television – Page 18 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

02 On The Importance of Screenwriters from In Conversation with Dr. Rosanne Welch and Intellect Books [Video]

Transcript:

So I mostly am interested in that and screenwriting because in Hollywood the issue has always been — we have that “Auteur Theory” which has been fought about and we’ve argued about. We’re getting there but you still read in the newspapers the review of a film and they’ll say it belongs to the director. They’ll name you know so and so such and such film and maybe four paragraphs in you’ll find oh that person also wrote it. So they’re a writer-director. Why didn’t you say that right or five paragraphs in they’ll now mention who wrote the thing and you’re like well that’s what I want to know. That’s where the idea came from. I get it. Directors do cool things and they run the set and whatever but the theme and the characters and the dialogue — which is what we quote all the time — came from the writer and that’s the person that I feel like we should be — I don’t say they have to be higher than the director. Let’s get equal again, right, which again we were in the Silent Era. So that stuff interests me a lot.

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.

RMW Rosanne Signature for Web

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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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06 More On “She is wise and unafraid…” from The Difficulties and Delicacies of Writing the First Female Doctor in 50+ years [Video] [Doctor Who]

It was great to be able to attend this year’s SD WhoCon in San Diego and present this lecture on “The Difficulties and Delicacies of Writing the First Female Doctor in 50+ years” in which I discuss how successful I think showrunner Christopher Chibnall was in making that transition.

It gave me a chance to talk about the creative work of a showrunner/screenwriter while also reconnecting to some friends we had met at this same convention some 3 years ago – and to talk about one of my favorite subjects – Doctor Who!

Transcript:

…but this line I really like. I also think it’s an example of how he promised to sort of give the show a bit of a female gaze right and I love all the dudes who’ve ever been on Doctor Who — well maybe not Colin Baker so much — but you know in general do love them all but he made a promise and I think he kept it. I think he didn’t just sort of gloss over and pretend and I think we’ll see that in the choice of guest characters, the choice of people we get to meet, right down to the fact that we met Ada Lovelace, who we’ve kind of heard about but I’ll still mention her in some classes and people don’t know who she is. So the fact that he’s giving a moment here for people to go oh oh that’s an interesting woman I need to know some more about and I think he scattered the show with those types of characters — those types of historical people we would not have met had he not kept in mind, I’ve promised to give this a kind of a different spin right? So that really impresses me.

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40 Artist-Scholars from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

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

Transcript:

Rosanne: Lots of people in town actually teach at some of the various schools because of course we’re in LA so there’s tons of schools that have film programs and screenwriting programs and all that stuff. So you get a lot of that blend. Now I really love the fact that in Europe they’re more structured around what I would call a scholar-artist because they get grants to make their films. So a lot of filmmakers are teachers at major universities and then they make movies and they get the money from the government to make the movies. We don’t quite do that here, but we’re seeing a little more of that. Certainly on the film festival circuit and stuff like that or you know for instance Kevin Wilmot, who got the oscar for co-writing Black Klansmen with Spike Lee, he’s a full-time professor at Kansas University. That’s what he does, He doesn’t want to live in LA or New York. He wants to write movies and he met Spike Lee at a film festival and they each had a movie up at the film festival early on in both their careers and they decided they liked each other. Speaking of networking, they started to collaborate and you know two years ago he won an Oscar and he went back — he flew back to Kansas the next day and put his Oscar on the lectern in front of his classroom and started talking.

Host: That’s so funny.

Rosanne: Yes to both worlds. That’s my idea of the best of both worlds.

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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01 Introduction and Stephens College MFA In TV and Screenwriting from In Conversation with Dr. Rosanne Welch and Intellect Books [Video]

Transcript:

James: I just want to say welcome to everyone who’s joining us today. This is In Conversation. We’ll be chatting for another 45 minutes or so. I’m very pleased to have Dr. Rosanne Welch with me today who is a practicing screenwriter with some serious writing credits to her CV, which we’ll get into as well, but also she runs an MFA program and works as a major researcher involved in Intellect’s Journal of Screenwriting which we can also definitely discuss. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about your research interest? Is it just screenwriting you focus on or is there other aspects of film and history?

Rosanne: Well it’s largely yes film history as well but it kind of always focuses on women in film history because they’ve sort of been left behind on the cutting room floor. We’re getting there we’re seeing more involvement in that. I actually had a great conversation with the documentarian from the BBC who found me because I put a lot of my lectures online and in one of them I discuss research that we’re trying to do into a woman named Jennie Louise Toussaint. She was an African-American screenwriter in the Silent Era but the problem is her work was not preserved right? The films we know disintegrated. There are no paper scripts around. We know she existed because of advertisements in newspapers advertising her films that were playing. So they noticed that I had mentioned her and just said here’s someone we need to find more research on and they’re doing a BBC documentary on famous sisters of famous brothers — on accomplished women who were sisters of famous brothers and her brother was a Harlem Renaissance photographer. So they were like do you know anything more about her so we can do more on her. This is what I have. We’re all building on the knowledge. I mean that’s what a journal is for. We build on the knowledge that other people have found and eventually we get a bigger picture that didn’t exist.

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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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05 “She is wise and unafraid…” from The Difficulties and Delicacies of Writing the First Female Doctor in 50+ years [Video] [Doctor Who]

Transcript:

Because I do know — I have two very favorite — yeah my very favorite fandoms are Doctor Who and The Monkees and somebody did this lovely piece of fan art which I just fell in love with so I love how fandom blends together and you know the whole community that you create with other people who love what you love but today we’re going to talk about the writing of this new female Doctor right? I used to actually have a Matt outfit I like to wear and I had a Peter outfit that I like to wear but now I’m going to have to kind of have to go with the fact that hello I bought this two years ago here at WhoCon, so it’s really fun. Anyway, this was actually the title and this is a line right from the first episode. What I loved is this business right? “She’s wise and unafraid and I believe in her.” One of the things I noticed about what Chibnall had to do right away and I know that we all have some gripes about some of the stuff he’s done but I think that he made some very good choices in the beginning and a lot of that has to do with writing and hiring some other very good writers who brought in some aspects of the show we hadn’t had before.

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39 More On Teaching? from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

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

Transcript:

…but I miss part of it right and you do miss trying to explain to people how it should be done because you can’t really do that on a tv show — maybe if you’re the showrunner but even then you’re hiring people that already know how to do it and they don’t want you to tell them how. They may listen to you and like roll their eyes because they have to because you’re paying the money but that’s not the same world right and I also think there wasn’t a lot of focus on women in this business for a long time and so I thought that was something that I could bring to a classroom was to really bring forward more young women who would be ready to tackle this business and really have a true understanding of it. So they’d know what to expect and sort of how to work around some of the bullshit and you know be good enough not to fall into any traps. So I just thought it would be you know — and I live in LA and TV comes and goes. You don’t always know when the next show will sell or when you get staffed on something. So good back — you know it’s always a good background if — I’ll just do this for a while and move and you know change around 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 My Writing from The Difficulties and Delicacies of Writing the First Female Doctor in 50+ years [Video] [Doctor Who]

Transcript:

So Written By Magazine. Journal of Screenwriting again obviously coming from that standpoint and California History. I do some pop culture for them so I’m trying to figure out how to get some Doctor Who in there right? A little — I’m a little behind on Matt having actually been in the West but maybe I’ll get something on there. This is the piece that I did for Written By and as I said it’s a sample over there. It was really fun to sort of sit in the room with him. I do think he’s one of my favorite writers and that made me very happy and then these are a bunch of other books and things that I’ve written so you kind of know where I’m coming from and where these opinions come from.

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38 Why Teaching? from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

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

Transcript:

Host: I guess I’ll ask, why why did you also want to teach?

Rosanne: I actually — my first job was as a high school teacher because I come from Ohio — a college in Ohio and there was no way you were going to convince your parents or anybody that like it was legitimate to think you’d get a job in television. So I had to get a real like get a degree in something real. So it was in high school and I taught literature and things like that for a couple years until I could make the move to California and I could make it because you could teach in Ohio. You could teach here. So I could get a long-distance job as a teacher which gave me a financial way to make a move like that. So I actually liked it. I missed it in a weird way. I mean certainly doesn’t pay as much as TV but there’s a lot of things you do as a teacher — there are skills you have and a lot of that translates into writing in that and pitching because pitching is like I’m giving a lecture and explaining an idea to you to make you love it so much you’ll pay me to do it. So that’s a skill. That little performance thing comes from a teaching background and I also think that television particularly because it’s — well was free and even if your parents are paying for it essentially is free — as opposed to movies you have to fork over 20 bucks to go see them. So television is like this giant podium that a teacher would stand at and lecture and a TV show and a movie — any piece of writing that’s good that sticks to you — has a message — is there with a theme about how you want other people to live their lives. A lesson that you wish other people would learn. So really writing is like being a teacher on steroids.

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.

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03 Russell T Davies from The Difficulties and Delicacies of Writing the First Female Doctor in 50+ years [Video] [Doctor Who]

Transcript:

I also am on the editorial board for different things. Written By Magazine is the magazine of the Writers Guild. I have a sample of it over there. I got lucky one time when Russell was in town doing Miracle Day the editor was like I know you’re a Doctor Who fan. Would you like to interview him and I was like yes I would love to sit in a room and chat with him and it turned out few journalists are as Whovian of a fan as I. So we ended up chatting longer than I was meant to be there and the publicist would walk by and go “Are you all done yet?” and I thought. oh, they’re going to kick me out, and then Russell was like in a minute and he’d send the publicist away. So I laughed.

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37 Finding Your Writing Process…from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

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

Transcript:

I have another friend who teaches a thing called “speed drafting” So then you figure out what’s your best way to work and his idea is that you should set a little timer — an hour and a half, two hours, whatever you think — and just keep going and if you have a problem — I need to research something– you just slug in a little thing — figure this out later — that sort of thing keep moving, keep moving and the next day you don’t go back and look at what you did the day before. You just take it from where you stopped and go. So you have a whole first draft as fast as possible and then you take the time to pick your way through and do the rewriting and fill in the stuff that you didn’t know along the way. That works for him. That gives him two hours a day of writing and that’s all he needs to get to a — and then it’s two hours of rewriting when he gets to that stage. So you find a process that works for you and then you make sure your lifestyle allows for that process.

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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