women – Page 11 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

05 “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:

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.

Watch this entire presentation

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

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.

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

27 Conclusion from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

So I think she’s a pretty cool lady all around. I think it’s cool to realize how much of an effect this movie has had on film history. If you are a die-hard fan and you watch it for Christmas, even though it’s not a Christmas movie, you’ll notice the big moment at the end is that all through the movie she’s defined herself as Holly Gennaro which is her maiden name because they’re separated but in the end when they make up and she runs to the police and they say something about our you so and so she says Holly Maclean. She takes his name back. So she’s doing exactly a homage to that moment. In the same way, some 20 years later — this is 1988 — in Notting Hill, we finally have a guy who doesn’t mind when they call him Mr Scott which is Anna Scott’s name right? That’s not his last name but he’s now fine with a wife who is five million times more famous than he will ever be. So our society had come to this point one assumes in 1999 and Dorothy yourself has been homaged and written about. Fitzgerald who knew her personally wrote about her in The Last Tycoon. She’s one of the characters in there. She’s in this Broadway play as a character and if you like the Gilmore Girls at all Amy Sherman Palladino’s production company is called “Dorothy Parker Drank Here.” That’s how popular she maintains in the modern world. I got a bunch of clips you can see at another time because we don’t have time. I always like to offer up a bibliography because you should know there’s a lot of stuff you could study and that’s it. That’s everything I can say in a nutshell about A Star is Born.

Watch this entire presentation

Connections at conferences matter! Through the most recent SCMS, I met Vicki Callahan, whose film history focus right now is on Mabel Normand. When she learned I could put together a lecture on the importance of the female voice in the A Star is Born franchise she asked me to give that lecture to her master students.

It made for a great opportunity for me to hone the ideas I’m working on for a chapter on that franchise that I’m writing for a new book from Bloomsbury: The Bloomsbury Handbook Of International Screenplay Theory. It’s always nice when one piece of research can be purposed in other ways – and it’s always fun revisiting such a female-centric film franchise – one that drew the talents of such powerful performers as Janet Gaynor, Judy Garland, Barbara Streisand, and Lady Gaga.

Find out why in this lecture!

Watch this entire presentation

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

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.

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:

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.

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.

Get your copy today!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

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.

Watch this entire presentation

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

26 Dorothy Parker and Social Justice from “Female Creatives & A Star Is Born” [Video]

Transcript:

I think it’s important to remember what it could have been if we’d had a chance to see a Whitney Houston version. I think that would have been an incredible movie. I’m still bummed I’m never going to get to see it and I think it’d really be cool if Dorothy had lived to see it all but she didn’t. She died in 1967 and I think it’s interesting to point out why it is Martin Luther King in this picture. People may or may not know that if you buy any of her writing — if you buy the portable Dorothy Parker — you will find that she gave all her money, when she died, to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King. She did not know, of course, that he would die a year later and all of his estate went to the NAACP. So if you buy any of her writing, you’re supporting the NAACP and that’s because even as a young woman at the age of 27 she was reviewing broadway plays and she reviewed Emperor Jones and she had this quote about how people — how the producers in Broadway at that time — because it wasn’t you know she wasn’t involved in Hollywood — they were wasting the genius of the African-American community. Obviously, she’s using word of the day but she recognized the genius that was being lost. So she wanted to support the cause of social — civil rights — social justice and civil rights and I think that’s pretty cool.

Watch this entire presentation

Find out why in this lecture!

Watch this entire presentation

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

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!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

03 Russell T Davies from The Difficulties and Delicacies of Writing the First Female Doctor in 50+ years [Video] [Doctor Who]

Transcript:

I also am on the editorial board for different things. Written By Magazine is the magazine of the Writers Guild. I have a sample of it over there. I got lucky one time when Russell was in town doing Miracle Day the editor was like I know you’re a Doctor Who fan. Would you like to interview him and I was like yes I would love to sit in a room and chat with him and it turned out few journalists are as Whovian of a fan as I. So we ended up chatting longer than I was meant to be there and the publicist would walk by and go “Are you all done yet?” and I thought. oh, they’re going to kick me out, and then Russell was like in a minute and he’d send the publicist away. So I laughed.

Watch this entire presentation

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

37 Finding Your Writing Process…from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

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

Transcript:

I have another friend who teaches a thing called “speed drafting” So then you figure out what’s your best way to work and his idea is that you should set a little timer — an hour and a half, two hours, whatever you think — and just keep going and if you have a problem — I need to research something– you just slug in a little thing — figure this out later — that sort of thing keep moving, keep moving and the next day you don’t go back and look at what you did the day before. You just take it from where you stopped and go. So you have a whole first draft as fast as possible and then you take the time to pick your way through and do the rewriting and fill in the stuff that you didn’t know along the way. That works for him. That gives him two hours a day of writing and that’s all he needs to get to a — and then it’s two hours of rewriting when he gets to that stage. So you find a process that works for you and then you make sure your lifestyle allows for that process.

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.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS