Mindful(l) Media is a new show and podcast from Dr. Rosanne Welch helping the audience to be more Mindfull about the Media we both create and consume as it relates to the portrayal of Gender, Diversity, and Equality.
Today’s show is brought to you by Audible.com. While I watched hours and hours of television in my childhood, I also read tons of books – and as a professor I have found that you can easily tell the readers from the non-readers by their spelling and their level of vocabulary so I always tell students to find time to read. It’s also deeply peaceful to get lost in a story. If you love audio books you can support us here at 3rdPass Media by starting your free 30-day trial with Audible today. Choose from over 100, 000 books.
Thanks to Dan Kammer, the Library Director at Stephens College, for including a display of my publications in an exhibition of work by various faculty members this month. It looks great – and hopefully the students will be intrigued enough to stop by and read some of the books – or use them for research in their own academic adventures!
A video abstract for Honey, You Know I Can’t Hear You When You Aren’t in the Room: Key Female Filmmakers Prove the Importance of Having a Female in the Writing Room.
I’m Dr.Rosanne Welch. I teach screenwriting and history of screenwriting to MFA students in the Stephens College MFA program.
Screenwriters are often the unsung heroes of Hollywood, a fact that is doubly true for female screenwriters. While writers can research many things and are capable of creating unknown worlds such as Narnia or Lothlorien, it is true that the subject they know best – and will protect the most – will always be themselves and their experiences. Proof of this truth of filmmaking can be found in the careers of many successful female filmmakers from the start of the Hollywood studio system to the modern world of independents. Films produced by these women illustrates how important it is to have a female voice in the room.
My paper will discuss the ways female characters were created and protected by the presence of such female writers as:
Anita Loos, famous for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, which involves much more than Marilyn Monroe singing “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend”;
Dorothy Parker, who with her husband wrote A Star is Born, where a famous actress must juggle her rising fame as her husband’s career fails.
Ruth Gordon who co-authored Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike, both iconic lead characters played by Katherine Hepburn.
Phoebe Ephron wrote several films, adapted Carousel from the stage to the screen all while nurturing the creativity and career of her four daughter-writers including Delia, Amy, Hallie and Nora Ephron…
Joan Didion who co-wrote the 3rd remake of A Star is Born (the one starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson)
and Frances Goodrich Hackett who adapted The Thin Man; It’s a Wonderful Life and The Diary of Anne Frank who said the quote that set me on the path to write this piece:
“I’m always the only woman working on the picture and I hold the fate of the women [characters] in my hand… I’ll fight for what the gal will or will not do, and I can be completely unfeminine about it.”
Beyond bringing better quality female characters to the screen, these women brought more three-dimensional, equal marriages to the screen, creating role models other could follow.
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Mindful(l) Media is a new show and podcast from Dr. Rosanne Welch helping the audience to be more Mindfull about the Media we both create and consume as it relates to the portrayal of Gender, Diversity, and Equality.
Today’s show is brought to you by Audible.com. While I watched hours and hours of television in my childhood, I also read tons of books – and as a professor I have found that you can easily tell the readers from the non-readers by their spelling and their level of vocabulary so I always tell students to find time to read. It’s also deeply peaceful to get lost in a story. If you love audio books you can support us here at 3rdPass Media by starting your free 30-day trial with Audible today. Choose from over 100, 000 books.
Though I teach One-Hour Drama I thought it would be cool to highlight the fact that for the first time ever the 3 finalists for the Thurber Prize for Humor Writing are all female. The prize is named after James Thurber of Ohio who wrote The Secret Life of Walter Mitty and years of New Yorker cartoons (even after he went blind!).
We should be reading these women:
Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?
Annabelle Gurwitch, I See You Made an Effort: Compliments, Indignities, and Survival Stories from the Edge of 50
Mindful(l) Media is a new show and podcast from Dr. Rosanne Welch helping the audience to be more Mindfull about the Media we both create and consume as it relates to the portrayal of Gender, Diversity, and Equality.
Today’s show is brought to you by Audible.com. While I watched hours and hours of television in my childhood, I also read tons of books – and as a professor I have found that you can easily tell the readers from the non-readers by their spelling and their level of vocabulary so I always tell students to find time to read. It’s also deeply peaceful to get lost in a story. If you love audio books you can support us here at 3rdPass Media by starting your free 30-day trial with Audible today. Choose from over 100, 000 books.
The Stephens College Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts in TV and Screenwriting will prepare you to compete in the high-stakes world of professional screenwriting. The second-oldest women’s college in the country, Stephens is an institution on a mission: To increase the voices and impact of women in television and film.It’s a mission that has drawn both the attention and the support of some of the most successful and well-known women writers in Hollywood—women who care deeply about ensuring that women’s voices and stories are heard.
Program Highlights
You’ll begin the program in Hollywood (we meet at the beautiful Jim Henson Studios) where you’ll spend 10 days in classes and workshops, and return for another 10 days six months later.
Between residencies, you’ll work online with at least four different mentors. Our entire faculty is comprised of working writers, members of the Writer’s Guild of America, including Ken LaZebnik, Carol Barbee, Kathleen McGhee-Anderson, Barbara Nance, Rosanne Welch and William Rabkin.
Our community of professors and professional working writers are here to help you develop your vision, your voice and your career as a screenwriter. And they’ll do it on your schedule, on your time and in-between all of the other demands of your crazy-busy life.
Learning the craft of writing is essential but so is learning the business of selling what you write. Providing you with access to prominent show-runners, writers from the film world, development executives, agents and managers is a vital component of this program.
I will be part of this panel discussion at the Redlands Film and Beer festival, October 22-25, 2015 with Daniel Petrie, Jr.. Join us as we use Star Wars to discuss a host of screenwriting concepts and how this movie, and it’s writer, Lawrence Kasdan, changed screenwriting forever.
REDLANDS >> Redlands nonprofit SLATE Inc. (Supporting Local Artists of Film Through Empowerment), has announced the first panel discussion leader for this year’s Film and Beer festival: the “Beverly Hills Cop” writer.
Daniel Petrie Jr., best known for writing and producing such popular ’80s films as “Beverly Hills Cop,” “Beverly Hills Cop II” and “Turner and Hooch,” will be on hand to answer questions in the first panel discussion.
The 2015 festival will use the theme “Star Wars” to help stimulate film industry discussions among festival attendees.
“The first industry panel we are doing is about how ‘Star Wars’ changed filmmaking and impacted the industry,” said SLATE Inc. founder Lucas Cuny. “Petrie is an industry insider who has served twice as the president of the screenwriters guild. He will be a great addition to the discussion.”
Petrie graduated from the University of Redlands in 1975. Cuny said Petrie’s industry experience and ties to Redlands make him an ideal addition to the festival.
“People can relate to someone who spent time here and has gone on to big things in the film world,” Cuny said. “He is an old friend. We were discussing the first Slate festival while I was very early in the planning stages. He said to me, ‘Everyone has a film festival. What is going to make yours different?’ That’s when I thought let’s get some beer involved, especially being in an area with craft breweries and a great food scene.”
Rosanne Welch, a radio, TV and film department adjunct professor at Cal State Fullerton will also serve on a panel discussion. Welch was a professor of Cuny’s while he was working toward his master’s degree at CSUF over the past few years.
Proceeds from the Redlands Film and Beer Festival will be used for ongoing efforts to benefit local film and media artists.
From 1966-1968 NBC aired The Monkees on Mondays at 7:30pm, opposite Gilligan’s Island on CBS and Iron Horse on ABC. During that time Raybert Productions, headed by Bert Schneider and Bob Rafelson, produced 58 half-hours of what Time Magazine contributor James Poniewozik recently described as “far better TV than it had to be.
During an era of formulaic domestic sitcoms and wacky comedies, it was a stylistically ambitious show, with a distinctive visual style, absurdist sense of humor, and unusual story structure that was commercial, wholesome, and yet impressively weird.”
Originally, the producers conceived The Monkees as a response to the youth and music movement of the early 60s, a time when every young person seemed to be slinging a guitar on their back and hoping to change the world. In the shadow of Hard Day’s Night the producers cast four relative unknowns who could act, sing and play instruments – Davy Jones, Micky Dolenz, Peter Tork and Mike Nesmith – and hired Jim Frawley to teach them improvisation and become their in-house director. Beyond mere fame, The Monkees deserves ranking as a TV Cultural and Comedy Classic because, according to Micky Dolenz, “It brought long hair into the living room and changed the way teenagers were portrayed on television. It made it okay to have long hair in the same way Henry Winkler as the Fonz late made it okay to wear a black leather jacket and Will Smith in Fresh Prince of Bel Air made it okay to be to be young, black and like rap.”
From an artistic standpoint the show introduced a new generation of viewers to the kind of fourth-wall-breaking, slapstick comedy created by Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers as well as to the idea of friends in their late teens living on their own without adult advice or supervision, a powerful idea at the height of the Vietnam war.
While there is continued controversy over the fact that the musical group has yet to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, time has shown that the television show deserves the accolades it earned. Now it deserves a deeper reading and that is exactly what The Metatexual Menagerie That Was The Monkees will provide.
Go beyond the fandom and delve deeply into what The Monkees meant to “the young generation” and to our current world.
Chapters will include:
Introduction: I’m (Still) a Believer
Sweet Young Thing: Contextualizing The Monkees with a Short History of Teenagers on Television
Authorship on The Monkees: Who Wrote The Monkees and what was that Something They Had to Say?
Look Out, Here Comes Tomorrow: Counter-Culture Comes to Television and Middle America via The Monkees
The Kind of Girl I Could Love: Feminism, Gender and Sexuality in The Monkees
Shades of Grey: An Ethnic Studies look at Minority Representation on The Monkees
We Were Made for Each Other: The Monkees Menagerie of Metatextuality
We Were Made for Each Other: The Sequel: Nascent Television Aesthetic Techniques on The Monkees
A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You Identity Construction and Confusion on The Monkees
9 Theme(s) from The Monkees: Narrative Structure, Literary References and Themes on The Monkees
Salesman / What am I Doing Hangin’ Round? The Cultural Collateral of The Monkees
Music Innovation and the seeds of MTV
I’ll Be True To You: Fandom and The Monkees
Dr. Rosanne Welch teaches screenwriting in the RTVF Department at California State University, Fullerton and for the Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting. As a television writer/producer her credits include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences and Touched by an Angel. She has been published a chapter in Torchwood Declassified: Investigating Mainstream Cult Television (I.B.Tauris); and an essay in Doctor Who and Race: An Anthology and co-edited The Encyclopedia of Women in American History (ABC-CLIO). Her fondness for The Monkees began while sitting in front of a small, black-and-white kitchen television at the age of five.
Why Monkees Matter: The Writing Staff of The Monkees Brought the 1960s Counter Culture to Pre-Teens
Presented at the Cal Poly Pomona President’s Symposium
Dr. Welch is available for interviewa on Why The Monkees Mattered and The Monkees in general. She is a long-time fan of The Monkees and extremely knowledgeable on both The Monkees television show and their music. She has given several presentations on The Monkees in college classrooms across Southern California at the Cal Poly Pomona President’s Symposium.
Update (July 3, 2016): Why The Monkees Matter Now Available on Kindle Reader, Smartphones and Tablets! –
Checking Amazon.com just now, I see that “Why The Monkees Matter” is available for purchase in Kindle format.
You can read the book immediately on your Kindle device OR on your smartphone, tablet or personal computer using the free Kindle App or web site.
(The print edition is still marked “Pre-Order” on Amazon, but I expect that to change after the July 4th holiday).
You can buy your copy of “Why The Monkees Matter” and start reading in seconds — perhaps while you enjoy some holiday hammock time on your own “Pleasant Valley Sunday”!
Update (June 30, 2016): I have received reports that people who pre-ordered directly from the publishers have started to receive their books. Yea! The book is also currently available as an Amazon Kindle Editon for your immediate purchase and download. Amazon still shows the Print Edition as Pre-Order but I expect that to change any minute.
Update (April 8, 2016): Our first level of pre-orders are open today! You can pre-order “Why The Monkees Matter” directly from the publishers, MacFarland, on their web site. — Pre-Order “Why The Monkees Matter” today!
Update (March 7,2016): The “final” title has been approved and, unfortunately, the publication date has been moved back to Fall 2016. That said, this still allows you to make it a great Holiday gift for all your Monkee Fan friends and family — Rosanne
![Honey, You Know I Can’t Hear You When You Aren’t in the Room: Key Female Filmmakers Prove the Importance of Having a Female in the Writing Room [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/gender-screenplay-abstract-560x198.jpeg)
