tv – Page 14 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

22 On Costumes and Sonic Screwdrivers 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:

So costume is a huge and this is what a showrunner does. You sit with every single department and you decide and you get the final say. So of course you get the final hit if people don’t like what you decided but that’s your job to make decisions right and to be able to go this is why I did that and maybe I’ll change my mind if it isn’t as appealing as it could be. So costume is important but for me the most important thing that a writer brings, of course, is dialogue and he had to really think about how can this person talk like The Doctor but reference and accept the fact that you don’t look like all the previous Doctors and other people aren’t going to treat you immediately the same way they would treat a male walking into many of these situations and so that was to me a very delicate dance and I like this particular – you know very beginning right she’s like I lost my sonic screwdriver. I could build one. I’m good at building things probably and we’re all giggling right because The Doctor has to be funny but then there was this but but he she has to be competent. So you don’t want the woman to not be competent but any Doctor would have said that.

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13 Toshiko (Tosh) Sato from Why Torchwood Still Matters with Dr. Rosanne Welch, San Diego Who Con 2021 [Video]

I recently presented a talk on Torchwood (Why Torchwood Still Matters) where I highlighted a few ways in which the show (airing from 2006 to 2011) came up with progressive and innovative ideas that are being used by other franchises today.

I always enjoy attending the SD (San Diego) WhoCon because the audiences are so well-informed on the Whoniverse and Whovians love Captain Jack and the crew that made this spinoff program so engaging.

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Transcript:

The person of color they ended up with and did keep of course was Toshiko and here they did good and they made a small mistake or they fell into a stereotype. Certainly, they made her a regular. She has a sex life. She falls in love with an alien. So we’re going to go into omnisexual stuff too. So we’re continuing the idea of the show but she also falls in love with Owen. So you know she also falls in love with a human but usually your person of color – largely when that person is of Asian descent – never has a sex life. Never has a home family. It’s like they don’t exist except to be in the workplace. So I would say that the stereotype they fell into was of course she is our computer expert. Happens a lot. We just ran into a yet another new series in the UK called Annika and it’s the story of a female cop and one of her assistants – one of the other cops – is the actress who played Cho Chang in the Harry Potter series. Now she’s about 30 and she does computer stuff but she also works in the field. So we’ve seen her interrogate people. So they’ve moved beyond that stereotype. They started there and now we’ve seen them move beyond that. So I would say that’s maybe the one flaw with this character but they certainly gave her a three-dimensional life and that’s really all anybody’s asking for. If you’re going to include a character they shouldn’t just be there as window dressing. They should have a complete life right and that’s been an argument for a long time with people of color on different tv shows. They don’t go home to somebody. They’re just there hanging out with the white people helping them out and it’s kind of like no they have other people in their life. So Tosh had a sex life. She had love. She had desires and she went through on most of those. So I think she’s a pretty focused…

Audience: She got more action than Jack.

Rosanne: She did. She totally did which is you know that’s I think innovative.

Audience: That’s saying something.

Rosanne: Exactly.

Audience: Jack talks a good game.

Rosanne: Exactly

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

Transcript:

The question about why we forget women screenwriters is bothering us for a long time and one of the things we fall back on is this thing called unreliable narrators and it’s really sad to think that many of these early women writers – and there were more women writing films in the early silent days than there were men. It was a Wild West of a job and so we always let women in in the beginning. We did the same thing in aviation. Tons of female flyers. They’re doing all kinds of contests flying from here to Cleveland. I don’t know why Cleveland did it with hub right and all these contests and then when it becomes a business we say oh no no no this is now a place where men can make money. You ladies should leave and we essentially leave them behind. So, one whenever we became a business – both in aviation and in Hollywood – they took women who had been producers, they’d been directors, they’d written their own material and the guys running the studio suddenly said um here’s your new contract. You’re now a junior writer and you can work with this guy and they were like thank you I’ll go back to new york and I’ll write novels right. So that’s Anita Loos and “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and you know Francis Marion who’s probably the most famous early female screenwriter. They just started writing novels where they could again be in charge of the whole story. You know why should they be treated that way.

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. —

What this entire presentation

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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What Is a Western? Gidget (1959) – Part Of The Series What Is A Western? Film Series – Autry Museum of the American West [Event]

I’m pleased to have been invited to give the introductory remarks before a showing of the 1959 Gidget film at the Autry Museum of the American West (in Griffith Park).

Join us on Saturday, August 6, 2022, at 1:30 PM. I’ll be giving a shortened version of the presentation I made when we attended the Screenwriting Research Network conference held in New Zealand a few years ago.

In a nutshell, I trace Gidget, the Little Girl with Big Ideas from its origins as a novel, its transformation into a film franchise, and then into a TV series. Along the way, we’ll discover how this one story created a new myth about how teenagers reinvented the West. — Rosanne

What Is a Western? Gidget (1959) – Part Of The Series What Is A Western? Film Series – Autry Museum of the American West

Saturday, August 6, 2022, 1:30 p.m.
The Autry: Wells Fargo Theater

Appropriate For: Families
Admission: Free for Autry Members | Museum Admission Included With Ticket
RSVP/Reservations: Reservations Recommended | Space Is Limited

RESERVE NOW

Considered to be the first of the “beach party” movies, this coming-of-age tale is based on the true story of Kathy Kohner and her experiences as a young woman in the then-niche and masculine sport of surfing. Widely credited with the mainstreaming of surfing culture in the United States, it also inspired many films and television series featuring the character of Gidget.

Introduced by Rosanne Welch, executive director, Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting

Directed by Paul Wendkos | Starring Sandra Dee, James Darren, and Cliff Robertson

Screenplay by Gabrielle Upton | Based on a novel by Frederick Kohner

The What is a Western? Film Series explores the wide range of movies that can be considered Westerns, and the ways in which they shape our understanding of the American West. Each screening includes a guest lecturer who will introduce the film and explain its significance in the genre.

18 ”Angels With Dirty Faces“ from In Conversation with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

Transcript:

Host: What are your what’s your favorite Jimmy Cagney movie if you have one?

Rosanne: Oh gosh I like angels and actually have my students watch “Angels With Dirty Faces” because it’s such a very perfect movie from that period right? It’s him and Pat O’Brien. He’s the gangster who’s about to go to the death you know to to to be executed and Pat O’Brien is a priest and the beginning of that movie is their two little boys – two young boys – who are robbing a train like you know stealing pencils or something and they the cops see him and they start running and the cops catch Jimmy Cagney but they don’t catch Pat O’Brien’s character and of course the concept is he goes to juvenile hall he learns how to be a bigger criminal whereas the other guy gets to go and become a priest and so it’s the perfect like I mean it’s funny because it seems cheesy but in fact it’s really about the fact that it’s about nurturing right and and how we should take children and give them better things so they want to be they can be better in life and then there’s a great ending that no one’s ever sure and it’s wonderful when the ending makes the audience think because the priest goes to his friend on the eve of his execution because there’s a bunch of boys in the neighborhood who think he’s cool and the priest is like oh no they’ll grow up to be like him and not like me. So it goes to his friend and he says you gotta do something that keeps them from making a martyr out of you and he’s like I’m never gonna do that. I’m strong and brave and everything and then they come to take him to the electric chair and he falls apart and you never know is he really just not he’s a coward he’s scared to death of dying or is he doing his priest friend a favor.

Host: Yeah i think it’s a very powerful movie.

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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12 Photography can be an Unreliable Narrator from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

Nearly two years ago I had the pleasure of being invited to join a panel at the then upcoming SCMS (Society of Cinema and Media Studies) conference set for Seattle. As you know that was canceled due to Covid with the hopes of reconvening in Colorado in 2021. That became a virtual conference but our group decided to reapply our panel and we four were able to ‘meet’ on Zoom on Sunday and present: Writing Between the Lines: Feminist Strategies for Historical Absences, Cliché, and the Unreliable Narrator.

Here you can watch a clip from my part of the presentation,

“When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues in Oral Histories”

Transcript:

Photography can be an unreliable narrator to us. In this case, this is a famous photo of the writers of the Sid Caeser show. So I’ve flipped over to tv for a minute. Look at all these important men whose careers went on and on and on but when they took this picture Selma Diamond and Lucille Callan – the two women who were on Sid Caeser shows – had died. So they were not present for this photograph which goes down in history as the picture of the writers of these shows. If you don’t read the small print in the tiny bottom corner there you don’t notice that unpictured are the only two women that we could possibly credit. Billy Crystal was so excited about this when this happened he helped organize this Vanity Fair gathering. This is the long thing I won’t get into but he talks about how much he wants in life he would dream of being in that room and he names all the men and none of the women because he’s forgotten they exist right? That photograph allows us to forget that.

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21 More On Costumes from The Difficulties and Delicacies of Writing the First Female Doctor in 50+ years [Video] [Doctor Who]

Transcript:

There were part partially were reflecting Tom’s scarf back in the day and partially we’re reflecting the rainbow right because again inclusion but in this sort of gentle historic to Who but also modern for now world and there’s also a lavender line in here which doesn’t show up in Tom’s scarf but is a reference to the Suffragettes because they were lavender sashes in the uk when they were marching. So it’s kind of a cool little thing they added. Yeah oh yeah, they gave it much thought and this is him in consultation with costumers. There is a great show on Netflix. What’s it called? Where they do where they interview it’s the Abstract one right? They interviewed the costume designer who got the Oscar for Black Panther. Yes, it’s an hour of her discussing the job of being a costume designer. It’s a show on Netflix called Abstract and they meet a different artist every week and her name escapes me right now but she got started on “Do the Right Thing” and she got the Oscar for designing the costumes for Black Panther and it’s a whole like she got started. She was an actress in college and she didn’t get cast in a play and they asked her if she would work on costumes and her grandmother had taught her to sew and so then she was like hey I really actually like this and she goes through the process of when I get a script I break it down. I look at all the characters. What their backstory is? I decide everything that they should look like. What the colors mean. All of that and then of course in consultation with the writer and the producer we go what do they like what don’t they like etcetera etcetera.

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12 Martha Jones from Why Torchwood Still Matters with Dr. Rosanne Welch, San Diego Who Con 2021 [Video]

I always enjoy attending the SD (San Diego) WhoCon because the audiences are so well-informed on the Whoniverse and Whovians love Captain Jack and the crew that made this spinoff program so engaging.

RMW Rosanne Signature for Web

Transcript:

Now we come to Martha who belongs on this show but the actress had other ideas. Totally fine. You run your own career. You’re gonna go do that but again in terms of representation the idea all along was that she would have learned from her travels with The Doctor. Where are you gonna use skills like that? Where else? In Torchwood. So totally useful for her. So to have a woman and when I wrote about torchwood I realized i can’t call her African-American. They were like wait wait. I said what do you do they said she’s an English woman of African descent. So there you go or whatever descent a person happens to be in England. So think about how great and I think this would have been so cool if she was a regular on the show but okay she chose not to be but that was the plan and they did try to use her as a guest whenever they could and I think that’s a big deal. Again making sure that there was a person of color in the lead of that show.

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02 Why Study Women Screenwriters from What Is a Western? Interview Series: When Women Wrote Westerns from the Autry Museum of the American West [Video]

Transcript:

Host: Our guest today is Rosanne Welch. She’s a former screenwriter and historian and a professor at the MFA program in Screenwriting and TV writing at Stephens College. She’s the editor of the book “When Women Wrote Hollywood” as well as the author of numerous other books that you can check out but welcome. Thanks for joining us today Rosanne.

Rosanne: Thanks for asking me. I love to talk about women screenwriters.

Host: That’s great yeah so we’re going to focus on a sub-topic within the book you edited When Women Wrote Westerns. How do we see the history of tv and film differently when we learn about these women screenwriters who are often forgotten and perhaps why were they forgotten in the first place.

Rosanne: The why is always sad to learn but we’re learning it in all of our history classes no matter what we teach in this country and we’re getting very good at that right? We’re learning that the people who told the stories were the winners and in fact, there were many many more stories that were left on the cutting room floor if you will. So having different people write – in this case, we’re discussing women – another gender looking at this perspective of the experience they had right? All those men didn’t come West by themselves. They generally brought women with them or met women here right because nobody wants to be alone for 20 years of their life right? So they have a different perspective of what happened and including them in the story makes the story richer because we need to understand who really were the founders of our country and who were the people who caused the trouble when they came out here right? If we’re colonizing an area that was already inhabited women were part of that too. So women have to take a shot about that and recognize that in their own privilege they came and thought this place belonged to them.

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Find more information at the Autry Museum of the American West

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17 My Favorite Actors and Movies from In Conversation with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video]

Transcript:

Rosanne: I love introducing students to classic films they’ve never seen and they think they know the whole story because so they saw they saw the one James Cameron directed and gee-whiz nobody knows about who wrote the thing and I can’t even quote that off the top of my head because I don’t actually like that movie so… yes but i know the 1920s the Cameron one? Did he write it?

Host: Yeah. I think he may have done. I think I would like to fact check someone fact-check us out but I’m not a big fan of that movie and but the one with Barbara Stanwyck is really cool.

Rosanne: Yeah that’s a really good version of that and Brackett got the Oscar for that so there’s reason for the Oscar and also it was one of the early movies of a young Robert Wagner and I was a big Robert Wagner fan when I was a kid watching his tv shows and whatnot. So seeing him as like a 19-year-old. I loved old movies for that reason. You’d see all these actors, in fact, I was kind of the geeky kid at my all-girl Catholic school and there was a kid who always liked to beat up on me – like verbally not physically – and I remember one time she asked me on the bus going to school who my favorite actor was and without thinking that it would be stupid I said Jimmy Cagney and like half the bus didn’t know who he was and half that did were like oh what’s wrong with you. He’s 85 and I was like I mean from the movies I’ve seen. He’s like really 30 and never mind yeah.

Host: Brilliant. I love Jimmy Cagney. I like the fact that he was able to do those gangster roles and then musicals and then come back later in life and be like a really gnarly gangster again.

Rosanne: When he had done he had done dancing with his sister on broadway so he was really a dancer and that kind of works in the gangster world because there’s that bouncy like you’re always a boxer and dancers and boxers have a lot in common.

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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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