I had the pleasure of sitting down with Alex Miller, the Senior Director of Admissions at Stephens College the other day to talk about our MFA in TV and Screenwriting.
Alex had collected some of the basic questions asked by applicants so we answered them over this short 10 minute video.
If you’d like to know what sort of activities fill the days during our 10 day residency intensive or wonder about the composition of our cohorts, or what type of classes we offer that are unique to our program — here’s the place to find out. — Rosanne
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:
I do teach at Stephens College which is located in Missouri but we teach low-residency so they do everything online but they come to Hollywood — which is where I live — for 10 days twice a year and that’s a lovely thing. It’s at the Jim Henson Studios so there’s Kermit saying hi to you when you come in. Very lovely and very welcoming to see Kermit every morning. I have a teaching philosophy which is pretty simple. Words matter. Writers matter. Women writers matter. Thank you very much. Yes Indeed. We haven’t thought about women a lot over the years and I do. One of the things I think we need to think about — this is a Facebook post that I saw the other day and – how words can be misused. So I don’t want to get too political on you. I’m coming from a place where there’s a lot of politics going on, as you can imagine, but think about how these words were misused right? Take a little second. Your brain will wrap around the mistake in these words. Think about it you could have written that a different way but they had an opinion they wanted to put out, right, so words are important.
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
This new “A Woman Wrote That” post is an echo of the Writers Guild campaign of a few years ago (“A Writer Wrote That”) where they noted famous movie quotes and credited the screenwriter rather than the director. The difference here being that we will be posting lines from films written by female screenwriters. Feel free to share! — Rosanne
WAVERLY: “You don’t know the power you have over me. One word from you, one look, and I’m four years old again.”
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Transcript:
This is actually a program from New Zealand. Who knew New Zealand made television, but I have my students write spec scripts — speculative scripts — which are their own versions of a show that already exists to teach the art of copying, because if you’re going to write television you have to copy what exists and then you make your own story, but you have to know how the characters sound. So, I have them pitch ideas from programs they are watching, but they have to write a United States show because that’s what the people are going to read in the United States. This young man pitched an episode of this show because he saw it on Netflix and he didn’t even realize it wasn’t from the United States. he didn’t even notice that they were using city names from New — he didn’t know what New Zealand was really, but the TV showed him and I stay that we learn the mythology of other cultures. This is a show about Norse mythology. the young boys on the program discover that they are the re-born versions of Norse gods and their goal is to get together with the other Norse gods and eventually go back to heaven together and rule the world. It’s adorable and I wouldn’t have heard about it except for Netflix.
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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
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:
As Paolo said — so I won’t spend a lot of time on it — these are the shows –these are the books I’ve done. Sorry. Largely a big Doctor Who fan. Any Doctor Who fans in the house. Really we’ll talk a little bit about the writing of that. It’s quite a brilliant show, I think. These are most of the things I’ve done. Also, love Torchwood has also been quite well done. I am the book review editor, so if you’re Masters students — when you graduate — you can email me, and if there’s a book you’d like to have for free — because they don’t pay you to write in journals — you can review the book and I’ll have it sent to you so you can do that and it’s a credit for you so it’s a lovely thing and Written By Magazine is the magazine of the Writers Guild. You can read this online for free if you go to writtenby.com. You go to WGA, which is our website for the Writer’s Guild, and every two months or so it comes out. Always interviews with writers and showrunners, movie film writers, people like that, so it’s really I think an excellent thing it’s like having a guest speaker come to you and very in-depth interviews, right? We’ll talk about some of them that I’ve done over time.
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
This new “A Woman Wrote That” post is an echo of the Writers Guild campaign of a few years ago (“A Writer Wrote That”) where they noted famous movie quotes and credited the screenwriter rather than the director. The difference here being that we will be posting lines from films written by female screenwriters. Feel free to share! — Rosanne
COLONEL BRANDON: “Give me an occupation, Miss Dashwood, or I shall run mad.”
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.
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
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
Transcript:
They had to have the United States version, so they remade the TV show. They called it the Red Band Society and they didn’t understand the culture of Italy. The show In Italy is all about hope and has a little magical realism to it because one of the children is in a coma but he narrates the story because he watches his friends become friends and grow and have hope that they will be cured someday and in the United States we didn’t get that which is very sad. The show was actually canceled after six episodes because they focused on the grown-ups who were the doctors and the nurses. They thought the story had to be “we’re gonna find that cure because that’s what we do we save the world.” That wasn’t the story at all. They did. They ruined the story right and because we don’t — we think nice people are boring, the nurse is the meanest woman I have ever met and these children are dying of terminal diseases and she’s being mean to them and they thought that that was very edgy. That’s the big word I hate in the United States right now — edgy, We need edgy programming. How many people can we kill in the next five minutes? So we ruined this lovely program right but at least, through Netflix, I can watch the Italian version with subtitles.
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
This new “A Woman Wrote That” post is an echo of the Writers Guild campaign of a few years ago (“A Writer Wrote That”) where they noted famous movie quotes and credited the screenwriter rather than the director. The difference here being that we will be posting lines from films written by female screenwriters. Feel free to share! — Rosanne
This new “A Woman Wrote That” post is an echo of the Writers Guild campaign of a few years ago (“A Writer Wrote That”) where they noted famous movie quotes and credited the screenwriter rather than the director. The difference here being that we will be posting lines from films written by female screenwriters. Feel free to share! — Rosanne
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