On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch
Writing, Film, Television and More!
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
ANNIE
You make a million decisions that mean nothing, and then one day you order take-out and it changes your life.
Thanks to the gracious invitation from my Screenwriting Research Network colleague Paolo Russo – and a grant he was able to procure (and in the before-Covid time) I was able to spend a week at Oxford Brookes University working with the screenwriting masters students in Paolo’s course. At the culmination of the week, I gave this lecture on how writers rooms worked in the States.
Transcript:
What happens with writers rooms because this is the place where work gets done. Where stories get told, created, honed, in a particular way. The very beginning, this is what everybody thought. This is a writer’s room because comedies did use them. Comedians, we’re used to having three or four guys — generally, always guys — who travel with them and help them make funnier jokes. In America that was best seen in the Dick Van Dyke Show which you can see on youtube in a million different ways and Sally Rogers was the only woman anybody ever saw who wrote television which was kind of shocking but many women who came later defined her as a role model because that told them they could get in a room someday right? If they found the right kind of guys who would let them in.
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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!
† Available from the LA Public Library
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Great TV and Movies are built around the theme, you have to have friends. You have to have friends you can trust.
Look how powerful that has been. We need that message.
We go to movies and television shows – we go to stories – to learn that message.
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
Screenwriter and director Sue Clayton and academic Shohini Chaudhuri consider storytelling structures in Bhutan, a country that has, until recently, been relatively culturally isolated but is now moving towards entering the global stage. As in the rest of South Asia, the dominant cinematic model in Bhutan is that of Bollywood, yet Buddhism, the oral tradition and supernatural beliefs form a rich repertoire of stories that screenwriters of the emerging film industry are increasingly attempting to mine. In this article, we show how cinematic storytelling in Bhutan functions as a kind of ‘secondary orality’ through our analyses of an earlier international co-production Travellers and Magicians (2003), two local DV films, and the film project that Clayton is developing in dialogue with Bhutanese writers, Jumolhari. We argue that Bhutan’s Buddhist, animist and oral traditions challenge and transform classically established cinema conventions of story structure, decentring individual human subjectivity as the controlling force and producing an altogether different kind of hero’s journey.
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!
* 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!
Watch this entire presentation
![44 Samantha! from Brazil from Why Researching Screenwriters Has Always Mattered [Video] (1 minute)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/rmw-sao-paolo-44.png)
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Transcript:
In watching Brazilian television I found Samanta! which I thought is adorable. I’m amazed we haven’t copied that in the United States yet because this experience of being a child star is something that is, sadly, universal and I think that it’s important to realize that a program can travel to many cultures because themes are universal and that’s why when we start writing from a theme we know that it’s something that going to work. We talked about Harry Potter this morning. It amazes me that we’re talking about a billion-dollar piece of merchandise that is entirely built around the theme, you have to have friends. You have to have friends you can trust. That’s all. That’s the theme of every single book and every single movie and look how powerful that has been. We need that message. We go to movies and television shows, we go to stories, to learn those messages.
Watch this entire presentation
A Note About This Presentation
A clip from my keynote speech at the 10th Screenwriters´(hi)Stories Seminar for the interdisciplinary Graduation Program in “Education, Art, and History of Culture”, in Mackenzie Presbyterian University, at São Paulo, SP, Brazil, focused on the topic “Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered.” I was especially pleased with the passion these young scholars have toward screenwriting and it’s importance in transmitting culture across the man-made borders of our world.
To understand the world we have to understand its stories and to understand the world’s stories we must understand the world’s storytellers. A century ago and longer those people would have been the novelists of any particular country but since the invention of film, the storytellers who reach the most people with their ideas and their lessons have been the screenwriters. My teaching philosophy is that: Words matter, Writers matter, and Women writers matte, r so women writers are my focus because they have been the far less researched and yet they are over half the population. We cannot tell the stories of the people until we know what stories the mothers have passed down to their children. Those are the stories that last. Now is the time to research screenwriters of all cultures and the stories they tell because people are finally recognizing the work of writers and appreciating how their favorite stories took shape on the page long before they were cast, or filmed, or edited. But also because streaming services make the stories of many cultures now available to a much wider world than ever before.
Many thanks to Glaucia Davino for the invitation.
* 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!
† Available from the LA Public Library
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
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
HARRY
Men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.
![05 Women Writers Matter from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (27 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/rmw-oxford-brookes-05.png)
Thanks to the gracious invitation from my Screenwriting Research Network colleague Paolo Russo – and a grant he was able to procure (and in the before-Covid time) I was able to spend a week at Oxford Brookes University working with the screenwriting masters students in Paolo’s course. At the culmination of the week, I gave this lecture on how writers rooms worked in the States.
Transcript:
Women writers have always mattered. They certainly matter to me but we do not teach them very often and that’s a choice of the people who put classes together 50, 60, 80 years ago and didn’t mention the women. So I mention them a lot. These are women that you should know. These are women from American film history. There are women in English film history equally important. Hopefully, you’re having that covered in your classes.
Watch this entire presentation
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
* 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!
† Available from the LA Public Library
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
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
Female fantasy and postfeminist politics in Nora Ephron’s screenplays by Roberta Garrett
The article examines and re-evaluates Nora Ephron’s screenplays; it argues that Ephron’s popularity with female viewers, and her association with the derided category of ‘chick-flicks’, has caused critics to overlook her important contribution to female screenwriting in the last twenty years. Since the late 1980s, Ephron has created a number of highly successful mainstream, popular screenplays that skilfully articulate and express the conflicting pressures experienced by young women, while still offering a positive view of ‘feminine’ culture. Through an analysis of key features of Ephron’s romantic comedies – such as the characteristics of the Ephron heroine, the use of parallel narrative and the symbolic significance of mother/daughter relationships, the article argues that Ephron’s narratives offset specific negative cultural stereotypes of single and professional women from the 1990s and noughties through a sympathetic, feminist-influenced approach to contemporary gender roles, expectations and courtship rituals. Ephron’s screenplays offer an uplifting vision of feminine culture and attributes in which patriarchal attitudes are countered and defeated by the optimism, resourcefulness and integrity of the female heroine.
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!
* 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!
Watch this entire presentation
![43 Murdoch Mysteries from Canada from Why Researching Screenwriters Has Always Mattered [Video] (1 minute)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/rmw-sao-paolo-43.png)
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
Transcript:
This is a police program it’s from the police — it’s a period drama. So it’s the police in 1902 in Toronto, Canada and so they don’t have guns and for an American to watch a policeman who can arrest people without putting a gun in their face is an amazing experience because we’re far too used to shoot-’em-ups right? So i am pleased with the idea that a younger generation of children are watching people do this job without violence and he’s the most famous detective. It’s the number one show in Canada. So i love the idea that you know you would think that we know a lot about Canada. The other funny thing is because it’s a period drama, they introduce us to famous Canadians in history — people who grow up to be Prime Ministers or one was the first woman lawyer in Canada and we never study Canadian history in the United States, so we’ll watch the program and that’s how I’ve learned more Canadian history in my life.
Watch this entire presentation
A Note About This Presentation
A clip from my keynote speech at the 10th Screenwriters´(hi)Stories Seminar for the interdisciplinary Graduation Program in “Education, Art, and History of Culture”, in Mackenzie Presbyterian University, at São Paulo, SP, Brazil, focused on the topic “Why Researching Screenwriters (has Always) Mattered.” I was especially pleased with the passion these young scholars have toward screenwriting and it’s importance in transmitting culture across the man-made borders of our world.
To understand the world we have to understand its stories and to understand the world’s stories we must understand the world’s storytellers. A century ago and longer those people would have been the novelists of any particular country but since the invention of film, the storytellers who reach the most people with their ideas and their lessons have been the screenwriters. My teaching philosophy is that: Words matter, Writers matter, and Women writers matte, r so women writers are my focus because they have been the far less researched and yet they are over half the population. We cannot tell the stories of the people until we know what stories the mothers have passed down to their children. Those are the stories that last. Now is the time to research screenwriters of all cultures and the stories they tell because people are finally recognizing the work of writers and appreciating how their favorite stories took shape on the page long before they were cast, or filmed, or edited. But also because streaming services make the stories of many cultures now available to a much wider world than ever before.
Many thanks to Glaucia Davino for the invitation.
* 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!
† Available from the LA Public Library
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: RSS
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.