tv – Page 24 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

28 Art Is Very Subjective from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

Watch the entire presentation – Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 here

Transcript:

So fascinating but you’re right and what’s interesting is you just hit on the fact that here Shonda Rhimes who almost always has a hit but not always because it’s not science right? You can’t even — it’s always a little bit of a this is my gut feeling. This is interesting. Now you go see what the audience thinks about it and not every person who you think should be — same thing right — Steven Spielberg doesn’t always have a hit. Sometimes he misses. It’s not science. It’s art and art is very subjective.

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.

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Screenwriter Eve Unsell, Hitchcock’s Mentor Who Saved Universal’s European Operation — Dr. Rosanne Welch, Script magazine, December 2021

Born in Chicago in 1888 (or thereabouts, different sites report different dates), writer-producer Eve Unsell grew up in Caldwell, Kansas. After earning her undergraduate degree and working as a journalist for the Kansas City Post, she attended graduate school at Boston’s Emerson College for a year. There she studied drama and literature before heading to New York. After reading one of her short stories, theatrical agent Beatrice deMille (mother of Cecil and William) hired to work as what was then called a play reader and constructionist. During her career, Unsell accumulated nearly 100 credits as a screenwriter while writing for notable stars including Mary Pickford, Lon Chaney, Clara Bow, Baby Peggy and Jack Benny.

Read Screenwriter Eve Unsell, Hitchcock’s Mentor Who Saved Universal’s European Operation

Read about more women from early Hollywood

The Monkee’s Michael Nesmith, 1942- 2021

Facebook is fleeting so when I heard that Mike Nesmith of The Monkees had passed away this morning I posted this short tribute along with the link to his audition for the show:

This is how I will remember Mike, another hopeful young performer who came to Hollywood, hit the heights so many others only dream of, and became the ‘father’ figure on a show that eschewed authority figures. RIP Mike Nesmith.

But there is more to say (heck, I discovered there was a whole book’s worth). In Monkees fan circles I call myself a Mickey girl as Dolenz was my major childhood crush from the show. What I recognized in the character of Mike (all the actors used their real names on the show which proved to make their career lives post the show a bit more difficult) was the strength and balance he brought to the show. Part of that came from being among the older (and taller) of the 4 actors and part from his having been in the military for a short time – and he was the only then-married member of the band.

Just as Davy Jones brought his bit of vaudevillian Broadway to the show, Peter Tork brought a bit of peace-loving hippie and Mickey Dolenz brought his Marx Brothers madcap-ed-ness, Mike brought what one producer defined as a “Will Rogers kind of country and western figure” to the show – and to their concerts through his songwriting. I wonder what would have happened if back then actors also contributed writing to their TV shows as some do today… What sort of adventures would Mike have added to the story of those 4 fictional boys who dreamed of being famous when he lived that dream…?

27 Queen Charlotte from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

Watch the entire presentation – Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 here

Transcript:

Queen Charlotte was so popular they’re doing a prequel about queen charlotte’s life because she is reportedly to be the first queen who was a woman of color in England but it wasn’t widely known right? So that’s the piece that you can go back into and really dig through and we’ll see where that goes. I don’t know. I just read this the other day but that’s another example of wow that was so popular now the Netflix is like how can I mine this more. They already know they’re going to do seven more limited series because each of the children in the Bridgeton family is going to have their own six-hour love story right? Those are what all the books are. So each book is going to have its own limited series and they’re like but how else can we mine this intellectual property. Oh, let’s go backwards and do a prequel on this character who’s not part of the other books but we’ll do you know so that’ll be whatever they discover both historically and then whatever fictional thing they lay on top of that.

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.

The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V6 Issue 2: Off goes the telly: Writer discourse on the Life on Mars franchise finales by Christine Becker

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

Off goes the telly: Writer discourse on the Life on Mars franchise finales by Christine Becker

The British original Life on Mars, the spin-off Ashes to Ashes, and the American remake of Life on Mars offered divergent endings to the same premise, and each series finale divided viewer opinion to varying degrees. This article discusses these three different endings and considers how the writers of each series framed explanations for their creative decisions in discourse surrounding the finales. The article’s analysis illustrates that the series writers strove to justify their narrative resolutions strategically at various points in each series run to account for potential public reaction and to frame their writing decisions as driven primarily by creative motivations, not industrial ones. As such, the article suggests that writers of television finales, particularly those that close off serialized shows, have more opportunity and pressure than ever before to enter into dialogue with emboldened audiences about the production process.

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!

26 Controversy Scares Broadcasters from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

Watch the entire presentation – Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 here

Transcript:

Controversy scares broadcasters because it of course the word broad means they need the biggest audience possible because they’re selling advertising time and promising the biggest eyeballs on your ads. So if you do something controversial they’ll get less viewers and then the ad people will want to pay them less. So they have a bigger you know a bigger obligation to make the advertisers to not scare the audience away. Which is why you get stuff that’s much more progressive on cable and then eventually in streaming.

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.

The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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52 Conclusion from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video]

Thanks to the gracious invitation from my Screenwriting Research Network colleague Paolo Russo – and a grant he was able to procure (and in the before-Covid time) I was able to spend a week at Oxford Brookes University working with the screenwriting masters students in Paolo’s course. At the culmination of the week, I gave this lecture on how writers rooms worked in the States.

Transcript:

…and if you don’t think novelists are writers who collaborate think about the fact that all these guys hung around with each other in a writer’s group and read stuff to each other and took notes from each other and made changes based on those notes. Those were writer’s rooms. The Eagle and whatever that pub is called I haven’t gotten to yet …that was a writer’s room right and from that room not only did we get those books. We got this collaboration. Phil Jackson is great. I love him. He’s brilliant. He does great stuff. He doesn’t do it alone. He’s just the guy who’s willing to do the interviews. His wife doesn’t care to do interviews. I don’t know what’s wrong with her but she’s making me crazy right because we’re forgetting that two women co-wrote this movie. That’s what makes it so much better for our times right? They got the best-adapted screenplay award. Two women and a guy made The Lord of the Rings into what it is. I think that’s really important. So who remembers what I said my teaching philosophy was

three things matter

Words matter, Writers matter, and Women Writers matter.

Thank you very much. You’re listening. This thing is good. All right and this is important to me. It’s not just what I know. It’s spreading that around this is my first graduating classroom at Stephen’s MFA. As I said it was an all-female college. So it’s about spreading the word. Writers are teachers with a giant podium. What’s your opinion of how this world should work? Put it out there and the bigger audience you get the more influence you get. Forget YoutTube and who does makeup well. Those aren’t influencers. People who tell stories — I seriously — they’re not — people who tell stories are influencers because stories teach us to feel and that’s what you get paid to do which I love. So again these are a bunch of books I use when I’m just thinking about putting this together. So if you’re interested in reading about showrunners, those are a bunch of books that do interviews with them, and of course, this is the bunch that I’ve written and that’s all I have to say. So I guess we’re doing a q a now right? so if people have questions, I am totally open to your things.

Watch this entire presentation

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V6 Issue 2: Guest and returning writers in American television drama series: The two Davids by Tom Steward

Guest and returning writers in American television drama series: The two Davids by Tom Steward

The article uses two distinct historical case studies to argue in favour of the agency of guest writers and returning episode writers of American television drama series in terms of their ability to create thematically and stylistically distinctive episodes with an individual voice. In the first, I look at writer-director David Mamet’s episode of Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1980–1987) entitled ‘A Wasted Weekend’ and in the second I discuss several episodes written by writer-director-producer David Chase for The Rockford Files (NBC, 1974–1980). I explore the case studies in relation to existing critical literature on American television drama authorship and comparison to more recent examples of guest and returning episode writers. Using in-depth textual, script and production analysis, I argue that the tone, content and style of certain episodes of American television drama series are unique to the individual writer. I contend that the production roles of guest writer and returning episode writer, while different at different times, offer scope for writers to distinguish their work in American television. In addressing these particular screenwriting roles, I challenge the overemphasis on the production hierarchy in terms of critical accounts of creativity within American television drama and probe the exploitation of writers in cultural validations of television.

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!

25 More On Network Notes from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

Watch the entire presentation – Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast | Episode # 29 here

Transcript:

The idea was that the little boy would want to be popular in school and he would stumble on some internet pornography and print it and hand it around at school so the bigger boys would think he was cool and then, of course, he would have to pay the price for that and get suspended for a couple of days. His parent would be upset. We’d have to talk about the problem with pornography and what it does to the way people believe – think about women and all of that. And the network came back and said they thought it would be more engaging if the little boy didn’t copy what he found on the internet, but he created his own and I about wanted to go kill myself because I did not believe in that family — that boy — whatever — had that inclination, but I wasn’t running the show. I was just selling an episode then and the Executive Producer, Jeff Melvoin, did argue and argue, and that one we didn’t win. So, in that episode, the boy actually takes a picture of someone who’s naked on the Internet and puts his teacher’s face on it and it’s like Oooo, look he photoshopped it before there even Photoshop, I think, and I hated that so much, but I didn’t have any control to change it, so you just had to got with it and make sure that the ending — there was a big discussion about how and why that was wrong and how depressed the father was that his son would behave in that fashion and it really showed that there wasn’t anything cool or wonderful about what he had done. So we had to sort of overwrite the ending to make up for a beginning that we didn’t appreciate, but you know, it was their — they had enough — it was only the 3rd season of that show so they still had a chance to say no and they often did.

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.

The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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Alice Burton Russell Micheaux: “Breaking Barriers on Two Fronts” — Dr. Rosanne Welch, Script magazine, November 2021

Film history texts often neglect female screenwriters and completely omit the names of women of color such as Alice Burton Russell Micheaux, wife of filmmaker Oscar Micheaux. Script contributor Dr. Rosanne Welch rightly so celebrates the female screenwriters who came before us with attainable insight about filmmaker Alice Burton Russell Micheaux.

Read Alice Burton Russell Micheaux: “Breaking Barriers on Two Fronts” — Dr. Rosanne Welch, Script magazine, November 2021

Read about more women from early Hollywood