presentation – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

02 Early History Episodes from The Real History Behind the Historic Episodes of Doctor Who with Dr. Rosanne Welch – SD Who Con 2023

In this presentation given at the 2023 San Diego WhoCon I talked about what really happened at Pompeii on volcano day; the agricultural knowledge of the Aztecs; when Robin Hood began appearing in literature, and the bravery of Noor Inayat Khan and Rosa Parks.

Transcript:

What we’re talking about today is the real history behind the history behind Doctor Who. We know from the beginning the show was meant to teach history. It was a children’s program and I think that’s a really lovely idea and so they began with two teachers as companions. That was so intentional and it worked. It was a great way to warm people up and you had to have people who knew something about where they were going. Who had something to say and of course we had a student. You have to have someone you can talk to right? So it was a really lovely blend of characters.The very — one of the earliest ones they did went into the world of the Romans. Everyone’s always fascinated by the Romans and I think what’s really interesting is, sadly, just a little bit later, Highlanders was the last historical one they produced in that early period. They decided it wasn’t what the audience wanted. What did the audience want? Audience:Gimmicks and Robots? Duh, Daleks, right? The Daleks showed up and that was it they were like oh no no this is what the audience is coming for. Forget that history. Forget that study. Don’t learn anything.It’s okay. Also we know that once we get to John Pertwee and he’s trapped on Earth he can’t travel. So there’s no way he’s going to go into the past. So we lose a chunk of time where there was this moment to do something about history and then new Who showed up and we gained it back.
What we’re talking about today is the real history behind the history behind Doctor Who. We know from the beginning the show was meant to teach history. It was a children’s program and I think that’s a really lovely idea and so they began with two teachers as companions. That was so intentional and it worked. It was a great way to warm people up and you had to have people who knew something about where they were going. Who had something to say and of course we had a student. You have to have someone you can talk to right? So it was a really lovely blend of characters.The very — one of the earliest ones they did went into the world of the Romans. Everyone’s always fascinated by the Romans and I think what’s really interesting is, sadly, just a little bit later, Highlanders was the last historical one they produced in that early period. They decided it wasn’t what the audience wanted. What did the audience want? Audience:Gimmicks and Robots? Duh, Daleks, right? The Daleks showed up and that was it they were like oh no no this is what the audience is coming for. Forget that history. Forget that study. Don’t learn anything.It’s okay. Also we know that once we get to John Pertwee and he’s trapped on Earth he can’t travel. So there’s no way he’s going to go into the past. So we lose a chunk of time where there was this moment to do something about history and then new Who showed up and we gained it back.

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01 Introduction from The Real History Behind the Historic Episodes of Doctor Who with Dr. Rosanne Welch – SD Who Con 2023

Transcript:

well welcome everybody very nice to see everybody um I’m glad that the title sounded interesting I hope that the entire presentation will prove interesting um I am Rosanne Welch I teach at a couple places actually because that’s how you do it these days uh Steven’s college is actually in Missouri but we run an uh MFA in screenwriting here in Los Angeles well here north of here in Los Angeles um and so that’s my specialty I was a television writer for about 20 years and then I got into Academia so I studied history because I wasn’t sure I wanted to study writing so I ended up doing a lot of history stuff which was fascinating um and so today we’re going to look at this show that we all love which started out to teach history and how much of it you know is real and how much is fake um and these are kind of the breath of the place that I want to cover um I come from as I said TV writing so I was on all these shows in the past and even on a show like Touch by an Angel we would deal with history because angels of course last forever it was a traveling Angels show where the Angels happen to be Angels but right stylistically The Fugitive is a traveling Angel show MacGyver is a traveling Angel show Doctor Who is a traveling Angel show someone who just goes from place to place and helps other people out and I think that’s really really cool um and then like I said I got a PhD at Claremont University also in slightly above us a couple hours and that’s where I focused on history for a while before I went back into working and writing so that’s where I’m sort of interested in both of these areas and I think we see that show up in Doctor Who um I’m also on the editorial board for these various journals so very interested in how writing is presented to people and how stories are told um I was extremely lucky uh the the magazine of The Writers Guild written by magazine uh I was on the board for that like I said and the editor knew that I was a huge Doctor Who fan so in that period when Russell came to town and did that fourth season of Torchwood here in town um he called me the editor called me and said we’re going to interview him would you like to be the one to talk to him to which I said uh yeah can I do that right away and it was great because as most of these things go the pr person set me up in a room with Russell and it was this Glass Room in the middle of this fancy place in in in Santa Monica and uh the guy said well you have 20 minutes and I was like I can do this in 20 minutes right I’m happy to be here and 20 minutes passed and you saw the pr guy open the door and poke in and Russell was like I’m not done yet and you kicked the pr guy because I knew what I was talking about and I was asking him these really interesting questions and he was having such a great time we ended up talking for an hour and you just saw the man walk around looking but he didn’t want to poke his head in again and get yelled at so it was a marvelous and fun time and this um interview is online uh on this particular website um which is on the writer Guild website and I’ve I’ve also written a bunch of books not all about Doctor Who these three happen to be about Doctor Who and just got me very interested in analyzing the show and why has it been so popular for so long we know it’s provided us a really interesting character who obviously there are many versions of and we’re all very happy to see all those different versions but why else right why else does it stick with us the latest book is the one that’s right up here and it’s about Jodi’s era hello um because that was of course a very iconic moment in all Television right

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The Real History Behind the Historic Episodes of Doctor Who with Dr. Rosanne Welch – SD Who Con 2023 (Complete)

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27 Conclusion from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

So I think she’s a pretty cool lady all around. I think it’s cool to realize how much of an effect this movie has had on film history. If you are a die-hard fan and you watch it for Christmas, even though it’s not a Christmas movie, you’ll notice the big moment at the end is that all through the movie she’s defined herself as Holly Gennaro which is her maiden name because they’re separated but in the end when they make up and she runs to the police and they say something about our you so and so she says Holly Maclean. She takes his name back. So she’s doing exactly a homage to that moment. In the same way, some 20 years later — this is 1988 — in Notting Hill, we finally have a guy who doesn’t mind when they call him Mr Scott which is Anna Scott’s name right? That’s not his last name but he’s now fine with a wife who is five million times more famous than he will ever be. So our society had come to this point one assumes in 1999 and Dorothy yourself has been homaged and written about. Fitzgerald who knew her personally wrote about her in The Last Tycoon. She’s one of the characters in there. She’s in this Broadway play as a character and if you like the Gilmore Girls at all Amy Sherman Palladino’s production company is called “Dorothy Parker Drank Here.” That’s how popular she maintains in the modern world. I got a bunch of clips you can see at another time because we don’t have time. I always like to offer up a bibliography because you should know there’s a lot of stuff you could study and that’s it. That’s everything I can say in a nutshell about A Star is Born.

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Connections at conferences matter! Through the most recent SCMS, I met Vicki Callahan, whose film history focus right now is on Mabel Normand. When she learned I could put together a lecture on the importance of the female voice in the A Star is Born franchise she asked me to give that lecture to her master students.

It made for a great opportunity for me to hone the ideas I’m working on for a chapter on that franchise that I’m writing for a new book from Bloomsbury: The Bloomsbury Handbook Of International Screenplay Theory. It’s always nice when one piece of research can be purposed in other ways – and it’s always fun revisiting such a female-centric film franchise – one that drew the talents of such powerful performers as Janet Gaynor, Judy Garland, Barbara Streisand, and Lady Gaga.

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26 Dorothy Parker and Social Justice from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

I think it’s important to remember what it could have been if we’d had a chance to see a Whitney Houston version. I think that would have been an incredible movie. I’m still bummed I’m never going to get to see it and I think it’d really be cool if Dorothy had lived to see it all but she didn’t. She died in 1967 and I think it’s interesting to point out why it is Martin Luther King in this picture. People may or may not know that if you buy any of her writing — if you buy the portable Dorothy Parker — you will find that she gave all her money, when she died, to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. She did not know, of course, that he would die a year later and all of his estate went to the NAACP. So if you buy any of her writing, you’re supporting the NAACP and that’s because even as a young woman at the age of 27 she was reviewing broadway plays and she reviewed Emperor Jones and she had this quote about how people — how the producers in Broadway at that time — because it wasn’t you know she wasn’t involved in Hollywood — they were wasting the genius of the African-American community. Obviously, she’s using word of the day but she recognized the genius that was being lost. So she wanted to support the cause of social — civil rights — social justice and civil rights and I think that’s pretty cool.

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25 How Did The Characters Grow? from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

Think about how men feel today. I think men have changed. That’s why they gave more attention to Bradley Cooper’s character. There are seven million men who are sort of stay-at-home dads. That’s a huge thing. That’s a huge difference. There are a lot more men getting used to the fact that their wives will have more money than they do right? Colleges are like 60% women, 40% men which means you’re likely to be in a marriage where your wife will make more money than you, and your generation is likely to be more comfortable with that. I think that’s a good thing. I think it’s important to see that the female characters grow a little bit in every one of these iterations. The last two are more ethnic women. That wouldn’t have happened before right? Barbara is so clearly a Jewish woman and very proud of it and Allie represents herself as a Sicilian American woman. Her father is a Sicilian guy who owns a bunch of limos, you know. He’s a driver for a limo company. This is a very New York Sicilian kind of thing. In both cases, the women in these last two films — the female performers — wrote the songs they had their characters sing, and they both won Academy Awards for writing one of those songs. Which is a huge deal right to me again making it more of a female franchise. Allie accepts more of the stuff that happened to Janet Gaynor. You know, look at me. Check me out. Make sure that you know I can change. I’ll do anything you want to be successful. She accepts the dancers and things she doesn’t need and in this case, people feel like she was more on her own because she didn’t say I’m Mrs. anybody but she took his name which was again following that pattern of respecting him. So I think it’s really important to remember them.

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24 All About The Women…from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

This is the only time they made separate posters and focused on them. Almost every movie iteration you see them both together because it’s a love story. That’s what you’re being told in that poster. I don’t know what these posters are telling you except do you know the title of the movie then you’ll understand but I had several students who never knew it was a remake when they went to see it. So they had no idea. The title meant nothing to them. It’s always the female that carries the story right? This is this giant poster of Ally. That’s what this is all about. All these women are the reasons these movies were made in the first place. That’s what drew the box office. That’s what drew the studios to support and every one of these is the story of a woman doing something new against the culture of her time. Facing one of the various waves of feminism right? If you think about 1937 women had had the vote for under 20 years. A bunch of women were still not voting because their husbands wouldn’t let them even though it was legal right and 54 we’re 10 years after the end of the war and the Rosie the Riveter and all that stuff when women were told to go back home, put on your pearls, and start vacuuming right? Don’t try to be in the man’s world. That’s your job. We get around to 76 and we’re in the second wave of feminism. That’s just three years after Roe versus Wade and we’re still doing the equal pay marches. We’re still looking for equal pay and if you get around to the current version, it’s ten years after the Lilly Ledbetter act, which gave fair pay to people doing the same job. So each of these movies takes place in their female characters working truly in a world where there were still feminist issues going on. Which i think is also part of what Dorothy started with.

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23 More on The Bradley Cooper Version…from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

In this scene, and these are quotes from Bradley Cooper as he was making the film he’s being interviewed right, he says he’s on stage trying to support her but his demons won’t let him right? So we still have the debacle but it’s not because he wants to ruin her night. He’s trying to be there to support her and then it’s embarrassing and terrible and sad and also he says that at the end of the movie, she’s just starting right and what she’s going to create is going to be bigger than what we’ve seen prior. That means her movie isn’t this movie — that her movie is the next one which will never be made. That means this is the Jackson Maine story and that’s not what I signed up for. I signed up for the star — the female star — being born. So I think that’s a huge change that he as a male writer has brought to this franchise. You look at the writing credits, right? So if Bradley wrote it with this guy Will Fetters. If you go to the Writers Guild when you have time when it’s open again in the library, they have a copy of the first draft and if you read it to compare to the film that you saw in 2019 you will be shocked because it is not brilliant. It is this guy who’s an Academy Award winner for Forrest Gump and I think he has two Academy Awards, Eric Roth who came in to do the rewrite that really molded the piece but he’s taking the ideas that Bradley Cooper had which are to focus more on Jackson Maine’s character. They base themselves on the Moss Heart screenplay, right? So by the time we’re done with this Dorothy’s name has finally disappeared entirely even though all the bones of it are really still there and really still her if you ask me.

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22 The Bradley Cooper Version?…from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

Now I tend to call this the Bradley Cooper version and as Jacob asked me”Do I like it?” I like it to the extent that I like the bones of this story but because a male wrote it, and had two other male screenwriters rewrite him, it becomes his story. It becomes the Jackson Maine story. We have much more focus on his character, his backstory, and while giving a female superstar one name seems modern, in many ways it erases part of her own history. What is her actual last name right? A female character without a last name is not one who’s been thought through all the way, I would say in reading a script. So in this case, we focus so much on his backstory. So much about his own family. It’s his brother that’s part of the story. So much is more about the star who’s dying than the star who is being born in this movie. She doesn’t really have the same agency. Certainly not that Barbra Streisand gave her character. Really not that we had out of Julie or Janet either.