television – Page 4 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

01 Introduction from The Doctor Who Changed the TV Universe – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

Transcript:

Today is going to be about how our show “Doctor Who” changed the television Universe because it really has had great a great effect in what we see on TV today and I think people don’t even necessarily recognize the power of this one show. So that’s what we’re going to talk about. As we’ve discussed in the past and I always do this just because in case there’s new people but you all know me. So you know what I’ve done and blah blah that I have so I’m going to skip through all this stuff and get to the meat of what we’re doing which is how it changed the TV Universe. I’m gonna say right off the bat, we had never done a spin-off that would take place in another country. That we would take “Torchwood” and do “Miracle Day”– which we all have our opinions on. I’m not a huge fan of “Miracle Day” – but the idea that they transported a show to another country right? It got a new staff of people and gave it that different feeling. That’s huge and I’ve not seen another show do that yet. So the power that they could say we want to try seeing what would happen if we moved to the States and got this other feeling. So to me that’s always big and of course, he really wanted to work with Jane Espenson who I love and adore from “Buffy (The Vampire Slayer)” and many other shows. So there was this cross-cultural respect for the kind of work that happens someplace else.

In this presentation given at the 2022 San Diego WhoCon I had the chance to trace the many ways Doctor Who changed the TV universe. By focusing on the interesting and innovative things the many writers did with the show across the years we were able to see the Who footprint by becoming the first narrative program to reach 50 years on the air, the first to create a spin-off across the ocean, and a show alongside Star Trek that created the Con-craze that brought the world of cosplay to the mainstream. Perhaps most importantly, a love of Doctor Who lead more Americans to watch programming from other countries – from Korean dramas to Mexican telenovelas – which has so enriched our culture.

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The Doctor Who Changed the TV Universe (Full Presentation) – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

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The Doctor Who Changed the TV Universe (Full Presentation) – Dr. Rosanne Welch

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24 Conclusion from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

Host: I know it’s always so heartening when something turns up that was thought to be lost and there may still be some Treasures out there and people are discovering new things every day and that’s what you know of course of interest to us at the Museum – finding those rare rare voices that luckily were preserved in some way or other and just bringing them to light more.

Rosanne: Well and that’s what I always tell students too. If you go to places like museums you know when my students are in town – they’re low residency but they come in town once twice a year – and we’ll go to The Autry. We’ll go to the Herrick. We’ll go to different places but what – even long before I did this job – I would go to The Autry with my son because of course cowboy stuff cool but also you look at the photographs of who the Cowboys right and we all know they weren’t John Wayne. We all know that wasn’t who it was right? They were the Mexican Americans and they were Chinese Americans and you see that in the photographs but movies came along and made them all Caucasian and that’s ridiculous but that became the myth right? So the more we look at the real history the more we can tell those real stories. I love research.

Host: Me too. Well, thanks so much for joining us it was such a wonderful conversation and I especially I think I’ll take away this idea of a sort of community type stories in westerns particularly from our perspective – what are those western films that feature that Community story and is that a sort of more feminine point of view or a kind of women’s view of the West. That’s going to stick with me but as will many other points thanks so much for joining us.

Rosanne: Thanks for asking me. I love to talk about this clearly and I love The Autry

Museum

Host: Thanks

the archery Museum of the American West thanks our members and supporters

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. —

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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.

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23 The Importance of Archives from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

…and women are terrible at keeping track of their own archives. So many of these women threw away material. They cleaned out their houses. They were busy with kids. They didn’t want all this clutter around when their career was over and it disappeared. I mean it’s a great story, Bess Meredyth – who wrote many, many films in the silent era – and then she married Michael Curtiz who is the director of Casablanca and there –as people study Casablanca often – he would be asked the question on the set and had to leave to figure it out and they knew he went home to call his wife to help him figure out the story problem. Then he’d come back and her son wrote a biography of her. He also became a TV writer. Problem was he never thought to ask his mother about her career. When she was older it was like I didn’t imagine she did anything interesting. So even within our own families we don’t talk about the work that we do women particularly and that’s a mistake because then the stories die. So we need you know in the places where we have things like the Library of Congress and all the catalogs of film, we have to start going backward and preserving as much of female work as we can and work by African Americans. We have a lot of early African-American screenwriters where we know they existed because there are advertisements for their movies but the movies don’t exist anymore. So how can we study stuff that we can’t have access to.

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22 Preserving Women’s Film History from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

Host: So are there some ways that we as – like the work you’ve been doing with your research – that in terms of revising those kind of incomplete histories of the film industry. What steps can we take to actually repair that and have a more accurate Narrative of the past?

Rosanne: Oh wow. Well, of course, hire more women writers. Step one to get more of those stories that – hire more underrepresented voices to tell us the stories we haven’t heard before and once we’ve done that, we have to preserve this material. One of the issues again with why we don’t remember these women is when we started preserving films and doing the Library of Congress and the 100 Years of – all of that stuff – people kind of push the that wasn’t important. It was Charlie Chaplin and these other people and we preserved all their material. We didn’t really think about that when it comes to stuff done by women.

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21 Examples of the Heroine’s Journey from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

Host: What are the examples of the heroine’s journey? What are some of those the stories that are in the heroine’s journey format template? I’m curious.

Rosanne: Oh I would obviously “The Wizard of Oz” like I said. In a TV world, we claim that for “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” right? Very much so about that. The joke becomes you could say “Scooby-Doo” does that. It’s anything that involves a team coming together and so in a fun way that can also be sometimes a male-focused team. If you think about war movies they’re all about a team of people coming together for the betterment of each other. Even though they’re like the most dude movies and you could say the same thing about westerns. If it’s a group of people an Oregon Trail kind of thing or group of men in a town or the sheriff and a couple of his buddies. The heroine in terms of pulling away from being female and then pulling back into it, that tends to happen more often in sort of romantic comedy or something like “The Intern” where she’s trying to figure out how to be a leader of these other men and then she has to realize it’s about the nurturing that I do. That is better than me being more loud and annoying and stuff but I can make a list for you that I can have.

Host: Okay great. Well, I’ll claim “The Wizard of Oz” and “Buffy” as westerns. I think Sunnyvale – Sunnyvale? Is that – I think that’s in California we can call it

Rosanne: it is. That’s true. It is about making the town safe for the new inhabitants.

Host: Right.

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20 Diversity in the Room from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

But we’re also looking for news stories and the newer, most interesting ones. They’re gonna break through because the audience is so diverse and so wide and now we’re International right with Netflix and streaming and all that stuff. We can think about people we haven’t covered before and we know around the world other people will be interested in it. In the same way, we’re watching Japanese anime and you know Korean telenovelas and all that stuff.

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19 Claim Your Space in the Room from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

…and there’s a lot of dudes in town — really good guys — who are learning that wait a minute, we’re used to talking over women and all that sort of thing and we have to stop and let people finish their thoughts before we dive in with something else and then people forget things and then women also have to be good — you know the classic story is that you might pitch an idea and no one takes it up and 15 minutes later a guy pitches it in the writer’s room and then everyone’s like oh yeah let’s go with that. Then you have to say that’s exactly what I said 10 minutes ago and then they’ll all kind of oh yeah. You’re right. You have to claim your talent or other people will gladly walk over it. So I think those are behavioral things right but we don’t want to — we don’t have to be super dude-like to succeed. We just have to be strong and know that you’re good at what you do…and you’ll succeed.

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18 The Heroine’s Journey from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

For women particularly though, we know the world is still a boys club and so you have to be confident and you don’t want to be overly aggressive because then people say bad things about you and yet if you’re not, you don’t get through the sort of the clutter of everything. One of the cool things that we teach about is we all know “The Hero’s Journey” – which is what I talked about with Luke Skywalker – but “The Heroine’s Journey” is a thing that we teach right and Maureen Murdoch came up with that. “The Heroine’s Journey”, of course, is about a female character but it’s about what women learn from society which is generally if you want to succeed you have to act like a man. So you separate – your beginning of that movie – you separate from your girlishness and you start doing dude stuff and by the time you’re done with the movie you figure it out, no the only way to actually get forward is to use the talents that I have, perhaps inherently, because I’m a female and when I reconnect to how female I am then I succeed. So to me, that’s what women have to remember to do.

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34 Conclusion from In Conversation with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

Transcript:

Host: Well that’s about what we’ve got time for but is there anything you would like to add just at the end? I would just like to also like to shout out the “Journal of Screenwriting” again and want everyone to go and check out the special issues on women in screenwriting, which is really important and excellent work and the start of a lot more research coming out and focusing on women screenwriters and so thank you for putting that together. I’m really glad it came out and came out with Intellect. So yeah thanks for that.

Rosanne: Yes well it’s – in two years, in 2023, the SRN conference I’m gonna hold it on the Stephens College campus and it’s going to be the theme will be women in screenwriting. So we’ll get a whole lot more stuff and probably a publication will come out of that. So that would be exciting.

Host: I will I’ll definitely be coming to check that out in person when we can also go back to conferences again but yeah just everyone should check out the Screenwriting Network . Is it screenwriters Network?

Rosanne: The Screenwriting Research Network and it’s free to join if you’re an academic or a practitioner and it’s online. You can see our website and we have of course a Facebook page and all that stuff.

Host: Really oh and I should also say about the “Journal of Screenwriting.” There is free content online so you can download free articles from that journal publication. So I recommend people do that but yeah just thank you so much. It’s been a real honor. You really know your stuff and you wear many different hats you know. A practicing writer, a teacher, and an excellent scholar. So thanks for coming and joining us today. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

Rosanne: Well thanks you know. It’s another beautiful thing about conferences. We met because of SCMS without that we would not have met. So I appreciate this time and it’s been – it’s always fun to talk about this stuff because I’m a fan above everything else.

Host: We’re like cool nerds it’s interesting. Cool nerds. That’s what it is.

Well thanks, everyone for tuning in. We’ll be back again next Wednesday I don’t know who my guest would be yet so what’s this space and thank you again Rosanne Welch. It’s been amazing having you on. Have a great rest of your day and thank you again.

Rosanne: Thank you. Bye-bye.

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.

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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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