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.
Transcript:
One of my other fandoms is The Monkees and I have a whole book on The Monkees and about the fact that when I was a kid watching them as a child I would assume, looking back at it as a grown-up, that like all the women on the show must have been bimbos and cheerleaders and all the boys would hang out with them and when I looked at as an adult I discovered that every single girl they ever dated had a job and she was a girl who took care of herself and I thought, Is that a message that seeped into my brain when I was a kid? That if I wanted to marry a Monkee I had to be a woman of some substance of something. All right, so really I think messages do come to us. So, I think Torchwood had a lot of really good messages.
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: My teaching philosophy is Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter and we need to pay more attention to them. So we’re back to what I’m originally talking about. How do we get forgotten in the books? Well, this is a lovely example not from screenwriting but from art. When this painting sold – the painting of David And Goliath – it was assumed to belong to Giovanni Francesco but in fact, it belonged to Artemisia and Artemisia Gentileschi is just now coming out as someone that we’re going to learn more about in the art world. So this happens to us all the time – it happens to women all the time.
(technical issues)
She painted that. Artemisia that’s her self-portrait. she painted David and Goliath. We’re doing this in all the different worlds and I think we need to pay attention to how we’re doing it in Hollywood.
Our intrepid panel leader, Christina Lane (author of Phantom Lady – the new biography of writer-producer Joan Harrison) kept us connected across the time. Other panel participants included Philana Payton (UCLA) who is researching the memoirs of Eartha Kitt and Vicki Callahan (USC) who covered the career of Mabel Normand. I was happy to highlight the many female screenwriters whose histories were left on the cutting room floor thanks to the unreliable narrators of their work who included directors, film reviewers, and husbands – all who left the female writers out of their own memories.
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:
If we look here, obviously, we have, again, female leadership. The police person is Yasmin, right? It’s a woman police officer who’s gonna come and join. So now we’re gonna have two relatively powerful women running things and that’s different for us. I mean I like Tegan too. She was fun but you know a little screamy goofy right and Nyssa was a doctor. So Nyssa, I really enjoyed Nyssa. So finding two strong women in stories is very interesting.
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.
Transcript:
So I think what was interesting is we got a chance to go to this academic conference which was Investigating Torchwood and I heard all kinds of interesting things – some of which helped me put this together – ideas about the show that I didn’t think of and so then we published the piece. So this is why I’m interested in thinking about Torchwood and why I think it should have gone longer than four seasons although miracle day killed it which is all another conversation – but it was a show that was a work in progress with a lot of new ideas and some of those ideas have slowly seeded into the regular tv that we’re watching now and so I think it’s really interesting to look at these original ideas. They were being very innovative and I like that and I want to see more of that and I just happen to like this meme because it’s true one of the things that of course Jack – Captain Jack – brought to us was looking at the world in a bigger way right and then all the ideas of who he could be and who could love and who the other characters could be with. They were relatively new if you think about it and it’s the thing that we teach in my program – representation matters. We have to pay attention to the things we’re seeing because TV is the thing that comes into your home for free or pay the cable bill if your parents pay it right – but we’re getting to see things that you wouldn’t see if you didn’t want to pay the money at a movie theater right? So the tv is really like so interesting because who knows what we’re learning from it.
Rosanne:…and then the second-biggest – and many people will tell you this – and it’s not just in classes and what you read – doing readership all over town – never write something that looks like I’ve seen it before, because why do I need you? I need to see something that’s different and that’s where you – your personal. perspective comes from, right? I need to see something I haven’t seen before and that doesn’t mean it has to be edgier and worse and mean and nasty, but there’s just – there’s an honesty to it that I didn’t expect. That’s what I want to see.
Host: ..and that’s perspective that gives you that.
Rosanne: Exactly.
Host: I feel like I’ve learned so much today.
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.
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: That was marvelous and I’m so excited about this panel because we’re all talking a little bit about everything which is really nice. Yes, love men. Don’t want to pick on men. Married to a man. Have a son but there you go. We’re going to talk about how men forget women in the archives. First, I would like to acknowledge that I am speaking from the traditional lands of the Tongva people and I want to respect their elders and their people that came before us. This was the ground of Los Angeles all the way out to the Catalina islands and I think it’s something worth people studying. Very briefly about me. I was a television writer for 20 years. So I wrote on 90210 and Picket Fences and Touched by an Angel. Currently, I’m kind of using words from my book When Women Wrote Hollywood which is about the early silent screenwriters – female screenwriters – and how they have been forgotten. I also am the book review editor for the Journal of Screenwriting. So if you ever want to write a review or have a book that needs reviewing, let me know because I’d love to do that and I’m on the editorial board for Written By magazine which I always suggest people read. It is free digitally online about every six weeks the Writer’s Guild comes out with it and there are some wonderful interviews with movie star – movie writers and tv writers. So that’s kind of the world I’m in. I am the executive director of the Stephens College TV and Screenwriting MFA and our mantra is Write, Reach and Represent because I think that’s what writing is all about. The school is actually in Missouri but it’s a low residency program so people come to LA and we work at the Jim Henson Studios. So talk about Mabel Normand who worked at Charlie Chaplin studios with him. This was originally Charlie Chaplin Studios before A&M Records and Jim Henson. So it’s a beautiful piece of Hollywood memorabilia.
Our intrepid panel leader, Christina Lane (author of Phantom Lady – the new biography of writer-producer Joan Harrison) kept us connected across the time. Other panel participants included Philana Payton (UCLA) who is researching the memoirs of Eartha Kitt and Vicki Callahan (USC) who covered the career of Mabel Normand. I was happy to highlight the many female screenwriters whose histories were left on the cutting room floor thanks to the unreliable narrators of their work who included directors, film reviewers, and husbands – all who left the female writers out of their own memories.
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:
The other important thing is casting who would be around her. So, as the showrunner, he is casting all of these new characters and he’s inventing them from scratch and so we looked at this group of people and thought OK, who does he surround the first female Doctor with and it was important to him, I also think he promised and mostly came through on diversity and diversity is one of those words that gets tossed around a lot. Some people are saying let’s get rid of that word. Let’s go with inclusion. It just means let’s tell more stories. Let’s tell a wider range of stories that we haven’t had a chance to see before. So he committed to that and by virtue of who he chose to follow her obviously, we are going to get some different stories that had not yet – I mean it’s 50+ years of a TV show. What new things can you possibly write? And, of course, for The Doctor that comes from the people who follow him. So I think that these were very good choices.
Host: What’s like mistakes that you see in young writer scripts that are like most common? Like just an aspect of writing that a lot of young writers don’t get or have trouble with at first?
Rosanne: There’s probably a couple of things. I see, sometimes, that people don’t take the time to do the research they need into the world they want to write about. It’s really not good to come into class with a first act, let’s say, or an outline and if I want to ask you a question about how doctors would really do that and you say I haven’t looked into it yet. Don’t write it until you’ve looked into it. I’ve had people write cop shows where cops do things they don’t – you can’t do. It doesn’t work that way, right? Oh well, I didn’t know that. Well, you’re writing a cop show. Go figure out what happens the day after they shoot somebody. They don’t just go back to their desk. There are all kinds of stuff that happens or actually, you’re trying to think. I’ve always had examples of that or people who do different things or they have doctors do different things like that’s not how a doctor – that’s not how a hospital works. Didn’t you pay attention to that? Have you ever been to a hospital, you know, you can’t do that. You must know – you must be the expert in the room when you have brought in a story about a certain time or place. I laughed because I had someone once who was writing a piece that took place in the 70s and she had the parents strap their child into the car seat before putting them in the car and I stopped and I said did you research the history of car seats? Do you know that they didn’t start until the mid-80s? In the 70s you strapped your kid into a seat belt – if you bothered with that at all – because not all cars had seat belts. She had no idea. She thought since there had been car seats since her childhood they had always existed and I was like I now know that you didn’t do your homework. I’m not going to hire a writer onto my show who didn’t take the time to look into the period they were writing about. So you got to do your research. I think that’s probably the biggest mistake I see.
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 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.
Transcript:
So we’ll get into Torchwood which is what we’re here to talk about. This whole – my interest in Torchwood bled into another academic friend of mine – a guy named Martin Griffin he was on my Ph.D. committee and he knew I liked both Doctor Who and Torchwood. He was actually from Scotland and he would talk about the show. He knew it as a child and so he was – thought it was interesting there was an American who knew it as well as he did. So we got along really well even though my dissertation had nothing to do with Doctor Who. It should have now that I think about it, but when the show aired – when Children of Earth aired – I had an argument with the ending and he and I had this long watercooler conversation about it and about – I don’t know – six months later he called me and he said you know I just saw a call for papers, which you get in academia a lot is people are putting together book collections about different things and they want people to write a chapter on whatever the topic is. So for instance what I did yesterday was a chapter on the new female Doctor and how it was to write her and that was a chapter in one book. Well, he called me and said this book called Torchwood Declassified was being put together and he thought the two of us could write a chapter based on my argument with the ending of Children of Earth and I was like really? We could write something? They said well there’s going to be a symposium in Cardiff but since I live in the UK, I will go and present the paper. You don’t have to be there but you’ll get credit. You’re supposed to get that you know credit on your resume and when you go to conferences. So I was like okay I’ll write the thing because that’ll be fun and then when they accepted it and they invited him to the event I was like well why shouldn’t we go to Cardiff? Why am I not taking a vacation to Cardiff If I can? I can write it a little bit off my taxes because it’s business. So in fact, we went – we presented at the thing. So this whole thing all started with a conversation.
I enjoyed sharing the names and careers of women like Peg Lynch, Gertrude Berg, Selma Diamond, and D.C. Fontana to the members who gathered on Zoom last Wednesday morning. There are so many more I could have talked about whose names don’t appear in mainstream books about the history of television so we have to learn who they are and carry those names forward ourselves. It’s one of the missions of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting – and has been one of my missions all my life.
Transcript:
…But we can say it took from Treva in the 60s and early 70s, it takes until 2017 for an African-American woman to win an Emmy for writing again a comedy and that’s Lena Waithe who was writing on Master of None. She won the Emmy in 2017. She was also a performer on the show so much like Molly Goldberg she was in the show. She wrote an episode for her character and that episode was so honest and so beautiful that she won the Emmy award for it. So this is where we have come to right? This is where we have come to in our world. I am happy again to say that I work for Stephens College and we are all about bringing out these stories of women. We want more people to read about women, read books like Phantom Lady, who read books like my book on the Women of Early Hollywood, and know more of the names of these important women. For my world that’s pretty much what I’m here to say this morning. So we have I see 10 minutes on the clock here, so that if we would like to have any questions or chatting that’s totally optional. I’ve unshared my screen and I’m going to remake Janice the host again so I am no longer in charge of the screen. So that Janice can go from there.
Janice: Thank you very much Dr. Welch. It was just lovely. A wonderful, wonderful, wonderful program. You do so much to illuminate women and to rescue them from oblivion. As many of our women speakers have said women in various fields, we’ll do our part.
Many thanks to Janice Law of the American Women Writers National Museum who invited me to give a short talk on The Women of Early TV.
I enjoyed sharing the names and careers of women like Peg Lynch, Gertrude Berg, Selma Diamond, and D.C. Fontana to the members who gathered on Zoom last Wednesday morning. There are so many more I could have talked about whose names don’t appear in mainstream books about the history of television so we have to learn who they are and carry those names forward ourselves. It’s one of the missions of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting – and has been one of my missions all my life.
Watch this entire presentation
Women pioneers who created, produced, or shepherded many of America’s most wildly popular, early television programs will be profiled by Dr. Rosanne Welch.
![04 Other Interests from Why Torchwood Still Matters with Dr. Rosanne Welch, San Diego Who Con 2021 [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/rmw-whocon-2021-torchwood-04.jpg)
![02 How Do We Get Forgotten? from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/rmw-scms-2021-02.jpg)
![12 Her Companions from The Difficulties and Delicacies of Writing the First Female Doctor in 50+ years [Video] [Doctor Who]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/rmw-whocon-2021-chibnall-12.jpg)
![03 Represenation in Torchwood from Why Torchwood Still Matters with Dr. Rosanne Welch, San Diego Who Con 2021 [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/rmw-whocon-2021-torchwood-03.jpg)
![46 Screenwriting Mistakes: Write Something New... from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/rmw-courier-13-46.jpg)
![01 Introduction from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/rmw-scms-2021-01-1-1200x675.jpg)
![01 Introduciton from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/rmw-scms-2021-01.jpg)
![11 Casting Supporting Characters...from The Difficulties and Delicacies of Writing the First Female Doctor in 50+ years [Video] [Doctor Who]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/rmw-whocon-2021-chibnall-11.jpg)
![45 Screenwriting Mistakes: Lack of Research... from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/rmw-courier-13-45.jpg)
![02 My Interest In Torchwood from Why Torchwood Still Matters with Dr. Rosanne Welch, San Diego Who Con 2021 [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/rmw-whocon-2021-torchwood-02.jpg)
![From Women in Early TV for the American Women Writers National Museum [Video]](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/rmw-visible-stars-early-tv-19.jpg)
