On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch
Writing, Film, Television and More!
Dr. Rosanne Welch records a segment of Mindful(l) Media, her podcast on Women and Diversity in Media for the 3rd Pass Media Network.
Mindful(l) Media is a podcast dedicated to “Thinking Critically about the Media we Create… and Consume!”
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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.
‘Beverly Hills Cop’ writer will return to Redlands for Film and Beer fest
By Tabetha Wittenmyer, Correspondent
For more information or to sign up for the Redlands Film and Beer festival, email info@slate-inc.org or go to http://slate-inc.org.
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.
Now available from McFarland
ORDER TODAY!
Listen to The Zilch podcast with Rosanne discussing this new book
** Rosanne’s interview starts at 29:15
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:
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.
** Contact Dr. Rosanne Welch at rosanne@welchwrite.com or by phone at 818-804-5049
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 25, 2016): Why The Monkees Matter is now available for pre-order from Amazon.com using the links below! Pre-Order “Why The Monkees Matter” today!
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
From Mindful(l) Media: The Waste of Talent in Hollywood by Dr. Rosanne Welch
I’ve been watching some old made for television movies from back in the days when that didn’t sound so derogatory — early made for television movies were things like Playhouse 90 where the work of up and coming New York playwrights and other quality material was being beamed into American homes — it was only over the years when TV movies turned into ‘victimized chick of the week’ or ‘disease of the week’ type sagas.
So watching some of these early dramas has made me notice a few things… such as the quality of the writing, the way stories spoke UP to the intelligence of the viewer (in an era when fewer folks had college degrees) — and the waste of talent that takes place in Hollywood. I guess I thought it was a more modern event, this not giving actors of color a greater chance to use their gifts for our entertainment. In my childhood television viewing — From Baretta to Starsky and Hutch to The Streets of San Francisco — it did not escape me that the white guys (and they were always guys) got to be the cops and the people of color seemed always to be the crooks, pimps and prostitutes that the nice white cops were investigating.
Read the entire article on Mindful(l) Media
I’m hard at work completing my upcoming book on The Monkees, The Monkees – A Made for TV Metatexual Menagerie for McFarland Publishing. The book is scheduled for release in Spring 2016.
You can join my Monkees mailing list to receive future updates and notification of the books release.
Here are the current chapter titles, although this may change in the final publication. I hope you’ll check it out when it hits the stores!
Introduction: I’m (Still) a Believer 1. Sweet Young Thing: Contextualizing The Monkees with a Short History of Teenagers on Television, 2. Authorship on The Monkees: Who Wrote The Monkees and what was that Something They Had to Say? 3. Look Out, Here Comes Tomorrow: Counter-Culture Comes to Television and Middle America via The Monkees 4. The Kind of Girl I Could Love: Feminism, Gender and Sexuality in The Monkees 5. Shades of Grey LAn Ethnic Studies look at Minority Representation on The Monkees 6. We Were Made for Each Other: The Monkees Menagerie of Metatextuality 7. We Were Made for Each Other: The Sequel: Nascent Television Aesthetic Techniques on The Monkee 8. 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 10. Salesman / What am I Doing Hangin’ Round? The Cultural Collateral of The Monkees 11. Music Innovation and the seeds of MTV
12. I’ll Be True To You: Fandom and The Monkees
Fun fact of the day: I’m reading It’s the Pictures That Got Small — the diaries of Charles Brackett who co-wrote “Sunset Boulevard” and “Titanic” in the 1950s and I found him noting,
“It’s so dangerous to give a name to a gangster (the liability of lawsuit is so great) that they use the names of employees in the Research Department over and over…”
Too funny! I’d love to do research comparing the MGM employee roles to the gangster characters in their films!
You can get the book at Amazon.com or perhaps from your local library.
Check out page 50-51 for a marvelous piece by my friend Jule Selbo about the MFA in Screenwriting she created for Cal State Fullerton! And page 56-57 for the great piece by other friend Ken Lazebnik on the new Stephens College MFA in Screenwriting! Each of the directors of these two programs care deeply about their students — and about the quality of the craft — so it’s a pleasure working with them! (And read the rest of the issue because it has a great piece on the writers behind GRIMM which really takes you inside the creative brain as it conjures up a new world of characters worth visiting each week!)
One Saturday March 23rd my co-author Dawn Comer Jefferson and I were invited to the California African American Museum (CAAM) for their annual literacy day, this year titled “Heads are Turning, Children are Learning”. We presented a workshop on African American on the Oregon Trail, based on the research we did for the story in our children’s book The Promise which involves an enslaved family taken on the Oregon Trail with the promise of freedom if they survive. Sadly, when they all arrive in Oregon, the owner frees the parents but not the children since he had never mentioned the children in their original deal.
About 20 children and parents attended the workshop and participated in an exercise where they wrote a letter back to family and friends about their experience on the Oregon Trail. It was fun to hear what parts of the presentation they remembered enough to include in their letters and to see them enjoy a chance to be creative.
Please join Dr. Rosanne Welch and Dawn Comer Jefferson for Literacy Day at the California African American Museum. We will be doing a workshop for kids as well as readings from our book, The Promise. Signed copies of The Promise will also be available for purchase.
The day includes several local authors offering writing workshops and book signings, celebrities reading books, art and crafts, book giveaways and music. And there will be a lunch truck on the premises.
We hope to see you there!
Since 2004, in celebration of National Children’s Book Week, we present local Los Angelels authors and celebrity readers in CAAM’s galleries. The activities of the day also include an arts and crafts workshop, literacy workshops, face-painting, and book giveaways for families in attendance.
The Promise Co-Author, Dawn Comer Jefferson, presents at 2014 CAAM Literacy Day Event
Saturday, May 23, 2015
11am – 4 pm
Free and open to the public. Parking: $10.
The California African American Museum is easily accessible from the Metro Expo line using the Exposition Park/USC Station. (See map below)
RSVP preferred: 213.744.2024
California African American Museum
600 State Drive Exposition Park
Los Angeles, CA 90037
[MAP]
Scenes from 2014 CAAM Literacy Day Event
At Cal Poly Pomona Today for “How Who Redefined Masculinity – The Doctors and their Male Companions” #doctorwho
Cal Poly Pomona University Library Classroom 1807, First Floor
