television – Page 41 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

34 More on Get Out from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute)

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Transcript:

A perfect example of taking horror and blending in social commentary right and putting those together so the horror is that one extra level above what you thought it could be right and that’s what makes it stand out. That’s what makes it Oscar-worthy right? He’s doing exactly what Toni Morrison did but doing it in a film. He’s still talking about the horror of slavery and what it meant to this country in a whole different type of story which I think is really cool. I think it’s cool because all of this is coming full circle now as Netflix is about excuse me CW is about to open a new show called The Shelley Society about Mary Shelley and all her buddies who battled monsters back in their own day which sounds an awful lot like a redo of Buffy, just with a famous character in it right? I think that’s going to be really fascinating. I really want that to work. It’s being done by the gentleman who’s doing Riverdale, which is taking the Archie comics and readapting them. I think that’s pretty cool.

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.

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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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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 2: Some attitudes and trajectories in screenwriting research by Steven Maras

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

Some attitudes and trajectories in screenwriting research by Steven Maras

An edited extract from a keynote address at the third Screenwriting Research Network conference, ‘Screenwriting Research: History, Theory and Practice’, at the University of Copenhagen in 2010,1 this piece focuses on what I have termed the ‘object problem’ in screenwriting research. I pay specific attention to how we might address the object problem by thinking about different attitudes and trajectories in screenwriting research.

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!

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** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out!

33 Get Out and The Last Boy from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 28 seconds)

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Transcript:

Now, I think it’s really important to think about also another thing that we use in our class. Jordan Peele, right? He wrote which horror film? Get Out. Thank you very much. He got an Oscar for writing that. That’s how different, unique, and creative that film is. He gave us not a final girl because if you haven’t seen the movie she’s a bad guy. Spoiler alert. He gave us the final guy. This is a movie about the final guy — the guy who survives where no one else survived before right? He sees the horror that’s happening and he uses his brain to get out of it. So I had to think about that. So does he qualify for these definitions? He is the last one left standing. All the other people who came before him have been incorporated you know white people have been put into their brains and it’s weird. Ehhh, I don’t know if he’s definitely young he’s not necessarily innocent because he and his girlfriend have definitely had sex right but he’s a really good nice guy so maybe he qualifies as innocent. I don’t know and then we think about in the end — spoiler alert — he kills the bad girl by strangling her right. Is that a feminine way to kill people? Poisoning is more a feminine thing. I don’t know but it’s not a masculine way either. So it’s a little bit right a little bit. Maybe it’s not the perfect definition but he’s definitely the last guy standing when we get to the end of this movie. Which is quite brilliant.

A Note About This Presentation

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

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 2: Re-writing Paul Laverty’s screenplay – The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006) by Jill Nelmes

Re-writing Paul Laverty’s screenplay – The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2006) by Jill Nelmes

This article analyses two drafts of Paul Laverty’s screenplay The Wind that Shakes the Barley (2004b, 2005), pointing out that the changes from the first draft to the second draft focus on a single protagonist and emphasize the narrative drive, prioritizing these over informational detail and scenes which do not have a clear narrative function. In this study, I argue, re-writing acts as a refining and filtering process, in which only the essential parts of the story are retained while the model of ‘cause’ then ‘effect’ is applied to ensure the linearity of the action.

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!

Reel Sisters of the Diaspora Film Festival Script Breakdown Session with Dr. Rosanne Welch and Dawn Comer Jefferson – Sunday, October 25, 2020

As the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting is one of the sponsors of the Reel Sisters of the Diaspora Film Festival I’ll be hosting (along with MFA mentor Dawn Comer Jefferson) a free script breakdown and Q & A with Nicole Ballivian (writer-director) for her 10 minute short Joe and the Shawl described as the story of “an adorable tow truck driver who really digs Kelli, a fellow North Carolinian, when he meets her as he changes her dead car battery. But Joe’s interest takes a sharp right turn when he learns that Kelli is a Muslim.”

If you’d like to virtually attend the event, register and join us

Sunday, October 25th
1pm-2:30pm (Pacific Time)
FREE
Register Here

For more information on the Joe and the Shawl, check out the film’s website

Joe & The Shawl: Bernie Sanders Teaser from Nicole Ballivian on Vimeo.

Joe & The Shawl – Official Trailer from Nicole Ballivian on Vimeo.

32 Women As Survivors from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (40 seconds)

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Transcript:

Now we’ve had a ton of final girls in movies. There was actually a final girl movie because of that trope right? So i think that’s kind of interesting, but what’s great is that after 11 Halloween sequels, they came back to Jamie Lee Curtis and said will you do another one of these movies and she said “Now I will only do it if we flip the whole damn thing and from now on I’m the survivor. She’s the survivor. She gets back at the guy who did that to them. That’s why she agreed to the movie to flip that trope over in her adulthood. She’s like why don’t we call women survivors? Why are they girls? They’re survivors. Let’s think about the language and how it’s used.

A Note About This Presentation

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

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 2: Britain’s First Suicide Bombers – The script and the screenwriter in dramatized documentary for television by Garry Lyons

Britain’s First Suicide Bombers – The script and the screenwriter in dramatized documentary for television by Garry Lyons

This article centres on a drama-documentary developed by the author, an experienced screenwriter, producer and academic. The project in question was a major featurelength film for the BBC about the first suicide attack carried out by UK citizens. Aside from the significant difficulties posed by the subject matter, the mixed-genre nature of the film made its development problematic, falling between two distinct and contrasting traditions of programme-making. This case study locates the project in the context of a rising fashion for dramadoc within the BBC post 2000, identifies unforeseen difficulties with screenwriting that arose with the use of the form, and illustrates how those difficulties became amplified in this particular production. The analysis deals with the status of the screenwriter in a process where the script is no longer sovereign, raising questions of authorship, division of labour and collaborative exchange. It contributes to the ongoing debate between documentary values of sobriety and objectivity as opposed to dramatic ones of inner truth and emotional understanding, and makes the case for an ‘accumulation of voices’ as a justifiable representation of reality in contrast to a linear expository narrative. Finally, it commends further study of mixed genre drama/ documentary as a way of reappraising orthodox screenwriting theory, offering as it does production methodologies that frequently dispense with the formal screenplay.

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!

31 The Importance of Names from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (53 seconds)

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Transcript:

Also, think about how important names are with your characters. You all know from your childhood Cruella de Ville. Y’all knew what that was really, of course, maybe not when you were five but eventually you caught on. She was the devil, right? Think about all the movie characters Luke Skywalker walks through the sky right? Han Solo flies alone. I guess you forget about Chewbacca and that right? Names mean something. Ginny Fields. Ginny is the nickname for Virginia which means her name is Virgin Fields. She’s never had sex. (Audience) She’s never been plowed. She has never been plowed. Seriously. That is literally what her name is telling you. Is that not crazy? That.. is it’s wonderful. She’s right. I love that. So you really have to think about, my gosh, what was that message telling young girls right and who decided that was the message they needed.

A Note About This Presentation

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

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 2: Greenaway’s books: Peter Greenaway’s published screenplays by Miguel Mota

Greenaway’s books: Peter Greenaway’s published screenplays by Miguel Mota

Greenaway’s published screenplays – screenplays produced and consumed as discrete material objects – function both as fluid, hybrid texts and as material books that stand ambivalently and therefore suggestively and productively poised between print and film technologies. Ranging from the early scripts published by Faber and Faber in the mid-to-late 1980s to the later and still-ongoing series of scripts produced by the French publisher Dis Voir, Greenaway’s published screenplays are fascinating examples of print film texts that produce and demand unique ways of reading and looking. By addressing these books as visual and material objects, distinct from the films, we might evince and extract from the pages of these published screenplays entirely new texts with a plurality of narrative possibilities, in which juxtapositions and relationships amongst different cultural discourses can give rise to innovative visual and verbal structures. Such an approach to Greenaway’s published film scripts as material events might contribute a curious but compelling chapter to the history of the ontology of the screenplay, affording the published script a visibility it often otherwise lacks.

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!

30 The “Final Girl” Trope from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (43 seconds)

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Transcript:

Now one of the things we have to think about — side note — when we think about horror movies again — is what they’re telling us. In this movie, as we know, spoiler alert, he’s the bad guy. Anthony Perkins was gay and by casting him they knew the audience would feel awkward about him. there would be something wrong with him They didn’t have to say what it was. They just knew society would find him wrong and so they cast him as the bad guy right? And so under all of this, what we’re saying is you can’t trust gay men. They’re dangerous. Don’t be near them. That’s the underlying concept behind Psycho. So I think that’s really — I have to think about what are the messages we’re getting from the stuff we’re watching and the stuff we’re reading and how do we counter those if they’re messages that we don’t want to have but it’s a good movie. It’s a good movie but have to think about that.

A Note About This Presentation

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

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