video – Page 13 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

15 Treva Silverman From Women in Early TV for the American Women Writers National Museum [Video]

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.

Transcript:

Moving into the 1960s one of my favorite people is Treva Silverman. She is one of the first female writers to win an Emmy. In fact, she won two in the same year for writing without a male partner. All the previous women who had won had had a male partner. Treva was a solo writer. She originally wrote for The Monkees. One show that I have written an entire book about that I’m very interested in and I will credit her with the fact that in 58 episodes of a show about rock and roll singers, every girl they met had a job and a career. They did not ever date bimbos. They dated girls who were journalists and who were worked at record stores or there was one who was a princess and a princess is a job right? So I think Treva was the feminist voice on that show.

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.

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Women pioneers who created, produced, or shepherded many of America’s most wildly popular, early television programs will be profiled by Dr. Rosanne Welch.

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06 More On “She is wise and unafraid…” 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:

…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.

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40 Artist-Scholars from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

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

Transcript:

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.

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14 Joan Harrison From Women in Early TV for the American Women Writers National Museum [Video]

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.

Transcript:

Joan Harrison is a woman few people know about today because this man, Alfred Hitchcock, overshadowed all the writers of all his movies. We call them Hitchcock films but I find that very very disingenuous because in fact they were written by other people. Often this woman, Joan Harrison. She wrote, in fact, the only movie that Hitchcock ever won an Oscar for — Rebecca. She’s the woman who found the story, adapted it, wrote the script was on the set for all the production of it. She was originally his secretary. She began as the secretary and there were many people who never forgave that title however she wrote many other films. She began to produce films and we’re talking about early in the 40s, 50s. She’s going to move into the 1960s as the producer of the Alfred Hitchcock’s Presents program. So she’ll do TV production, executive producing, long before that ever existed for most people and very recently a friend of mine — I met her online doing other work — Christina Lane –she’s a professor out of the College of Florida. She wrote Phantom Lady. Of course, that’s the name of a film but also it’s the story of Joan Harrison’s life. So it’s the first full biography of a female producer of that time period that takes her work very seriously but notice how the subtitle still has to be “The forgotten woman behind Hitchcock.” That’s the name that we recognize. That’s the name people relate to. So her career has always been overshadowed by the fact that she worked for Hitchcock. There’s another book about writing with Hitchcock by I believe his name is Michael Shane, I’d have to double-check but he wrote several Hitchcock films and he wrote a book about writing with Hitchcock. About what it was like to work with him and as much as we call them Hitchcock films and I’m very against that auteur theory because I think the writer is the person who brings you your theme — that’s what they’re considered. So we have to remember the people behind the directing. They were the writers and this is a beautiful picture of her as a producer looking at a piece of edited film and making some choices. So she did the full gamut of work in these early days of television.

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.

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.

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05 “She is wise and unafraid…” from The Difficulties and Delicacies of Writing the First Female Doctor in 50+ years [Video] [Doctor Who]

Transcript:

Because I do know — I have two very favorite — yeah my very favorite fandoms are Doctor Who and The Monkees and somebody did this lovely piece of fan art which I just fell in love with so I love how fandom blends together and you know the whole community that you create with other people who love what you love but today we’re going to talk about the writing of this new female Doctor right? I used to actually have a Matt outfit I like to wear and I had a Peter outfit that I like to wear but now I’m going to have to kind of have to go with the fact that hello I bought this two years ago here at WhoCon, so it’s really fun. Anyway, this was actually the title and this is a line right from the first episode. What I loved is this business right? “She’s wise and unafraid and I believe in her.” One of the things I noticed about what Chibnall had to do right away and I know that we all have some gripes about some of the stuff he’s done but I think that he made some very good choices in the beginning and a lot of that has to do with writing and hiring some other very good writers who brought in some aspects of the show we hadn’t had before.

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39 More On Teaching? from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

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

Transcript:

…but I miss part of it right and you do miss trying to explain to people how it should be done because you can’t really do that on a tv show — maybe if you’re the showrunner but even then you’re hiring people that already know how to do it and they don’t want you to tell them how. They may listen to you and like roll their eyes because they have to because you’re paying the money but that’s not the same world right and I also think there wasn’t a lot of focus on women in this business for a long time and so I thought that was something that I could bring to a classroom was to really bring forward more young women who would be ready to tackle this business and really have a true understanding of it. So they’d know what to expect and sort of how to work around some of the bullshit and you know be good enough not to fall into any traps. So I just thought it would be you know — and I live in LA and TV comes and goes. You don’t always know when the next show will sell or when you get staffed on something. So good back — you know it’s always a good background if — I’ll just do this for a while and move and you know change around so.

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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13 Even More On D. C. Fontana From Women in Early TV for the American Women Writers National Museum [Video]

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.

Transcript:

There’s a great story. Nichelle Nichols was going to quit because, if you think about it, stereotypically, she was the secretary. She took calls for the captain on Star Trek. So she kind of thought this is a waste of my time. She’d been a big band singer. She had more to do with her life and in fact, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King met her at some fundraiser and said “Oh no-no. You are deeply important because you are showing young children that we belong in the future.” So she stayed on the show and looked then she did the movies and of course, Nichelle is as iconic as any of the early females in television. This is all the work of Dorothy Fontana and I think we need to recognize her name and be really interested in all her other work. She later went on to do Babylon 5 of course another science fiction show. She worked on the video game versions of Star Trek. So she stayed in that realm and was sort of the cover who knew all the history and how all the characters should be portrayed long after Gene Roddenberry passed away.

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.

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Women pioneers who created, produced, or shepherded many of America’s most wildly popular, early television programs will be profiled by Dr. Rosanne Welch.

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04 My Writing from The Difficulties and Delicacies of Writing the First Female Doctor in 50+ years [Video] [Doctor Who]

Transcript:

So Written By Magazine. Journal of Screenwriting again obviously coming from that standpoint and California History. I do some pop culture for them so I’m trying to figure out how to get some Doctor Who in there right? A little — I’m a little behind on Matt having actually been in the West but maybe I’ll get something on there. This is the piece that I did for Written By and as I said it’s a sample over there. It was really fun to sort of sit in the room with him. I do think he’s one of my favorite writers and that made me very happy and then these are a bunch of other books and things that I’ve written so you kind of know where I’m coming from and where these opinions come from.

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38 Why Teaching? from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

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

Transcript:

Host: I guess I’ll ask, why why did you also want to teach?

Rosanne: I actually — my first job was as a high school teacher because I come from Ohio — a college in Ohio and there was no way you were going to convince your parents or anybody that like it was legitimate to think you’d get a job in television. So I had to get a real like get a degree in something real. So it was in high school and I taught literature and things like that for a couple years until I could make the move to California and I could make it because you could teach in Ohio. You could teach here. So I could get a long-distance job as a teacher which gave me a financial way to make a move like that. So I actually liked it. I missed it in a weird way. I mean certainly doesn’t pay as much as TV but there’s a lot of things you do as a teacher — there are skills you have and a lot of that translates into writing in that and pitching because pitching is like I’m giving a lecture and explaining an idea to you to make you love it so much you’ll pay me to do it. So that’s a skill. That little performance thing comes from a teaching background and I also think that television particularly because it’s — well was free and even if your parents are paying for it essentially is free — as opposed to movies you have to fork over 20 bucks to go see them. So television is like this giant podium that a teacher would stand at and lecture and a TV show and a movie — any piece of writing that’s good that sticks to you — has a message — is there with a theme about how you want other people to live their lives. A lesson that you wish other people would learn. So really writing is like being a teacher on steroids.

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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12 More On D. C. Fontana From Women in Early TV for the American Women Writers National Museum [Video]

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.

Transcript:

She started out, as often happens to women, as an assistant to Gene Roddenberry. She had written short stories. She had actually written episodes of shows like The Big Valley and The High Chaparral. Again, two very progressive early shows. Problem was, how do you get a gig? She got a gig as his assistant but she was there at the very beginning. In the early books about Star Trek they will talk about how intrinsic she was to coming up with the fact that females needed to be important on the show because it was about the future and of course someone like Nichelle Nichols right? We had to have African-American representation in the future and this is going to be, again, so important to representation because Nichelle Nichols is going to inspire Mae Jemison, the first African-American female astronaut right? Mae Jemison saw Nichelle Nichols and knew that she could be in space because she saw it, so she could be it right?

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.

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.

Get your copy today!

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