PRESS: Screenwriters and academics converge on Stephens College for international conference, Columbia Tribune, Columbia, Missouri

While it was a pleasure to host the Screenwriting Research Network’s 2023 conference last week. I love reconnecting with all the folks we see annually in such wonderful places in the world (from Leeds to London to Dunedin to Milan). But the other great thing about this event was the chance to share the Stephens College campus in Columbia, Missouri with everyone. This article in the Columbia Tribune covered the conference’s opening night reception and interviewed some of our international guests so it gives you a lovely feel of who was there and why we gather annually:

PRESS: Screenwriters and academics converge on Stephens College for international conference, Columbia Tribune, Columbia, Missouri

Srn 2023 poster female gazeScreenwriters and academics converge on Stephens College for international conference

Screenwriters and screenwriting academics are gathering at Stephens College through Saturday for the Screenwriting Research Network Conference with the theme Gender and the Female Gaze.

A reception for conference participants was Wednesday night in the penthouse of the college library.

Participants are from at least 15 countries, said Roseanne Welch, executive director the Stephens’ Master of Fine Arts in TV and Screenwriting. Stephens College is a private women’s college in Columbia.

The female gaze refers to seeing life through women’s eyes, Welch said.

“We’re seeing that happen in all kinds of recent films, not just ‘Barbie'” Welch said.

Women’s stories were more complicated in the films of the 1930s and 1940s, she said.

“There were these complete stories with women anti-heroes,” Welch said.

Read the entire article – Screenwriters and academics converge on Stephens College for international conference

PRESS: International Screenwriting Conference coming to COMO, COMO Magazine, Columbia, Missouri

Srn 2023 poster female gaze

International Screenwriting Conference coming to COMO

September 20-23 event will highlight female influence on film, television industries 

Some of the biggest behind-the-scenes stars of television and motion pictures — the screenwriters — will converge on the Stephens College campus in Columbia from September 20-23 for the 15th Annual Screenwriting Research Network Conference. 

Focused on the theme “Gender and the Female Gaze,” the three-day conference will bring an international collection of film professors and practitioners from Finland, France, New Zealand, Brazil, Italy, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other countries to Columbia. Attendees will get the chance to learn from experienced screenwriters, attend exhibitions, and network with other screenwriters. 

Keynote speakers include Columbia native Phil Lazebnik, who has written screenplays for films including Pocahontas and Mulan, and Meg LeFauve, who was nominated for a Best Screenplay Oscar for the Pixar blockbuster Inside Out. Along with the keynote speech, LaFauve will appear for a Q&A after a public screening of Inside Out at Ragtag Theatre on Saturday, September 23. 

Read the entire article – International Screenwriting Conference coming to COMO

Dr. Rosanne Welch Interview – She Served Too, KOPN FM, Columbia, Missouri [Audio]

Dr. Rosanne Welch Interview - She Served Too, KPON FM, Columbia, MIssouri [Audio]While I was on the Stephens College campus a couple of weeks ago for the Screenwriting Research Network conference I had the pleasure of appearing on the She Served, Too radio show hosted by Elizabeth Herrera.

A military veteran, Herrera also runs the Stephens College Mission Promise Kept program. Together we spoke about the many military women whose stories have yet to be told on the big (or small) screen including the Mercury 13. Herrera was kind enough to let me talk about the Screenwriting Research Network conference we were holding on the Stephens campus that week and, of course, about the many military women who have dome through our Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting and how telling our stories helps us heal – whether we turn them into scripts or not it’s the act of talking and being heard that heals.

She Served Too
Every 3rd Tue at 5:00 PM With Elizabeth Herrera

Host Elizabeth Herrera has served in the United States Air Force, non-profits, and managing crisis care centers for women. On her show She Served Too, she discusses current issues from her unique perspective.

SRN 2023 Conference, Columbia, Missouri USA – Call for Papers – Proposals Due January 6, 2022

SRN 2023 Conference, Columbia, Missouri USA - Call for Papers - Proposals Due January 6, 2022

CALL FOR PAPERS

SRN 2023: GENDER AND THE FEMALE GAZE

September 20-23, 2023

The SRN (Screenwriting Research Network) is comprised of scholars, writers, and practice-based researchers. Started in 2006, the network currently has 700 members from 50+ countries. The aim of the annual International Conference is to continue, and expand, discussions around the screenplay and to strengthen a rapidly emerging, and global, research network. For more information, please visit our website: http://screenwritingresearch.com

The 15th annual conference is organized by the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting and the School of Integrative Studies at Stephens College. The arts and humanities thrive in Columbia, Missouri, as dozens of on- and off-campus performances occur year-round at Stephens, making the College one of Columbia’s premier centers for the performing arts.

Call for Papers:

Coming from a host college that focuses on female participation in the arts, the conference theme “Gender and the Female Gaze” wants to discuss the contributions of female screenwriters and the plethora of female-focused stories told on screen from the Silent Era through the modern-day. We encourage and embrace research that is around women of different ethnicities, religious and cultural backgrounds, and particularly hope to engage topics which relate to minority cultures within minority (and majority) communities.

We are thus particularly interested in abstracts for presentations on (but not limited to) the following topics:

  • Female screenwriters in silent cinema
  • The influence of female writer (-directors) in contemporary culture
  • Case studies on individual female screenwriter’s work
  • Patterns in the women-centered stories that have been brought to the screen
  • Historiography of manuals and screenwriting pedagogy where this reflects the work of female screenwriters
  • Censorship of women’s stories and women’s writings
  • Female screenwriters within writing partnerships
  • The work of female screenwriters within script production (e.g. as showrunners, script editors or consultants)
  • The question of a female voice within screenwriting
  • The cultural influence of female characters created by female screenwriters
  • The way life experiences led to the story told
  • The challenges to their projects screenwriters often meet which speak to political, religious, gender or other barriers which may not apply to their male counterparts.
  • The real-world impact of the script on its audiences and society.
  • Examples of the ways women stepped out of traditional roles to work for change and an improved future for themselves and their communities through screenwriting.
  • How female screen stories tackled issues of culture, religion, identity, gender and race
  • How women have negotiated screen industry norms and practices, biases and social hurdles in order to tell their screen stories.
  • Ways in which the professional woman’s everyday life (e.g. romance, marriage, parenthood status or citizenship) has been challenged or made more challenging because of her professional work, and vice versa.
  • Issues caused by unreliable narrators of history
  • Studies of cultural appropriation in screenwriting; cultural imperialism; cultural disconnect and/or discord which comes about through discourses of power
  • Research into the ways in which money/ finance precludes certain stories from being told, even by successful screenwriters

Proposals for presentations beyond the theme of the conference are also welcome. The aim of the SRN being to foster research that rethinks the screenplay in relation to its histories, theories, values, and creative practices, any proposal underpinned by such research will be considered. We expect papers on the broad topics of pedagogy, theory, and practice – but even those may reflect the conference theme via the choices of writers chosen for inclusion in the study.

Essential Information:

Deadline for abstracts: January 6, 2023
Acceptances: February 15th, 2023
Registration by: June 30, 2023

Submissions via email and contact:

Rosanne Welch
rwelch@stephens.edu

Submission of abstracts/proposals

  • Proposals/Abstracts can be sent as either a Word or PDF document: please indicate
  • “yourname_PROPOSALTYPE” (i.e. paper or panel) clearly in the file title and in the subject heading of your submission.
  • All presentations will be delivered in person, in English, and be underpinned by original research work being conducted by the presenter. Multiple presenters (max. 2) for co-written papers are allowed.

1.) Proposals for traditional 20-minute papers, followed by Q&A. They should include:

  • Title
  • Author’s name
  • Affiliation (university, independent, practitioner, etc.)
  • Contact details
  • Abstract (max. 300 words)
  • 4-6 keywords
  • short bio (max 150 words), detailing your research activity, publications and/or screenwriting practice – and if the piece contributes to the conference theme please note.

2.) Proposals for Pre-constituted panels

Proposals for pre-constituted panels can be submitted by any of the presenters or the Chair of the panel and should include:

  • title of the panel
  • brief outline (100 words maximum) of the overall topic
  • abstracts of all the presentations – no more than 3 papers – following abstract guidelines listed above.

Abstracts should follow the guidelines for individual papers as above and include short bios and contact details of both the speakers and the panel Chair. Wherever possible, the Chair should NOT be one of the presenters. If a proposal for a pre-constituted panel does not include a Chair, the Conference Committee will appoint one. All proposals should indicate “Panel Proposal SRN 2022 in the file title and in the subject heading of the submission email.

Website and registration

The Website for the conference will include a wealth of useful information (e.g., registration, travel arrangements, accommodation options), as well as all the updates and the program leading up to the Conference. It will go live in early December.

The conference fee is expected to be in the region of $120 USD.

17 We Stand On The Shoulders…from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

Nearly two years ago I had the pleasure of being invited to join a panel at the then upcoming SCMS (Society of Cinema and Media Studies) conference set for Seattle.  As you know that was canceled due to Covid with the hopes of reconvening in Colorado in 2021.  That became a virtual conference but our group decided to reapply our panel and we four were able to ‘meet’ on Zoom on Sunday and present:  Writing Between the Lines: Feminist Strategies for Historical Absences, Cliché, and the Unreliable Narrator. 

Here you can watch a clip from my part of the presentation,

“When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues in Oral Histories”

17 We Stand On The Shoulders…from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

Transcript:

I think that we stand on the shoulders of the people who came before us and it’s our job to make sure they are not forgotten. So, we have to be the people who do our own research and don’t trust all of those narrators that we study when we go through our research and – I do love and archive so I don’t want people to think I don’t – but there you go. That’s me. That’s my book. That’s what I want to talk about and I hope that you remember those names and if you haven’t heard of them before and you feel like looking them up and learning more about them, because women did run Hollywood for a long time.

 

 


Watch this entire presentation

16 Joan Didion & John Gregory Dunne from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

Nearly two years ago I had the pleasure of being invited to join a panel at the then upcoming SCMS (Society of Cinema and Media Studies) conference set for Seattle.  As you know that was canceled due to Covid with the hopes of reconvening in Colorado in 2021.  That became a virtual conference but our group decided to reapply our panel and we four were able to ‘meet’ on Zoom on Sunday and present:  Writing Between the Lines: Feminist Strategies for Historical Absences, Cliché, and the Unreliable Narrator. 

Here you can watch a clip from my part of the presentation,

“When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues in Oral Histories”

16 Joan Didion & John Gregory Dunne from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

Transcript:

Again, as I said, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne who wrote all these wonderful things together. John Gregory Dunne actually would have Joan go to meetings first because the men you work with in Hollywood, if you went to a meeting together would look at John while they talked. So, if they sent Joan alone and pretended John was sick one day the men got used to looking at her and then when they came together they looked at both of them. so, they were pretty brilliant about making sure she didn’t get forgotten in the writing process like that.

 

 


Watch this entire presentation

15 Nice Guys and Allies from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

Nearly two years ago I had the pleasure of being invited to join a panel at the then upcoming SCMS (Society of Cinema and Media Studies) conference set for Seattle.  As you know that was canceled due to Covid with the hopes of reconvening in Colorado in 2021.  That became a virtual conference but our group decided to reapply our panel and we four were able to ‘meet’ on Zoom on Sunday and present:  Writing Between the Lines: Feminist Strategies for Historical Absences, Cliché, and the Unreliable Narrator. 

Here you can watch a clip from my part of the presentation,

“When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues in Oral Histories”

15 Nice Guys and Allies  from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

Transcript:

I very briefly want to be fair to all the lovely nice men in the world because they are –they do exist and they do credit the women in their lives. These husbands all – from Garson Kanin to Albert Hackett to John Gregory Dunn all credited their wives with equal or more work on all the projects they did together and you’ll recognize of course Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon having done these films which won them all Academy Award nominations and Garson always talks about how much of a writer Ruth was even though we as a culture remember her as an actress but he does complain about the fact that they call it George Cukor’s “Adam’s Rib” when in fact much of the direction was written into the script by Garson and Ruth. Having been theater people they understood exactly where they wanted the camera to go, So they get erased by Cukor. Albert and Francis, of course, are brilliant. They wrote for almost 50 years in Hollywood but when you look at the posters of their work it’s the director Frank Capra who essentially erases them from the picture. Their names are down here very tiny and here’s the crazy thing about that. They also in their career are going to write “The Diary of Anne Frank” for which they’re going to get the Pulitzer Prize. Capra don’t have no Pulitzer Prize but it’s called Frank Capra’s “It’s A Wonderful Life” right? No thank you. They also wrote Nick and Nora Charles the real “The Thin Man” which is Nick and Nora Charles. I’m talking fast because I want to use up all my time. I’m sorry and that’s normally put off on Dashiell Hammett who wrote the novel but if you look at the movie the couple in the movie is actually Francis and Albert.

 

 


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Screenwriting Research Network Conversation #2 – Memories of Our Previous International Conferences [Video]

In my role as the Secretary for the Executive Council of the SRN (Screenwriting Research Network) I was happy to be asked to act as host for the second SRN Conversation – a chance to talk with folks who have planned a couple of our earlier conferences around the world.

I spoke with organizers JJ Murphy of the Madison, Wisconsin 2013 conference and Kathryn Millard and Alex Munt of the Sydney 2012. The SRN Conversations allow us to create an archive of the history of the group and inform new members about all the opportunities gained from attending our conferences.

All their info will help me in planning SRN 2023 on my home campus at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri.

Screenwriting Research Network Conversation #2 – Memories of Our Previous International Conferences [Video]

14 Obituaries Are Unreliable Narrators from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

Nearly two years ago I had the pleasure of being invited to join a panel at the then upcoming SCMS (Society of Cinema and Media Studies) conference set for Seattle.  As you know that was canceled due to Covid with the hopes of reconvening in Colorado in 2021.  That became a virtual conference but our group decided to reapply our panel and we four were able to ‘meet’ on Zoom on Sunday and present:  Writing Between the Lines: Feminist Strategies for Historical Absences, Cliché, and the Unreliable Narrator. 

Here you can watch a clip from my part of the presentation,

“When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues in Oral Histories”

14 Obituaries Are Unreliable Narrators from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

Transcript:

To be fair, it does happen to male screenwriters sometimes. Nunally Johnson is the one who adapted ‘The Grapes of Wrath” and John Ford, who directed actually wrote in a book that he said, “You know people are credit this particular shot with my genius but you wrote it down in the scripts.” Right? And Nunally was like, ‘I don’t know who’s going get the attribution but I know I wrote it and that’s all that matters.” So, he didn’t particularly care but his name disappears so badly that obituary writers are terribly unreliable narrators. When Nunally Johnson’s wife died – she was the actress Dorris Bowden who played Rose O’Sharon in The Grapes of Wrath – they called it John Ford’s Grapes of Wrath and they said that she left acting after she married that film’s screenwriter. They took his name out of his wife’s obituary. Who’s more important in her death? Her husband or the guy who directed a movie she did fifty years ago? Clearly think about that and she herself was very proud of how John Steinbeck had talked about Nunally Johnson’s writing because he was so brilliant. So to erase him out of her obituary is ridiculous.

 

 


Watch this entire presentation

13 Women Writers To Remember from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

Nearly two years ago I had the pleasure of being invited to join a panel at the then upcoming SCMS (Society of Cinema and Media Studies) conference set for Seattle.  As you know that was canceled due to Covid with the hopes of reconvening in Colorado in 2021.  That became a virtual conference but our group decided to reapply our panel and we four were able to ‘meet’ on Zoom on Sunday and present:  Writing Between the Lines: Feminist Strategies for Historical Absences, Cliché, and the Unreliable Narrator. 

Here you can watch a clip from my part of the presentation,

“When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues in Oral Histories”

13 Women Writers To Remember from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

Transcript:

Selma Diamond. Brilliant writer back in the day. We know her more from being an actress on “Night Court” and being on many of the talk shows and Lucille Kallan found a way to stay in the history books because she became a novelist after she stopped writing television and I think she’s pretty brilliant. You can see this lovely picture of her. So pictures from back in the day do include the women but that’s not the one Vanity Fair chose to publish. She was memorialized a little bit in Neil Simon’s play although he took the two women and turned them into one female character. There are seven boys in this play and one girl. They couldn’t do two girls and six boys. Just thinking about how they could have arranged that right? They thought they were all the same. Even though almost any female tv writer that you meet will tell you that it was the existence of Sally Rogers that turned them into a tv writer and Sally Rogers is patterned after Selma and Lucille right because “The Dick Van Dyke Show” was the Sid Caesar Show. So the importance of those women disappears in history.

 

 


Watch this entire presentation