film – Page 34 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

04 The Comedy Writer’s Room from How The Chaos Of Collaboration in the Writers Room Created Golden Age Television [Video]

With the full recording of “How The Chaos Of Collaboration in the Writers Room Created Golden Age Television”

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When the folks hosting the conference announced their theme as “Screen Narratives: Chaos and Order” the word ‘chaos’ immediately brought to mind writers rooms. I offered a quick history of writers rooms (the presentations are only 20 minutes long) and then quoted several current showrunners on how they compose their rooms and how they run them.

Transcript

In terms of the history of writer’s rooms, comedy always sort of had them and we know that going back into the early days of the George Burns and Gracie Allen Show. He had a team of writers including his brother who worked with him. So comedy always knew that it needed a group. It was as if they knew the sitcom was an outgrowth of standup comedy or those vaudeville acts they had all been in. Of course, we love The Dick Van Dyke Show taught many people in America — many females in America — you could write for television because there was a female character writing of television, right, in the ’60s. So that taught us we had a place in this business which is a good thing. Neil Simon worked in early TV comedy shows and so he then glamourized that in his play so that’s a way that people learn about writer’s rooms. They see it operate and this was a room that included very famous men. Larry Gelbart who did M*A*S*H. Woody Allen who we can say other things about these days.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V4 Issue 2: Unknown spaces and uncertainty in film development by Margot Nash

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

Unknown spaces and uncertainty in film development by Margot Nash

This article examines a discovery-driven process to script development as opposed to a formula-driven one. It is an investigation into the uncertain nature of the creative process in general, and the all-pervasive quest for certainty in film development in particular. Development strategies that value a discovery-driven process are few and far between, as are strategies to explore the gaps, or elisions, within a screenplay where subtext thrives, yet these are transformative spaces that invite an active and creative response. In this article I engage in practice-based research as a writer/director and as a teacher, and investigate two particular areas of film development. The first is early-stage script development where ideas are still struggling to find form; the second is latter-stage script development where a screenplay is refined in order to create spaces where others might respond imaginatively. I advocate risk taking, and the use of unconventional models, in order to create new spaces for students to explore their creativity, and I examine the ‘unknown’ and the ‘uncertain’ as active spaces, both for a screenwriter developing new work and for those who engage creatively with a screenplay as it transforms into a film. I argue that gaps or spaces within a screenplay offer opportunities for directors, actors, key creative crew and eventually an audience to actively participate, and that a development process that values the unknown offers the screenwriter a gateway to adventure and innovation. Screenwriting textbooks rarely enter the unknown and uncertain spaces of creativity yet, as many artists (albeit working in less-expensive mediums) seem to know instinctively, it is within the interplay of the known and the unknown, of passion and reason, and of logic and intuition – that creativity lies.

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.

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!

The Civil War On Film – 23 in a series – “Many historians and critics consider Glory the best American Civil War movie ever made.”

Many historians and critics consider Glory the best American Civil War movie ever made. The film shatters the great taboo of Civil War movies—making race and slavery central to the story and using black characters to do so (Chadwick 2001).

Movies profiled in this book:

Watch this presentation on “When Women Wrote Hollywood” for the Empire State Center for the Book [Video] (1 hour)

MFA Executive Director Dr. Rosanne Welch gave a Zoom presentation on“When Women Wrote Hollywood” for the Empire State Center for the Book, the New York State affiliate of the Library of Congress Center for the Book.

Dr. Welch discussed many highly successful female screenwriters of early Hollywood and explained why they don’t appear in most mainstream histories of the era.

The essays in this book were written by the alumni of the inaugural class of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting and come from the stories of the many brilliant female screenwriters studied in our History of Screenwriting courses and collected into When Women Wrote Hollywood.

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A Woman Wrote That – 19 in a series – You’ve Got Mail (1998), Writer: Nora Ephron

This new “A Woman Wrote That” post is an echo of the Writers Guild campaign of a few years ago (“A Writer Wrote That”) where they noted famous movie quotes and credited the screenwriter rather than the director. The difference here being that we will be posting lines from films written by female screenwriters. Feel free to share! — Rosanne

KATHLEEN

When you read a book as a child, it becomes a part of your identity in a way that no other reading in your whole life does.

You’ve Got Mail on IMDB
You’ve Got Mail on Wikipedia
Nora Ephron on Wikipedia and IMDB
Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

Dr. Rosanne Welch hosts a Master Class With Executive Producer/Showrunner Gloria Calderón Kellett — Athena Film Festival 2021

Each year, as a sponsor of the Athena Film Festival, the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting hosts a Master Class interview with a major television showrunner.

For this year’s virtual festival, I had the privilege of interviewing Gloria Calderon Kellett, co-creator and executive producer of the beloved reboot of One Day at a Time.

In our interview, Kellett shared how much she learned about running a show from her earliest days as a writer’s assistant, how earning an MFA was an investment in her future, and how much joy she’s had in using the power of her position to Write, Reach and Represent.

Please enjoy this Master Class with Showrunner, writer, and actress Gloria Calderón Kellett.

Gloria Calderón Kellett is a Showrunner, writer, director, and actor best known for the critically acclaimed reboot ONE DAY AT A TIME. She is currently on a deal at Amazon Studios where she is developing new shows and movies.

Sponsored by Stephens College MFA Program on TV and Screenwriting

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Where’s Her Movie? Actress, Maria Montez – 12 in a series

“Where’s HER Movie” posts will highlight interesting and accomplished women from a variety of professional backgrounds who deserve to have movies written about them as much as all the male scientists, authors, performers, and geniuses have had written about them across the over 100 years of film. This is our attempt to help write these women back into mainstream history. — Rosanne

María África Gracia Vidal (6 June 1912 – 7 September 1951),(known as the “Queen Of The Technicolor” and “Maria Montez”) was a Dominican motion picture actress who gained fame and popularity in the 1940s as an exotic beauty starring in a series of filmed-in-Technicolor costume adventure films. Her screen image was that of a seductress, dressed in fanciful costumes and sparkling jewels. She became so identified with these adventure epics that she became known as “The Queen of Technicolor”. Over her career, Montez appeared in 26 films, 21 of which were made in North America and the last five were made in Europe. — Wikipedia

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V4 Issue 2: Tracing the voice of the auteur: Persona and the Ingmar Bergman Archive by Anna Sofia Rossholm

Tracing the voice of the auteur: Persona and the Ingmar Bergman Archive by Anna Sofia Rossholm

This article discusses the Ingmar Bergman Archive, a donation by Bergman himself, mainly consisting of notebooks, manuscripts, production documents and letters, as well as the screenwriting process behind the film Persona (1966). The study approaches the digital manuscript archive as an interface that lends itself to an understanding of the artwork as continuous movement of transformation across media, an understanding that also links to aesthetical ideas on the relations between words and images expressed in Bergman’s cinematographic work. The study opens with a discussion of these issues and continues with a reading of the self-reflexive film Persona in order to examine how the explicit reflections on the mediation are negotiated across notebook drafts and scripts. The different phases in the process of creation – from notes and drafts to script versions and film – reflect on the transitory nature of the text as well as drawing on the specificities of each form of expression.

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!

The Civil War On Film – 22 in a series – “…but allowed filmmakers to avoid the contentious issue of slavery.”

In the decades before World War II, Civil War films were largely set in the Eastern theater, but as the center for movie making shifted west to California and studios built permanent western sets (so as to make a great number of inexpensive western films), filmmakers began combining the two film genres. The innovation not only expanded the kind of movie stories that could be told, but allowed filmmakers to avoid the contentious issue of slavery.

Movies profiled in this book:

Rosanne presents to Oxford Brookes University Students in transatlantic creative education exchange

Previous, on-site, presentation at Oxford Brookes

Thanks for our meeting at a Screenwriting Research Network conference almost 10 years ago Dr. Paolo Russo (of Oxford Brookes University) and I have been able to engage in a few transatlantic creative exchanges.

He’s come to speak on Italian Neo-realism to my MFA candidates and I had the pleasure of visiting with his masters candidates (in person! when that was still possible) and giving them notes on their drama series treatments.

This week I’ll be doing that again on Zoom with the help of Shannon Dobson Fopeano, my Graduate Assistant in the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting. Paolo and I are both interested in expanding the reach of this cross-ocean collegiality in the future!