film – Page 63 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

37 Sarah Connor and Dana Scully from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (52 seconds)

Watch this entire presentation

The Sisterhood of Science Fiction: A Walk Through Some Writers and Characters You (Should) Know And Love

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

This one allowed me to riff on some of my favorite female science fiction writers across time, whether they be novelists or television writers. It also opened up a good conversation on what art we support and include in our lives – and what that art says to us and about us. — Rosanne

Transcript:

Of course, then we move over to Sarah Connor and the Terminator. Again. it’s this thing that gives everybody power. Not what I’m providing inside and Sarah Connor is pretty boss and pretty tough but it’s that gun we always go back to. So I don’t think about it’s– (Audience) I always remember her and even when I’m exercising when she’s doing the pull-ups. (Rosanne) Yes. (Audience) I — when I exercise, I think about her. (Rosanne) See that’s good. That’s– that’s the inner strength. That’s very cool yeah. That is the cool bit of it. Yeah. So we’re getting around to it. Of course through those movies we then come up with the X-Files and now we have Dana Scully who is all-powerful because it’s her brain. Not big on using the gun, right, that’s his job. She’s using her brain and she’s the more intellectual — the stronger one — in many ways. He’s the one running by his heart and his emotions and she’s the one running through her mind. So we’re switching the male and female sort of identifiers in this piece, which is pretty strong.

* 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!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

#MeetTheGraduatesMonday: Yousif Nash – Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

Every Monday we will be profiling a member of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting 2020 graduating class. This exciting, fresh crop of writers are the future of the industry and are going on to do BIG things, so get to know them now! First up is Yousif Nash! #MeetTheGraduatesMonday

Yousif Nash is a true nerd who prides himself for having an encyclopedic knowledge on games, comics, anime, film, and television. An American born Iraqi, his parents regaled him with stories of their homeland, how it felt like a mystical land with history, culture, and wonder. It influenced him to become a storyteller, but he delayed that pursuit as he answered the call of duty and became an officer of the United States Air Force. When he left, he pursued writing seriously. He was accepted to the Writers Guild Foundation Veterans Workshop, worked on short and feature length films in his hometown, and is finishing his Masters of Fine Arts in TV Writing and Screenwriting from Stephens College. He just finished an internship at Hivemind (The Witcher, The Expanse) and is currently in another internship at Berlanti Productions (Arrow, The Flash, Riverdale) and Avi Arad’s Production Company (Spider-Man, Venom). He likes to write about nerds that suffer the normalcies of life, sci-fi, fantasy, and about Arab characters being normal people in America.

Visit Stephens.edu/mfa for more information.

Follow @StephensMFA on Instagram

Follow and Like the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

39 Fay Kanin from “When Women Wrote Hollywood” with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (40 seconds)

Part of the California State University, Fullerton Faculty Noon Time Talks at the Pollak Library.

Watch this entire presentation

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

Transcript:

Fay Kanin is very cool. She was married to Garson Kanin’s brother and so they worked together and not only in movies but now we’re blending into the television era and she wrote this brilliant TV movie. She got an Emmy Award with Carol Burnett and it was about a mother who found out her son had been killed in Vietnam by friendly fire but the government had said it was enemy fire and she — when she — in looking into how he died — discovered that and then she wanted to make it known so people understood that was one of the risks that your children were taking when they joined the military. It’s a very powerful TV movie. There she is with her husband Michael. These are some of the other things that they did that everybody knows.

Dr. Rosanne Welch discusses the women in her new book “When Women Wrote Hollywood” which covers female screenwriters from the Silents through the early 1940s when women wrote over 50% of films and Frances Marion was the highest paid screenwriter (male or female) and the first to win 2 Oscars. Yet, she fails to appear in film history books, which continue to regurgitate the myth that male directors did it all – even though it’s been proven that the only profitable movies Cecil B. de Mille ever directed were all written by Jeannie Macpherson film ever won for Best Picture was written by Robert E. Sherwood (who people have heard of, mostly due to his connection to Dorothy Parker) and Joan Harrison.

Buy a signed copy of when Women Wrote Hollywood

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

* 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!
† Available from the LA Public Library

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

36 Star Wars, Alien, and Women Characters from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute)

Watch this entire presentation

The Sisterhood of Science Fiction: A Walk Through Some Writers and Characters You (Should) Know And Love

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

Transcript:

And of course, it brought us many other powerful engaging women right? We got Rei. We’re dealing with Padme from the earlier session. We had Jyn Erso. I really like Rogue One more than I even like the new Star Wars, but that’s just me. Then we have Rose Tiko which was a big move right and then there are people kind of Oh, what’s she doing in there. She doesn’t have any place in the movie. She does. She’s showing us that people of Asian descent show up in the future. That’s a huge message right and again she does it mostly peacefully you know there’s a gun in there someone but we get rid of that pretty quick and then it’s about your skill with it with lightsaber stuff. Moving forward we all know or we think we know Alien right and Sigourney Weaver. Sadly the rumor in Hollywood is that the reason that character is so strong and interesting is the it was written to be a man and when they couldn’t get a male to star in the movie they just threw it to Sigourney Weaver and they never rewrote it girl-ify it up. So she’s powerful because she’s doing all the things we expect men to do in movies without having to be a guy.

* 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!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Author, Tom Stempel Speaks at Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting Winter Workshop

Tom Stempel, (historian and author of one of the textbooks used in our MFA – Framework: a History of Screenwriting) has a blog – Understanding Screenwriting — where he analyzes the work of recent screenplays, many of which you may have just seen.

Visit Stephens.edu/mfa for more information.

Follow @StephensMFA on Instagram

Follow and Like the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V10 Issue 3: Reel by reel: Jan Stanislav Kolár’s narrative poetics in the context of transition to feature-length format in Czech silent cinema by Martin Kos

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

Reel by reel: Jan Stanislav Kolár’s narrative poetics in the context of transition to feature-length format in Czech silent cinema by Martin Kos

This article examines the screenwriting practice in Czech silent cinema in the late 1910s and 1920s. It focuses on Jan Stanislav Kolár’s narrative poetics as a case study of specific storytelling choices within the transitional era from one- or two-reelers to the feature-length format in the context of local technological restrictions in exhibition – inevitable breaks of changing film reels in single-projector cinemas. Poetological analysis of Kolár’s Řina (1926) with his other surviving scenarios and pictures shows that meant not only the necessity of adapting to these limitations, but also became a productive way of achieving particular effects on the audience. Semi-independent narrative acts, thrilling moments occurring at the end of the reel, or significant shifts in space and time between two reels were integral parts of his own original stories as well as adaptations of various novels. Nevertheless, the article outlines more general perspective in relation to film reels as structural narrative units and screenwriting practice among Czech filmmakers as well.

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!

Join me at the Screenwriting Research Network’s Annual Conference in Oxford, UK

* 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!

38 Elaine May from “When Women Wrote Hollywood” with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (53 seconds)

Part of the California State University, Fullerton Faculty Noon Time Talks at the Pollak Library.

Watch this entire presentation

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

Transcript:

Elaine May is another name that’s fallen out of history and shouldn’t. Now we’re in the 70s. Elaine I think is a brilliant writer. Heaven Can Wait wouldn’t be what it was. Warren Beatty got tons of focus for that but she wrote it. She came out of doing nightclub things with Mike Nichols. They were Nichols in May and they wrote all their routines. It was like a traveling SNL sketch. You probably still know who Mike Nichols is, but Elaine May has fallen out of history because at a certain point she started directing. Which is cool, but she directed a movie called Ishtar which lost a ton of money and she was never given a directing job again. I can name you many a man who has directed a film that lost a ton of money and somehow they still got a second and a third and a fourth job. Elaine Mae was never given the right to direct a film again. Her writing is brilliant and as you know she still continued writing she did Primary Colors.

Buy a signed copy of when Women Wrote Hollywood

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

* 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!
† Available from the LA Public Library

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Listen to “Between the Sheets: Writing About Sex on TV” from the Writers Guild Foundation and Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting [Audio]

Between the Sheets: Writing About Sex on Television

Listen to Between the Sheets: Writing About Sex on TV from the Writers Guild Foundation and Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

The Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting program teamed up with the Writers Guild Foundation to pull the covers back on a topic that still makes viewers blush: sex. On this special evening, our panel of TV writers and producers share how they approach writing about sex, from intimate scenes to revealing dialogue, and the nuances they consider when crafting stories about sex and sexuality.

Panelists:

Michelle Ashford – Masters of Sex, The Pacific
Cindy Chupack – I’m Dying Up Here, Divorce, Sex and the City
Sahar Jahani – 13 Reasons Why, Ramy
Dayna Lynne North – Insecure, Single Ladies, Lincoln Heights
Gladys Rodriguez – Vida, Dynasty, Sons of Anarchy
Moderated by Dr. Rosanne Welch.

Writers Guild Foundation – @wgfoundation

Visit Stephens.edu/mfa for more information.

Follow @StephensMFA on Instagram

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 11: Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Screenplay. Wr: June Mathis. Dir. Fred Niblo, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1925 USA 142 mins.

Months of research went into the creation of the essays in “When Women Wrote Hollywood.” Here are some of the resources used to enlighten today’s film lovers to the female pioneers who helped create it.

From The “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Archives 11: Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ. Screenplay. Wr: June Mathis. Dir. Fred Niblo, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1925 USA 142 mins.

By Unknown – impawards.com, Public Domain, Link

Watch Ben Hur (1925) on Hoopla (Free)

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ is a 1925 American silent epic adventure-drama film directed by Fred Niblo and written by June Mathis based on the 1880 novel Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ by General Lew Wallace. Starring Ramon Novarro as the title character, the film is the first feature-length adaptation of the novel and second overall, following the 1907 short.

In 1997, Ben-Hur was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.” — Wikipedia

Buy “When Women Wrote Hollywood” Today!

†

Paperback Edition | Kindle Edition | Google Play Edition

* 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!
† Available from the LA Public Library