On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch
Writing, Film, Television and More!
JOIN US!
Instagram Live – Wed, March 24, 2021, 10am PDT
on the Intellect Instagram Account
I’ll be joining Intellect editor James Campbell this Wednesday the 24th for his Instagram Live segment.
We’ll be discussing the Special Issue of the Journal of Screenwriting that I co-edited with Rose Ferrell which covered international Women in Screenwriting.
We’ll also be talking about how and why to write for journals and how to use them in your courses.
Writers are important.
Writer comes before director when people are writer-directors because writers are more important. You cannot direct some people walking around a room.
Somebody has to say why they’re there and what they’re doing.
Screenwriters have always been important.
During the Hollywood Blacklist 9 out of 10 of those jailed were screenwriters.
Their powerful ideas scared those in power.
Writers are often told to “write what you know.”
Instead, we should write the emotions we know.
These are universal.
If we censor the storytellers, we are censoring the stories.
If we censor the stories, we are censoring the culture.
If we censor the culture, we are censoring the people and their struggles.
I promised to clean my desk before a full semester of online learning began… and I did. See? There’s room for my cat Spotted Leaf (named after a character in the Erin Hunter series of books about cats who live in the woods – Warriors). Spot (as we call her for short) enjoys hearing me talk to students about everything from films to fiction. Maybe in one of her past 9 lives she was a humanities professor, too!
Another Day, Another Video Conference
As a member of the Executive Council of the Screenwriting Research Network (SRN) I have the great pleasure of meeting with colleagues from several continents (Australia, South America, Europe, etc) on a monthly basis to discuss the business of the organization. it continues to amaze me how technology allows us to do this – as it continues to amaze me how lucky I am to have had the chance to meet all of these lovely folks in person at our various conferences. Can’t wait for the next one – in Oxford in 2021!
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
Everybody’s a Writer Theorizing screenwriting as creative labour by Bridget Conor
This paper offers a theoretical agenda for a labourist analysis of screenwriting, and critically evaluates the marginal status of screenwriting within film production systems. On the one hand, screenwriting offers an exemplary case study of creative work in post-modernized film production industries, work characterized by freelancing and multivalent working patterns, insecurity and hierarchization. Investigating screenwriting as creative labour also offers unique insights into an intensely industrial vocation; this requires a highly particular theorization of the contexts and conditions of writers’ working lives.This paper draws on sociological analyses of creative production and utilizes a Foucauldian understanding of technologies of the self as this concept has been applied in the analysis of creative labour. This approach enables a critical examination of particular aspects of screenwriting labour, including the rigidity of the industrial screenplay form and its pedagogical frameworks, the standardized mechanisms of control over screenwriting labour (such as inequitable collaboration and practices of multiple authorship), and the heady mix of both creative fulfilment and punishment which characterizes this form of work.
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
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