books – Page 7 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

05 The Missing Women Part 2 From 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, 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.

RMW Rosanne Signature for Web

Transcript:

However, those two ladies were so important to the creation of Rose Marie — this character on the beloved Dick Van Dyke Show. This is one of the most important characters really in television history and many many female tv writers today will tell you that they knew this job was possible because they saw her do it on the fictional Dick Van Dyke Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show was a fictionalization of the staff writing for Sid Caesar right? Carl Reiner’s character is meant to be a personification of that. So these are the typical gentlemen who worked for him and she is a representation of Lucille and Selma Diamond sort of wrapped together. A woman who never got married right? Couldn’t find a guy. This is a very stereotypical vision of a career gal as they would say back in the day but she inspired many many women all the way up through Tina Fey and I think it’s always important to think about the power of television. One of my favorite stories has nothing to do with tv writers but to do with a Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who says she learned that she could be a lawyer someday by watching Perry Mason as a child. She learned that lawyers existed and that it was a job that required college and so she did well in school so that she could move forward and look she’s on the Supreme Court today. So television has a lot of power and the visuals women see on television are very very important to the ideas. You have to see it so that you can be it right? So Rose Marie stands for a lot of things — a representation of the women who truly did come before her and an inspiration to the women who came after.

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.

Get your copy today!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

05 The Missing Women From 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.

RMW Rosanne Signature for Web

Transcript:

…and here’s the problem. See all these men that we’re seeing in the pictures. All these men are who are remembered for writing for Sid Caesar. You’ve got Carl Reiner. You’ve got Woody Allen. You’ve got Larry Gelbart, who’s going to go on to do M*A*SH for us. These men are icons of comedy. When they came together to be recognized both Lucille and Selma had passed away. So when it was time to take this photograph, this is what people will remember about the writers of these classic iconic early comedies. They will not remember that women were on board for those things. The other sad thing to realize is this is still the visual of what a writing staff looks like on a late-night comedy show. When Stephen Colbert’s show won the Emmy a few years ago, there’s one female writer among the 13 male writers on that show. It is an issue that is still with us today in television. So we have to think about it, but sadly because this is such a great photograph, people will forget way down here it says not pictured the two ladies who didn’t happen to be able to be there that day.

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.

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.

Get your copy today!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

04 Selma Diamond From 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.

RMW Rosanne Signature for Web

Transcript:

Next, we want to see Selma Diamond. Selma Diamond was an early writer on Your Show of Shows. Look at these names that she is with — Mel Tolkin, Larry Gelbart, Mel Brooks, and Selma Diamond right? She was such a fascinating woman but many people only know her from her part on Night Court which was a show in the late 80s. She stepped into that character. She actually passed away in the course of the show and was replaced by Marsha Warfield. So most people only know her from her acting career but in fact, she was a writer many years earlier. She had some comedy albums that were very very well respected and I happen to know right now her great-nephew is working on a documentary to tell the story of her career because sadly what happens to her and this woman, Lucy Kallen — Lucille Kallen, excuse me. She was also a writer on these early Sid Caesar shows right? So you can see her in this picture. She’s right there doing the work with everybody. She’s part of it everywhere you go except when we start to think about memorializing the people who worked on these shows. Now you have to think about how brilliant Lucille Kallen was. When tv went away from her right when it started to be something that they weren’t really giving her jobs in she began to write murder mysteries. The Tanglewood Murder. That whole CB Greenfield line is her. So she was already in the world of let’s have a continuing series. If I can’t do it on tv, I’ll do it in book form. So this is a woman who wrote all her career and I also happen to love this quote by her — a man’s home is his castle and his wife is the janitor. This is the kind of wit. She’s very much a Dorothy Parker type of person.

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.

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.

Get your copy today!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

03 Gertrude Berg From 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.

RMW Rosanne Signature for Web

Transcript:

Gertrude Berg is a woman we need to know about. We think about early television. We think about diversity. In this case, it was considered quite diverse that there would be a Jewish family on television and so she wrote The Goldbergs, one of the earliest, again, sitcoms and these are the pile of scripts behind her because this ran as well on radio and then moved into television where she portrayed herself in the show right? So that’s a beautiful other thing. Long before they were Seinfeld in any of those other comics, she became the star of the show she also wrote. This impresses me because the double work involved in that is almost hard to explain and what’s really amazing about Molly Goldberg is in the 1940s she was voted the second most admired woman in America, right after the first lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Imagine that was showing us the early power of television and how those stories can move into our lives and really be part of something. So I found that absolutely fascinating.

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.

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.

Get your copy today!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

02 Peg Lynch 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.

Transcript:

My teaching philosophy is that Words matter, Writers matter,. and Women Writers matter and they are far too often left out of the history books that we use to teach our incoming students. My school is Stephens College as Jen has so nicely told you and we teach a program in TV and Screenwriting — a master’s program — and I’m excited to say that we are all about representation on television and we’re going to see a little example of that in my presentation today. So let’s get to it. One of the first women — we credit her with inventing the sitcom which is a money maker for television for all these many, many years. Peg Lynch. She began in radio, as many of these women did, and she was writing short sketches — 10 and 15 minute sketches — called the Ethel and Albert Comedies and this is the first time she took sort of domestic life and made jokes out of it and put that on the media right? In this case, radio shows and eventually they became television shows and to her credit, she has 11,000 scripts. So think about that as if she was writing for a variety show if you will. It went on for many years. There were many many episodes. So she’s the first person who really got into the husband and wife having a chat and let’s make some jokes about how tough real-life can be. Often with the wife being a little smarter than the husband right? Being a step ahead of him but society allowed him to move forward and of course, that’s a pattern we’re gonna see repeated naturally in I Love Lucy.

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.

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.

Get your copy today!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

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.

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.

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.

Get your copy today!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

On Arthur Laurents and The Way We Were

Going to YouTube to find a fun clip to add to someone’s FB post generally leads down the rabbit hole (thank you Lewis Carroll for inventing Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and therefore inventing the phrase “down the rabbit hole”).

Last week it led me to clips from The Way We Were, written by Arthur Laurents and starring Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford.

I had re-read Laurents’ autobiography — Original Story — over the summer since I love reading about how writers came up with their best work (and his book had a whole chapter on it complete with explanations for a bad cut by the director and studio execs that destroyed a key reason the couple splits up – spoiler alert).

Iconic is overused but it fits here. That love story with an unexpected but completely organic ending is a classic for a reason – all the parts added up to the perfect whole. I wanted to highlight this scene because of the power it gives the female character and the fear that power can have on the equally powerful male character. I can’t think of too many scenes that can do that – enhanced by the power both of these superstars brought to their performances.

Resources

Professors Dr. Rosanne Welch and Dr. Peg Lamphier spotlight Gloria Steinem in women-centered book series – PolyPost

What’s normal in my world is working on books with my friend and colleague, Dr. Peg Lamphier, about brilliant women in U.S. history. What’s not normal is having a brilliant young journalism student, Elizabeth Casillas, approach us to write an article about our work.

This article in the PolyPost is the outcome of both of those events.

It covers the latest book in the series Peg and I are editing: Women Making History where we were asked to create 8 women’s biographies to include in the series – with the best part being we then chose the 8 writers for the job. That meant giving a few of them their first book project ever. That is when this job become the most fun. This article covers the latest book on the life of Gloria Steinem, written by William Pruden (the only male author in the whole series – why? Because women’s history IS U.S. History so men can – and should – highlight it, too).

Peg Lamphier and Rosanne Welch, lecturers in the Interdisciplinary General Education Department, teamed up to co-edit “Gloria Steinem: A Life in American History,” the second installment of their book series focused on women’s contribution to American history and culture released Aug. 2.

The book, written by William Prudent and published by ABC-CLIO, covers the life of feminist journalist Gloria Steinem. After previously working with ABC-CLIO on “Women in American History,” an encyclopedia dedicated to detailing women’s contributions in American history and culture, Lamphier and Welch were sought out by the publishing firm to co-edit a larger book series.

Other subjects in the book series include Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Hillary Clinton, Helen Keller, Sally Ride, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ida B. Wells and Delores Huerta.

“If we’re going to have a series on women, what I want is books on women that don’t have 13 other books about them,” said Lamphier on the decision to incorporate Steinem into the series. “We keep trotting out the same women; it’s like we can only know 10 women at a time in America, so we got some people like Wilma Mankiller and Gloria Steinem.” A world-renowned feminist, Steinem’s life experiences were crucial to the feminist movement which compelled the lecturers to include her story in the series.

Read the entire article

Dr. Rosanne Welch’s Chapter in Doctor Who – New Dawn: Essays on the Jodie Whittaker Era from Manchester University Press Now Available

I’m happy to announce the publication of Doctor Who New Dawn: Essays on the Jodie Whittaker Era for which I was invited to write a chapter.

My focus was on the delicate work showrunner/writer Chris Chibnall had to do in realizing this new Doctor so it’s called “She is Wise and Unafraid” Writing the First Female Doctor and a Diverse Universe for her to Protect.

I touch on the myriad decisions a showrunner makes in creating a character from costuming to sidekicks (called companions in the Whoniverse) to dialogue. I was excited to have been invited to contribute to this collection and proud to showcase the way screenwriters work.

I know academic books can be expensive but you can always ask your local or college library to order a copy for you to read!

Doctor Who – new dawn explores the latest cultural moment in this long-running BBC TV series: the casting of a female lead. Analysing showrunner Chris Chibnall and Jodie Whittaker’s era means considering contemporary Doctor Who as an inclusive, regendered brand. Featuring original interview material with cast members, this edited collection also includes an in-depth discussion with Segun Akinola, composer of the iconic theme tune’s current version. The book critically address the series’ representations of diversity, as well as fan responses to the thirteenth Doctor via the likes of memes, cosplay and even translation into Spanish as a grammatically gendered language. In addition, concluding essays look at how this moment of Who has been merchandised, especially via the ‘experience economy’, and how official/unofficial reactions to UK lockdown helped the show to further re-emphasise its public-service potential.

P.S. You can check out the trailer for Jodie’s upcoming 3rd season here:

The Civil War On Film – Review

Because the Civil War ended less than 30 years before the first motion pictures, it became a favorite subject for the new medium and has remained so ever since. Unfortunately, many of these Civil War films are historically inaccurate. According to Lamphier (humanities, California State Polytechnic Univ.) and Welch (screenwriting, Stephens College), films of the Civil War “almost universally erase the past” in order to forget that it was so “painful, destructive, and unpleasant” (p. ix). To illustrate the varying approaches to Civil War history and memory, the authors selected ten significant films—ranging chronologically and thematically from Gone with the Wind (1939) to Free State of Jones (2016)—devoting a chapter to each. All the chapters present the historical background and cultural context for the film, contexts that include, among other things, combat, gender, immigration, leadership, pacifism, race, and slavery. Other works—e.g., Bruce Chadwick’s The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Film (CH, Mar’02, 39-3875) and The American Civil War on Film and TV: Blue and Gray in Black and White and Color, ed. by Douglas Brode, Shea Brode, and Cynthia Miller (CH, May’18, 55-3151)—cover more films and themes; the present volume will be especially useful as a tool for teaching cinematic representations of the past. — J. I. Deutsch, George Washington University

Movies profiled in this book: