Writing – Page 34 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

01 Introduction from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American Television]: from Freelancing to Writers Rooms [Video] (1 minute)

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:

As Paolo said — so I won’t spend a lot of time on it — these are the shows –these are the books I’ve done. Sorry. Largely a big Doctor Who fan. Any Doctor Who fans in the house. Really we’ll talk a little bit about the writing of that. It’s quite a brilliant show, I think. These are most of the things I’ve done. Also, love Torchwood has also been quite well done. I am the book review editor, so if you’re Masters students — when you graduate — you can email me, and if there’s a book you’d like to have for free — because they don’t pay you to write in journals — you can review the book and I’ll have it sent to you so you can do that and it’s a credit for you so it’s a lovely thing and Written By Magazine is the magazine of the Writers Guild. You can read this online for free if you go to writtenby.com. You go to WGA, which is our website for the Writer’s Guild, and every two months or so it comes out. Always interviews with writers and showrunners, movie film writers, people like that, so it’s really I think an excellent thing it’s like having a guest speaker come to you and very in-depth interviews, right? We’ll talk about some of them that I’ve done over time.

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

“A Man Of Action Saving Liberty: A Novel Based On The Life Of Giuseppe Garibaldi” – 14 in a series

“Do you knit as you sleep, as well?” Giuseppe teased, due to her swift progress. Anita knitted as she alternated between walking and riding horseback. For herself she had fashioned a red wool cape over a white peasant blouse that billowed around her neck. As she finished the last stitch on the poncho she had designed for him, she handed it proudly to Giuseppe. He draped it over his head and across his shoulders. The varying colors of the stripes across the chest gave the piece a distinguished look that made Anita smile.

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

Join our low-residency MFA in TV and Screenwriting at the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting — Apply Now

Join our low-residency MFA in TV and Screenwriting to share in our mission of bringing more female and underrepresented voices into mainstream media.

Apply Now

The Civil War On Film – 9 in a series – The earliest films were pro-Union…

Between 1908 and 1910 filmmakers released seventy Civil War films, and another hundred by 1916. The earliest films were pro-Union, or at least featured a Union victory, but in 1909 southern theater owners began to complain about Northern bias. Filmmakers saw a market for pro-southern movies.

Movies profiled in this book:

Where’s Her Movie? Painter, Artemisia Gentileschi – 3 in a series

“Where’s HER Movie” posts will highlight interesting and accomplished women from a variety of professional backgrounds who deserve to have movies written about them as much as all the male scientists, authors, performers, and geniuses have had written about them across the over 100 years of film. This is our attempt to help write these women back into mainstream history. — Rosanne

An Italian Baroque painter, Gentileschi began her careet at the age of 15, gained an international clientele, and was the first woman to become a member of the Accademia di Arte del Disegno in Florence (in the 1620s).

She is now considered one of the most accomplished seventeenth-century artists.

A Woman Wrote That – 5 in a series – Sense and Sensibility by Emma Thompson (1995)

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

COLONEL BRANDON: “Give me an occupation, Miss Dashwood, or I shall run mad.”

Sense and Sensibility Script

Sense and Sensibility on IMDB
Emma Thompson on Wikipedia and IMDB
Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American Television]: from Freelancing to Writers Rooms [Video] (52 minutes)

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

“A Man Of Action Saving Liberty: A Novel Based On The Life Of Giuseppe Garibaldi” – 13 in a series

Giuseppe approached the first local he found, who happened to be Henrique sweeping the stoop outside the door of his shop. Thrilled to meet one of the victorious rebels, Henrique invited Giuseppe to his home for coffee. There, as if in a dream, he found the woman he had seen on the hillside, preparing the afternoon coffee.

Henrique saw Giuseppe’s shocked face and politely introduced them, “Senor Garibaldi this is my cook, Aninha.” Neither spoke, not even the banal niceties one expects when strangers are introduced, because neither Giuseppe or Aninha felt like strangers to the other in that moment.

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

The Civil War On Film – 8 in a series – “…Lost Cause adherents deny the immorality and cruelty of slavery….”

The last component of the Lost Cause, and perhaps the key component, is the cherished belief in happy slaves and sub-human African Americans in need of civilization and Christianity. Lost Cause adherents deny the immorality and cruelty of slavery and insist slavery was a benign and misunderstood institution.

Movies profiled in this book:

38 More On International TV Shows and the US from Why Researching Screenwriters Has Always Mattered [Video] (1 minute 18 seconds)

Watch this entire presentation

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

Transcript:

They had to have the United States version, so they remade the TV show. They called it the Red Band Society and they didn’t understand the culture of Italy. The show In Italy is all about hope and has a little magical realism to it because one of the children is in a coma but he narrates the story because he watches his friends become friends and grow and have hope that they will be cured someday and in the United States we didn’t get that which is very sad. The show was actually canceled after six episodes because they focused on the grown-ups who were the doctors and the nurses. They thought the story had to be “we’re gonna find that cure because that’s what we do we save the world.” That wasn’t the story at all. They did. They ruined the story right and because we don’t — we think nice people are boring, the nurse is the meanest woman I have ever met and these children are dying of terminal diseases and she’s being mean to them and they thought that that was very edgy. That’s the big word I hate in the United States right now — edgy, We need edgy programming. How many people can we kill in the next five minutes? So we ruined this lovely program right but at least, through Netflix, I can watch the Italian version with subtitles.

Watch this entire presentation

A Note About This Presentation

A clip from my keynote speech at the 10th Screenwriters´(hi)Stories Seminar for the interdisciplinary Graduation Program in “Education, Art, and History of Culture”, in Mackenzie Presbyterian University, at São Paulo, SP, Brazil, focused on the topic “Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered.” I was especially pleased with the passion these young scholars have toward screenwriting and it’s importance in transmitting culture across the man-made borders of our world.

To understand the world we have to understand its stories and to understand the world’s stories we must understand the world’s storytellers. A century ago and longer those people would have been the novelists of any particular country but since the invention of film, the storytellers who reach the most people with their ideas and their lessons have been the screenwriters. My teaching philosophy is that: Words matter, Writers matter, and Women writers matte, r so women writers are my focus because they have been the far less researched and yet they are over half the population. We cannot tell the stories of the people until we know what stories the mothers have passed down to their children. Those are the stories that last. Now is the time to research screenwriters of all cultures and the stories they tell because people are finally recognizing the work of writers and appreciating how their favorite stories took shape on the page long before they were cast, or filmed, or edited. But also because streaming services make the stories of many cultures now available to a much wider world than ever before.

Many thanks to Glaucia Davino for the invitation.

* 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