15 They Keep Killing Suzie…and Grace from Why Torchwood Still Matters with Dr. Rosanne Welch, San Diego Who Con 2021 [Video]

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.

RMW Rosanne Signature for Web

15 They Keep Killing Suzie…and Grace from Why Torchwood Still Matters with Dr. Rosanne Welch, San Diego Who Con 2021 [Video]

Transcript:

What they did in Torchwood they, of course, repeat when we come along to the Jodie Whittaker Doctor because they made you think we had a regular we didn’t have in the pilot. Right? That’s a trick that’s hard to get away with, but they made sure and wrote in a person who looked like they were part of the team and everything was happening and then they die in the pilot. And you’re like, whoa what happened?

They knew what they were doing. They knew they were killing the woman of color in that pilot, but they made sure she came back in Graham’s visions – right – he saw the visions of her and Ryan talks about her all the time. They even show The Doctor going to a funeral. How many people have died in the course of Doctor Who – I never once saw any of the Doctors go to a funeral. They respected her enough she stayed to go to her funeral. That’s how important that character is. So I think, I wouldn’t claim it as that but perhaps that is something they learned and they tried very hard not to do. Which I think is really interesting.

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Screenwriting Research Network Conversation #2 – Memories of Our Previous International Conferences [Video]

In my role as the Secretary for the Executive Council of the SRN (Screenwriting Research Network) I was happy to be asked to act as host for the second SRN Conversation – a chance to talk with folks who have planned a couple of our earlier conferences around the world.

I spoke with organizers JJ Murphy of the Madison, Wisconsin 2013 conference and Kathryn Millard and Alex Munt of the Sydney 2012. The SRN Conversations allow us to create an archive of the history of the group and inform new members about all the opportunities gained from attending our conferences.

All their info will help me in planning SRN 2023 on my home campus at Stephens College in Columbia, Missouri.

Screenwriting Research Network Conversation #2 – Memories of Our Previous International Conferences [Video]

14 Obituaries Are Unreliable Narrators from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

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”

14 Obituaries Are Unreliable Narrators from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

Transcript:

To be fair, it does happen to male screenwriters sometimes. Nunally Johnson is the one who adapted ‘The Grapes of Wrath” and John Ford, who directed actually wrote in a book that he said, “You know people are credit this particular shot with my genius but you wrote it down in the scripts.” Right? And Nunally was like, ‘I don’t know who’s going get the attribution but I know I wrote it and that’s all that matters.” So, he didn’t particularly care but his name disappears so badly that obituary writers are terribly unreliable narrators. When Nunally Johnson’s wife died – she was the actress Dorris Bowden who played Rose O’Sharon in The Grapes of Wrath – they called it John Ford’s Grapes of Wrath and they said that she left acting after she married that film’s screenwriter. They took his name out of his wife’s obituary. Who’s more important in her death? Her husband or the guy who directed a movie she did fifty years ago? Clearly think about that and she herself was very proud of how John Steinbeck had talked about Nunally Johnson’s writing because he was so brilliant. So to erase him out of her obituary is ridiculous.

 

 


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23 The Voice of the Character 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!

23 The Voice of the Character from The Difficulties and Delicacies of Writing the First Female Doctor in 50+ years [Video] [Doctor Who]

Transcript:

So it was a real like getting to know the voice of a character and a character that has had similar but slightly different voices across all 50 years. They all have had their own way of doing things and their own sort of idioms. I think that’s really delicate but that line really stuck out to me and you just can’t imagine thinking your way through it so long and then I think this is really important because it keeps us with the theme – the overarching theme – of the series which is really about pacifism and about really attempting to bring peace to the universe, not war. Even though of course David comes back from the time war and all that stuff but I think keeping that in mind and allowing a female character to bring forward that idea. In a funny way I’m a huge fan of Robert Redford and all that sort of thing and “The Way We Were” is one of my favorite romances and the idea that there was the Barbra Streisand character – ban the bomb, pushing for pacifism. It’s a woman is always trying to say let’s not go to war first let’s get to the solution because I don’t want to see all the people I know get hurt. So I think that’s very true not just that she’s a female character but it’s Doctor Who. That’s the job right? So we try to do it without a gun. Sometimes they show up but they really don’t belong there. They really don’t belong there.

 

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14 Owen Harper from Why Torchwood Still Matters with Dr. Rosanne Welch, San Diego Who Con 2021 [Video]

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.

RMW Rosanne Signature for Web

14 Owen Harper from Why Torchwood Still Matters with Dr. Rosanne Welch, San Diego Who Con 2021 [Video]

Transcript:

 

…and then Owen was an interesting character. I mean he could be your bland white guy except he wasn’t a nice guy necessarily and they had to put up with him because of his talent and he had to learn and grow. So I think he was an interesting character. He’s not the most interesting of all of them. The fact that he had a relationship with Tosh says a little bit about him right? So it’s not the best character but he was you know i mean if he had to have a second white guy he was okay but here’s where i start thinking about the writing makes the show stand out.

 

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13 Women Writers To Remember from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

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”

13 Women Writers To Remember from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

Transcript:

Selma Diamond. Brilliant writer back in the day. We know her more from being an actress on “Night Court” and being on many of the talk shows and Lucille Kallan found a way to stay in the history books because she became a novelist after she stopped writing television and I think she’s pretty brilliant. You can see this lovely picture of her. So pictures from back in the day do include the women but that’s not the one Vanity Fair chose to publish. She was memorialized a little bit in Neil Simon’s play although he took the two women and turned them into one female character. There are seven boys in this play and one girl. They couldn’t do two girls and six boys. Just thinking about how they could have arranged that right? They thought they were all the same. Even though almost any female tv writer that you meet will tell you that it was the existence of Sally Rogers that turned them into a tv writer and Sally Rogers is patterned after Selma and Lucille right because “The Dick Van Dyke Show” was the Sid Caesar Show. So the importance of those women disappears in history.

 

 


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22 On Costumes and Sonic Screwdrivers 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!

22 On Costumes and Sonic Screwdrivers from The Difficulties and Delicacies of Writing the First Female Doctor in 50+ years [Video] [Doctor Who]

Transcript:

So costume is a huge and this is what a showrunner does. You sit with every single department and you decide and you get the final say. So of course you get the final hit if people don’t like what you decided but that’s your job to make decisions right and to be able to go this is why I did that and maybe I’ll change my mind if it isn’t as appealing as it could be. So costume is important but for me the most important thing that a writer brings, of course, is dialogue and he had to really think about how can this person talk like The Doctor but reference and accept the fact that you don’t look like all the previous Doctors and other people aren’t going to treat you immediately the same way they would treat a male walking into many of these situations and so that was to me a very delicate dance and I like this particular – you know very beginning right she’s like I lost my sonic screwdriver. I could build one. I’m good at building things probably and we’re all giggling right because The Doctor has to be funny but then there was this but but he she has to be competent. So you don’t want the woman to not be competent but any Doctor would have said that.

 

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13 Toshiko (Tosh) Sato from Why Torchwood Still Matters with Dr. Rosanne Welch, San Diego Who Con 2021 [Video]

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.

RMW Rosanne Signature for Web

13 Toshiko (Tosh) Sato from Why Torchwood Still Matters with Dr. Rosanne Welch, San Diego Who Con 2021 [Video]

Transcript:

The person of color they ended up with and did keep of course was Toshiko and here they did good and they made a small mistake or they fell into a stereotype. Certainly, they made her a regular. She has a sex life. She falls in love with an alien. So we’re going to go into omnisexual stuff too. So we’re continuing the idea of the show but she also falls in love with Owen. So you know she also falls in love with a human but usually your person of color – largely when that person is of Asian descent – never has a sex life. Never has a home family. It’s like they don’t exist except to be in the workplace. So I would say that the stereotype they fell into was of course she is our computer expert. Happens a lot. We just ran into a yet another new series in the UK called Annika and it’s the story of a female cop and one of her assistants – one of the other cops –  is the actress who played Cho Chang in the Harry Potter series. Now she’s about 30 and she does computer stuff but she also works in the field. So we’ve seen her interrogate people. So they’ve moved beyond that stereotype. They started there and now we’ve seen them move beyond that. So I would say that’s maybe the one flaw with this character but they certainly gave her a three-dimensional life and that’s really all anybody’s asking for. If you’re going to include a character they shouldn’t just be there as window dressing. They should have a complete life right and that’s been an argument for a long time with people of color on different tv shows. They don’t go home to somebody. They’re just there hanging out with the white people helping them out and it’s kind of like no they have other people in their life. So Tosh had a sex life. She had love. She had desires and she went through on most of those. So I think she’s a pretty focused…

Audience: She got more action than Jack.

Rosanne: She did. She totally did which is you know that’s I think innovative.

Audience: That’s saying something.

Rosanne: Exactly.

Audience: Jack talks a good game.

Rosanne: Exactly

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12 Photography can be an Unreliable Narrator from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

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”

12 Photography can be an Unreliable Narrator  from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

Transcript:

Photography can be an unreliable narrator to us. In this case, this is a famous photo of the writers of the Sid Caeser show. So I’ve flipped over to tv for a minute. Look at all these important men whose careers went on and on and on but when they took this picture Selma Diamond and Lucille Callan – the two women who were on Sid Caeser shows – had died. So they were not present for this photograph which goes down in history as the picture of the writers of these shows. If you don’t read the small print in the tiny bottom corner there you don’t notice that unpictured are the only two women that we could possibly credit. Billy Crystal was so excited about this when this happened he helped organize this Vanity Fair gathering. This is the long thing I won’t get into but he talks about how much he wants in life he would dream of being in that room and he names all the men and none of the women because he’s forgotten they exist right? That photograph allows us to forget that.

 

 


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21 More On Costumes 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!

21 More On Costumws from The Difficulties and Delicacies of Writing the First Female Doctor in 50+ years [Video] [Doctor Who]

 

Transcript:

There were part partially were reflecting Tom’s scarf back in the day and partially we’re reflecting the rainbow right because again inclusion but in this sort of gentle historic to Who but also modern for now world and there’s also a lavender line in here which doesn’t show up in Tom’s scarf but is a reference to the Suffragettes because they were lavender sashes in the uk when they were marching. So it’s kind of a cool little thing they added. Yeah oh yeah, they gave it much thought and this is him in consultation with costumers. There is a great show on Netflix. What’s it called? Where they do where they interview it’s the Abstract one right? They interviewed the costume designer who got the Oscar for Black Panther. Yes, it’s an hour of her discussing the job of being a costume designer. It’s a show on Netflix called Abstract and they meet a different artist every week and her name escapes me right now but she got started on “Do the Right Thing” and she got the Oscar for designing the costumes for Black Panther and it’s a whole like she got started. She was an actress in college and she didn’t get cast in a play and they asked her if she would work on costumes and her grandmother had taught her to sew and so then she was like hey I really actually like this and she goes through the process of when I get a script I break it down. I look at all the characters. What their backstory is? I decide everything that they should look like. What the colors mean. All of that and then of course in consultation with the writer and the producer we go what do they like what don’t they like etcetera etcetera.

 

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