Writers on Writing – Page 2 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

10 Fuller and Italian Reunification from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]

In researching and writing my book on Giuseppe and Anita Garibaldi and the unification of Italy (A Man Of Action Saving Liberty: A Novel Based On The Life Of Giuseppe Garibaldi) I re-discovered the first American female war correspondent – Margaret Fuller — who I had first met in a college course on the Transcendentalists. I was once again fascinated by a life lived purposefully.

Then I found Tammy Rose’s podcast on the Transcendentalists – Concord Days – and was delighted when she asked me to guest for a discussion of Fuller’s work in Italy as both a journalist – and a nurse. — Rosanne

Watch this entire presentation

Concord Days sends love to Margaret Fuller on the anniversary of her death in 1850.

The conversation focuses on Margaret’s exciting days in ITALY!

Dr. Rosanne Welch takes us through her adventures and enthusiastically reminds us what she was like when she was living her best life!

Transcript:

Rosanne: My joke, I have Sicilian relatives that I visited and they always say, “Come there if you’re traveling in Europe because you see Greek ruins and Roman ruins” and you know mosques everybody, everybody invaded Sicily and took over at some point. So it’s like the whole world, in a nutshell, and my cousin’s actually a teacher of Sicilian literature and language and there are dictionaries that’ll give you the entire Italian language translated into Sicilian and it’s that much — that different.

Tammy: Love it.

Rosanne: Exactly and so what’s happening is is Margaret has read and heard about Mazzini, Giuseppe Manzini and he was a group called Young Italy and they wanted to create a union right? Which is what we did among all our various territories right? All our you know we became a union. So it was like getting a chance to live through our revolution to experience another country doing it.

Tammy: Wow yeah

Rosanne: …and I think that’s what drew her.

Tammy: Exactly because you’re seeing history like creating itself.

Rosanne: Exactly meeting the founders.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

09 Why Italy? from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]

Watch this entire presentation

Concord Days sends love to Margaret Fuller on the anniversary of her death in 1850.

The conversation focuses on Margaret’s exciting days in ITALY!

Dr. Rosanne Welch takes us through her adventures and enthusiastically reminds us what she was like when she was living her best life!

Transcript:

Tammy: Why does she go to Italy? What is going on and what is she excited about?

Rosanne: You know Italy — we forget because we had our founding right but in Italy, they were a scattering of different city-states basically up until we’re talking the 1860s is when this finally gets settled and it’s in the 1830s that this roiling begins. We should be all one country. Remember the roman empire. We owned the whole world. Now we can’t even own this little boot that’s part of us

Tammy: Right and Italy was all these like little like city-states and it wasn’t really the Italy that we know today.

Rosane: Austria owned some parts of it right and France owned some parts of it. Sicily was its own country. It was not part of Italy.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

08 Smart Women and Transcendentalism from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]

Watch this entire presentation

Concord Days sends love to Margaret Fuller on the anniversary of her death in 1850.

The conversation focuses on Margaret’s exciting days in ITALY!

Dr. Rosanne Welch takes us through her adventures and enthusiastically reminds us what she was like when she was living her best life!

Transcript:

It’s such an interesting thing because they — they spouted ideas about equality but it’s a different thing to have the intellectual idea that women should be and then here’s like — you use the word intimidated — and I think that is the perfect description because imagine like well I said it could happen but I didn’t know I’d run into someone who’s going to challenge my — I’m the smart guy in the room — like you get that right? You can — you can see how that would have, it would have shocked them and maybe their own wives had that capacity but weren’t given the ability to show it off.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

07 Emerson and “The Dial” from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]

Watch this entire presentation

Concord Days sends love to Margaret Fuller on the anniversary of her death in 1850.

The conversation focuses on Margaret’s exciting days in ITALY!

Dr. Rosanne Welch takes us through her adventures and enthusiastically reminds us what she was like when she was living her best life!

Transcript:

Tammy: When it comes to the transcendentalist one of the big things is also The Dial right? That’s the biggest magazine. That’s the thing that sort of cements the idea of the transcendentalists and all these writers get published there and Emerson had asked her to be the main editor and he said that he was going to pay her and then he never ended up paying her.

Rosanne: Exactly. She didn’t even get a free place a cabin on his land to live

Tammy: Right right like his friend you know uh but I and and you know he would always put her up in his house whenever she wanted to come visit concord. She had an open invitation but you know his wife Lidian didn’t necessarily appreciate it and it wasn’t the best of relationships. So I and I feel like Margaret was never really maybe comfortable in the Concord world because they the guys here just didn’t understand how to deal with her.

Rosanne: Nor did the women right because you have to imagine they were probably — had they had some education — they knew they could do more but weren’t allowed to and then here’s this woman who’s getting to so there’s going to be this under you know layer of kind of jealousy but I don’t want to be jealous but I want that but I can’t have it.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

10 Things Hollywood Writers Must Know with Dr. Rosanne Welch – Best in Fest Podcast Ep #23 – La Femme Film Festival

The Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting is one of many sponsors of the LaFemme Film Festival which supports and nurtures the artistic entertainment productions of women. Their President and Director, Leslie LaPage, hosts the Best in Fest podcast and recently invited me on to talk about the 10 Things Hollywood Writers Must Know.

Dr. Rosanne Welch is a writer and university professor of Humanities in the (IGE) Department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona; and screenwriting for two MFA in Screenwriting programs (Cal State, Fullerton and Stephens College). Her current books include Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture (McFarland Publishing, 2017) and Women in American History: A Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia and Document Collection (ABC-CLIO, 2017), which she co-edited with her CalPoly Pomona colleague and officemate, Dr. Peg Lamphier.

In her previous life, Welch was a television writer/producer with credits that include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences and Touched by an Angel and ABC NEWS/Nightline. Welch serves as Book Reviews editor for Journal of Screenwriting and on the Editorial Advisory Board for Written By magazine, the magazine of the Writers Guild.

In this episode, Leslie and Rosanne discuss 10 things Hollywood writers must know. For example, how to write what you emotionally know, how to work in a writer’s room, the do’s and don’ts of pitching, when to use a pitch deck and when it’s a horrible idea and much more.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

06 The Right to be in the Room from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]

Watch this entire presentation

Concord Days sends love to Margaret Fuller on the anniversary of her death in 1850.

The conversation focuses on Margaret’s exciting days in ITALY!

Dr. Rosanne Welch takes us through her adventures and enthusiastically reminds us what she was like when she was living her best life!

Transcript:

Tammy: …and she’s constantly reinventing herself. Like that one of my favorite things about her is the conversations that she had with women which are kind of like modern-day podcasts where it’s like let’s just get everybody together and just talk. You know.

Rosanne: Well that’s and that goes into the 1960s. Their rap sessions right? That’s it you know consciousness-raising and in every generation, like we often teach that the beginning of women’s right or whatever you know you go back to Mary Wollstonecraft right and then think about that’s England but here in America those same conversations are being had.

Tammy: Yeah Yeah and I and I feel like she had to do so much fighting and but or not even like necessarily fighting but just like to reaffirm her right to be in that room or to you know be working as a correspondent for Horace Greeley’s paper.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

05 Margaret’s Education from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]

Watch this entire presentation

Concord Days sends love to Margaret Fuller on the anniversary of her death in 1850.

The conversation focuses on Margaret’s exciting days in ITALY!

Dr. Rosanne Welch takes us through her adventures and enthusiastically reminds us what she was like when she was living her best life!

Transcript:

Tammy: …and it got her all over the place.

Rosanne: It did and I often compare her — when i’m talking to students about her — I compare her to John Quincy Adams, right, who at 10 was translating his own father’s paperwork and knew five or six languages and he’s going to be like — in my opinion — our smartest president. So she’s on par with him but not given the opportunities.

Tammy: Exactly and even in her day she was known as the most widely read woman in America and she talked her way into the Harvard library even though she couldn’t actually attend Harvard you know and she made sure that she could get the education that she wanted. She must have had this like internal drive and curiosity that just kept her going throughout her life.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

04 Sex and Marriage from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]

Watch this entire presentation

Concord Days sends love to Margaret Fuller on the anniversary of her death in 1850.

The conversation focuses on Margaret’s exciting days in ITALY!

Dr. Rosanne Welch takes us through her adventures and enthusiastically reminds us what she was like when she was living her best life!

Transcript:

Rosanne: So they knew sex. They talked about sex and they wanted to be careful about it.

Tammy: Right.

Rosanne: Exactly. So funny.

Tammy: Yeah. Well, and Margaret was especially aware of issues about being a woman in a make society and issues of marriage and how it was very hard to actually have an equal balance between two intellectual individuals because it was not something that she had generally seen or that generally happened.

Rosanne: It didn’t. It wasn’t socially acceptable. Women were supposed to accept that, even if you were semi-smart, you had been allowed some learning, which she got lucky because her father believed in that. Then you gave that up when you went home and then you just took care of the kids if you got married.

Tammy: Right and her father started training her when she was a kid. This is not a little thing. He was a strict disciplinarian and wanted her to be translating The Aeneid by the time she was 10 without any hesitation and without any errors and she had nightmares as a child because he was holding her up to such a high standard, but I think she lived by that high standard for the rest of her life.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

03 Transcendentalism and the 1960s from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]

Watch this entire presentation

Concord Days sends love to Margaret Fuller on the anniversary of her death in 1850.

The conversation focuses on Margaret’s exciting days in ITALY!

Dr. Rosanne Welch takes us through her adventures and enthusiastically reminds us what she was like when she was living her best life!

Transcript:

Rosanne: When I used to teach a straight history class I would often compare this era of the transcendentalists and all the utopian societies to the 1960s because we have that same urge going on to make the world a better place and I love that and most people — we know about the 60s. We’ve seen it in movies and stuff but they really don’t know that that urge happened so much earlier and that women were part of it.

Tammy: Exactly. Well, and the women were part of it kind of whether they wanted to be or not because these utopian societies were maybe designed by men. You know Bronson was kind of like, all right this is how I want to run the school. I want to be open and honest with the kids and even Elizabeth Peabody you know she wrote a book called the history of that school and in it she’s like we told the children the right answers to all the questions that they had including when they asked about sex. You know we told them honestly.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

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.

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS