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:
I tend to teach Broadchurch. I think it’s one of the best mini-series that I’ve ever seen. I always think something’s really good if I can’t guess the ending because yeah then you’re like okay you got me because I’m really looking at every single moment and if I don’t know then you have done some very good writing and I really love that. I think of course looking at the fact that Olivia Coleman before she won her Oscar and now her Emmy for The Crown recognizing a powerful actress a little bit earlier than other people did and bringing her forth and of course because of Broadchurch, we get to Jody right and I just — she — in the midst of this terrible tragedy was as strong a person as she could be. She wasn’t just in a corner weeping and crying and all that. So I think he’s always treated women intelligently and respectfully.
When Netflix first really started running and doing a lot of reruns and stuff like that — and I think it’s still true — Gray’s Anatomy tends to fall on the top of the viewing of Netflix because people fell in love with those characters. They want to see them succeed. They want to watch people — a character that’s interesting is someone who wants to be better at what they do for interesting reasons. Walter White wanted to be better at what he did for interesting — they were bad reasons but they were interesting right? The Gray’s Anatomy doctors want to be the best doctors. Whether it’s because they have a competitive streak and they have to be better than everybody else — which is kind of a bad reason put to a good use right or because, in that case, Meredith Gray was trying to live up to the reputation of her mother and that’s something you’ll probably never do because she was a groundbreaking person. So then she had the confidence issue and all that which made us love her even though she could be a real pain in the butt sometimes. So you have to have a character who is moving toward learning something that you would like other people to learn. I think if you start there you will invent something interesting.
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.
I was at SCMS too, doing a paper and it was on Unreliable Narrators and a great example of that — this happens to many female writers — but also Nunnally Johnson wrote the adaptation of The Grapes Of Wrath which was filmed by John Ford and my example of — one of my examples is that obituaries are unreliable narrators because eventuallyNunnally Johnson married the actress Doris Bowden who played Rosa Sharon in the film. When she died just about five or six years ago you know in her 90s, her obituary said that she had starred in John Ford’s The Grapes Of Wrath and afterward married that film’s screenwriter. So her husband’s name didn’t appear in her obituary but the director of the film she made 50 years ago — his name appeared in her obituary. So i have to laugh at that because even John Ford — then I found some lovely quotes where he talked about how Nunnally Johnson directed on the page. He said you know this is the camera angle and this is what we need close up and this is all going to track and all those things and Ford said you know people are going to credit me with that and Nunnally Johnson said I don’t care who they credit. I know who did it. So it’s kind of a pity that people don’t recognize these names of the movies they love.
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 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.
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.
Hope Loring co-wrote Wings (1927), the first film ever to win the Academy Award for Best Film at the inaugural ceremonies in 1927. The story of World War I fighter pilots involved in a love triangle starred Clara Bow and is the first on-screen appearance of a young Gary Cooper.
Born in Barcelona, Spain (or maybe Madrid) in 1894 Loring had moved to England at the age of 2 to live with an aunt after her parents died in a car accident. At the age of five, the aunt moved her to the United States where she studied dance and literature at various boarding schools. At 14 Loring sold her first short story to a magazine. She reported that she had come to Los Angeles by 1916 after stints as an extra in New York and drama critic in Florida.
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:
I think we have to look at his early work to see that he was capable of doing this right? When I think about the early episodes that he wrote obviously before he became the Executive Producer almost every episode had an important leader who was a female and that just sort of glosses over you when you’re looking at it but when you put it all together like every single time he was trying to find a way to show us a woman in charge. So he was really building up to be the guy, the showrunner, who would be able to do a full female character but if you think about this right Hungry Earth we’ve got Dr. Chaudry. That’s a really cool thing. Could have been a boy doctor. Was a girl doctor right? Writers make those choices all the time. Captain Kath in 42 right has to go through that terrible experience. She could have been a male captain of the ship right. It wouldn’t have hurt and then I just adore Kate Lethbridge Stewart. I think she’s marvelous. There’s actually another tv show in the UK called Grantchester. It’s about a vicar. Now his mother is played by the actress who played Kate. So it’s kind of fun to see her in different roles but so he did this — so Chibnalll did this in his early work and now both outside of Doctor Who, I’m really impressed with some of the stuff he’s done again involving strong female characters.
Host: Like what do you think are like the principles of good television writing that you try to teach your students? Like what’s the things you want them to get from your classes.
Rosanne: Well I want them to think that whatever they’re writing is a message. So I think they should start with a theme. What is the message you want to put out in the world and what’s a story that’s like the metaphor or that’s the parable that will tell that idea? Plant that idea in people’s minds? I think you always — you have your own life philosophy. I don’t care how old you are. You don’t have to be old or young to have it right? You have some ideas and those make everything stronger. The stuff you really like is because you really agreed with what was being said about how to live or how to treat other people right and so you really have to think about those things and that’s going to make whatever you do richer. So I like to start from a place of theme and of course then tv is all about characters because I need someone I’m going to want to come and meet over and over again either 20 hours in a row or 20 weeks in a row however I choose to do that. So I need to find someone that I can connect with and I think that’s something that in the movies you know you could do a lot of explosions, fun stuff, tent poll movies and all that. Although I suppose my son would say Transformers were characters he really cared to watch right but they’re a little different than you know the kind of people you’d see let’s say on Grey’s Anatomy speaking of Shonda Rhimes.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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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