On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch
Writing, Film, Television and More!
This new “A Woman Wrote That” post is an echo of the Writers Guild campaign of a few years ago (“A Writer Wrote That”) where they noted famous movie quotes and credited the screenwriter rather than the director. The difference here being that we will be posting lines from films written by female screenwriters. Feel free to share! — Rosanne
PRINCESS LEIA
Why, you stuck up, half-witted, scruffy-looking… nerf-herder.
One of the biggest things that makes me so excited is people are beginning to read screenplays as literature.
The script isn’t just a blueprint. We’re going to read the action lines, the dialogue, and we’re going to hear the voice of the writer in a way that we can’t on screen.
![08 Monkees Writers and History from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (1 minute)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/rmw-oxford-brookes-08.png)
Thanks to the gracious invitation from my Screenwriting Research Network colleague Paolo Russo – and a grant he was able to procure (and in the before-Covid time) I was able to spend a week at Oxford Brookes University working with the screenwriting masters students in Paolo’s course. At the culmination of the week, I gave this lecture on how writers rooms worked in the States.
Transcript:
I wrote this article for Written By which is about these writers and it was very interesting to go back and speak to them in their 80s about what their experience had been to write hippie characters in the 60s and it was all about how they shared stories. Some of them were more conservative. Some of them were already becoming hippies. Treva tells a funny story about her mother not understanding what it meant when she said she smoked pot. Her mother thought she was doing something in the kitchen. She didn’t divest her of that opinion right? So they all had a different attitude toward how they wrote but in one-hour dramas, things were done differently back in the day as everyone is fond of saying. They used writer pools. They would simply hire you under contract at a studio — Universal, Warner Brothers, Disney, whatever it was — and you literally sat on the line now that’s a that’s a pool of women typing. That’s how scripts were done before there were computers right? They had a bunch of women in a room. They had that ditto paper and you type and you get three copies with the little purple stuff and think about that. You’re doing that 24/7. If you’re doing Gone with the Wind, how many copies of that script do you have to consistently keep typing so that it’s ready.
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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!
† Available from the LA Public Library
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1848 – Return to Italy
Political changes in the various kingdoms on the Italian peninsula helped convince Giuseppe and many of the members of his Italian legion that now was the time to return, that now was the time to use the skills they had obtained in their battles for South American freedom to support unity in their homeland.
As a producer interested in maximizing his profits, Selznick worked hard to head off any possible protest. The NAACP took issue with the use of the n-word in the book, so the script used the word “freedmen” instead. Selznick also conceded to veterans of the Union army. In the book, Scarlett shoots one of Sherman’s soldiers after he menaces her with rape. In the film the soldier becomes a deserter who was going against Sherman’s orders to not harm citizens on the March to the Sea.
Movies profiled in this book:
This new “A Woman Wrote That” post is an echo of the Writers Guild campaign of a few years ago (“A Writer Wrote That”) where they noted famous movie quotes and credited the screenwriter rather than the director. The difference here being that we will be posting lines from films written by female screenwriters. Feel free to share! — Rosanne
JUDY
Look at this place. The army couldn’t afford drapes?
I’m thrilled to have been asked to make a presentation for the American Women Writers National Museum (AWWNM) on the topic of “An Introduction to the Women of Early TV: There are More Women than Lucy to Love“. I’ll be discussing the groundbreaking work of women from Gertrude Berg (one of the first women to create, write, produce and star in a long-running hit — The Goldbergs) to D.C. Fontana (Star Trek). — 
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RSVP Today!
Email AWWNM1@gmail.com
Wed Feb 10, 2021 noon-12:45 EDT
“An Introduction to the Women of Early TV: There are More Women than Lucy to Love“
Sponsored by: American Women Writers National Museum
Time & Place: noon-12:45 p.m. EDT / 9 AM PDT via Zoom
All AWWNM programs are now via Zoom until further notice. Invitations are sent via email to AWWNM’s mailing list. RSVPS are REQUIRED in order to receive a link to a specific program. If you would like an invitation, email request to AWWNM1@gmail.com.
Dr. Rosanne Welch, Executive Director of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting, Author, Historian and Book Reviews editor of the Journal of Screenwriting will profile pioneer women who created, produced and worked on many of America’s most wildly popular early TV Programs.
“My goal is to rescue these talented women from historical oblivion”, she said.
Some of the women writers she will discuss are:
![New Book by IGE Lecturers Critique the Civil War in Films via PolyCentric [News]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/civil-war-film-cover.jpg)
Recently my co-author Peg Lamphier and I sat for an interview about our Civil War on Film book to discuss the American film industry’s depiction of the American Civil War and the mythologies and ideologies surrounding the experience of that war.
We completely destroy any idea that there is something noble and admirable about the Confederacy. There is not. They fought to preserve human bondage. That should be morally revolting to all twenty-first century Americans and the fact that it is not is a testament to how far we still have to go to heal the wounds of our nation’s history of slavery.
Suddenly, the book seems even more timely than when we began writing it 2 years ago. — Rosanne
New Book by IGE Lecturers Critique the Civil War in Films
For their third book project, lecturers Peg Lamphier and Roseanne Welch, in the Department of Interdisciplinary General Education, decided to write a book examining the American film industry’s depiction of the American Civil War. In their book, “The Civil War on Film,” the authors contend that American films are filled with mythologies and ideologies surrounding the experience of the war and further research is required to uncover the full, real history.
![New Book by IGE Lecturers Critique the Civil War in Films via PolyCentric [News]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Welch-and-Lamphier.jpg)
Peg Lamphier and Roseanne Welch, lecturers in the Department of Interdisciplinary General Education, team up on their third book, which examines the American film industry’s depiction of the American Civil War.
According to the authors, the Civil War, which occurred from 1861-1865, is contested ground both among historians and the general public. They argue that most are clear about the anti-slavery aims of the war, as well as the fundamentally treasonous nature of succession, but neo-Confederates cast the war in terms favorable to their white supremacist agenda.
In a joint statement, Lamphier and Welch wrote, “Our book is entirely unsympathetic to the Neo-Con/Lost Cause agenda and so we’re engaged in a vigorous refutation of a number of pro-Confederate myths that serve to hamper racial equality in modern America. We hope readers will better understand the nature of the war and the troubled way it’s been filmed as they work through our book. We also hope it shows readers that films always engage in a bit of fictionalization in order to heighten the drama.”
Other Welch/Lamphier Books
![07 The Monkees Writers Room from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (44 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/rmw-oxford-brookes-07.png)
Thanks to the gracious invitation from my Screenwriting Research Network colleague Paolo Russo – and a grant he was able to procure (and in the before-Covid time) I was able to spend a week at Oxford Brookes University working with the screenwriting masters students in Paolo’s course. At the culmination of the week, I gave this lecture on how writers rooms worked in the States.
Transcript:
Neil Simon actually wrote about writing for Sid Caesar in a play and that was all about glorifying what happened in the writer’s room. So it’s really a fun kind of play if you see it. I did some work on this tv show which is from the 60s. It’s also all on YouTube if you care to see it. It was a comedy about four guys who ran a rock and roll band. They’re literally still around and still touring. They’re in New Zealand right now. That’s how long-lasting the effect of the show was but these folks were all the writers of it including Treva Silverman — the woman up in the corner. She was the first woman to write alone on a series without a male partner — a husband or a guy who happened to work with her. That’s a big move. It seems ridiculous but that was a big moment in TV history.
Watch this entire presentation
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
* 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!
† Available from the LA Public Library
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
There were four thousand Italian families in Montevideo at the time. When the city was put under siege Giuseppe put together a force of Italians to help defend the city. The fame the newspapers generated brought hundreds of those Italians to join Giuseppe’s forces with a two-fold promise: they would fight for freedom for Uruguay and use this fight as a training ground so they could all return to Italy and unite their own beloved country.