Writing – Page 31 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

We need this message… via Instagram

Great TV and Movies are built around the theme, you have to have friends. You have to have friends you can trust.

Look how powerful that has been. We need that message.

We go to movies and television shows – we go to stories – to learn that message.

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The Civil War On Film – 14 in a series – “Yet Mitchell created a heroine who never glorified the “Lost Cause” the way other characters in the movie did”

Yet Mitchell created a heroine who never glorified the “Lost Cause” the way other characters in the movie did. In fact, Mitchell urged producer David O. Selznick to hire her friend, Susan Myrick, a newspaper columnist from Macon, Georgia, as a technical consultant precisely because of her “common sense and utter lack of sentimentality about ‘The Old South’” (Flamini 1975). Yet, in spite of Scarlett’s own practical attitude, the film does glorify the Old South and conform to Lost Cause mythology.

Movies profiled in this book:

A Woman Wrote That – 10 in a series – When Harry Met Sally (1989) by Nora Ephron

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

HARRY

Men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.

When Harry Met Sally on IMDB
When Harry Met Sally on Wikipedia
Nora Ephron on Wikipedia and IMDB
Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

05 Women Writers Matter from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (27 seconds)

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:

Women writers have always mattered. They certainly matter to me but we do not teach them very often and that’s a choice of the people who put classes together 50, 60, 80 years ago and didn’t mention the women. So I mention them a lot. These are women that you should know. These are women from American film history. There are women in English film history equally important. Hopefully, you’re having that covered in your classes.

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“A Man Of Action Saving Liberty: A Novel Based On The Life Of Giuseppe Garibaldi” – 18 in a series

Since Anita could not wield a gun in one hand and a child in the other, Anita followed with the other camp wives, despite Giuseppe’s pleas that she stay behind until the baby was weaned. Instead, she rode with the three-month-old Menotti on the saddle in front of her. When the troops came to a stream swollen by recent rains, Giuseppe turned his poncho so the hood was in front and wrapped Menotti inside it so he could keep the wet child warm with his body heat.

Get your copy of A Man Of Action Saving Liberty Today!

The Civil War On Film – 13 in a series – Movies that make dubious historical claims can provide rich opportunities for learning…

Movies that make dubious historical claims can provide rich opportunities for learning. Each of the movies we chose for this volume do a different kind of work and were ‘big’ enough films that they are still widely available should a reader chose to watch them. We also tried to pick films that covered a wide swath of film history or were representative of a certain type of Civil War movie. Most importantly, each film allows for a discussion of different facets of Civil War history.

Movies profiled in this book:

A Woman Wrote That – 9 in a series – Klondike Annie by Mae West (1936)

ROSE “THE FRISCO DOLL”

When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I’ve never tried before.

Klondike Annie on IMDB
Klondike Annie on Wikipedia
Mae West on Wikipedia and IMDB
Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

“Writers are important” via Instagram

Writers are important.

Writer comes before director when people are writer-directors because writers are more important. You cannot direct some people walking around a room.

Somebody has to say why they’re there and what they’re doing.

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“Let us simply celebrate good television” and Bridgerton [Opinion]

“Let us simply celebrate good television” and Bridgerton [Opinion] by Dr. Rosanne Welch

Leave it to NPR to get it right, which is why I’m posting this piece they did on Bridgerton (Netflix), the new show executive produced by Shonda Rhimes and created for television by Chris Van Dusen from the romance book series by Julia Quinn.

See ‘Bridgerton’ Is A Delicious, Raunchy Tale Of One Very Hot Family

Far beyond explaining the show’s popularity, this article interested me because it understood instantly that what works best and most binge-ably about this show is that

“Let us simply celebrate good television, made by a shop run by a woman who loves good television and written by people who are experienced in television.”

In fact, I found one of the cleanest, clearest descriptions of the difference between movie screenplays and television screenplays while listening to this.

“Writing television requires writing to the rhythm of the episode, not just the season. An episode must have its own shape, its own rise and fall… Obviously, in a serialized story, one episode will not be complete on its own when it comes to plot, but it should work on its own structurally. It should have a beginning, middle, and end.”

You could spend a whole semester in a writing class and not yet be able to define it so cleanly – or create a piece that demonstrates having digested that delightfully delectable tidbit.

I also appreciated the note about how we may think streaming services invented binge-watching but

“Remember, binge-watching really came of age with DVDs, which didn’t have the Netflixian boosts of the auto-play and the credits-skipping and the part where they almost bodily shove you from one episode to the next episode. If you watched 10 episodes of Grey’s Anatomy on DVD, it was because you affirmatively said yes, over and over.”

I would go so far as to say TV in general invented that because before streaming it had to make characters and stories so compelling you would remember to be in front of the TV set at the same time every week in order to keep up.

That’s quite a lot of television writing (and history) information to glean out of one short public radio piece. Kudos to NPR pop culture correspondent Linda Holmes. And because we learn so much from any writer’s origin story – don’t miss her story at the end of the online post:

“She began her professional life as an attorney. In time, however, her affection for writing, popular culture, and the online universe eclipsed her legal ambitions. She shoved her law degree in the back of the closet, gave its living-room space to DVD sets of The Wire, and never looked back.

Holmes was a writer and editor at Television Without Pity, where she recapped several hundred hours of programming — including both High School Musical movies, for which she did not receive hazard pay. Her first novel, Evvie Drake Starts Over, will be published in the summer of 2019.”

Rosanne Welch serves as Executive Director of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting. Television credits include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, Nightline and Touched by an Angel. Award-winning publications include When Women Wrote Hollywood, runner up for the Susan Koppelman Award for best edited book in feminist studies and Women in American History, named Outstanding Reference Source and added to the list of 2017’s Best Historical Materials, by the ALA.

Category: Writing