television – Page 44 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 1: Competitive writing: BBC Public Service television light entertainment and comedy in the 1970s and 1980s by Heather Sutherland

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

Competitive writing: BBC Public Service television light entertainment and comedy in the 1970s and 1980s by Heather Sutherland

Comedy has always been the least plausibly public service genre. It is entertaining and consequently seen as trivial, closest to commercial and often close to vulgar. Yet comedy remains the key to attracting audiences and is the aspect of programming most greedily eyed by the BBC’s competitors. This article examines how, facing severe competition during the 1970s and 1980s, in the shape of ITV and the arrival of Channel 4 in 1982, the BBC responded to the challenges of this competitive landscape, highlighting the Corporation’s approach to comedy writers and writing as a key competitive tactic. Whilst ITV and Channel 4 had their successes, the BBC, through its emphasis on organic as opposed to formula comedy forms, was able to articulate clearly the differences between its light entertainment and comedy scripts and those of the competitors. For instance, the absence of a commercial break allowed the development of more intricate plots and sub-plots, alongside in-depth characters; the structure of joke-telling adopted a more dramatic form, bringing to light wider themes, and resulting in comedic work that could inform, educate and entertain all at once. Furthermore, the nurturing approach experienced by writers working for the Corporation allowed the encouragement of new writers (to address new niche audiences) and the taking of risks in writing (particularly those under the heading alternative comedy), ultimately enabling writers to produce scripts that allowed the BBC to not only match its competitors, but to exceed them, principally with regard to the idea of what is termed here popular quality programming. As such, the history of the BBC’s approach to comedy writers and the styles and forms of BBC comedy writing can be a means of access to the core debates about what the BBC should do and produce as a public service; here is one strategy that was key to the Corporation’s defence of its public broadcaster status and its funding by licence fee. Its comedy department, scriptwriters and scripts act as an illustration of the shifts and tensions being experienced behind the scenes in the Corporation overall at this particular point in time.

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!

Beyond the Doctor: The Remarkable Verity Lambert via Medium

Female producers are pretty important, too. And they HAVE been around for a while.

Over on the BBC, Verity Lambert helped invent the longest running sci-fi series IN THE WORLD. My fav: Doctor Who. And after 50 years they have a female Doctor in the person of Jodie Whittaker. Lambert would be so proud. — Rosanne

Beyond the Doctor: The Remarkable Verity Lambert via Medium

There are few people who can claim to have left as indelible a print on British television as Verity Lambert. In a career that would last over forty-five years she would play a critical role in bringing a wealth of classic British serials to the screen, and one truly global phenomenon — Doctor Who.

The daughter of a London accountant, Verity entered the world of television via one of the few routes available to women at the time, or at least to those for whom acting held no interest — secretarial work. Blessed with a good education and eighteen months of secretarial school, she was able to find work in the press office at Grenada TV in 1956. Shortly after that, she moved on to become a shorthand typist at ABC. Further secretarial moves soon followed, as Lambert tried to engineer a move away from administration towards production. Her break finally came in 1958 with that appointment as a production assistant on Armchair Theatre.

Read more

20 Even More On Buffy from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 16 seconds)

Watch this entire presentation

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

I presented this holiday lecture “When Women Write Horror” on Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. Researching the many, many women who have written horror stories – in novels, films and television – brought new names to my attention who I am excited to start reading. I hope you will be, too!

Transcript:

The other thing that’s important about Buffy is that we’re going to blend in some LGBTQ stories in the course of time. We’re going to blend in the fact that these men in her life help but never save the day. In any other story, it’s the men who come along and save the damsel in distress. In this case, it’s the chick who saves the dudes in distress or through sharing the work they make the solution happen. One of the special things about Buffy was it is about how a woman masters a problem in a feminine way right? Sadly we tend to think that when boys learn how to save the day they learn how to master a weapon and go one on one with the bad guy. That’s what they’ve seen in a million movies — many movies that i enjoy myself. The way women do it is they gather a group around them and they empower that group to be as good as they can be together and then as a group they go forward and they save the day and that’s a feminine way of doing things that’s a very that’s a very teacherly way of doing things. Together we will learn this and we will master this thing and move on in the world and succeed. So i think the show did so many things from a feminine perspective and i think it’s because of those two ladies. That makes a big difference.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 2: Who Writes British Films: A Summary on the UKFC Report and a Call for Further Research by Susan Rogers

Who Writes British Films: A Summary on the UKFC Report and a Call for Further Research by Susan Rogers

In 2007 I was commissioned by the UK Film Council to investigate the background and employment experience of screenwriters credited on a random selection of recent UK films. The resulting report, Writing British Films Who Writes British Films and How They are Recruited, confirmed some widely-held views and uncovered much new information. The UK Film Council’s first studies had revealed that many of the beliefs about screenwriting, expressed in interviews within the British film industry, to be anecdotal or based on unsubstantiated fact and to an extent, myth, confirming the scarcity of research in this field. The following is a summary and a reflection on the findings revealed in the report.

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!

Screenwriter Jennifer Maisel from The March Sisters at Christmas, and Tempting Fate from the How I Wrote That Podcast [Audio]

Subscribe to the Podcast with iTunes | TuneIn

Listen to this episode

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Jennifer Maisel most recently developed an original pilot called “The 626” with Super Deluxe and adapted two Jane Green novels—Tempting Fate and To Have and to Hold, which aired in June. She currently is working on a two-hour about campus rape and institutional betrayal with Just Singer Entertainment. Her screenplay “Lost Boy” was filmed starring Virginia Madsen. She wrote The Assault and The March Sisters for Mar Vista Entertainment and Double Wedding for Jaffe Braunstein. She has written movies for NBC, ABC, MTV and Lifetime, was a staff writer on the television series Related, wrote a pilot for ABC Family and an animated feature for Disney. Maisel has developed original pilots with Bunim-Murray, Ineffable, Stun Media and MomentumTV and co-created the critically acclaimed web series Faux Baby with Laura Brennan and Rachel Leventhal. The screenplay adaptation of her play The Last Seder won Showtime’s Tony Cox Screenwriting Award, meriting her a month’s stay in a haunted farmhouse at the Nantucket Screenwriter’s Colony. A graduate of Cornell University and NYU’s Dramatic Writing program, Maisel is also an award-winning playwright whose Eight Nights will premiere at Antaeus Theatre in October 2019; the play is currently part of a nationwide event called 8 Nights of Eight Nights, raising funds and awareness for HIAS. She has taught playwriting at University of Southern California and guest-lectured around the country.

On adapting novels “I like the puzzle of taking something that’s epic, novels are epic, even not great novels are epic, and you have to figure out how to find the essential spine to it and give shape to it as a writer.” — Jennifer Maisel

Presented by Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

Visit the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting for more information.

Follow @StephensMFA on Instagram

Follow and Like the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 2: From three acts to three screens: the significance of the role of writing in a new media film project by Jeremy Bubb

From three acts to three screens: the significance of the role of writing in a new media film project by Jeremy Bubb

This article will discuss the writing and editing of a short film called Writ in Water, a project specifically designed for three-screen projection. I will explore the influences of the process of writing for multi-image drama by considering Lev Manovich’s notion of narrative as database, Gene Youngblood’s view of syncretism and synaesthetics and Robert McKee’s approach to three-act structure in relation to story, inciting incident, character development and narrative timeline. I will also outline the influence of Aristotle on this new media drama triptych and, finally, discuss scriptwriting as a changing component in relation to digital technology. The continuing significance of the script as blueprint will be explored and how classic story structure and use of new technology work together to inform the final work. This article aims to reflect on the acts and the actions of narrative creation using the classic tropes of screenwriting and its influences, and also recognize the importance of process in contributing to new knowledge in the area of multi-image screen narrative. A full appreciation of an artwork includes an understanding of the extent to which it is a product and reflection of the technologies used in its making (Shaw and Weibel 2003: 198).

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!

19 More On Buffy from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (39 seconds)

Watch this entire presentation

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

Transcript:

Importantly, Jane Espenson eventually went on and created Warehouse 13 which is an adorable little show also in the sort of sci-fi world. Really good show. So I think it’s really important to think about everything that Buffy did to throw all the tropes of horror to flip them. So now we have the blonde is saving the world. This rarely happens. The blonde is usually the one who gets dead first right? So not only is she a girl who saves the world she has to be a blonde girl and she has to be a cheerleader because we have to take every single anti-female trope and say “no”, there’s power in who she is.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 2: Zen and the art of film narrative: towards a transcendental realism in film by Erik Knudsen

Zen and the art of film narrative: towards a transcendental realism in film by Erik Knudsen

Nations and peoples are largely the stories they feed themselves. If they tell themselves stories that are lies, they will suffer the consequences of those lies. If they tell themselves stories that face their own truths, they will free their histories for future flowerings. (Okri 1995: 21) What defines the classic narrative is also at the root of its limitations; an epistemology that ties it to a material and psychological paradigm governed by largely explicable laws of cause and effect. Such notions as character motivation, narrative aims, obstacles, climax and so on have evolved to become as overwhelmingly dominant in cinema as the dogma of reason which subsequently the industrial age solidified. It is from this that the moving-image medium emerged: empirical evidence of motivations, mechanistic notions of causes and effects and scientifically based including the pseudosciences of psychology and sociology that provide justifications for events and actions all serve to reinforce the dominance of the classic narrative’s role in the storytelling of the developed world.In this article, I shall call for a different perspective on cinematic narrative form; not with a view to discussing what film generally is, but to make some general suggestions of what it could be, particularly from the perspective of a film-maker trying to transcend the limitations of the classic narrative. The motive is to try and understand how, in practice, one may evolve narrative forms in such a way as to deal with experiences not sufficiently touched by the classic form, as it is currently generally practised in cinema. I shall, in particular, look at the relationship between emotions and feelings and their relationship to narrative structure and bring into this examination some notions and ideas from Zen Buddhism to re-evaluate that relationship. The issues I hope to raise are about paradigms and I shall therefore deliberately base my discussion on general assertions and eclectic contextualization.

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!

18 Jane Espenson & Marti Noxon from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 9 seconds)

Watch this entire presentation

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

Transcript:

I’m also really excited about TV shows as you can see and because TV affects more people — because more people are exposed to it — and so I like to think about who are the women in television and what stories are they putting out there. This is our modern literature in many ways and these ladies, Jane Espenson and Marti Noxon were pivotal to a show that took horror and used it to flip all the gender stereotypes that could possibly flip in one one-hour program and that program is… Buffy the Vampire Slayer right. So we generally attribute the show to Joss Whedon and that is true and that is fine and he did write the pilot and he did show run and managed the show. We have since come to find that he was a me-too kind of guy and we don’t need to talk about him that much anymore. So then the question is how could the show have been so feminist with that mind behind it? Well, turns out these ladies were on staff and I believe when you look at the episodes they wrote it was the soul of Marti Noxon and Jane Espenson which gave us the true stories that last in the Buffy realm.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 2: First of all, the screenplay problem has to be solved: the public debate on screenwriting in 1930s Finland by Raija Talvio

First of all, the screenplay problem has to be solved: the public debate on screenwriting in 1930s Finland by Raija Talvio

In 1930s Finland the new medium of the sound film was regarded as an essential part of modern culture. After the advent of sound, the domestic film industry flourished and the development of the national cinema became the subject of a lively debate in popular film magazines. A large part of this discussion was centred on the screenplay. The choice of suitable subject matter and important themes were investigated, as were the special requirements of the craft for the writer. In this article I explore how screenwriting and the screenwriter were constantly defined and redefined in public discussion in film magazines during the decade and how this discussion influenced the formation of the identity of the screenwriting profession.

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!