speaking – Page 20 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

09 Studio Contract Writers from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (46 seconds)

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:

Men — because they were mostly men — worked in writer’s pools. So you got a contract with the studio to be a Universal writer and then people who ran different shows — so they’d be just like in England is today — one guy, again generally a guy, who was in charge of the show and that person would go into the writer’s pool and say “Who’s free this week? I need an episode of…Generally, it was these kinds of shows. Columbo is still kind of famous today. The NBC Mystery Movie was like that. So they go I need a Columbo who’s got an idea and somebody would raise their hand and go “I’ve got an idea” and then they would write next week’s Columbo right? So they were in a pool of writers. Out of that pool came these men who were icons of the 80s and early 90s and it was because of their originality that they began to stand out and I really can’t stress that enough.

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08 Monkees Writers and History from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (1 minute)

Transcript:

I wrote this article for Written By which is about these writers and it was very interesting to go back and speak to them in their 80s about what their experience had been to write hippie characters in the 60s and it was all about how they shared stories. Some of them were more conservative. Some of them were already becoming hippies. Treva tells a funny story about her mother not understanding what it meant when she said she smoked pot. Her mother thought she was doing something in the kitchen. She didn’t divest her of that opinion right? So they all had a different attitude toward how they wrote but in one-hour dramas, things were done differently back in the day as everyone is fond of saying. They used writer pools. They would simply hire you under contract at a studio — Universal, Warner Brothers, Disney, whatever it was — and you literally sat on the line now that’s a that’s a pool of women typing. That’s how scripts were done before there were computers right? They had a bunch of women in a room. They had that ditto paper and you type and you get three copies with the little purple stuff and think about that. You’re doing that 24/7. If you’re doing Gone with the Wind, how many copies of that script do you have to consistently keep typing so that it’s ready.

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Dr. Rosanne Welch Speaks On “An Introduction to the Women of Early TV: There are More Women than Lucy to Love“ for the American Women Writers National Museum [Virtual via Zoom]

I’m thrilled to have been asked to make a presentation for the American Women Writers National Museum (AWWNM) on the topic of “An Introduction to the Women of Early TV: There are More Women than Lucy to Love“. I’ll be discussing the groundbreaking work of women from Gertrude Berg (one of the first women to create, write, produce and star in a long-running hit — The Goldbergs) to D.C. Fontana (Star Trek). —

RSVP Today!
Email AWWNM1@gmail.com

Wed Feb 10, 2021 noon-12:45 EDT

“An Introduction to the Women of Early TV: There are More Women than Lucy to Love“

Sponsored by: American Women Writers National Museum

Time & Place: noon-12:45 p.m. EDT / 9 AM PDT via Zoom

All AWWNM programs are now via Zoom until further notice. Invitations are sent via email to AWWNM’s mailing list. RSVPS are REQUIRED in order to receive a link to a specific program. If you would like an invitation, email request to AWWNM1@gmail.com.

Dr. Rosanne Welch, Executive Director of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting, Author, Historian and Book Reviews editor of the Journal of Screenwriting will profile pioneer women who created, produced and worked on many of America’s most wildly popular early TV Programs.

“My goal is to rescue these talented women from historical oblivion”, she said.

Some of the women writers she will discuss are:

Lucille Ball (1911-1989) of “I Love Lucy” fame, who also ran Desilu production company and greenlighted the blockbuster Star Trek productions.
Treva Silverman (1936- ) winner of two Emmy awards for the brilliant comedy The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
D.C. Fontana (Dorothy Catherine) Fontana (1939-2019) a story editor of Star Trek
Leigh Brackett (1915-1878) known as “Queen of the Space Opera” who wrote on or worked on timeless films: The Big Sleep (1946), Rio Bravo (1959), The Long Goodbye (1973) and The Empire Strike Back (1980).
Peg Lynch (1915-2015) She wrote about 11,000 scripts for radio and TV

Watch Dr. Rosanne Welch on What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video] (27 minutes)

The Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting is building a relationship with the Autry Museum of the American West since both organizations are devoted to bringing out more diverse and untold stories. Last year we were able to take our cohort of graduating MFA candidates to the museum’s theatre for a showing of Michael Wilson’s Salt of the Earth and we had plans to present a film of our choice this year – but of course the pandemic changed all that. Instead, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis asked me if I would sit for an interview about female screenwriters in the western genre and so “When Women Wrote Westerns” came to be a part of their “What Is a Western? Interview Series”.

I had a great time discussing so many wonderful women writers – from Jeanne MacPherson to D.C. Fontana to Edna Ferber to Emily Andras. If you love westerns I suggest you watch Josh’s other interviews covering everything from the work of Native Americans in Western movies to films in the western-horror hybrid. —

As part of a series exploring the significance of the Western genre and the ways in which the movies shape our understanding of the American West, Autry Curator Josh Garrett-Davis interviews Professor Rosanne Welch about the women screenwriters of Hollywood and their contributions to the Western genre.

Find more information at the Autry Museum of the American West

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07 The Monkees Writers Room from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (44 seconds)

Transcript:

Neil Simon actually wrote about writing for Sid Caesar in a play and that was all about glorifying what happened in the writer’s room. So it’s really a fun kind of play if you see it. I did some work on this tv show which is from the 60s. It’s also all on YouTube if you care to see it. It was a comedy about four guys who ran a rock and roll band. They’re literally still around and still touring. They’re in New Zealand right now. That’s how long-lasting the effect of the show was but these folks were all the writers of it including Treva Silverman — the woman up in the corner. She was the first woman to write alone on a series without a male partner — a husband or a guy who happened to work with her. That’s a big move. It seems ridiculous but that was a big moment in TV history.

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Dr. Rosanne Welch Hosts “Act Two: Transitioning to TV Writing from Previous Careers” for the WGA Foundation [Video]

During every workshop intensive for the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting I have the privilege of creating and moderating a panel of female screenwriters discussing various topics.

Our most recent panel focused on “Transitioning to Television” and included panelists who came to television from previous careers. This allowed me to talk to women who came to TV whose first careers included being a doctor, lobbyist, college professor and, of especially pride for our MFA program, a former Senior Physical Security Analyst for federal agencies, U.S. Army Reserve veteran.

All of them are now writing on major television shows and their advice and honesty was greatly appreciated. — Rosanne

For this session, we teamed up with Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting for a discussion on transitioning to TV writing from other careers. Learn how our panel of TV writers and producers made the jump to television, how their previous experiences inform their writing, and how that lens impacts their approach in the writers room.

Panelists are Zoanne Clack, M.D., MPH (Executive Producer, Grey’s Anatomy), Rashaan Dozier-Escalante (Staff Writer, SEAL Team), Akilah Green (Co-producer, Black Monday), and Calaya Michelle Stallworth, Ph.D (Executive Story Editor, Fear of the Walking Dead).
Moderated by Dr. Rosanne Welch, Director of Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting.

Filmed on January 13, 2021.

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06 Inside The Writers Room from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (43 seconds)

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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05 Women Writers Matter from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (27 seconds)

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.

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04 Down With The Auteur Theory from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (54 seconds)

Transcript:

Writers. Really. Matter. I think it’s really true The Auteur Theory — and I don’t want to pick on the French — hopefully, there’s no one french in here — I’m picking on you — not my probably looking at your French friend, right — many people are now tearing down the Auteur Theory because it’s ridiculous. The director is not the only person responsible for why a film works. It has always begun with a writer. Yes, it moves to a director but that’s a collaboration and we made a mistake. Some people have written about the fact that in the early days of film critique critics couldn’t go through two or three names of writers so they went to the director’s name because it was the only one person named and slowly that became the idea of who the auteur was right? It’s not true. Vince Gilligan, very famous in America for Breaking Dad. Really considered one of our best showrunners — one of our best television writers — pretty much says it and I agree with him.

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03 Why Writers Matter from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (41 seconds)

Transcript:

Likewise, writers are important. Writer comes before director when people are writer-directors because writers are more important. You cannot direct nothing. You cannot direct some people walking around a room right? Somebody has to say why they’re there and what they’re doing. So writers are very important and women writers — well this is one of my reasons why writers are important too — when you talk to friends about a movie you love, you do not generally say “remember the camera angle in scene five.” You say “remember the dialogue.” You quote dialogue to your friends. That’s the writer. That’s why the writer is more important. That’s why more people should want to be writers.

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