Writing, Film, Television and More!
Such a fun night last night with a wonderfully engaged and energized panel of showrunners talking about Writing the Teen Voice. From top clockwise: Peter Barsocchini (High School Musical), Robia Rashid (Atypical), Chuck Rosin (Beverly Hills, 90210) and Brian Yorkey (13 Reasons Why). Watch their shows!
Photo: Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting
Photo: Writers Guild Foundation
Watch this entire presentation
![My Background from Giving Voice to Silent Films and the Far From Silent Women Who Wrote Them with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (0:40)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ufva-03-background.jpeg)
A recording of my presentation at this year’s University Film and Video Association (UFVA) 2017 conference.
Transcript:
This is my background in the business. These are all the different shows that I worked on. Always with a focus on the female characters. How can I make the female characters stronger? I’m a girl. Interesting enough I have a boy — a son — and when I had him I thought, “Oh no, I’m supposed to have a girl so I can teach her to be a feminist.” and then someone went “No let me teach him to love a feminist.” and I thought, ‘Oh yeah.” So, and this is the stuff that I have written. Mostly focused on women — women in Doctor Who and how race is portrayed. Women in Aviation. I’ve just got a second encyclopedia set of women in History. I am part of the Women Screenwriters Encyclopedia and my latest book is on The Monkees and feminism in The Monkees because it was actually there in the show if you look hard enough.
Books Mentioned In This Presentation
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** Buy “Why The Monkees Matter” Today **
Each in his own right was an authentic, mostly American teenager from various parts of the world, Nesmith the too-young-married Texan, Tork the Connecticut gentleman, Dolenz the Cruise Night Valley boy, a character type later glamorized in American Graffiti (1973), and Jones who offered a throwback to the 19th century teenage life of apprenticeship, first to a racing stable and then to an agent.
from Why The Monkees Mattered by Dr. Rosanne Welch — Buy your Copy today!
Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture
McFarland (Direct from Publisher) | Amazon | Kindle Edition | Nook Edition
A History of Screenwriting – 42 in a series – Within Our Gates – Oscar Micheaux (1920)
Oscar Devereaux Micheaux (US: /ˈɒskə.mɪˈʃoʊ/ ( listen); January 2, 1884 – March 25, 1951) was an African American author, film director and independent producer of more than 44 films. Although the short-lived Lincoln Motion Picture Company was the first movie company owned and controlled by black filmmakers,[1] Micheaux is regarded as the first major African-American feature filmmaker, a prominent producer of race film, and has been described as “the most successful African-American filmmaker of the first half of the 20th century”.[2] He produced both silent films and sound films when the industry changed to incorporate speaking actors.
Micheaux’s first novel The Conquest was adapted to film and re-titled The Homesteader.[5] This film, which met with critical and commercial success, was released in 1919. It revolves around a man named Jean Baptiste, called the Homesteader, who falls in love with many white women but resists marrying one out of his loyalty to his race. Baptiste sacrifices love to be a key symbol for his fellow African Americans. He looks for love among his own people and marries an African-American woman. Relations between them deteriorate. Eventually, Baptiste is not allowed to see his wife. She kills her father for keeping them apart and commits suicide. Baptiste is accused of the crime, but is ultimately cleared. An old love helps him through his troubles. After he learns that she is a mulatto and thus part African, they marry. This film deals extensively with race relationships.
Micheaux’s second silent film was Within Our Gates, produced in 1920.[5] Although sometimes considered his response to the film Birth of a Nation, Micheaux said that he created it independently as a response to the widespread social instability following World War I. Within Our Gates revolved around the main character, Sylvia Landry, a mixed-race school teacher. In a flashback, Sylvia is shown growing up as the adopted daughter of a sharecropper. When her father confronts their white landlord over money, a fight ensues. The landlord is shot by another white man, but Sylvia’s adoptive father is accused and lynched with her adoptive mother. — Wikipedia
Learn more about Oscar Micheaux with these books
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I teach several classes for the Stephens College Low-Residency MFA in Screenwriting, including History of Screenwriting. In fact, I created the curriculum for that course from scratch and customized it to this particular MFA in that it covers ‘Screenwriting’ (not directors) and even more specifically, the class has a female-centric focus. As part History of Screenwriting I, the first course in the four-class series, we focus on the early women screenwriters of the silent film era who male historians have, for the most part, quietly forgotten in their books. In this series, I share with you some of the screenwriters and films that should be part of any screenwriters education. I believe that in order to become a great screenwriter, you need to understand the deep history of screenwriting and the amazing people who created the career. — Dr. Rosanne Welch
Calling all Whovians – and those who plan to start binging soon! For her 5th Doctor Who lecture to the CPP community, Dr. Rosanne Welch will discuss how society – and the show’s writing staff – prepared the audience for a major change in this 50-year franchise – the creation of the first Lady Doctor!
Open to the public
Date: Thursday, November 16th
Time: 12pm – 1pm
Location: Cal Poly Pomona University Library
3801 West Temple Ave. Pomona, CA 91768
University Library (building 15), 4th floor, Events Room 4829
Rosanne Welch talks about “Why The Monkees Matter” with Jean Hopkins Power
Watch this entire presentation (45 mins)
Jean Powergirl takes the host reigns and welcomes her guest Rosanne Welch, PhD to the show! They’ll be discussing Roseanne’s book, “Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture.”
Transcript:
Jean: All right, so did you get..have you been able to talk personally to any of The Monkees.
Rosanne: I was able to…I did phone interviews with Micky Dolenz when I was working…originally I did an article about the writers of the show for… this is Written By Magazine which is the magazine of the Writers Guild and I’m on the board there so I sometimes recommend things I’d like to do and if other writers don’t want to take them, I do them. So I had done that article so that is when I interviewed Micky to talk about — to talk to an actor who understood how writers operated and how scripts work. In fact, I also among all the things I bring to the book signings I have an actual script from the show.
Jean: Which I love stuff like this. An actual script. An actual television script which to me is great. it is just a beautiful thing. In the day, this is how it was done. Notice the little brads. I don’t think you Millenials even know what a brad is, but anyway, this is awesome. This is like a relic for Monkees people. Imean you might need a bodyguard because I know some Monkees crazy people that would like tackle you for that, but I digress.
Rosanne: Seriously. In fact, one of the gentlemen I talked to, Coslough Johnson, talked about when he would go to the studio to hand in a freelance script, he would be mauled by teenagers who were hanging around the gates wanting any piece of memorabilia they could get. “I just want to deliver my work.”
Jean: First-degree relic. (Laugher)
A hit television show about a fictitious rock band, The Monkees (1966-1968) earned two Emmys–Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Comedy. Capitalizing on the show’s success, the actual band formed by the actors, at their peak, sold more albums than The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined and set the stage for other musical TV characters from The Partridge Family to Hannah Montana. In the late 1980s, the Monkees began a series of reunion tours that continued into their 50th anniversary.
This book tells the story of The Monkees and how the show changed television, introducing a new generation to the fourth-wall-breaking slapstick created by Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers. Its creators contributed to the innovative film and television of 1970s with projects like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laugh-In and Welcome Back, Kotter. Immense profits from the show, its music and its merchandising funded the producers’ move into films such as Head, Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces.
Rosanne Welch, PhD has written for television (Touched by an Angel, Picket Fences) and print (Three Ring Circus: How Real Couples Balance Marriage, Work and Kids and The Encyclopedia of Women in Aviation and Space). In the documentary world she has written and produced Bill Clinton and the Boys Nation Class of 1963 for ABC NEWS/Nightline and consulted on PBS’s A Prince Among Slaves, the story of a prince from West Africa who was enslaved in the 1780s, freed by order of President John Quincy Adams in the 1820s and returned to his homeland.
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I get so many books in the mail for me to distribute to reviewers for The Journal of Screenwriting that opening the daily deliveries is like having a birthday party every day – and then I forget that every now and then the book that arrives is one for which I’ve written something – an essay, a chapter, etc – and that brings an extra smile to my face.
Seeing my name in print never ceases to amaze me as it was a goal of mine from a very young age – hence my helming of the 8th grade newspaper at St. Pius X School, the 12th grade “Fourth Estate” at Bedford Senior High and the columns I’ve written for my college newspaper, The Cleveland Plain Dealer and The Los Angeles Times collectively.
Today I was pleased to receive The American Civil War on Film and TV: Blue and Gray in Black and White and Color edited by Doulas Brode, Shea T. Brode and Cynthia J. Miller – it has my chapter: “Hidden Behind Hoopskirts: The Many Women of Hollywood’s Civil War” and as Doug says in the Introduction, this chapter gave me a chance to focus on the portrayal of enslaved females for wherever there was a Southern belle in an old Hollywood movie, there, too would be her maid.
Granted, as a new collection of essays by scholars – and in hardback – the book costs $105 and there are no used copies out yet. But you can always ask your local or college library to stock a copy and then be the first to check it out!
From Amazon.com…
Whether on the big screen or small, films featuring the American Civil War are among the most classic and controversial in motion picture history. From D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) to Free State of Jones (2016), the war has provided the setting, ideologies, and character archetypes for cinematic narratives of morality, race, gender, and nation, as well as serving as historical education for a century of Americans.
In The American Civil War on Film and TV: Blue and Gray in Black and White and Color, Douglas Brode, Shea T. Brode, and Cynthia J. Miller bring together nineteen essays by a diverse array of scholars across the disciplines to explore these issues. The essays included here span a wide range of films, from the silent era to the present day, including Buster Keaton’s The General (1926), Red Badge of Courage (1951), Glory (1989), Gettysburg (1993), and Cold Mountain (2003), as well as television mini-series The Blue and The Gray (1982) and John Jakes’ acclaimed North and South trilogy (1985-86).
As an accessible volume to dedicated to a critical conversation about the Civil War on film, The American Civil War on Film and TV will appeal to not only to scholars of film, military history, American history, and cultural history, but to fans of war films and period films, as well.
