podcast – Page 11 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

12 90210 & Teenage Lives from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

Watch the entire presentation – Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 here

Transcript:

If you go pre-90210 you’re going to find that teenagers were more often in comedies and more often in kind of doing silly things and very superficial things — getting a date — things like that and from 90210 on they had real lives and real things could happen to them and real problems happen to them and as you said continue through Euphoria exactly exactly. You don’t do a teen show these days that doesn’t look at their lives more in-depth. I guess that’s what I’m going to say.

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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11 Even More On Beverly Hills 90210 from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

Watch the entire presentation – Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 here

Transcript:

So those characters became three-dimensional human beings for the five years he ran the show and then he left and a couple of people who mostly worked in — more that’s the word I want — more soap opera kind of things and I like soap operas. I don’t think they’re bad but they’re a different style and they turn the show into who is having sex with who each week but it stayed in the air for another three or four years because of the foundation, the love, for those original characters that the audience had. They just kept wanting to watch them even if the stories got less and less interesting and that’s the power of what he put together in those first two years. So truly believing and caring about those characters — which meant he truly believed and cared about the writing — the stories had to be real and I think that showed. That’s why I mean come on why do you guys still know what Beverly Hills 90210 is? You weren’t around in the 90s right but it’s been around and rerun. There’s a lot of other teenage shows but that one sticks right? There’s a reason for that.

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.

The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.

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10 More On Beverly Hills 90210 from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 [Video]

Watch the entire presentation – Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 here

Transcript:

…and I always say Beverly Hills 90210 is an excellent study for people in how who the showrunner is makes a difference because that show was created as a pilot by Darren Starr who’s still famously writing pilots and then he left and the show was run, managed on a daily basis by Chuck Rosen. If you look at the pilot of 90210, it’s really a bunch of rich kids and fancy clothes hanging out at the beach having bonfires. There’s not a whole lot of meat to it. Two Ohio kid’s dad moves to town because he’s an accountant and he’s going to work in Beverly Hills and so their midwest values meet Beverly hills values and that’s all you get. Chuck took over and he was the child of a surgeon at Cedars-Sinai. He grew up in Beverly Hills. So those children became real three-dimensional human beings because one of the issues is how do you — how do you connect to a character that’s uber-rich. Like they have no problems because they’re rich and that’s what most people would think because we’re not all rich but he knew kids who had drug problems. He knew kids whose parents had drug problems and therefore weren’t there for them. So he looked at the fact that it doesn’t matter how much money you have, if there’s a problem in your family, it still makes you vulnerable and that is going to make an audience interested in you.

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.

The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.

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09 Beverly Hills 90210 from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 [Video]

Watch the entire presentation – Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 here

Transcript:

Host: Were you a writer? Were you a writer’s assistant in that?

Rosanne:I was a freelance writer on that. That was my very first script.

Host: Okay so wow yeah. How did you– how did you feel when you got like the um the chance?

Rosanne: That’s wonderful stuff. It’s wonderful stuff. It was because at the time I had a partner and she was the assistant to the executive producer of that show. So after reading four — count them — four spec scripts of ours, he finally agreed to let us pitch and so we came in and pitched and that was lovely. So she was much more comfortable in that room than I was because she knew everybody. She’d been there for two or three years at that point but you know I knew the gentleman in charge, Chuck Rosen was one of the quote-unquote good guys in town. A real — a sweetheart. He’d been on a show called Northern Exposure, which I adored. He’s an excellent writer — just and cared about the stories.

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.

The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.

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Review: Stories from the Epicenter Podcast, California History Journal, Dr. Rosanne Welch

I was pleased to be asked to join the Editorial Team for California History journal and am always impressed by the work of editor Mary Ann Irwin when each new issue comes out.

As their expert on the popular culture of our State I have the chance to vet articles in that area – and to review books that cover it as well. For this issue there was yet another new request – review a podcast “Stories from the Epicenter” that explores the experience and memory of the Loma Prieta Earthquake through oral history records and interviews with current residents of Santa Cruz and Watsonville. A co-creation of the University Library at UC Santa Cruz, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, and Santa Cruz Public Libraries I found it fascinating to hear. — Rosanne

You can listen to it here

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Daniel Story, series producer. Stories from the Epicenter. University Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, and Santa Cruz Public Libraries.

Podcast website: https://library.ucsc.edu/StoriesFromTheEpicenter
Listen on major podcast platforms or at https://anchor.fm/storiesfromtheepicenter
Podcast companion resource: https://arcg.is/04mPTG

Stories from the Epicenter is a ten-part documentary podcast that explores the experience and memory of the Loma Prieta Earthquake through oral history records and interviews with current residents of Santa Cruz and Watsonville. Coproduced by the University Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in partnership with the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History and Santa Cruz Public Libraries, this production shows its pedigree across the episodes sampled by this reviewer, herself a fan of such high-caliber podcasts as BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time and Thinking Allowed and popular culture podcasts such as Today I Found Out and The Dinner Party Download.

With so many new forms of distribution, the very definition of “podcast” needs to be reconsidered. Podcasts first emerged when MTV host/announcer Adam Curry wanted a self-loading iPod, and computer programmer Dave Winer invented the RSS feed, a computer program that allowed users to keep track of and subscribe to many different websites. Together Curry and Winer developed a way to allow RSS feeds to carry audio and video files, so that users could download files automatically to their iPods each time they synched to a computer. Cell phones with broadband connectivity negated much of the technical need for official podcasts, but the many eclectic early podcasts whetted audience desire for independent, non-gate-kept productions. Now the term refers broadly to radioand television-style shows delivered over the Internet. Audiences can subscribe to podcasts or find them on YouTube, which emerged at the same time as RSS feeds to offer yet another model of distribution.

As with all new forms of media, once established outlets began using them, they naturally gained more respect. Now many history-based podcasts can be found, like the esteemed British Library’s Curator’s Corner and Curators on Camera, or American History Tellers from Wondery, the network behind Tides of History and Fall of Rome.

On October 17, 2020, Stories from the Epicenter released ten episodes recorded in the aftermath of the Loma Prieta earthquake, a magnitude 3.5 earthquake that occurred nine miles from San Francisco at 5:04 P.M. on October 17, 1989. Damage included the collapse of a section of the double-deck Nimitz Freeway in Oakland that killed forty-two people. Three more were killed by the collapse of buildings along the Pacific Garden Mall in Santa Cruz. While many Californians felt the effect of the earthquake as it began, audiences elsewhere also learned of it almost immediately through the 1989 World Series, then airing live from Candlestick Park. The video signal broke up just after sportscaster Al Michaels announced the event.

The episodes follow chronologically from the opening, “Pacific Garden Mall,” which covers the growth of the area in the years before the quake, through “The First Thirty Days,” which involves the emergency response in Santa Cruz, and then to “The Politics of Rebuilding.” Among the ten main episodes, series producer Madeline Maria’s “The Kids Are Alright” stands out for looking through the eyes of those who were children at the time. Recording the voices and memories of teenagers paints the event in a particularly emotional way that stays with the listener long after the twenty-six-minute segment ends.

Aaron Zachmeier, fifteen at the time, recalls how his five-year-old sister stayed under a table for a few hours after the quake while he went skateboarding around town, surveying the damage. “It was exciting and interesting to watch things change … and when they settled down it was a disappointment.” Zachmeier felt he had discovered a magical place “that was then taken away from me, but maybe that was perfect because magical places don’t persist”—because, to his eyes, media outlets ignored Santa Cruz and instead focused on San Francisco. In an aside that will be familiar to contemporary readers experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic, Zachmeier admits that “it was weirdly joyful to experience normal life being put on hold, which created an interesting space in which to exist.”

Another story Maria researched concerned a homeless nine-year-old who recalled waking up in her parents’ tent and watching the sidewalk move in waves. The segment ends with an interview with Kevin Waggoner, a six-year-old during the earthquake, whose father was the single park ranger assigned to the Forest of Nisene Marks State Park, the actual epicenter of the earthquake. Kevin had the chance to visit the epicenter with his father because his Campfire Kids group wanted a tour of the spot, to which his father agreed. His father had been in the park during the earthquake and declared that it felt milder than in the more urban part of the city, illustrating how nature is better prepared than the built environment to withstand such temblors.

Also of interest is episode 7, “A Tale of Two Newspapers,” which follows the ways that such disasters affect professionals charged with documenting them in real time. Episode 8, “The Memory Remains,” focuses on bringing back some UC Santa Cruz graduates whose experiences were recorded right after the quake; producers asked them to listen to portions of their original testimonies and to comment on how their earlier thoughts survived the test of time. Each episode utilizes the vast variety of music from the area, including excerpts from “El Sonido de la Vida” by Silva de Alegria and “Cinema Pathetic” by Blue Dot Sessions.

While Stories from the Epicenter is reminiscent of an extended National Public Radio series focused on a very personal, very seismic, and very geographically specific event, the episodes somehow manage to be universal in their coverage of the emotions that all listeners likely connect to events experienced in their own homes. The benefit of such podcasts to historians is obvious. There is great value to such oral histories being available online to researchers, sparing them the expense of traveling to distant archives. The downside to podcasts, in some cases, is an “amateur” quality—but the same can often be said of radio, television, and other media. At a time when inclusivity is more important than ever, podcasts like these offer individuals the chance to share their voices and, simultaneously, to facilitate wide sharing of experiences, ideas, and emotions.

Well executed history podcasts like these suit our times perfectly.

Rosanne Welch

And of course you can check out the California History journal at your local library.

08 Playing The Game… from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 [Video]

Watch the entire presentation – Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 here

Transcript:

…and you really need to understand how the business works not just the people management then but now move up to understanding how the network makes their decisions and how do you sell things to them. I mean I’ve had showrunning friends who will tell stories about how there were moments they wanted in a script and they knew the network wouldn’t like those moments. Maybe they’re pushing the envelope on something. So they put in a couple of worse moments knowing that when the network said oh you can’t do that or that or that they’d go I hear what you’re saying. I understand. I won’t do that or that but I’ve got to have this and they’d get the one thing they really wanted. So they were playing a little chess game as well right? So at every level, there’s an understanding of what do people need. How do I give them what I want and still what they need at the same time.

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.

The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.

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07 It’s Show Business…Not Show Art…from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 [Video]

Watch the entire presentation – Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 here

Transcript:

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.

The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.

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06 How To Pitch To A Showrunner…from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 [Video]

Watch the entire presentation – Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 here

Transcript:

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.

The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.

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05 Working The Room…from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 [Video]

Watch the entire presentation – Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 here

Transcript:

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.

The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.

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04 What The Show Is from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 [Video]

Watch the entire presentation – Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 here

Transcript:

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.

The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.

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