It was great to be able to attend this year’s SD WhoCon in San Diego and present this lecture on “The Difficulties and Delicacies of Writing the First Female Doctor in 50+ years” in which I discuss how successful I think showrunner Christopher Chibnall was in making that transition.
It gave me a chance to talk about the creative work of a showrunner/screenwriter while also reconnecting to some friends we had met at this same convention some 3 years ago – and to talk about one of my favorite subjects – Doctor Who!
Transcript:
I also am on the editorial board for different things. Written By Magazine is the magazine of the Writers Guild. I have a sample of it over there. I got lucky one time when Russell was in town doing Miracle Day the editor was like I know you’re a Doctor Who fan. Would you like to interview him and I was like yes I would love to sit in a room and chat with him and it turned out few journalists are as Whovian of a fan as I. So we ended up chatting longer than I was meant to be there and the publicist would walk by and go “Are you all done yet?” and I thought. oh, they’re going to kick me out, and then Russell was like in a minute and he’d send the publicist away. So I laughed.
I have another friend who teaches a thing called “speed drafting” So then you figure out what’s your best way to work and his idea is that you should set a little timer — an hour and a half, two hours, whatever you think — and just keep going and if you have a problem — I need to research something– you just slug in a little thing — figure this out later — that sort of thing keep moving, keep moving and the next day you don’t go back and look at what you did the day before. You just take it from where you stopped and go. So you have a whole first draft as fast as possible and then you take the time to pick your way through and do the rewriting and fill in the stuff that you didn’t know along the way. That works for him. That gives him two hours a day of writing and that’s all he needs to get to a — and then it’s two hours of rewriting when he gets to that stage. So you find a process that works for you and then you make sure your lifestyle allows for that process.
It’s always fun to sit down with students and share stories about entering the television industry and how things work at all stages and I had that opportunity the other day.
Daniela Torres, a just-graduated (Congratulations!) student of the Columbia College Semester in LA program asked me to guest on a podcast she had recently begun hosting with another college student she met during her internship (good example of networking in action!).
We could have talked all morning (the benefit of a 3 hour class session) but we held it to about an hour and fifteen minutes or so. Hopefully, along the way I answered some questions you might have about how the business works. So often it amounts to working hard at being a better writer and gathering a group of other talented, hard-working people around you so you can all rise together.
Dr. Rosanne Welch is a television writer with credits that include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, ABCNEWS: Nightline and Touched by an Angel. She also teaches Television Writing and the Art of Film at San Jose State University.
Rosanne discusses what made shows like Beverly Hills 90210 compelling, what to do and not to do when attempting to pitch a show to broadcast or streaming, what most young writers neglect in their writing process, and much more!
The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.
From Marilyn Monroe to Lady Gaga it seems one actress every generation is said to have “It” but few know that a female screenwriter of the silent era coined that still current phrase. Meet Elinor Glyn. Her life as a high society wife in England fed the novel-writing success that brought Glyn an invitation to Hollywood at the age of 56.
Through marriage, she had gained the glamour of being a member of the titled nobility. Yet she soon learned he had less funds than could support their lifestyle, so Glyn became a writer, publishing a book a year to keep her family’s finances afloat. Her ‘naughty’ novels – because they involved women involved in torrid affairs — became best sellers. That success caused the Hearst publishing company to sign Glyn to write articles and – recognizing the power of the film industry – Glyn included a clause for the motion picture rights.
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.
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: Also her other book, Summer on the Lakes, which you know was written you know like 1844 where she’s just going to the Great Lakes and she’s essentially writing you know a version of Walden of her own and she’s talking with native Americans and all of this. It’s a travel memoir. It’s a, you know, it’s a journalistic you know um like it’s again dispatches from her journey…
Rosanne: …and we forget how important the Great Lakes were, right, before the country is humongous. This is how we travel all the goods and whatnot. I mean again from Ohio from Cleveland and just thinking about all the people I know who live in that area. It was so important that the Erie Canal — all these things that provided the transportation on water long before we have it any other way. It’s huge. I mean so to go to the Great Lakes. they were — they mean nothing now. Kids are like what’s the Great Lakes. I remember like they had to remember their names and all this stuff because times change but they were such a thing for her to memorialize if you will.
I am quite a fan of TED Talks – for their content and the spiffy way they illustrate a talk should go in a quick 20 minutes or so. I often show students one of my favorites – Chimamanda Adiche’s “The Danger of a Single Story” and show my friend, Art Benjamin’s TED Talks in some of my humanities courses. I was deeply pleased to be asked to give my own TED Talk, “A Female Voice In The Room”, when CalPolyPomona hosted their own TED@CPP event a few years ago. So when I find a new one worth sharing – I share it.
The latest TED Talk to catch my attention was given by film producer Lindsay Doran in 2012. “Saving the World Vs Kissing the Girl” is a fascinating look at how ‘action’ movies end on the announcement of the success to someone the protagonist is in a relationship with, making the culmination of the relationship more important than the ‘saving the world’ part.
For instance, at the end of Rocky he doesn’t say “Yo, Adrian, I won” because he doesn’t win the fight. He only survived it. The movie ends with Rocky and Adrian struggling to get to each other in the crowd. When they reach each other, they clutch each other saying, “I love you” over and over again. THAT’s the win.
Using Dirty Dancing, Karate Kid, and The King’s Speech she explains how positive relationships are more important than positive accomplishments in films. They always end with the healing of a primary relationship. Heroes who don’t win their fight (Rocky in Rocky, George Bailey in It’s A Wonderful Life, Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird) are so inspirational because they win their relationships.
Then she says that women don’t need to learn that relationships are more important than accomplishments in life – men do. So perhaps these action films are women’s way of teaching that lesson that no man is a failure who has friends.
Think about how men feel today. I think men have changed. That’s why they gave more attention to Bradley Cooper’s character. There are seven million men who are sort of stay-at-home dads. That’s a huge thing. That’s a huge difference. There are a lot more men getting used to the fact that their wives will have more money than they do right? Colleges are like 60% women, 40% men which means you’re likely to be in a marriage where your wife will make more money than you, and your generation is likely to be more comfortable with that. I think that’s a good thing. I think it’s important to see that the female characters grow a little bit in every one of these iterations. The last two are more ethnic women. That wouldn’t have happened before right? Barbara is so clearly a Jewish woman and very proud of it and Allie represents herself as a Sicilian American woman. Her father is a Sicilian guy who owns a bunch of limos, you know. He’s a driver for a limo company. This is a very New York Sicilian kind of thing. In both cases, the women in these last two films — the female performers — wrote the songs they had their characters sing, and they both won Academy Awards for writing one of those songs. Which is a huge deal right to me again making it more of a female franchise. Allie accepts more of the stuff that happened to Janet Gaynor. You know, look at me. Check me out. Make sure that you know I can change. I’ll do anything you want to be successful. She accepts the dancers and things she doesn’t need and in this case, people feel like she was more on her own because she didn’t say I’m Mrs. anybody but she took his name which was again following that pattern of respecting him. So I think it’s really important to remember them.
Watch this entire presentation
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.
I enjoyed sharing the names and careers of women like Peg Lynch, Gertrude 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:
Most importantly the first woman who began in Star Trek — Dorothy Catherine Fontana. Now, this is something very important to me for us to recognize. She was told that boys would not watch programs or read books — she wrote short stories — that were written by a girl if they had male protagonists. So she was encouraged by both her publisher and her television agent to go by her initials DC which meant that legions of girls did not know that DC Fontana, their favorite Star Trek writer, was a female right, and that’s been, I think, a problem for years. We continue to do that. When I was a kid in high school you read The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton — Susan Elizabeth Hinton — because no one thought anyone would write a book about gang kids written by a girl. likewise, I think — I’d like to think we grow out of these things but in fact, in my son’s childhood, the major giant best-selling book around the world was written by J. K. Rowling because no one thought boys would read a book by a girl named Joanne. So we really need to get rid of that idea. We also need to recognize the women who came before us who were following that. So Dorothy Fontana…
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, Gertrude 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.
Watch this entire presentation
Women pioneers who created, produced, or shepherded many of America’s most wildly popular, early television programs will be profiled by Dr. Rosanne Welch.
It was great to be able to attend this year’s SD WhoCon in San Diego and present this lecture on “The Difficulties and Delicacies of Writing the First Female Doctor in 50+ years” in which I discuss how successful I think showrunner Christopher Chibnall was in making that transition.
It gave me a chance to talk about the creative work of a showrunner/screenwriter while also reconnecting to some friends we had met at this same convention some 3 years ago – and to talk about one of my favorite subjects – Doctor Who!
Transcript:
I came out of television into academia. So I worked on these shows earlier in my career and learned a lot from the people who ran them right? 90210. Very popular still. Always shocked about that because there’s been lots of teen shows but I think we learned that they took these teenagers seriously and when you take your character seriously, they become friends to the people who watch and I obviously believe that’s true in Doctor Who. We all have our favorite doctors. Mine actually goes back to classic Who. I’m a Peter Davidson person but our companions. I mean they are about bringing friends into our home. That’s how TV is different than film because you have to pay to go see the people in the films but these people come into our homes where we’re having coffee or you know having pizza or whatever. So I really think it’s interesting to look at why we fall in love with these characters and for me, of course, it comes from the writing.
I have a friend who gets up at four in the morning and writes until six or seven and then heads off to work at 7:30. She has to be there at eight at an agency right? So she’s doing an agent thing but she wants to be a writer. So she’s — that’s her time and then the rest of the day she’s busy, busy, busy, and can’t possibly consume writing and couldn’t do it at night because she’s too darn tired from everything she did in the day but that means she goes to bed at like nine o’clock at night. So she can get up at three in the morning and still have had enough sleep to be ready to do that. That’s really disciplined but you have to be right? You have to be. When I was first — the first couple shows I was on there — the new writers always get stuck with the crummy time frames. So somebody always writes over Thanksgiving so there’ll be something to film like the Monday you come back. So there you go. Thanksgiving day. All your friends — your family’s all having dinner at the table and you’re in a different room in the house working your ass off to write something in five days that’ll be ready to produce or over summer. Some shows do. Some shows don’t or Christmas break. Yeah, it’s like well then I get this many days to do it. That’s all I’m gonna do is sit in front of this thing and just — you can’t stop.
It’s always fun to sit down with students and share stories about entering the television industry and how things work at all stages and I had that opportunity the other day.
Daniela Torres, a just-graduated (Congratulations!) student of the Columbia College Semester in LA program asked me to guest on a podcast she had recently begun hosting with another college student she met during her internship (good example of networking in action!).
We could have talked all morning (the benefit of a 3 hour class session) but we held it to about an hour and fifteen minutes or so. Hopefully, along the way I answered some questions you might have about how the business works. So often it amounts to working hard at being a better writer and gathering a group of other talented, hard-working people around you so you can all rise together.
Dr. Rosanne Welch is a television writer with credits that include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, ABCNEWS: Nightline and Touched by an Angel. She also teaches Television Writing and the Art of Film at San Jose State University.
Rosanne discusses what made shows like Beverly Hills 90210 compelling, what to do and not to do when attempting to pitch a show to broadcast or streaming, what most young writers neglect in their writing process, and much more!
The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.
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.
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: What are the new things you know. I’m sure that Margaret felt the same way where people were like, you know, we women aren’t supposed to be this smart. Women aren’t supposed to be able to hold their own in conversation. What’s going on?
Rosanne: …and you know it’s so funny because can you imagine what she would have done in this world of the internet to disperse her ideas in all the many ways? Whether it’s on a website or a blog or whether she would have been you know part of a podcast as you said earlier. The ability to spread your ideas so far and wide would have been such a joy I think.
Tammy: Exactly and she’s one of the people who would also like — it’s not just her ideas that were radical but she was also — she was the first I think to interpret to translate Goethe to English right? So like — it’s not like she’s just coming at it from, you know, here I am this person who’s uneducated. She has the chops to help you know place everything and give everything context.
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