Video – Page 6 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

01 Introduction from The Doctor Who Changed the TV Universe – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

Transcript:

Today is going to be about how our show “Doctor Who” changed the television Universe because it really has had great a great effect in what we see on TV today and I think people don’t even necessarily recognize the power of this one show. So that’s what we’re going to talk about. As we’ve discussed in the past and I always do this just because in case there’s new people but you all know me. So you know what I’ve done and blah blah that I have so I’m going to skip through all this stuff and get to the meat of what we’re doing which is how it changed the TV Universe. I’m gonna say right off the bat, we had never done a spin-off that would take place in another country. That we would take “Torchwood” and do “Miracle Day”– which we all have our opinions on. I’m not a huge fan of “Miracle Day” – but the idea that they transported a show to another country right? It got a new staff of people and gave it that different feeling. That’s huge and I’ve not seen another show do that yet. So the power that they could say we want to try seeing what would happen if we moved to the States and got this other feeling. So to me that’s always big and of course, he really wanted to work with Jane Espenson who I love and adore from “Buffy (The Vampire Slayer)” and many other shows. So there was this cross-cultural respect for the kind of work that happens someplace else.

In this presentation given at the 2022 San Diego WhoCon I had the chance to trace the many ways Doctor Who changed the TV universe. By focusing on the interesting and innovative things the many writers did with the show across the years we were able to see the Who footprint by becoming the first narrative program to reach 50 years on the air, the first to create a spin-off across the ocean, and a show alongside Star Trek that created the Con-craze that brought the world of cosplay to the mainstream. Perhaps most importantly, a love of Doctor Who lead more Americans to watch programming from other countries – from Korean dramas to Mexican telenovelas – which has so enriched our culture.

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The Doctor Who Changed the TV Universe (Full Presentation) – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

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The Doctor Who Changed the TV Universe (Full Presentation) – Dr. Rosanne Welch

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23 The Importance of Archives from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

…and women are terrible at keeping track of their own archives. So many of these women threw away material. They cleaned out their houses. They were busy with kids. They didn’t want all this clutter around when their career was over and it disappeared. I mean it’s a great story, Bess Meredyth – who wrote many, many films in the silent era – and then she married Michael Curtiz who is the director of Casablanca and there –as people study Casablanca often – he would be asked the question on the set and had to leave to figure it out and they knew he went home to call his wife to help him figure out the story problem. Then he’d come back and her son wrote a biography of her. He also became a TV writer. Problem was he never thought to ask his mother about her career. When she was older it was like I didn’t imagine she did anything interesting. So even within our own families we don’t talk about the work that we do women particularly and that’s a mistake because then the stories die. So we need you know in the places where we have things like the Library of Congress and all the catalogs of film, we have to start going backward and preserving as much of female work as we can and work by African Americans. We have a lot of early African-American screenwriters where we know they existed because there are advertisements for their movies but the movies don’t exist anymore. So how can we study stuff that we can’t have access to.

The Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting is building a relationship with the Autry Museum of the American West since both organizations are devoted to bringing out more diverse and untold stories. Last year we were able to take our cohort of graduating MFA candidates to the museum’s theatre for a showing of Michael Wilson’s Salt of the Earth and we had plans to present a film of our choice this year – but of course the pandemic changed all that. Instead, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis asked me if I would sit for an interview about female screenwriters in the western genre and so “When Women Wrote Westerns” came to be a part of their “What Is a Western? Interview Series”.

I had a great time discussing so many wonderful women writers – from Jeanne MacPherson to D.C. Fontana to Edna Ferber to Emily Andras. If you love westerns I suggest you watch Josh’s other interviews covering everything from the work of Native Americans in Western movies to films in the western-horror hybrid. —

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As part of a series exploring the significance of the Western genre and the ways in which the movies shape our understanding of the American West, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis interviews Professor Rosanne Welch about the women screenwriters of Hollywood and their contributions to the Western genre.

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22 Preserving Women’s Film History from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

Host: So are there some ways that we as – like the work you’ve been doing with your research – that in terms of revising those kind of incomplete histories of the film industry. What steps can we take to actually repair that and have a more accurate Narrative of the past?

Rosanne: Oh wow. Well, of course, hire more women writers. Step one to get more of those stories that – hire more underrepresented voices to tell us the stories we haven’t heard before and once we’ve done that, we have to preserve this material. One of the issues again with why we don’t remember these women is when we started preserving films and doing the Library of Congress and the 100 Years of – all of that stuff – people kind of push the that wasn’t important. It was Charlie Chaplin and these other people and we preserved all their material. We didn’t really think about that when it comes to stuff done by women.

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09 More On Neo-realism and Black Cinema From Jeanne to Suso to Julie to Spike: How Jeanne Macpherson’s Manual on Screenwriting Influenced Italian Realism which Influenced Black Independent Film in the U.S. [Video]

Transcript:

“Nothing But A Man” deals with this really in a way we hadn’t seen before. Then we get into “The Cool World” and this is now the first time we’ve seen sort of gang life and it’s not glorified and it’s not beautiful. This is a very sad version of this is all I have to make money. This is all I can do to survive. Which is very post-war and Italy except there’s no war here. Except the constant war that had been fought against African Americans from the very beginning right? So thinking about the trauma of it and all those things being reflected and always there’s youth in these movies to see how that trauma affects yet the Next Generation and again and again. Which I think I see a lot in “Rome Open City.” Then we get Melvin Van Peebles coming along with “Sweet Sweetbacks Badassssss Song” and suddenly we have auteurs in the black theater rebellion and that’s kind of a fascinating new idea. He breaks out into more mainstream. People know who he is. He’s the beginning of a kind of a dynasty because his son Mario also becomes a filmmaker and that’s the first time that we’ve seen that opportunity.

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At the recent Screenwriting Research Network conference in Vienna, I gave this talk titled “From Jeanne to Suso to Julie to Spike: How Jeanne Macpherson’s Manual on Screenwriting Influenced Italian Realism which Influenced Black Independent Film in the U.S.”

In the talk, I trace the ways a manual about screenwriting by silent film writer Jeanne Macpherson influenced Suso Cecchi d’Amici who began to utilize Macpherson’s ideas and became the queen of Italian neorealism screenwriting in Europe. Then those Italian neo-realist screenwriters in turn inspired the Los Angeles School of Black Independent Film Makers (the L.A. School). In turn, such as Charles Burnett, Billy Woodberry, Haile Gerima, and Julie Dash and their ideas fueled Spike Lee. Finally, when he became the first Black man to head the jury at the Cannes Film Festival (where Suso had once served) his choice of films influenced yet another generation of screenwriters.

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21 Examples of the Heroine’s Journey from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

Host: What are the examples of the heroine’s journey? What are some of those the stories that are in the heroine’s journey format template? I’m curious.

Rosanne: Oh I would obviously “The Wizard of Oz” like I said. In a TV world, we claim that for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” right? Very much so about that. The joke becomes you could say “Scooby-Doo” does that. It’s anything that involves a team coming together and so in a fun way that can also be sometimes a male-focused team. If you think about war movies they’re all about a team of people coming together for the betterment of each other. Even though they’re like the most dude movies and you could say the same thing about westerns. If it’s a group of people an Oregon Trail kind of thing or group of men in a town or the sheriff and a couple of his buddies. The heroine in terms of pulling away from being female and then pulling back into it, that tends to happen more often in sort of romantic comedy or something like “The Intern” where she’s trying to figure out how to be a leader of these other men and then she has to realize it’s about the nurturing that I do. That is better than me being more loud and annoying and stuff but I can make a list for you that I can have.

Host: Okay great. Well, I’ll claim “The Wizard of Oz” and “Buffy” as westerns. I think Sunnyvale – Sunnyvale? Is that – I think that’s in California we can call it

Rosanne: it is. That’s true. It is about making the town safe for the new inhabitants.

Host: Right.

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08 Neo-realism and Black Cinema From Jeanne to Suso to Julie to Spike: How Jeanne Macpherson’s Manual on Screenwriting Influenced Italian Realism which Influenced Black Independent Film in the U.S. [Video]

Transcript:

So it’s been really important to reincorporate these movies into and to see the progression of how they fit into International World Cinema. I think that’s really important. So I’m starting with “Nothing But A Man” which is a beautiful film interestingly enough made by not an African-American filmmaker but considered to have captured the struggle quite well. In this Ivan Dixon plays a railroad worker and he just moves from state to state avoiding the Jim Crow South. Trying to avoid the treatment that he would receive if he settled into any of these locations but you see him receive the treatment. So we’re dealing with the underpinning of how Americans are treating Americans of color in this time period and that was very harsh. It’s a sad side note. I actually worked with Ivan Dixon’s daughter on a show years ago and he did a show called “Hogan’s Heroes” which you may or may not have seen in reruns and it kind of ruined his independent film career because they thought he’d sold out but in fact, it’s a show about four prisoners of war in a German prisoner War Camp. It’s a comedy. I don’t understand how they ever thought that was a good idea but it was very popular in the late 60s and when people argued with him about why he did that piece because it made Nazis funny he said I had to prove that black men were there in the war and I thought that seeing me in that set of prisoners was important enough that I should do that but it meant that he didn’t do a lot of more serious films after that because of doing a comedy which I think is sad.

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20 Diversity in the Room from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

But we’re also looking for news stories and the newer, most interesting ones. They’re gonna break through because the audience is so diverse and so wide and now we’re International right with Netflix and streaming and all that stuff. We can think about people we haven’t covered before and we know around the world other people will be interested in it. In the same way, we’re watching Japanese anime and you know Korean telenovelas and all that stuff.

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07 More On Neo-realism in the US From Jeanne to Suso to Julie to Spike: How Jeanne Macpherson’s Manual on Screenwriting Influenced Italian Realism which Influenced Black Independent Film in the U.S. [Video]

Transcript:

…but interestingly enough in a place where it’s been ignored, it came deeply into the world of the black filmmakers of the 1970s who felt that they wanted finally to show the world and how harsh it had been in their lives. So we see a lot of that influence come through these movies which also didn’t end up often in mainstream film courses. You had to take a side class right and that’s a difficult thing.

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19 Claim Your Space in the Room from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

…and there’s a lot of dudes in town — really good guys — who are learning that wait a minute, we’re used to talking over women and all that sort of thing and we have to stop and let people finish their thoughts before we dive in with something else and then people forget things and then women also have to be good — you know the classic story is that you might pitch an idea and no one takes it up and 15 minutes later a guy pitches it in the writer’s room and then everyone’s like oh yeah let’s go with that. Then you have to say that’s exactly what I said 10 minutes ago and then they’ll all kind of oh yeah. You’re right. You have to claim your talent or other people will gladly walk over it. So I think those are behavioral things right but we don’t want to — we don’t have to be super dude-like to succeed. We just have to be strong and know that you’re good at what you do…and you’ll succeed.

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