Dr. Welch discussed many highly successful female screenwriters of early Hollywood and explained why they don’t appear in most mainstream histories of the era.
The essays in this book were written by the alumni of the inaugural class of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting and come from the stories of the many brilliant female screenwriters studied in our History of Screenwriting courses and collected into When Women Wrote Hollywood.
For this year’s virtual festival, I had the privilege of interviewing Gloria Calderon Kellett, co-creator and executive producer of the beloved reboot of One Day at a Time.
In our interview, Kellett shared how much she learned about running a show from her earliest days as a writer’s assistant, how earning an MFA was an investment in her future, and how much joy she’s had in using the power of her position to Write, Reach and Represent.
Gloria Calderón Kellett is a Showrunner, writer, director, and actor best known for the critically acclaimed reboot ONE DAY AT A TIME. She is currently on a deal at Amazon Studios where she is developing new shows and movies.
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When the folks hosting the conference announced their theme as “Screen Narratives: Chaos and Order” the word ‘chaos’ immediately brought to mind writers rooms. I offered a quick history of writers rooms (the presentations are only 20 minutes long) and then quoted several current showrunners on how they compose their rooms and how they run them.
Transcript
So that’s kind of my philosophy. I really don’t like the auteur theory and neither do a lot of other writers. This particular quote comes to us from the gentleman who gave us, in America, Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan. So I want to talk about writer’s rooms and his is considered one of the most organized so perhaps the less chaotic but still what happens in the room has its own form of chaos. So I think it’s really interesting that he is willing to defend the idea that writers are more important than directors. He’s certainly got an Emmy to prove he’s an important writer but I appreciate very much what he had to say. The room is about making people as comfortable as possible and this can be a difficult task but it’s the task of the executive producer or the showrunner to make sure that the people in the room are open to sharing as many of their interesting ideas as possible right? So chaos but managed chaos. You have to allow for much conversation but you’re the one managing what’s being said so you don’t run off on a tangent and of course Vince was brilliant at that.
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:
All right, so. what I wanted to do for about half a minute is describe this woman. Visually describe this character. Her name is Erin Brockovich. You may or may not have seen this movie all right. So we might know something about her from the movie but visually — and she’s Julia Roberts, you can tell — quickly how would you describe her if you’re writing that action line in your script? If nothing else, think of three adjectives. We always start with that. Style comes from what you do in the action lines because the dialogue has to sound like your characters but the action lines sound like you alright. Shy doesn’t work in the writers’ room. If you don’t have an idea, I’ll stop paying you a contract and you go home. I always tell my students when they have to pitch, you better have an idea right away because you’re turning down $38,000 because if there’s a new script and we need one done next week and you don’t do it your friend just got that much money. That’s a lot of money to turn down because you’re too shy to open your mouth. So school is when you practice not being shy.
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Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
When the folks hosting the conference announced their theme as “Screen Narratives: Chaos and Order” the word ‘chaos’ immediately brought to mind writers rooms. I offered a quick history of writers rooms (the presentations are only 20 minutes long) and then quoted several current showrunners on how they compose their rooms and how they run them.
Transcript
This is my teaching philosophy. Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter, and that’s something I try to focus on as much as possible. There’s a lot of women who never get mentioned and that bothers me but that’s a different lecture so — I did that last year this year. We’re talking about why writers are important and how the writers room works. As far as I’m concerned we have to remember that writer precedes director so I want more of our students to know the names of the writers of their favorite films not always just the directors because when you talk about a film you don’t say “Do you remember that beautiful camera angle in scene seven?” You say “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die” and that is something the writer did so I think we have to remember that the dialogue is what makes movies special and the characters.
##Teaching one of my 3 ##classes today for Cal Poly Pomona. This has been my classroom for the last year, like so many others. *DW (from Rosanne’s Prod)
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
When the folks hosting the conference announced their theme as “Screen Narratives: Chaos and Order” the word ‘chaos’ immediately brought to mind writers rooms. I offered a quick history of writers rooms (the presentations are only 20 minutes long) and then quoted several current showrunners on how they compose their rooms and how they run them.
Transcript
Always good to see everybody here. We’re all like on different time schedules so I’m still — I think it’s three in the morning in Los Angeles but that’s okay. Yes, we’re going to talk about this concept of chaos in writers’ rooms, which are really run in chaos, at least the ones in the United States. Just a quick background on who I am. I was in the business for several years. I wrote Picket Fences, Beverly Hills 90210 — which is a show that won’t die because they just did a live show or is just a little crazy and Touched By An Angel for a long time. So this is where I came from in television. This is what I’ve done in academia and writing. My favorite new book is a collection of essays written by many of my students about female screenwriters from the early days and giving us their backgrounds so I’m all about finding more women that we can write about and talk about in our classes. I think that’s important. I’m also the book review editor of the Journal of Screenwriting so if you have any books you’d like to review please let me know. I’d love to get you a free copy and get your review in the journal and also I’m on the editorial board for the Written By Magazine, which is the magazine of the Writers Guild of America. You can access that for free digitally online if you go to writtenby.com or go to wga.org and they’ll have a link to it, but every month we do interviews with either a film person or a television person or whole writer’s room from a show and I think it’s a great way to bring guest stars into a classroom from all over the world. Again, they’re obviously Americans although I interviewed Russell Davies several years ago so we do have some other folks come on into the magazine but it’s pretty cool.
Many thanks to Fred Velez for telling me about Daniel Sam and his fun internet Monkees talk show — followed by thanks to Dan for inviting me onto this discussion of all the great Monkees books out there. I enter the chat at the 15 minute mark in the video. — Rosanne
On Tuesday February 16th, 2021, the Plastic EP TV Facebook Live Monkees Discussion Panel held a literary discussion on Monkees Books.
Research on Edwin Hubble lead me to learn more about this set of female mathematicians – and in that wonderful way the synergy of the world seems to work they were then discussed on a UK comedy game show starring Sandy Toksvig – and I learned even more!
Henrietta Swan Levitt figured out how to measure the distance from the earth of pulsating stars. Edwin Hubble then used her calculations to discover the Milky Way. One of the game show guests asks when she gets credit and the answer is – only anecdotally from Hubble reminding people of her work. Why you might ask? For two reasons…
First, Levitt was part of what was nicknamed Pickering’s Harem. Edward Pickering ran the Harvard Observatory and found his male employees who analyzed data from the skies incompetent and slow so one day he said, “My maid could do it better.” The male staff said “Go ahead” so Pickering did hire a slew of women and as they worked so well he hired more women. Annie Jump Cannon manually classified 350,000 stars in her career. Yet, in that way misogyny takes over, rather than call them fellow mathematicians or astronomers, the women became… Pickering’s Harem. I also learned that this lead to the Harem effect — a phenomenon where male executives hire female assistants as they are cheaper and work harder. The jokes of these game show celebrities reminded me of the misogyny of naming the women Pickering’s Harem. We didn’t call the men of the Mercury project “Jackie Kennedy’s consorts”. I mean what a way to demean a set of highly educated women.
The Second reason Henrietta Swan Levitt did not receive full credit for her discovery is that Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler DID want to nominate Levitt for the 1926 Nobel Prize for Physics – but she had died 4 years earlier and the Prize can’t be awarded posthumously (I wonder what male thought up that dumb rule – and why?). Thankfully, Hubble always mentioned Levitt – but textbooks do not necessarily. At the end of the segment the host then covers the many lies Hubble told in his lifetime as a means of polishing his less than elegant background.
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