video – Page 22 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

01 Introduction from How The Chaos Of Collaboration in the Writers Room Created Golden Age Television [Video]

With the full recording of “How The Chaos Of Collaboration in the Writers Room Created Golden Age Television”

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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

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.

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Dr. Rosanne Welch Joins Panel on Monkees Books with Plastic EP Live [Video] (54 minutes)

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.

Participants included:

Fred Velez
Charles Rosenay
Ed Reilly
Michael A Ventrella
Mark Arnold
Natalie A Palumbo
Special Guest, Dr. Rosanne Welch, Author of Why The Monkees Matter

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“Pickering’s Harem”, Henrietta Swan Levitt, Edwin Hubble, and More on Women in Science

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…

Public Domain, Link

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.

Amazing what you can learn from a UK game show.

Dr. Rosanne Welch Speaks On “VISIBLE STARS: Women in Early TV” for the American Women Writers National Museum [Video] (26 minutes)

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, Gerturde 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.

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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Dr. Rosanne Welch Hosts “Act Two: Transitioning to TV Writing from Previous Careers” for the WGA Foundation [Video]

During every workshop intensive for the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting I have the privilege of creating and moderating a panel of female screenwriters discussing various topics.

Our most recent panel focused on “Transitioning to Television” and included panelists who came to television from previous careers. This allowed me to talk to women who came to TV whose first careers included being a doctor, lobbyist, college professor and, of especially pride for our MFA program, a former Senior Physical Security Analyst for federal agencies, U.S. Army Reserve veteran.

All of them are now writing on major television shows and their advice and honesty was greatly appreciated. — Rosanne

For this session, we teamed up with Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting for a discussion on transitioning to TV writing from other careers. Learn how our panel of TV writers and producers made the jump to television, how their previous experiences inform their writing, and how that lens impacts their approach in the writers room.

Panelists are Zoanne Clack, M.D., MPH (Executive Producer, Grey’s Anatomy), Rashaan Dozier-Escalante (Staff Writer, SEAL Team), Akilah Green (Co-producer, Black Monday), and Calaya Michelle Stallworth, Ph.D (Executive Story Editor, Fear of the Walking Dead).
Moderated by Dr. Rosanne Welch, Director of Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting.

Filmed on January 13, 2021.

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Dr. Rosanne Welch and Dr. Peg Lamphier Talk Women In American History on the College of Education and Integrative Studies Podcast [Video]

Here’s a fun interview of my friend and frequent collaborator Peg Lamphier and I on the podcast hosted by the Dean of the College of Education and Integrative Studies at Cal Poly Pomona.

He invited us to discuss the two awards given to our 4 volume encyclopedia on Women in American History. (It was named to both the 2018 Outstanding References Sources List and the 2018 list of Best Historical Materials, by the Reference and User Services Association (RUSA), a division of the American Library Association) and our current book contracts.

Thanks to Ashley Jones, the Communications Specialist at Cal Poly Pomona, who plans podcasts for helping to highlight the work of adjuncts on our campus. If we can’t get ‘the big bucks’ it’s nice to have our scholarship acknowledged by the larger community.

We filmed this before campus closed down in March so we end up saying our new book on Fact Checking Hollywood History will be out in April… which of course hasn’t happened since most college libraries continue to be closed. We expect it to be released in another couple of months.

Panel Discussion: More Than A Period: Writing Girls Coming of Age Stories For TV [Video] (1 hour 27 minutes)

Panel Discussion: More Than A Period: Writing Girls Coming of Age Stories For TV

Recently, I had the honor (and the fun) of moderating another panel for the Writers Guild Foundation with a conversation centered around how we write “Girls Coming of Age” stories for television.

Our panelists included Rheeqrheeq Chainey (The Baby Sitters Club), Sonia Kharkar (On My Block, Never Have I Ever), Ilana Peña (Creator, Diary of a Future President) and Christina Nieves (Generation), an alumna of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting, which was the greatest pleasure of the whole event!

For each Workshop the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting hosts a panel with the Writers Guild Foundation which takes place at the Guild offices in Los Angeles. For this August it will be on Zoom which means many more attendees can RSVP to join us – and we hope you will because this panel is extra-special.

It’s the second year in a row we’ve been able to invite an MFA alumna to be a panelist because they have become a working writer. Last year it was Class of 2019’s Sahar Jahani (who has written for Ramy and 13 Reasons Why) and on this panel we’ll be welcoming Class of 2020’s Christina Nieves to discuss Writing Girls Coming of Age Stories thanks to her new position as a staff writer on Generation.

We hope you can join me, Dr. Rosanne Welch, Executive Director of Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting as I moderate the discussion.

Photo by Kyle Gregory Devaras on Unsplash

More Than A Period: Writing Girls Coming of Age Stories For TV

Wednesday, August 12, 2020
4:30 PM 6:00 PM

We at the WGF may have hit a pause on our live events, but thanks to technology, we’re aiming to provide more access to advice and knowledge from film and TV writers while we’re all social distancing. Over the last few months, we’ve been hosting free Zoom panels about craft and all things relevant to writers.

For this session, we team up with Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting for a discussion about crafting girls’ coming-of-age stories. The panel of writers will share how their shows address this formative period for its characters, how their own experiences informed their writing, and why coming-of-age stories are an endless source of stories.

Panelists:

Sonia Kharkar – Executive Story Editor, On My Block, Never Have I Ever
Christina Nieves – Staff Writer, Generation
Ilana Peña – Creator, Diary of a Future President
Moderated by Dr. Rosanne Welch, Director of Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting.

When Women Wrote Hollywood: The Movies – First in a series – Fanchon, the Cricket by Frances Marion

An on-going series highlighting the women screenwriters of early Hollywood.

When I was first asked to create a history course for a new MFA focused on the mission of bringing more female voices and female-centric stories to Hollywood, I knew we had to start at the very beginning, when women ran Hollywood. No other course I had ever taken or been asked to teach focused on these women, some of whom I had been reading about since the summers of my childhood in Cleveland, Ohio. Back then, I went to the library once a week to collect a stack of memoirs by women I had seen interviewed on The Merv Griffin Show, women like Anita Loos and Adela Rogers St. Johns. Their stories introduced me to moguls like Louis B. Mayer or Jack Warner, who make up most of the history courses I later found in academia. Knowing better, I found most of those courses, and their accompanying textbooks, glossed over these women with a paragraph if they mentioned them at all. I conceived a course that would begin with these women who began Hollywood and culminate in research by each graduate student into the life and career of one particular early female screenwriter. That is what you find here. A collection of herstories about how these women lived, loved and created the stories that gave their audiences reasons to live and love in their own lives. — Dr. Rosanne Welch, Editor. When Women Wrote Hollywood

By Paramount Pictures – Variety (Apr. 1915) on the Internet Archive, Public Domain, Link

Fanchon, the Cricket is a 1915 American silent drama film produced by Famous Players Film Company and distributed by Paramount Pictures. It is based on a novel, La Petite Fadette by George Sand. It was directed by James Kirkwood and stars Mary Pickford, now working for Adolph Zukor and Daniel Frohman. A previous film version of the story was released in 1912 by IMP (later Universal) and directed by Herbert Brenon.^[1]— Wikipedia

Frances Marion(bornMarion Benson Owens, November 18, 1888^[1]– May 12, 1973) was an American screenwriter, journalist, author, and film director, often cited as one of the most renowned female screenwriters of the 20th century alongsideJune MathisandAnita Loos. During the course of her career, she wrote over 325 scripts.^[2]She was the first writer to win twoAcademy Awards. Marion began her film career working for filmmakerLois Weber. She wrote numeroussilent filmscenarios for actressMary Pickford, before transitioning to writingsound films. — Wikipedia

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Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting [Video]

What is the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting? Here is a short introduction.

We’re pleased to present a new slideshow designed by graphic artist Phoenix Bussey, a Stephens College undergrad, using photos taken by MFA candidates during the last few years of workshops. We think it tells our story well. Write. Reach. Represent.

Visit the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting web site to apply today!

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40 Conclusion from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 42 seconds)

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The Sisterhood of Science Fiction: A Walk Through Some Writers and Characters You (Should) Know And Love

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This one allowed me to riff on some of my favorite female science fiction writers across time, whether they be novelists or television writers. It also opened up a good conversation on what art we support and include in our lives – and what that art says to us and about us. — Rosanne

Transcript:

We’ve moved to the world thankfully where now we’re gonna have female superheroes even and that’s the big deal. Likewise I love this meme. It’s been going around on Facebook but you probably saw it — makes a difference that little girls are now seeing women in charge and all these kinds of films makes a big difference. I like this one too. I’ve live long enough to see my child princesses become generals right? That’s Princess Buttercup — kicking some butt and what — exactly — in Wonder Woman. As you wish exactly. As I wish that someone take care. That’s pretty cool. and we’ve come to a place where there’s a new movie opening this weekend or next weekend that’s about an African-American girl who has superhero powers and so does her mother and her grandmother. It all comes through three generations of women who have to use those powers well and they have to deal with them and not cause violence and issues like that. So the fact that we’ve moved all the way here from Frankenstein is pretty amazing I think and I think we always have to go back to what Octavia Butler said, we have to think what we don’t see we assume we can’t be. So whatever that is, we need to see those depictions of all of our different selves because diversity isn’t about getting more money at the box office. Those make much richer, better stories because we are a hugely diverse world and it’s not just actually here in America. It’s all over the world. There’s all kinds of different people everywhere. We really need to think about all of them living on into the future. That makes the best science fiction, in my opinion. So there we have it. Thank you all for coming.

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