For a few years running my colleague Warren Lewis has asked me to be a panelist for the semi-annual Film Spark event for ASU (Arizona State University) discussing pitching on a panel and then listening and giving notes to students during an afternoon pitchathon.
This year, due to our sheltering at home during the virus the event used Zoom so for the first time they recorded the hour long panel – and here it is.
We were each asked to give advice based on the stories of our best and worst pitches, which provided a few good laughs and hopefully a lot of good advice.
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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —
“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”
I presented this holiday lecture “When Women Write Horror” on Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. Researching the many, many women who have written horror stories – in novels, films and television – brought new names to my attention who I am excited to start reading. I hope you will be, too!
Transcript:
You probably know her more from the show that is currently on Netflix. However this show is not the book at all. It is based upon ideas in the book right? So Netflix is pretty smart. It’s based on the idea that a family grew up in this house and now as adults what’s wrong with their lives that they trace back to these moments in their childhood. So it’s a little bit like a haunted This Is Us, basically, but again with Stephen King, he really believes that the show is quite good and that she would like it and that’s a high praise from him because he thinks she is the greatest science fiction excuse-me horror writer in the United States. So I think it’s pretty cool that you can sample that and then go back and read the book and see where they got the ideas from. Imagine just taking that book and going “How do I do this differently right?” for TV. So Shirley Jackson, a very very big name.
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Transcript:
Even books like this book, Without Lying Down is written about famous women in early Hollywood but she doesn’t write about the people of color who worked in early Hollywood. She was very focused on reviving the names of women and I appreciate that but in doing that she forgot this gentleman. Oscar Micheaux was a famous African-American — that’s the phrase we use in the United States — filmmaker and he wrote many films some of which you can find on youtube today in answer to the stereotypes he saw being portrayed in the early days of film. He was trying to put out a different story right? So he’s not written about in very many books because people aren’t thinking about anyone but the very mainstream writers they’ve heard of.
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 gave us the chance to meet potential students (and a few who had already been accepted) and answer questions about how the program operates.
It’s always fun to engage with people and share our enthusiasm about the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting – and nowadays part of the fun of Zooming is checking out other folks’ backgrounds whether they are virtual (are they using the TARDIS of the Golden Gate Bridge) or their real office bookshelves. (Hey – I have that same book on my bookshelf!).
If you have any questions that weren’t answered during this Open House, send them directly to me at rwelch@stephens.edu and I’ll be glad to answer them.
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —
“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”
I presented this holiday lecture “When Women Write Horror” on Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. Researching the many, many women who have written horror stories – in novels, films and television – brought new names to my attention who I am excited to start reading. I hope you will be, too!
Transcript:
Some of you probably know her more from this short story that is also often read in high schools, The Lottery, which has to do with a town where once a year we choose one person who everybody else in town can stone to death and then we get all our aggressions out and we’re -peaceful the rest of the year and if you think about that coming from the brain of a housewife who’s been hanging around little kids all day and what was she saying about “I just want one day when I can take out all these aggressions and then I’ll be fine. I promise you,” but, of course, the issue is it’s a random — it’s a lottery when that name is pulled and this particular year it’s the mother in a family and how does the family react when it’s their mother that is going to be stoned to death this year. So, a really interesting brain going on with this woman. You might have heard of her before. This is her best-known novel and her best critic novel, “We’ve always lived in the castle.” Again, having to do with the family and people coming together and being horrified together. I think it’s very cool. I like that she says, “I delight in what I fear.” That’s not usually what I delight in but ok, whatever.
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Transcript:
Likewise this young woman — and these are all from early Hollywood, because they come out of this book, so they’re in my brain right now — Sarah Mason married this gentleman, Victor Herrmann. Before she married him she’d written 15 films. Together they wrote three or four and they won an Oscar for adapting a book called Little Women and then he became a director. He directed for another thirty years. He never wrote another film. She wrote 35 more films. He outlived his wife and when he went to give his oral history, he talked about how he trained her to write and how if it wasn’t for him she wouldn’t have had a career. That is how she is remembered in history because her own husband was her unreliable narrator. So I really have to think about interviews when we use them as the only piece of research.
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
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —
“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”
I presented this holiday lecture “When Women Write Horror” on Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. Researching the many, many women who have written horror stories – in novels, films and television – brought new names to my attention who I am excited to start reading. I hope you will be, too!
Transcript:
I’m jumping ahead to the woman we consider the mother of all haunted house stories and someone we actually teach in this class that we do here, which is Demons, The Undead and the Monstrous Other and we talk about horror. So Shirley Jackson. Shirley Jackson was actually said by Stephen King to be the best horror writer in American history and hello Stephen King is not exactly a nobody when we talk about that world and so The Haunting of Hill House was her major book. She’s a really interesting woman. She was a housewife which doesn’t sound like woo a housewife and she wrote horror while she was taking care of her kids. She had a little deal with alcoholism so that was a problem.
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Transcript:
So unreliable narrators are something we have to look at when we’re doing our own research or study about films. In this case, we have a woman named Jeannie Macpherson and a gentleman who you may or may not have heard, if if you know about early American films Cecil B. DeMille. Mostly if I teach this woman’s work people have heard of him they have never heard of her because when he outlived her and gave an interview to the Academy of Motion Pictures in oral history, he said — after she was long dead — she didn’t do much work I did most of it. She had some nice ideas but I was the one who did all the real work. But if you do the research, all the movies that he made that were blockbusters she wrote and when she didn’t write his films they did not make money. Why would he have kept her on board for 20 years of filmmaking if she did so very little but she didn’t live long enough to give her own oral history and he did.
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
We’re pleased to present a new slideshow designed by graphic artist Phoenix Bussey, a Stephens College undergrad, using photos taken by MFA candidates during the last few years of workshops. We think it tells our story well. Write. Reach. Represent.
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —
“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”
I presented this holiday lecture “When Women Write Horror” on Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. Researching the many, many women who have written horror stories – in novels, films and television – brought new names to my attention who I am excited to start reading. I hope you will be, too!
Transcript:
Who has done anything with her ghost stories for Christmas? I think that’d be an excellent thing to check into. Her house is on a haunted home tour, right,, if you go through the UK. You can study her house. That’s her library. When you see libraries like that from the old days, those are usually the rooms that belong to men. Those were the man caves of their day, but this is hers. This room belonged to a woman who was a writer and its haunted by her spirit. So I’m kind of making myself want to go do this tour while I think about it.
For a few years running my colleague Warren Lewis has asked me to be a panelist for the semi-annual Film Spark event for ASU (Arizona State University) discussing pitching on a panel and then listening and giving notes to students during an afternoon pitchathon. ![Creative Career Kickstart: Catching and Pitching Panel - ASU Film Spark Program [Video] (1 hour 15 minutes)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/asu-fim-spark.png)
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