would have been the novelists of any particular country but since the invention of film, the storytellers who reach the most people with their ideas and their lessons have been the screenwriters. My teaching philosophy is that: Words matter, Writers matter, and Women writers matte, r so women writers are my focus because they have been the far less researched and yet they are over half the population. We cannot tell the stories of the people until we know what stories the mothers have passed down to their children. Those are the stories that last. Now is the time to research screenwriters of all cultures and the stories they tell because people are finally recognizing the work of writers and appreciating how their favorite stories took shape on the page long before they were cast, or filmed, or edited. But also because streaming services make the stories of many cultures now available to a much wider world than ever before.
Many thanks to Glaucia Davino for the invitation.
* 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
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Event: Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting Open House – Wednesday, February 10, 2021
Wednesday, February 10, 2021
At 4 PM PDT – 5 PM PDT
Register Now
Explore the low-residency MFA in TV + Screenwriting with Executive Director Dr. Rosanne Welch. Our mission is to increase the impact of women and other under-represented voices in television and film. Our faculty and mentors include some of the best working writers in Hollywood, and our curriculum includes an in-depth look at the business side of TV and screenwriting.
47 More On Screenplays As Literature from Why Researching Screenwriters Has Always Mattered [Video] (51 seconds)
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Transcript:
In my family, we like A Christmas Carol — Dickens’ A Christmas Carol — and it’s been made into movies several times and for us, the best version is the one made by The Muppets because in that version Gonzo the muppet gives the action dialogue — the narration — that you would not see in any other version of the film but he narrates — he walks around town — as Dickens narrating. So you hear language that you miss in the other movies. So, to me, that’s what’s happening when people start reading actual screenplays. They’re seeing the craft as it exists on the page. Yes, of course, we’d like it made into a film and we want to see the beautiful vistas and we want to see actors who are wonderful but I just really need the story. That’s enough for me. That’s gonna make me feel something.
Watch this entire presentation
A Note About This Presentation
A clip from my keynote speech at the 10th Screenwriters´(hi)Stories Seminar for the interdisciplinary Graduation Program in “Education, Art, and History of Culture”, in Mackenzie Presbyterian University, at São Paulo, SP, Brazil, focused on the topic “Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered.” I was especially pleased with the passion these young scholars have toward screenwriting and it’s importance in transmitting culture across the man-made borders of our world.
To understand the world we have to understand its stories and to understand the world’s stories we must understand the world’s storytellers. A century ago and longer those people would have been the novelists of any particular country but since the invention of film, the storytellers who reach the most people with their ideas and their lessons have been the screenwriters. My teaching philosophy is that: Words matter, Writers matter, and Women writers matte, r so women writers are my focus because they have been the far less researched and yet they are over half the population. We cannot tell the stories of the people until we know what stories the mothers have passed down to their children. Those are the stories that last. Now is the time to research screenwriters of all cultures and the stories they tell because people are finally recognizing the work of writers and appreciating how their favorite stories took shape on the page long before they were cast, or filmed, or edited. But also because streaming services make the stories of many cultures now available to a much wider world than ever before.
Many thanks to Glaucia Davino for the invitation.
* 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