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!
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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
So that’s kind of my philosophy. I really don’t like the auteur theory and neither do a lot of other writers. This particular quote comes to us from the gentleman who gave us, in America, Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan. So I want to talk about writer’s rooms and his is considered one of the most organized so perhaps the less chaotic but still what happens in the room has its own form of chaos. So I think it’s really interesting that he is willing to defend the idea that writers are more important than directors. He’s certainly got an Emmy to prove he’s an important writer but I appreciate very much what he had to say. The room is about making people as comfortable as possible and this can be a difficult task but it’s the task of the executive producer or the showrunner to make sure that the people in the room are open to sharing as many of their interesting ideas as possible right? So chaos but managed chaos. You have to allow for much conversation but you’re the one managing what’s being said so you don’t run off on a tangent and of course Vince was brilliant at that.
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
MAYOR
Jack, please, I’m only an elected official here. I can’t make decisions by myself.
“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
Sojourner Truth (/soʊˈdʒɜːrnərtruːθ/; born Isabella “Belle” Baumfree; c. 1797 – November 26, 1883) was an American abolitionist and women’s rights activist. Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York, but escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. After going to court to recover her son in 1828, she became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man.
She gave herself the name Sojourner Truth in 1843 after she became convinced that God had called her to leave the city and go into the countryside “testifying the hope that was in her”.[1] Her best-known speech was delivered extemporaneously, in 1851, at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio. The speech became widely known during the Civil War by the title “Ain’t I a Woman?“, a variation of the original speech re-written by someone else using a stereotypical Southern dialect, whereas Sojourner Truth was from New York and grew up speaking Dutch as her first language. During the Civil War, Truth helped recruit black troops for the Union Army; after the war, she tried unsuccessfully to secure land grants from the federal government for formerly enslaved people (summarized as the promise of “forty acres and a mule” — Wikipedia
Giuseppe’s words were magnified by the arrival of Mazzini from France, ready to raise the needed support to defend the nation. “There are not five Italys, or four Italys, or three. There is only one Italy and the destiny of Rome and the destiny of Italy are the destiny of the world.”
While many Civil War films cover the Southern perspective, Friendly Persuasion involves the much rarer Northern experience, this one of a devout Indiana Quaker female minister whose family tries valiantly to uphold their pacifist values in the face of Confederate attack.
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
This is my teaching philosophy. Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter, and that’s something I try to focus on as much as possible. There’s a lot of women who never get mentioned and that bothers me but that’s a different lecture so — I did that last year this year. We’re talking about why writers are important and how the writers room works. As far as I’m concerned we have to remember that writer precedes director so I want more of our students to know the names of the writers of their favorite films not always just the directors because when you talk about a film you don’t say “Do you remember that beautiful camera angle in scene seven?” You say “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die” and that is something the writer did so I think we have to remember that the dialogue is what makes movies special and the characters.
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
GEORGE
“The good news, however, is that this overreacting… tends to get proportionately less by generation. So, your kids could be normal.”
MFA Executive Director Dr. Rosanne Welch will give 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. This event begins at 7 p.m. Eastern/6 p.m. Central on Tuesday, March 9, and is free and open to the public.
Dr. Welch will discuss many highly successful female screenwriters of early Hollywood and explain why they don’t appear in most mainstream histories of the era.
![03 Managed Chaos from How The Chaos Of Collaboration in the Writers Room Created Golden Age Television [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/srn-porto-03.jpg)
![02 Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter from How The Chaos Of Collaboration in the Writers Room Created Golden Age Television [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/srn-porto-02.jpg)
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