screenwriting research network – Page 13 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

11 Donald Bellisario from How The Chaos Of Collaboration in the Writers Room Created Golden Age Television [Video]

With the full recording of “How The Chaos Of Collaboration in the Writers Room Created Golden Age Television”

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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

Don Belisario gave us the military on television and that is a very distinct voice in America. It speaks to a part of the population that doesn’t feel they’re serviced by television right which they think is all run by liberal elites. So to glorify our military is the thing that is very popular in some parts of the country and that’s because Don Belisario was from the military. So he wanted to express that part of his life in writing.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V4 Issue 3: The pleasure of immersion: Some thoughts on how The Singing Detective sustains narrative by Anne Karpf

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

The pleasure of immersion: Some thoughts on how The Singing Detective sustains narrative by Anne Karpf

This article argues that while Dennis Potter’s television drama series The Singing Detective is commonly celebrated for its multi-layered narrative and the post-modern way that it played with genre, another of its critical features has remained relatively neglected: the sustained narrative pleasure that it afforded. It suggests that Potter allowed viewers the deep immersive experience of realist TV drama and storytelling, even while he was experimenting with narrative, so providing a bridge between modernist and traditional forms, and rewarding viewers (who had to try and integrate the series’ different fragments and layers into some sort of quasi-cohesive narrative) with abundant dramatic gratification. Narrative, it claims, is not effaced, only displaced, partly onto the central character of Marlow, whose subjectivity unifies the fragmented narrative. Potter broke radically with the conventions of TV medical drama, and the painful experience of Marlow-as-patient acts as another binding agent.

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.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V4 Issue 3: Chaos, culture and fantasy: The television plays of Howard Schuman by Leah Panos

Chaos, culture and fantasy: The television plays of Howard Schuman by Leah Panos

The single plays of American ex-pat playwright Howard Schuman produced for British television between 1973 and 1983 have received little critical attention. Written in a distinctly un-British madcap, non-naturalistic and often pulpy ‘B movie’ style, they centre around caricatured, hysterical and/or camp characters and make frequent references to popular culture. This article provides a general survey of Schuman’s plays and analyses his sensibility as a screenwriter, drawing extensively on material from interviews with the writer. The article’s particular focus is how and why different cultural forms including music, film and theatre are used and referred to in Schuman’s plays, and how this conditions the plays’ narrative content and visual and aural form. It also considers the reception of Schuman’s plays and their status as non-naturalistic dramas that engage heavily with American pop culture, within the context of British drama. Finally, it explores the writer’s relationship to style and aesthetics, and considers how his written works have been enhanced through creative design decisions, comparing his directions (in one of his scripts) with the realized play to reflect on the use of key devices.

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10 Steven Bochco from How The Chaos Of Collaboration in the Writers Room Created Golden Age Television [Video]

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Transcript

Then, of course , we have Steven Bochco, who gave us — he, as was said in the keynote, the multi-level story, many characters with different goals. He brought that to television in a way that hadn’t existed before. Adam-12 is a very basic, two guys do cop things all day. This was now groups of people. Here we had the policemen with their own personal lives at home. Later will have LA Law. The lawyers with their own personal lives and NYPD Lue. So that was what Bochco brought to television.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V4 Issue 3: Bridges and gaps: The Singing Detective’s serial afterlife by Sean O’Sullivan

Bridges and gaps: The Singing Detective’s serial afterlife by Sean O’Sullivan

The Singing Detective has long been considered a high point of televisual storytelling. But what is its specific legacy as a serial narrative, particularly in the contemporary U.S. context of ambitious dramas? In many ways, the experiment of The Singing Detective remains an outlier. If the likes of Mad Men and The Sopranos have re-invigorated seriality by emphasizing the gaps between episodes—by making the narrative broken rather than connected—The Singing Detective’s continuing contribution lies in its insistence on bridging the disparate parts that make a serial: old and new, sound and image, memory and imagination, ritual and eccentricity.

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A Woman Wrote That – 21 in a series – Bewitched (2005), Writer, Nora Ephron

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

UNCLE ARTHUR

Do you want the long version or the short version? Keep in mind, the long version is in Aramaic.

Bewitched on IMDB
Bewitched on Wikipedia
Nora Ephron on Wikipedia and IMDB
Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

Dr. Rosanne Welch and Intellect Editor James Campbell Talk Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting, The Journal of Screenwriting, and Other Work [Video] (1 hour)

One of the benefits of attending conferences is that you can meet the editors from the companies that have published some of your books face to face. That happened at the recent SCMS conference where I met Intellect editor James Campbell and he invited me to be a guest on his InstagramLive show.

We chatted about my work with the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting, and then my work with co-editor Rose Ferrell on the Journal of Screenwriting’s special issue on Women in Screenwriting (Volume 11, Number 3) that came out recently and which featured articles about an international set of female screenwriters from Syria, Argentina, China and Canada (to name a few).

We even had time to nerd out on our own favorite classic films across the eras which brought up fun memories of Angels with Dirty Faces, Back to the Future, Bonnie and Clyde, and of course, all things Star Wars from the original 3 to The Mandalorian. It’s always so fun to talk to fellow cinephiles.

With Intellect Books Editor James Campbell (@IntellectBooks)

Speaking with Dr. Rosanne Welch, Author, teacher, and television screenwriter. Today we cover everything from women in screenwriting to our favorite Jimmy Cagney movies and Friends.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V4 Issue 2: The screenwork as palimpsest by Rosamund Davies

Don’t Look Now: The screenwork as palimpsest by Rosamund Davies

The development of the screen idea is a dynamic, interactive process, involving a range of documents and collaborators. This article will consider the extra layer that adaptation from prose fiction to script adds to this process. Taking as my example the short story by Daphne du Maurier, Don’t Look Now, adapted for the screen by Allan Scott and Chris Bryant and subsequently directed by Nicolas Roeg (1973), I will focus in particular on the adaptation of narrative voice, from short story to screen: examining narration strategies in the short story, screenplay drafts and film, and the relationship between them. My discussion will explore the relevance of Ferrer and Groden’s notion of the creative process as an ‘always virtually present’ background process, of which each element of text and avant-texte constitutes but one manifestation. It will also introduce the figure of the palimpsest, considering how it might illuminate an understanding of the screenwork as constructed through the various layers that have contributed to its genesis, producing a multiple rather than a singular entity.

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Dr. Rosanne Welch and Intellect Editor James Campbell Talk The Journal of Screenwriting and Others – Instagram Live – Wed, March 24, 2021, 10am PDT

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.

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V4 Issue 2: Tracing the voice of the auteur: Persona and the Ingmar Bergman Archive by Anna Sofia Rossholm

Tracing the voice of the auteur: Persona and the Ingmar Bergman Archive by Anna Sofia Rossholm

This article discusses the Ingmar Bergman Archive, a donation by Bergman himself, mainly consisting of notebooks, manuscripts, production documents and letters, as well as the screenwriting process behind the film Persona (1966). The study approaches the digital manuscript archive as an interface that lends itself to an understanding of the artwork as continuous movement of transformation across media, an understanding that also links to aesthetical ideas on the relations between words and images expressed in Bergman’s cinematographic work. The study opens with a discussion of these issues and continues with a reading of the self-reflexive film Persona in order to examine how the explicit reflections on the mediation are negotiated across notebook drafts and scripts. The different phases in the process of creation – from notes and drafts to script versions and film – reflect on the transitory nature of the text as well as drawing on the specificities of each form of expression.

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* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs
** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!