abstract – Page 4 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

04 Who Inspired You? from In Conversation with Dr. Rosanne Welch and Intellect Books [Video]

Transcript:

Host: What women in filmmaking inspired you as a practicing filmmaking screenwriter?

Rosanne: I was the kid who watched a lot of tv because I was an only child and I lived with my immigrant Sicilian grandparents and my mom, but she was at work all day, especially in the summer vacation and that was before parents arranged play dates and drove you to your friend’s houses for so many hours and whatnot. You were just on your own. So you went to the library. You found a bunch of books. So I read up a lot of the early female screenwriters. People like Anita Loos and Adele Rogers St. John and so I knew they existed and I was really interested in their work, but it wasn’t available to see right? Nobody was showing that sort of thing on television. So tv shows and tv writers in that period really struck me. I did a book on The Monkees a few years ago because Treva Silverman was the first female writer of a television show — a comedy writer — who didn’t have a male partner and she eventually went to the Mary Tyler Moore Show and she won a couple of Emmys. So she had quite a good career. So I started to realize there were women doing this writing thing and then I started to look into older films and find names in the past but there was this period in Hollywood where the Silent period and a little bit into the Talkies is very much — I saw another academic years ago at a conference say that early aviation and early film were back-to-back and that women were deeply involved in both and as soon as they became money-making franchises and men created studios and were the bosses, they offered women who had done the job before jobs — new contracts — as junior writers and they’re really big women like Anita Loos whatever — I’ll just go write novels. I don’t need you. Like this is — I don’t — I’m not a junior anything. So they disappeared from the sort of textbooks that started to appear in film studies and it was all these men, right? So you really had to start looking for them and of course, now there are better books out there. Cari Beauchamp has a wonderful book on Francis Marion who is the first woman to win two Oscars for writing and she was the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood.

One of the benefits of attending conferences is that you can meet the editors from the companies that have published some of your books face to face. That happened at the recent SCMS conference where I met Intellect editor James Campbell and he invited me to be a guest on his InstagramLive show.

We chatted about my work with the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting, and then my work with co-editor Rose Ferrell on the Journal of Screenwriting’s special issue on Women in Screenwriting (Volume 11, Number 3) that came out recently and which featured articles about an international set of female screenwriters from Syria, Argentina, China and Canada (to name a few).

We even had time to nerd out on our own favorite classic films across the eras which brought up fun memories of Angels with Dirty Faces, Back to the Future, Bonnie and Clyde, and of course, all things Star Wars from the original 3 to The Mandalorian. It’s always so fun to talk to fellow cinephiles.

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With Intellect Books Editor James Campbell (@IntellectBooks)

Speaking with Dr. Rosanne Welch, Author, teacher, and television screenwriter. Today we cover everything from women in screenwriting to our favorite Jimmy Cagney movies and Friends.

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03 Unreliable Narrators from In Conversation with Dr. Rosanne Welch and Intellect Books [Video]

Transcript:

I was at SCMS too, doing a paper and it was on Unreliable Narrators and a great example of that — this happens to many female writers — but also Nunnally Johnson wrote the adaptation of The Grapes Of Wrath which was filmed by John Ford and my example of — one of my examples is that obituaries are unreliable narrators because eventuallyNunnally Johnson married the actress Doris Bowden who played Rosa Sharon in the film. When she died just about five or six years ago you know in her 90s, her obituary said that she had starred in John Ford’s The Grapes Of Wrath and afterward married that film’s screenwriter. So her husband’s name didn’t appear in her obituary but the director of the film she made 50 years ago — his name appeared in her obituary. So i have to laugh at that because even John Ford — then I found some lovely quotes where he talked about how Nunnally Johnson directed on the page. He said you know this is the camera angle and this is what we need close up and this is all going to track and all those things and Ford said you know people are going to credit me with that and Nunnally Johnson said I don’t care who they credit. I know who did it. So it’s kind of a pity that people don’t recognize these names of the movies they love.

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With Intellect Books Editor James Campbell (@IntellectBooks)

Speaking with Dr. Rosanne Welch, Author, teacher, and television screenwriter. Today we cover everything from women in screenwriting to our favorite Jimmy Cagney movies and Friends.

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02 On The Importance of Screenwriters from In Conversation with Dr. Rosanne Welch and Intellect Books [Video]

Transcript:

So I mostly am interested in that and screenwriting because in Hollywood the issue has always been — we have that “Auteur Theory” which has been fought about and we’ve argued about. We’re getting there but you still read in the newspapers the review of a film and they’ll say it belongs to the director. They’ll name you know so and so such and such film and maybe four paragraphs in you’ll find oh that person also wrote it. So they’re a writer-director. Why didn’t you say that right or five paragraphs in they’ll now mention who wrote the thing and you’re like well that’s what I want to know. That’s where the idea came from. I get it. Directors do cool things and they run the set and whatever but the theme and the characters and the dialogue — which is what we quote all the time — came from the writer and that’s the person that I feel like we should be — I don’t say they have to be higher than the director. Let’s get equal again, right, which again we were in the Silent Era. So that stuff interests me a lot.

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With Intellect Books Editor James Campbell (@IntellectBooks)

Speaking with Dr. Rosanne Welch, Author, teacher, and television screenwriter. Today we cover everything from women in screenwriting to our favorite Jimmy Cagney movies and Friends.

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01 Introduction and Stephens College MFA In TV and Screenwriting from In Conversation with Dr. Rosanne Welch and Intellect Books [Video]

Transcript:

James: I just want to say welcome to everyone who’s joining us today. This is In Conversation. We’ll be chatting for another 45 minutes or so. I’m very pleased to have Dr. Rosanne Welch with me today who is a practicing screenwriter with some serious writing credits to her CV, which we’ll get into as well, but also she runs an MFA program and works as a major researcher involved in Intellect’s Journal of Screenwriting which we can also definitely discuss. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about your research interest? Is it just screenwriting you focus on or is there other aspects of film and history?

Rosanne: Well it’s largely yes film history as well but it kind of always focuses on women in film history because they’ve sort of been left behind on the cutting room floor. We’re getting there we’re seeing more involvement in that. I actually had a great conversation with the documentarian from the BBC who found me because I put a lot of my lectures online and in one of them I discuss research that we’re trying to do into a woman named Jennie Louise Toussaint. She was an African-American screenwriter in the Silent Era but the problem is her work was not preserved right? The films we know disintegrated. There are no paper scripts around. We know she existed because of advertisements in newspapers advertising her films that were playing. So they noticed that I had mentioned her and just said here’s someone we need to find more research on and they’re doing a BBC documentary on famous sisters of famous brothers — on accomplished women who were sisters of famous brothers and her brother was a Harlem Renaissance photographer. So they were like do you know anything more about her so we can do more on her. This is what I have. We’re all building on the knowledge. I mean that’s what a journal is for. We build on the knowledge that other people have found and eventually we get a bigger picture that didn’t exist.

Watch this entire presentation

With Intellect Books Editor James Campbell (@IntellectBooks)

Speaking with Dr. Rosanne Welch, Author, teacher, and television screenwriter. Today we cover everything from women in screenwriting to our favorite Jimmy Cagney movies and Friends.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V6 Issue 2: Changing the way we think about character change in episodic television series by Radha O’Meara

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

Changing the way we think about character change in episodic television series by Radha O’Meara

Regular characters in episodic television series do not change, develop or transform. At least this is the way these characters are commonly understood. In television series, the plot focuses on episodic adventures, and the core cast of characters are seen as fairly rigid actants that facilitate those adventures. These apparently static characters of television series are generally understood in contrast to characters in television serials, who do transform over the course of episodes, seasons and years. This view can be found readily in popular discourse as well as writing manuals and scholarly treatises. But there is more to character change in television series. We can also see how characters in television series do change in different ways, displayed chiefly through character action and plot structure. Three kinds of character change on-screen are identified in this article: experiencing significant life events; expressing intense emotions, and displaying contrasting behaviours. Textual analysis of popular crime dramas and sitcoms demonstrates how characters in television series do change continually.

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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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V6 Issue 2: Off goes the telly: Writer discourse on the Life on Mars franchise finales by Christine Becker

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

Off goes the telly: Writer discourse on the Life on Mars franchise finales by Christine Becker

The British original Life on Mars, the spin-off Ashes to Ashes, and the American remake of Life on Mars offered divergent endings to the same premise, and each series finale divided viewer opinion to varying degrees. This article discusses these three different endings and considers how the writers of each series framed explanations for their creative decisions in discourse surrounding the finales. The article’s analysis illustrates that the series writers strove to justify their narrative resolutions strategically at various points in each series run to account for potential public reaction and to frame their writing decisions as driven primarily by creative motivations, not industrial ones. As such, the article suggests that writers of television finales, particularly those that close off serialized shows, have more opportunity and pressure than ever before to enter into dialogue with emboldened audiences about the production process.

Get your copy and subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting Today!

* 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!

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

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.

Get your copy and subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting Today!

* 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!

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V6 Issue 2: Judging authorship in divided cultural work: Broadcast series formats in mid-century idea law by Josh Heuman

Judging authorship in divided cultural work: Broadcast series formats in mid-century idea law by Josh Heuman

In the mid-twentieth century, US courts and legal commentators confronted increasingly prominent problems of idea protection. While not unique in raising such problems, the maturing radio and television broadcasting industry intensified and complicated them – in the unruliness of its idea markets, and the distinctive relation between idea and expression implied in broadcast series formats. Idea law offers a revealing scene of discourse about mid-century broadcast writing – a scene for making sense and value from often ambiguous and ambivalent writing practices. In particular, problems of idea protection and copyright’s idea–expression dichotomy draw out tensions across divisions of writing labour. This article explores how mid-century idea law struggled to account for the economic and cultural value of ideas, in arguments that compose particular but provocative discourses about broadcast authorship. It also points towards some of the broader interest of those arguments – as a particular case study in the fragmentation of authorship, and as a provocative but neglected antecedent for contemporary concerns like amateur participation, recombinatory creativity and even the ‘creative economy’.

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V6 Issue 2: Judging authorship in divided cultural work: Broadcast series formats in mid-century idea law by Josh Heuman

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V6 Issue 1: Shaping the documentary subject: Writing and visualizing the documentary and media art script by Janet Merewether

Shaping the documentary subject: Writing and visualizing the documentary and media art script by Janet Merewether

This article seeks to examine the varied modes of writing employed by documentary filmmakers and media artists, who may, as an alternative to a conventional ‘script’, devise a framework of intent, or a ‘working hypothesis’ in order to constitute or determine the underlying structure of the temporal work. Fiction and non-fiction screenwriter/directors regularly focus on the subjects of human mortality, yet the process of shaping a script differs for the documentary author in that they may choose, or seek to, film the actual lives of trauma victims or terminally ill subjects. This article will examine how a documentary writer/director undertakes the relatively analytical processes of screenwriting and film structuring, whilst simultaneously experiencing a premonition of loss and uncertainty as to future events. Is it possible that filmmaking and autobiographical writing, as documentarian Ross McElwee (Time Indefinite, 1993) suggests, in their attempts to confront death directly, are ‘just another denial of death-a way of distracting the filmmaker from dealing with death and then getting on with life’? Incorporating case studies of several of my own hybrid documentary films and digital artworks, I intend to examine some of the ethical, temporal, screenwriting and directorial issues that arise when selecting, filming and editing the lives of social actors or documentary participants. This article will discuss the key question: what can and do documentary and media art ‘scripts’ look like? How stylistically diverse can they be, in response to the director’s framework of intent, or the idiosyncratic qualities of the participant selected?

Get your copy and subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting Today!

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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V6 Issue 1: Cargo cults: Key moments in establishing screenwriting in the New Zealand Film Commission by Hester Joyce

Cargo cults: Key moments in establishing screenwriting in the New Zealand Film Commission by Hester Joyce

The New Zealand Film Commission (NZFC), a government-supported film industry funding agency founded in 1978, is directed ‘to encourage and also to participate and assist in the making, promotion, distribution and exhibition of films’. In the late 1980s the NZFC, in an attempt to capture a larger international audience for New Zealand-domiciled films, focused attention on screenwriting and screenplay development practices within the local industry. A rigorous training programme of seminar tours from Hollywood-industry script consultants, including seminars from Robert McKee and Linda Seger, followed. This article surveys key moments in this training process, the uptake of McKee and Seger’s screenplay analysis methods, and discusses the effects of these targeted initiatives on the screenwriting and development practices within the government-supported film industry through the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Get your copy and subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting Today!

* 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!