education – Page 8 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

16 More On Treva Silverman 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.

Transcript:

She moved on from that show, as I said, to win two Emmys for writing this beloved show — The Mary Tyler Moore Show. When James Brooks put that show together and James again a very respectable Executive Producer in television. Love all of what he’s done. He was a very progressive thinking man and he knew that if the show was about a single woman they ought to have a female on staff and so he asked Treva if she would join the show. The Emmys she won twofold. She won this Emmy for writing an episode about Lou Grant. she had single female friends who thought Ed Asner was appealing but his character on the show, Lou, was married and they felt guilty for liking a man who had a wife because it meant that they might be you know stealing a man from another woman. So she came up with the idea that Lou’s wife and he should get a divorce but the progressive new thought was not because Lou did anything bad. He’s not a gambler. He’s not cheating on her. It was that Edie Grant had decided that she wasn’t fulfilled — that she hadn’t done in her life what she wanted to do. She had only ever served him and it was her turn before she got too old and that was such a wildly innovative idea and it was so poignant and so sad because the audience loved him but we liked her as well and we understood that this was such a problem and she had to take this chance. So it was a brilliant episode. It won her an Emmy.

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!

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41 Theme and Character…from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

Watch the entire presentation – Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 here

Transcript:

Host: Like what do you think are like the principles of good television writing that you try to teach your students? Like what’s the things you want them to get from your classes.

Rosanne: Well I want them to think that whatever they’re writing is a message. So I think they should start with a theme. What is the message you want to put out in the world and what’s a story that’s like the metaphor or that’s the parable that will tell that idea? Plant that idea in people’s minds? I think you always — you have your own life philosophy. I don’t care how old you are. You don’t have to be old or young to have it right? You have some ideas and those make everything stronger. The stuff you really like is because you really agreed with what was being said about how to live or how to treat other people right and so you really have to think about those things and that’s going to make whatever you do richer. So I like to start from a place of theme and of course then tv is all about characters because I need someone I’m going to want to come and meet over and over again either 20 hours in a row or 20 weeks in a row however I choose to do that. So I need to find someone that I can connect with and I think that’s something that in the movies you know you could do a lot of explosions, fun stuff, tent poll movies and all that. Although I suppose my son would say Transformers were characters he really cared to watch right but they’re a little different than you know the kind of people you’d see let’s say on Grey’s Anatomy speaking of Shonda Rhimes.

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.

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15 Treva Silverman 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.

Transcript:

Moving into the 1960s one of my favorite people is Treva Silverman. She is one of the first female writers to win an Emmy. In fact, she won two in the same year for writing without a male partner. All the previous women who had won had had a male partner. Treva was a solo writer. She originally wrote for The Monkees. One show that I have written an entire book about that I’m very interested in and I will credit her with the fact that in 58 episodes of a show about rock and roll singers, every girl they met had a job and a career. They did not ever date bimbos. They dated girls who were journalists and who were worked at record stores or there was one who was a princess and a princess is a job right? So I think Treva was the feminist voice on that show.

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!

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40 Artist-Scholars from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

Watch the entire presentation – Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 here

Transcript:

Rosanne: Lots of people in town actually teach at some of the various schools because of course we’re in LA so there’s tons of schools that have film programs and screenwriting programs and all that stuff. So you get a lot of that blend. Now I really love the fact that in Europe they’re more structured around what I would call a scholar-artist because they get grants to make their films. So a lot of filmmakers are teachers at major universities and then they make movies and they get the money from the government to make the movies. We don’t quite do that here, but we’re seeing a little more of that. Certainly on the film festival circuit and stuff like that or you know for instance Kevin Wilmot, who got the oscar for co-writing Black Klansmen with Spike Lee, he’s a full-time professor at Kansas University. That’s what he does, He doesn’t want to live in LA or New York. He wants to write movies and he met Spike Lee at a film festival and they each had a movie up at the film festival early on in both their careers and they decided they liked each other. Speaking of networking, they started to collaborate and you know two years ago he won an Oscar and he went back — he flew back to Kansas the next day and put his Oscar on the lectern in front of his classroom and started talking.

Host: That’s so funny.

Rosanne: Yes to both worlds. That’s my idea of the best of both worlds.

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.

The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.

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14 Joan Harrison 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.

Transcript:

Joan Harrison is a woman few people know about today because this man, Alfred Hitchcock, overshadowed all the writers of all his movies. We call them Hitchcock films but I find that very very disingenuous because in fact they were written by other people. Often this woman, Joan Harrison. She wrote, in fact, the only movie that Hitchcock ever won an Oscar for — Rebecca. She’s the woman who found the story, adapted it, wrote the script was on the set for all the production of it. She was originally his secretary. She began as the secretary and there were many people who never forgave that title however she wrote many other films. She began to produce films and we’re talking about early in the 40s, 50s. She’s going to move into the 1960s as the producer of the Alfred Hitchcock’s Presents program. So she’ll do TV production, executive producing, long before that ever existed for most people and very recently a friend of mine — I met her online doing other work — Christina Lane –she’s a professor out of the College of Florida. She wrote Phantom Lady. Of course, that’s the name of a film but also it’s the story of Joan Harrison’s life. So it’s the first full biography of a female producer of that time period that takes her work very seriously but notice how the subtitle still has to be “The forgotten woman behind Hitchcock.” That’s the name that we recognize. That’s the name people relate to. So her career has always been overshadowed by the fact that she worked for Hitchcock. There’s another book about writing with Hitchcock by I believe his name is Michael Shane, I’d have to double-check but he wrote several Hitchcock films and he wrote a book about writing with Hitchcock. About what it was like to work with him and as much as we call them Hitchcock films and I’m very against that auteur theory because I think the writer is the person who brings you your theme — that’s what they’re considered. So we have to remember the people behind the directing. They were the writers and this is a beautiful picture of her as a producer looking at a piece of edited film and making some choices. So she did the full gamut of work in these early days of television.

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!

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39 More On Teaching? from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

Watch the entire presentation – Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 here

Transcript:

…but I miss part of it right and you do miss trying to explain to people how it should be done because you can’t really do that on a tv show — maybe if you’re the showrunner but even then you’re hiring people that already know how to do it and they don’t want you to tell them how. They may listen to you and like roll their eyes because they have to because you’re paying the money but that’s not the same world right and I also think there wasn’t a lot of focus on women in this business for a long time and so I thought that was something that I could bring to a classroom was to really bring forward more young women who would be ready to tackle this business and really have a true understanding of it. So they’d know what to expect and sort of how to work around some of the bullshit and you know be good enough not to fall into any traps. So I just thought it would be you know — and I live in LA and TV comes and goes. You don’t always know when the next show will sell or when you get staffed on something. So good back — you know it’s always a good background if — I’ll just do this for a while and move and you know change around so.

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.

The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.

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27 Conclusion from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

So I think she’s a pretty cool lady all around. I think it’s cool to realize how much of an effect this movie has had on film history. If you are a die-hard fan and you watch it for Christmas, even though it’s not a Christmas movie, you’ll notice the big moment at the end is that all through the movie she’s defined herself as Holly Gennaro which is her maiden name because they’re separated but in the end when they make up and she runs to the police and they say something about our you so and so she says Holly Maclean. She takes his name back. So she’s doing exactly a homage to that moment. In the same way, some 20 years later — this is 1988 — in Notting Hill, we finally have a guy who doesn’t mind when they call him Mr Scott which is Anna Scott’s name right? That’s not his last name but he’s now fine with a wife who is five million times more famous than he will ever be. So our society had come to this point one assumes in 1999 and Dorothy yourself has been homaged and written about. Fitzgerald who knew her personally wrote about her in The Last Tycoon. She’s one of the characters in there. She’s in this Broadway play as a character and if you like the Gilmore Girls at all Amy Sherman Palladino’s production company is called “Dorothy Parker Drank Here.” That’s how popular she maintains in the modern world. I got a bunch of clips you can see at another time because we don’t have time. I always like to offer up a bibliography because you should know there’s a lot of stuff you could study and that’s it. That’s everything I can say in a nutshell about A Star is Born.

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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.

Find out why in this lecture!

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13 Even More On D. C. Fontana 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.

Transcript:

There’s a great story. Nichelle Nichols was going to quit because, if you think about it, stereotypically, she was the secretary. She took calls for the captain on Star Trek. So she kind of thought this is a waste of my time. She’d been a big band singer. She had more to do with her life and in fact, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King met her at some fundraiser and said “Oh no-no. You are deeply important because you are showing young children that we belong in the future.” So she stayed on the show and looked then she did the movies and of course, Nichelle is as iconic as any of the early females in television. This is all the work of Dorothy Fontana and I think we need to recognize her name and be really interested in all her other work. She later went on to do Babylon 5 of course another science fiction show. She worked on the video game versions of Star Trek. So she stayed in that realm and was sort of the cover who knew all the history and how all the characters should be portrayed long after Gene Roddenberry passed away.

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

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38 Why Teaching? from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

Watch the entire presentation – Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 here

Transcript:

Host: I guess I’ll ask, why why did you also want to teach?

Rosanne: I actually — my first job was as a high school teacher because I come from Ohio — a college in Ohio and there was no way you were going to convince your parents or anybody that like it was legitimate to think you’d get a job in television. So I had to get a real like get a degree in something real. So it was in high school and I taught literature and things like that for a couple years until I could make the move to California and I could make it because you could teach in Ohio. You could teach here. So I could get a long-distance job as a teacher which gave me a financial way to make a move like that. So I actually liked it. I missed it in a weird way. I mean certainly doesn’t pay as much as TV but there’s a lot of things you do as a teacher — there are skills you have and a lot of that translates into writing in that and pitching because pitching is like I’m giving a lecture and explaining an idea to you to make you love it so much you’ll pay me to do it. So that’s a skill. That little performance thing comes from a teaching background and I also think that television particularly because it’s — well was free and even if your parents are paying for it essentially is free — as opposed to movies you have to fork over 20 bucks to go see them. So television is like this giant podium that a teacher would stand at and lecture and a TV show and a movie — any piece of writing that’s good that sticks to you — has a message — is there with a theme about how you want other people to live their lives. A lesson that you wish other people would learn. So really writing is like being a teacher on steroids.

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.

The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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26 Dorothy Parker and Social Justice from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

I think it’s important to remember what it could have been if we’d had a chance to see a Whitney Houston version. I think that would have been an incredible movie. I’m still bummed I’m never going to get to see it and I think it’d really be cool if Dorothy had lived to see it all but she didn’t. She died in 1967 and I think it’s interesting to point out why it is Martin Luther King in this picture. People may or may not know that if you buy any of her writing — if you buy the portable Dorothy Parker — you will find that she gave all her money, when she died, to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. She did not know, of course, that he would die a year later and all of his estate went to the NAACP. So if you buy any of her writing, you’re supporting the NAACP and that’s because even as a young woman at the age of 27 she was reviewing broadway plays and she reviewed Emperor Jones and she had this quote about how people — how the producers in Broadway at that time — because it wasn’t you know she wasn’t involved in Hollywood — they were wasting the genius of the African-American community. Obviously, she’s using word of the day but she recognized the genius that was being lost. So she wanted to support the cause of social — civil rights — social justice and civil rights and I think that’s pretty cool.