In researching and writing my book on Giuseppe and Anita Garibaldi and the unification of Italy (A Man Of Action Saving Liberty: A Novel Based On The Life Of Giuseppe Garibaldi) I re-discovered the first American female war correspondent – Margaret Fuller — who I had first met in a college course on the Transcendentalists. I was once again fascinated by a life lived purposefully.
Sometimes I love the way the internet lets you drill down layer after layer of research when you only had one small question – but you learn things you forgot you wanted to know. When I saw a question on Quora’s Ask a Screenwriter forum about the best “Based on a True Story” films the one that came immediately to mind was Brian’s Song so first I found the trailer:
There I came to find that not only did he win an Emmy for writing that TV film but also one for writing on the original Roots. Here he receives the Paddy Chayefsky Laurel Award for Television for “a WGA guild member who has advanced the literature of television and made outstanding contributions to the profession of the television writer.”
His advice to young writers is to “get off you’re a** and do the work” and to “Tell the truth in an interesting way.”
(If you listen to nothing else in this blog post – listen to that speech!).
Blinn was nominated 3 times for episodes of Fame. And he won Humanitas and Peabody Awards along the way. Blinn also produced Starsky and Hutch (both the TV show and the 2004 movie!). Finally, he co-wrote Purple Rain…
THAT is a career – and you probably have never heard of him.
Finally, I came to remember how much I had resisted watching “a football movie” but I kept hearing how much other people loved it so when it re-ran on the 11:30pm film one night I snuck out of bed in the childhood home I shared with my grandparents and watched the film – finding myself sobbing as it ended. I had never seen a film about such a strong male friendship – and I have rarely seen on as strong since.
Host: This might be a really sad thing to say, but do you think that, sometimes, it’s not always the best writers who get their pitches up but it’s the people who can work the room, by either maneuvering around, can get their stuff into the ears of the right people and then present that?
Rosanne: That is very true. I wouldn’t say — I mean you have to be a good writer to get in the room in the first place or they wouldn’t have hired you across all those stacks — you’ve seen all the things you’ve read for —
Host: Yeah. No. There’s a lot of crap to filter through. Absolutely.
Rosanne: Absolutely. So, generally speaking, you had to be a certain level to get in the room, but, yeah, it’s the people who can work — you have to work both things. A friend of mine is fond of saying, “It’s called show business. not show art.” So business is half of the job.
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.
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
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
Friends provides an interesting case study because they were sued by the writer’s assistant who said that the room was unsafe to her. She didn’t like the kind of sexual conversation that went on. She did not win that lawsuit because it was understood that your presumption going into that job — a show about a bunch of single people in New York — is that we’re going to be discussing these things and you should be comfortable in that — or take a different job on a different show. so that was an interesting — how do we run a room? — Safe but open and I don’t that we’ve found a perfect answer to that yet. I think they got away with what they did because they were all new. It was their first show. Look at how young they were. This is them nowadays, right? So, it — they weren’t sure how to run things, right? They were working the best they could.
Host: How would you pitch to a showrunner who seemed deflective to your ideas? Or like, I know that’s a loaded question.
Rosanne: Oh no, that’s an excellent question. That can happen because relationships grow and change. People get mad a each other for some reason. Maybe other people poison someone’s attitude about somebody else on the show, simply because they want to get rid of them because they’re competition. I mean, it doesn’t always happen. I’ve worked for some lovely people for whom I had a marvelous time and who were very supportive and wanted to help new writers moving up and they really were — there’s some wonderful people in this town. I really say the problem is we hear more of the bad stories than the good ones. But yes, in case such a thing happens, I think you should take a psychology class frankly. I think everyone should take a psychology class to understand the personalities out there and then you have to find new ways around that. When I felt like there might be someone getting in my way I figured out who my allies were and you made sure to connect with them. At certain points, there were certain things I wanted to change in a script and I knew a person at the table would argue against it. So, I went privately to a different producer on the show, who I knew I actually did get along with well, and explained why I didn’t like something and he was like… He had to agree with me first, right, or he wouldn’t help. He agreed with my point of view and so he knew he could present that in the room because he had a higher title than I did at the time — and so he did and when he presented it, it got accepted. So, I went sideways to get my ideas moved forward. So you know, you find a way.
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.
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
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 Handmaid’s Tale, they talk about how much work ahead of time they have to do and how much he wants the whole staff to contribute. He doesn’t want to be the full runner of the show — Bruce Miller — he wants everyone to be part of what he’s creating because he recognizes he’s a man running a show about women being oppressed in this Margaret Atwood future. So he has a particular take there and of course, we’re back to Vince Gilligan who I love greatly. He’s talking about making people feel comfortable, which I said, and I think comfort is very, very important. It has to be a safe place so that everyone is willing to tell their story. I laugh because my first days on Touched by an Angel the way they got all the writers to know each other was everyone had to tell the story of how they lost their virginity and once you told that to a room full of strangers you were willing to tell anything else. So it was an interesting first day of work to be sure. I’m not sure that qualifies as safe anymore but we’ll see.
Because the Civil War ended less than 30 years before the first motion pictures, it became a favorite subject for the new medium and has remained so ever since. Unfortunately, many of these Civil War films are historically inaccurate. According to Lamphier (humanities, California State Polytechnic Univ.) and Welch (screenwriting, Stephens College), films of the Civil War “almost universally erase the past” in order to forget that it was so “painful, destructive, and unpleasant” (p. ix). To illustrate the varying approaches to Civil War history and memory, the authors selected ten significant films—ranging chronologically and thematically from Gone with the Wind (1939) to Free State of Jones (2016)—devoting a chapter to each. All the chapters present the historical background and cultural context for the film, contexts that include, among other things, combat, gender, immigration, leadership, pacifism, race, and slavery. Other works—e.g., Bruce Chadwick’s The Reel Civil War: Mythmaking in American Film (CH, Mar’02, 39-3875) and The American Civil War on Film and TV: Blue and Gray in Black and White and Color, ed. by Douglas Brode, Shea Brode, and Cynthia Miller (CH, May’18, 55-3151)—cover more films and themes; the present volume will be especially useful as a tool for teaching cinematic representations of the past. — J. I. Deutsch, George Washington University
Then you have to understand them. What are they like? How do they want to hear things? Are they — what type of personalities do they like? You can’t really change yourself but you can readjust some things when you see how the rhythm is of what they like to do and actually, one of my favorite stories is that you also can cheat because I recognized early on in a particular show that there was a gentleman who didn’t like other people to win and so when you started to pitch he would find ways to tear it apart before the boss could say yes. Once you go the yes, he would be on board, because he wasn’t going to go against what the boss said. So, a joke I often tell students and friends is I had an idea that I wanted to pitch and I didn’t want to do it in front of that person being in the room so I waited until the boss — who happened to be another female — went to the bathroom and I pitched it over washing our hands at the sinks and by the time we got back to the room, she liked it enough that she started with “Rosanne had this great idea. We should talk it through,” and I saw the guy’s eyes across the table and I saw that he wanted to say something and he stopped and then I got the script because I stole it away from him. 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.
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.
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
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
So for me what’s interesting and important about a writer’s room is what you have to do. In this case, this show called Fresh Off The Boat. It’s based on the memories of an Asian-American man and his immigrant family and for their room they wanted to make sure all the people they hired had an outsider perspective. People who understood what it was like to go to a new place and be different and how do you manage that balance of I’m an American-Korean but my parents are truly Korean and in moving to another country the parents have given away part of the knowledge of their children because they won’t share the same kind of childhood. So that was an important aspect that Nahnatchka Khan wanted to bring to her show and really interesting that she’s not a Korean American and she’s running the show. So it’s about an experience she shares emotionally not the same ethnic experience and so I think that’s an interesting movement forward — which is pretty good.
The first job you have to do and any new show, of course, every new show — unless it’s someone you’ve worked with before and that that can happen but not always right sometimes your friends don’t get other jobs and so you move in with somebody else kind of. You have to understand them first. First, you have to understand their show and what do they think the show is. I give a classic example that most people will have heard of or at least seen some of The Sopranos and the joke about The Sopranos was they described the show as a family drama where dad happens to be a hitman. So if you were pitching an idea, you weren’t pitching a crime. You were pitching mom and dad had a fight and I’m afraid they’re getting divorced so I’m going to pretend to be sick to draw mommy and daddy together and while I’m doing that, daddy gets busy having to kill someone and I don’t get his attention right? Always the the dad’s story with that. Crime was a secondary thing and if you didn’t understand that you would pitch the incorrect kind of stories and you’d never win right? So first you have to understand what the person thinks their show is.
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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