Writing – Page 9 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

15 1976…from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

1976 comes along and this is Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson. So 54 or jump into 76. It’s kind of like once every generation there’s an interest and a need for this movie. Partially because female creatives, whether they be writers or actresses, see this as a great piece to work from and a great way to reflect on their moment in culture right? So this is a big fancy deal. Look at these great photographs. Let me tell you, this is going to be written by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunn. They are a married couple who write their own novels as you see here and work out of New York. They get hired to do this and Joan is going to have her own imprint on it. We’re going to see that in a second. I also want to highlight the fact that John Gregory Dunn wrote this marvelous book if you’ve never read it called Monster: Living Life Off the Big Screen. It’s about the writing of this film Up Close and Personal, which was meant to be the story of Jessica Savitch, an anchorwoman who died when she was high on cocaine and drove her car into a lake and drown and by the time they were done it had nothing to do with her at all and so this tells you the eight-year struggle to get the movie made out of the Disney company. It’s a really a good inside look at how writers and producers work with studios.

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Connections at conferences matter! Through the most recent SCMS, I met Vicki Callahan, whose film history focus right now is on Mabel Normand. When she learned I could put together a lecture on the importance of the female voice in the A Star is Born franchise she asked me to give that lecture to her master students.

It made for a great opportunity for me to hone the ideas I’m working on for a chapter on that franchise that I’m writing for a new book from Bloomsbury: The Bloomsbury Handbook Of International Screenplay Theory. It’s always nice when one piece of research can be purposed in other ways – and it’s always fun revisiting such a female-centric film franchise – one that drew the talents of such powerful performers as Janet Gaynor, Judy Garland, Barbara Streisand, and Lady Gaga.

Find out why in this lecture!

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01 Introduction from “VISIBLE STARS: Women in Early TV” for the American Women Writers National Museum [Video]

Many thanks to Janice Law of the American Women Writers National Museum who invited me to give a short talk on The Women of Early TV.

I enjoyed sharing the names and careers of women like Peg Lynch, Gerturde Berg, Selma Diamond and D.C. Fontana to the members who gathered on Zoom last Wednesday morning. There are so many more I could have talked about whose names don’t appear in mainstream books about the history of television so we have to learn who they are and carry those names forward ourselves. It’s one of the missions of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting – and has been one of my missions all my life.

Transcript:

Well good morning everybody. I am going to dive right in so that we have a chance to get started. So I’m going to share my screen and you’re going to be able to see some photographs of some of these most wonderful women who are part of early Hollywood and early television and to me, they’re the people that we’re here to talk about right? So one of the beautiful things we have to do is look at who came before us. I teach a class in tv and screenwriting and I want people to recognize the people on whose shoulders we stand. So today we’re going to talk about the women of early tv. There are many more women to love than just Lucy. She’s the only one we hear about. She’s done some good work and we want to talk about that but we want to speak to all these other women who are so important. A little background on me very quickly. I’m a television writer. I worked on these programs. Touched by an Angel. Beverly Hills 90210 and Picket Fences which was a marvelous show and I also did a little documentary work with ABC News Nightline. So very excited about that. I’m also very happy with the fact that these are books that I have written. Particularly this one is about women in early Hollywood screenwriters and that interests me very much. So of course this is also an Encyclopedia on Women in American History and the Arts. It’s a four-volume set we put out a couple of years ago and we won a couple of awards from National Library Associations so we’re happy about that. I’m also on the board — the editorial board — for the Journal of Screenwriting and Written By magazine which is the magazine of the Writers Guild where we interview certain tv writers every week and also movie writers and it is free online at writtenby.org, if you’re interested in reading about people in the arts these days in the media arts.

Many thanks to Janice Law of the American Women Writers National Museum who invited me to give a short talk on The Women of Early TV.

I enjoyed sharing the names and careers of women like Peg Lynch, Gerturde Berg, Selma Diamond and D.C. Fontana to the members who gathered on Zoom last Wednesday morning. There are so many more I could have talked about whose names don’t appear in mainstream books about the history of television so we have to learn who they are and carry those names forward ourselves. It’s one of the missions of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting – and has been one of my missions all my life.

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Women pioneers who created, produced or shepherded many of America’s most wildly popular, early television programs will be profiled by Dr. Rosanne Welch.

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20 What Might Have Been? from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]

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

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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!

Transcript:

Tammy: Exactly because I think she was coming back to participate in a lot of the early feminist or like women’s like Suffrage movements and she was scheduled to speak at — what is it — Seneca Falls maybe.

Rosanne: Seneca Falls because again Lydia Marie Child who she knew in her childhood right becomes a big leader of that. One of the founders of that event and of course she’d want Margaret Fuller. I mean, my god she’s world-known. She’s world-traveled. She’s the perfect example of what women can accomplish if they are not given the rules and requirements that society was forcing on them. Exactly what Seneca Falls was meant to counteract.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V6 Issue 2: Guest and returning writers in American television drama series: The two Davids by Tom Steward

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

Guest and returning writers in American television drama series: The two Davids by Tom Steward

The article uses two distinct historical case studies to argue in favour of the agency of guest writers and returning episode writers of American television drama series in terms of their ability to create thematically and stylistically distinctive episodes with an individual voice. In the first, I look at writer-director David Mamet’s episode of Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1980–1987) entitled ‘A Wasted Weekend’ and in the second I discuss several episodes written by writer-director-producer David Chase for The Rockford Files (NBC, 1974–1980). I explore the case studies in relation to existing critical literature on American television drama authorship and comparison to more recent examples of guest and returning episode writers. Using in-depth textual, script and production analysis, I argue that the tone, content and style of certain episodes of American television drama series are unique to the individual writer. I contend that the production roles of guest writer and returning episode writer, while different at different times, offer scope for writers to distinguish their work in American television. In addressing these particular screenwriting roles, I challenge the overemphasis on the production hierarchy in terms of critical accounts of creativity within American television drama and probe the exploitation of writers in cultural validations of television.

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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14 What Changed?…from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

So let’s look at what changed. First, we’ve got to move her into it being a musical star because this is Judy Garland. She’s going to have to sing musical numbers in this particular remake. We’re still going to have our drunken actor and they’re going to marry and he’s going to be jealous. This is something that remains the same all the way until we get to Bradley Cooper and we’ll talk about why that changes. We’re going to have our Academy Award moment because musicals were things that earned Academy Awards back in the day of course. He’s going to commit suicide off-screen. He’s going to walk off into the ocean as the noble man that he is and she too will introduce herself as Mrs. Norman Maine. So these things remain exactly the same. When the Writer’s Guild arbitrates a script to decide who should get final credit, they look at all versions of a script. They have a blind group of writers who sign up to do this and they get the scripts –writer one, writer two, writer three. You don’t get any names and then you decide statistically how much of a percentage of this person’s original work made it to the end and that’s how they decide credit. So I am looking at this as if I’m arbitrating the various versions of this script to see how much credit Dorothy Parker still deserves. In this case, I think a lot right? They’re borrowing a lot of what she did.

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On The Writers of Casablanca

While it is fun to look back at this review of Casablanca from when it was released – before anyone knew it would become the classic it is and be voted one of the greatest screenplays of all times – it’s also a reminder of my pet peeve. The reviewer never once names the screenwriters – twins Julius Epstein and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch – in the whole review.

He mentions the producer and the director in the first paragraph. Yet he writes: “through these people, the story of Casablanca is told with expert intensity.” And about the love story, he says: “the triangle is intelligently developed.” And in praise of the director, he notes “the wealth of contributing material that was placed at his disposal” without ever acknowledging the writers who did all of that.

As a final coup de grace he names each of the heads of departments and their “long list of technical achievements”… but never once mentions the writers who envisioned it all – Julius and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch. So I am mentioning them many times in this rant. Jacob and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch created the Casablanca we still watch, love, and teach 80 years after it was written by Jacob and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch.

Read ‘Casablanca’: THR’s 1942 Review from the Hollywood Reporter

19 What Have We Learned? from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]

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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!

Transcript:

Tammy: You try to figure out so what have we learned from a woman who sort of goes beyond her station in life and accomplishes all these amazing things. Is it that she does get punished in the end or is it something, like I would love to have the idea of like her spirit, is just interrupted and shifted to a different plane or something because I think

Rosanne: That’s such a non-American way to think but it is the best yeah because I hate the other one you’re right. The other one’s terrible because it does like oh look you did everything against the rules and you paid for it which is not a message we want to share but the idea that maybe you achieved. It’s a little Jonathan Livingston Seagull. You’ve achieved the peak and now you move on to that next plane that we we don’t know. So we can’t understand.

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13 1954 Credits…from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

Where, first of all, let’s look at these credits. One of the things I want to make point of so here’s Moss Hart. He takes full credit for the screenplay but it is based on the one that Dorothy did with Alan and Robert right? So this is how our credits read properly. What’s interesting about this is he says when he’s asked during his rewrites about some things he did not change at all and he didn’t for this very reason. He felt they were perfect the way they were. They were perfect the way she wrote them. He could not top those lines. So the 1954 version is still an echo and a mimic of Dorothy Parker in my opinion based on Moss Hart’s confession. If you want to put it that way and Moss Hart if you’ve never read Act One, this is his autobiography of growing up poor in New York, working in some summer camps that are very much like dirty dancing summer camp, and eventually making it on Broadway. It’s quite a good book if you’re interested in that period. Of course, the joke is how much of it is true and how much did he elaborate on. We will never really know. There is then obviously a real biography of him if you are interested but here’s the man who’s rewriting this version of A Star Is Born, so I will say though it is written solely by a man, it is a man relying on and reusing the words of a woman’s. The female imprint is still highly there in this version.

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18 Tragedy from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]

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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!

Transcript:

Tammy: I can just imagine Margaret saying, I don’t want to be defined by this shipwreck.

Rosanne: Yes you don’t and yet it does and doesn’t. She still has all these other things going for her but we are — as humans — as Americans– that voyeuristic tragedy. That’s why we’re still talking about the Titanic. Really. I mean and how many movies do we need about that. It’s very difficult and yet a tragedy is a a narrative that we’re used to right? We do Romeo and Juliet a million times. There’s a reason for tragedies to exist but I don’t know because I guess in Romeo and Juliet we learned the lesson that the parents being so separate caused this — that we could stop the hatred. It’s the same in West Side it’s a whole West Side Story. Stop the hatred because this is what it leads to. There’s a message. There is no message to her loss. We’ve learned nothing from that and I think that’s why it’s harder because I’ve tried to do I would love to do a Margaret Fuller movie but that part of it is just too sad for people to want to take on.

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12 Here Comes Judy…from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

1937. Huge Movie. It winds awards. It has everyone paying attention. Janet Gaynor is a very important actress. So, it’s a big deal. 1954 comes around. There is a movie we can remake and remember that in the era when they were remaking these films, there were no DVDs. There was no streaming. The film was done after it played in a theater for 2 weeks or 10 weeks — however successful it was. You would never see that film again. 1954. There’s no TV reruns of that film. That’s it. If your mother saw it in ’37, that’s it. Nobody has seen it since then. So remaking a movie made some sense. So, we’re going to come into this with a guy named Moss Hart. He’s a very famous Broadway playwright. He worked with George S. Kaufman, but he also worked on his own and he is invited to come and re-do this for Judy Garland as the star and it’s going to be a comeback film. She’s had trouble (Oh no) with drugs and alcohol AND it’s affected her career. So she needs a big vehicle and this is recognized as a showpiece for a female performer, but she’s Judy Garland, so we’ve got to change something.

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