Writing – Page 17 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V5 Issue 2: Normatizing the silent drama: Photoplay manuals of the 1910s and early 1920s by Terry Bailey

Highlighting the articles in the past editions of the Journal of Screenwriting, of which I am the Book Reviews Editor. Hopefully these abstracts will entice you to did a little deeper into the history and future of screenwriting. — Rosanne

Normatizing the silent drama: Photoplay manuals of the 1910s and early 1920s by Terry Bailey

The first instructional manuals to cover the writing of photoplays for silent drama emerged in 1911. In the wake of ‘Scenario Fever’, their style was often hyperbolic, and they claimed a great need in the film industry for new dramatic scenarists. In truth, few readers of manuals, or clients of the ‘schools’ that often distributed them, attained professional status. This article uses primary and secondary sources to examine the origins and content of the silent screenwriting manuals, and determines that, despite their poor record in fulfilling their ostensible purpose, they served valuable social functions. By overlooking screen drama’s debt to Victorian theatre and vaudeville, they served to normatize screenwriting practice in its own right, and thus helped to legitimize film’s sense of itself as a new medium. The uniform nature of their content, shaped by manual writers who were often working scenarists, suggests their reliability in clarifying aspects of screenwriting practice that lay behind the creation of silent films, and justifies their use as resources in film studies.

The Journal of Screenwriting is an international double-blind peer-reviewed journal that is published three times a year. The journal highlights current academic and professional thinking about the screenplay and intends to promote, stimulate and bring together current research and contemporary debates around the screenplay whilst encouraging groundbreaking research in an international arena. The journal is discursive, critical, rigorous and engages with issues in a dynamic and developing field, linking academic theory to screenwriting practice.

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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!

Concord Days: Dr Rosanne Welch discusses Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video] (53 mins)

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

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!

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William Blinn, Brian’s Song, Purple Rain, and Screenwriting

Sometimes I love the way the internet lets you drill down layer after layer of research when you only had one small question – but you learn things you forgot you wanted to know. When I saw a question on Quora’s Ask a Screenwriter forum about the best “Based on a True Story” films the one that came immediately to mind was Brian’s Song so first I found the trailer:

Naturally then, I wanted to know who wrote it, which brought me to the film’s Wikipedia page, which brought me to William Blinn’s Wikipedia page

There I came to find that not only did he win an Emmy for writing that TV film but also one for writing on the original Roots. Here he receives the Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for Television for “a WGA guild member who has advanced the literature of television and made outstanding contributions to the profession of the television writer.”

His advice to young writers is to “get off you’re a** and do the work” and to “Tell the truth in an interesting way.”

(If you listen to nothing else in this blog post – listen to that speech!).

Blinn was nominated 3 times for episodes of Fame. And he won Humanitas and Peabody Awards along the way. Blinn also produced Starsky and Hutch (both the TV show and the 2004 movie!). Finally, he co-wrote Purple Rain…

THAT is a career – and you probably have never heard of him.

Finally, I came to remember how much I had resisted watching “a football movie” but I kept hearing how much other people loved it so when it re-ran on the 11:30pm film one night I snuck out of bed in the childhood home I shared with my grandparents and watched the film – finding myself sobbing as it ended. I had never seen a film about such a strong male friendship – and I have rarely seen on as strong since.

Yay for the internet – and Yay for William Blinn.

07 It’s Show Business…Not Show Art…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:

Host: This might be a really sad thing to say, but do you think that, sometimes, it’s not always the best writers who get their pitches up but it’s the people who can work the room, by either maneuvering around, can get their stuff into the ears of the right people and then present that?

Rosanne: That is very true. I wouldn’t say — I mean you have to be a good writer to get in the room in the first place or they wouldn’t have hired you across all those stacks — you’ve seen all the things you’ve read for —

Host: Yeah. No. There’s a lot of crap to filter through. Absolutely.

Rosanne: Absolutely. So, generally speaking, you had to be a certain level to get in the room, but, yeah, it’s the people who can work — you have to work both things. A friend of mine is fond of saying, “It’s called show business. not show art.” So business is half of the job.

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.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V5 Issue 2: Written to be read: A personal reflection on screenwriting research, then and now by Claudia Sternberg

Written to be read: A personal reflection on screenwriting research, then and now by Claudia Sternberg

Having been identified as an early contributor to the intensifying academic study of the (American) screenplay and screenwriting, the author presents a personal account of the circumstances which led to her own research in the 1990s and the publication of Written for the Screen: The American Motion-Picture Screenplay as Text in 1997. Additionally, she offers some reflections on the consolidation and institutionalization of screenwriting research and sketches a number of possibilities for future work in the field.

Get your copy and subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting Today!

* 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!

06 How To Pitch To A Showrunner…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:

Host: How would you pitch to a showrunner who seemed deflective to your ideas? Or like, I know that’s a loaded question.

Rosanne: Oh no, that’s an excellent question. That can happen because relationships grow and change. People get mad a each other for some reason. Maybe other people poison someone’s attitude about somebody else on the show, simply because they want to get rid of them because they’re competition. I mean, it doesn’t always happen. I’ve worked for some lovely people for whom I had a marvelous time and who were very supportive and wanted to help new writers moving up and they really were — there’s some wonderful people in this town. I really say the problem is we hear more of the bad stories than the good ones. But yes, in case such a thing happens, I think you should take a psychology class frankly. I think everyone should take a psychology class to understand the personalities out there and then you have to find new ways around that. When I felt like there might be someone getting in my way I figured out who my allies were and you made sure to connect with them. At certain points, there were certain things I wanted to change in a script and I knew a person at the table would argue against it. So, I went privately to a different producer on the show, who I knew I actually did get along with well, and explained why I didn’t like something and he was like… He had to agree with me first, right, or he wouldn’t help. He agreed with my point of view and so he knew he could present that in the room because he had a higher title than I did at the time — and so he did and when he presented it, it got accepted. So, I went sideways to get my ideas moved forward. So you know, you find a way.

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.

The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V5 Issue 2: Filling up the glass: A look at the historiography of screenwriting by Tom Stempel

Filling up the glass: A look at the historiography of screenwriting by Tom Stempel

This article covers the historiography of screenwriting over the past 60 years, discussing whether there has developed a critical mass of scholars, writers, and publishers in the area. It begins with writings in the fifties, sixties and seventies by such writers as Pauline Kael and Richard Corliss, then spends time with the author’s experiences in writing about the history of screenwriting, and the problems he faced dealing with publishers. From there, the article moves on to the development of books about the history of screenwriting and screenwriters. There is a brief history of the rise, death and revival of Creative Screenwriting, which started as an academic journal and evolved into a magazine. The article notes that non-American academics got into the field earlier and in more depth than the Americans. The reasons American academia avoided the study of screenwriting are discussed, as is the recent growing involvement of American academics in the field.

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* 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!

The Civil War On Film – Review

Because the Civil War ended less than 30 years before the first motion pictures, it became a favorite subject for the new medium and has remained so ever since. Unfortunately, many of these Civil War films are historically inaccurate. According to Lamphier (humanities, California State Polytechnic Univ.) and Welch (screenwriting, Stephens College), films of the Civil War “almost universally erase the past” in order to forget that it was so “painful, destructive, and unpleasant” (p. ix). To illustrate the varying approaches to Civil War history and memory, the authors selected ten significant films—ranging chronologically and thematically from Gone with the Wind (1939) to Free State of Jones (2016)—devoting a chapter to each. All the chapters present the historical background and cultural context for the film, contexts that include, among other things, combat, gender, immigration, leadership, pacifism, race, and slavery. Other works—e.g., Bruce Chadwick’s The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Film (CH, Mar’02, 39-3875) and The American Civil War on Film and TV: Blue and Gray in Black and White and Color, ed. by Douglas Brode, Shea Brode, and Cynthia Miller (CH, May’18, 55-3151)—cover more films and themes; the present volume will be especially useful as a tool for teaching cinematic representations of the past. — J. I. Deutsch, George Washington University

Movies profiled in this book:

05 Working The Room…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:

Then you have to understand them. What are they like? How do they want to hear things? Are they — what type of personalities do they like? You can’t really change yourself but you can readjust some things when you see how the rhythm is of what they like to do and actually, one of my favorite stories is that you also can cheat because I recognized early on in a particular show that there was a gentleman who didn’t like other people to win and so when you started to pitch he would find ways to tear it apart before the boss could say yes. Once you go the yes, he would be on board, because he wasn’t going to go against what the boss said. So, a joke I often tell students and friends is I had an idea that I wanted to pitch and I didn’t want to do it in front of that person being in the room so I waited until the boss — who happened to be another female — went to the bathroom and I pitched it over washing our hands at the sinks and by the time we got back to the room, she liked it enough that she started with “Rosanne had this great idea. We should talk it through,” and I saw the guy’s eyes across the table and I saw that he wanted to say something and he stopped and then I got the script because I stole it away from him. So…

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.

The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V5 Issue 1: Poetic dramaturgy in Andrey Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia (1983): A character without a goal? by Marja-Riitta Koivumäki

Poetic dramaturgy in Andrey Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia (1983): A character without a goal? by Marja-Riitta Koivumäki

This article centres on the use of a character goal and a character arc as elements to express the theme and the meaning in Andrey Tarkovsky’s Nostalgia (1983). In classical dramaturgy, the goal of the character – what does the character want and what actions may he or she take in order to achieve this goal – is considered to be of the utmost importance. In Tarkovsky’s film, however, the character is passive and there does not seem to be any obvious goal to achieve. Through dramaturgical analysis my aim is to reveal the dramaturgical function of both the character goal and the character arc in Nostalgia. My contention is that a passive character forms part of an extensive dramaturgical system and that it carries more meaning than is apparent on the surface. Usually it is the character goal, what the character desires, that carries the spine of the narration and it is usually the starting point of the story design. I argue that the character arc (inner goal) can also assume this function and, accordingly, we can start the development of the screenplay from the perspective of considering how the character changes or why he/she might change. I also suggest that there is a need to reconsider the centrality of character goal, since the screenwriting theories of the twentieth century emphasize the importance of the character goal at the expense of the character arc. This article forms part of a larger study that aims to define certain characteristics of so-called poetic dramaturgy. As I’m interested in whether or not it is possible to define the features of poetic dramaturgy in a similar way as in classical dramaturgy so that they too can be incorporated into the writer’s craft, I also challenge the conventions of classical dramaturgy.

Get your copy and subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting Today!

* 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!