education – Page 9 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

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.

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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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.

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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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12 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.

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 started out, as often happens to women, as an assistant to Gene Roddenberry. She had written short stories. She had actually written episodes of shows like The Big Valley and The High Chaparral. Again, two very progressive early shows. Problem was, how do you get a gig? She got a gig as his assistant but she was there at the very beginning. In the early books about Star Trek they will talk about how intrinsic she was to coming up with the fact that females needed to be important on the show because it was about the future and of course someone like Nichelle Nichols right? We had to have African-American representation in the future and this is going to be, again, so important to representation because Nichelle Nichols is going to inspire Mae Jemison, the first African-American female astronaut right? Mae Jemison saw Nichelle Nichols and knew that she could be in space because she saw it, so she could be it right?

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.

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37 Finding Your Writing Process…from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

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

Transcript:

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.

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

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Elinor Glyn Recognized “It” Before Anyone Else -Because She Had “It” – Dr. Rosanne Welch, Script magazine, February 2022

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.

Read Elinor Glyn Recognized “It” Before Anyone Else – Because She Had “It”

Read about more women from early Hollywood

25 How Did The Characters Grow? from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

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.

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11 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:

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.

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Women pioneers who created, produced, or shepherded many of America’s most wildly popular, early television programs will be profiled by Dr. Rosanne Welch.

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36 More On Finding The Time To Write…from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

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

Transcript:

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.

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

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24 All About The Women…from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

This is the only time they made separate posters and focused on them. Almost every movie iteration you see them both together because it’s a love story. That’s what you’re being told in that poster. I don’t know what these posters are telling you except do you know the title of the movie then you’ll understand but I had several students who never knew it was a remake when they went to see it. So they had no idea. The title meant nothing to them. It’s always the female that carries the story right? This is this giant poster of Ally. That’s what this is all about. All these women are the reasons these movies were made in the first place. That’s what drew the box office. That’s what drew the studios to support and every one of these is the story of a woman doing something new against the culture of her time. Facing one of the various waves of feminism right? If you think about 1937 women had had the vote for under 20 years. A bunch of women were still not voting because their husbands wouldn’t let them even though it was legal right and 54 we’re 10 years after the end of the war and the Rosie the Riveter and all that stuff when women were told to go back home, put on your pearls, and start vacuuming right? Don’t try to be in the man’s world. That’s your job. We get around to 76 and we’re in the second wave of feminism. That’s just three years after Roe versus Wade and we’re still doing the equal pay marches. We’re still looking for equal pay and if you get around to the current version, it’s ten years after the Lilly Ledbetter act, which gave fair pay to people doing the same job. So each of these movies takes place in their female characters working truly in a world where there were still feminist issues going on. Which i think is also part of what Dorothy started with.

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10 Star Trek 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:

Desilu Productions gave the world Star Trek, a program that is credited with saving Paramount Studios from going bankrupt. This program became, as you know, such a cult following that it was followed into rerun after rerun after reruns for so many years. It’s one of the first television shows anyone thought to make into a feature film story. No one had done that with an earlier tv show before but they felt they had enough fans going in that they could get away with it and certainly the first one was not considered as critically wonderful but the second one, The Wrath of Khan, was considered one of the classic films and one of the best films in the Star Trek series and this series is so important, of course, was even rebooted with an entirely new cast right? So this story has gone on and on. We also know that it went into Star Trek: The Next Generation. It went into Star Trek Discovery. There’s now Star Trek: Picard. All of these shows have been very important in getting female writers started in the business. If you sold an episode to a Star Trek — any of the various franchises — you were considered a serious writer and you move forward. People like Jane Espenson and all kinds of women have moved forward from Star Trek.

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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