women – Page 8 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

13 More On The Companions 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:

What she had to do – what she – what Chibnall had to do is we’ve fallen into a pattern where all the companions fall in love with The Doctor and that was cool with Amy. That was like okay. Romantic storyline and I frankly love the fact that Martha had the guts to say dude you’re never gonna feel the way I feel and I’m not wasting my time. That to me was like the most grown-up thing I had seen a woman do. So very cool. That’s when I – yes. She really like then you’re like oh she’s like one of my favorite companions. So all right so we’re falling into that right? So how do you avoid that with the first female Doctor? Well pretty smart. We’re going to give you a young man who’s at least 15 years younger than the – of course, The Doctors years and years old – but the visual person so if you think about it Tosin is about 15 years younger than her and Graham is about 15 years older. So our brains aren’t going to immediately go hey are they going to fall in love. So he avoided that but he also had to think about the male characters. They can’t be stronger than her because that would ruin her ability to be the most important character. So we’ve got a very young man. Ryan should be as strong or stronger than as Jody Whitaker appears in life. So they gave him dyspraxia, right? They gave him a bit of a handicap that puts him a little bit behind right? So I had to think about that. It’s not a bad one. It’s not one that you know gets in the way too much but it keeps him from jumping in and saving the day, which you have to think about.

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12 Her Companions from The Difficulties and Delicacies of Writing the First Female Doctor in 50+ years [Video] [Doctor Who]

Transcript:

If we look here, obviously, we have, again, female leadership. The police person is Yasmin, right? It’s a woman police officer who’s gonna come and join. So now we’re gonna have two relatively powerful women running things and that’s different for us. I mean I like Tegan too. She was fun but you know a little screamy goofy right and Nyssa was a doctor. So Nyssa, I really enjoyed Nyssa. So finding two strong women in stories is very interesting.

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Screenwriter Clara Beranger – From Silents to Talkies to Teaching – Dr. Rosanne Welch, Script Magazine, April 2022

As with several silent film screenwriters, earlier careers in journalism and playwriting during the 1910s brought Clara Beranger to Hollywood. She would amass 85 credits between 1913 and 1934, bridging the worlds of silent and sound films.

Born Clara Strouse in Baltimore, Maryland on January 14, 1886, to a department store dynasty, she graduated in 1907 as a Phi Beta Kappa at Goucher College. She gained her professional surname when she married Albert Berwanger and kept it (except for the ‘w’) after their divorce. They had one child, a daughter named Frances, in 1909.

Read Screenwriter Clara Beranger – From Silents to Talkies to Teaching

Read about more women from early Hollywood

46 Screenwriting Mistakes: Write Something New… 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:…and then the second-biggest – and many people will tell you this – and it’s not just in classes and what you read – doing readership all over town – never write something that looks like I’ve seen it before, because why do I need you? I need to see something that’s different and that’s where you – your personal. perspective comes from, right? I need to see something I haven’t seen before and that doesn’t mean it has to be edgier and worse and mean and nasty, but there’s just – there’s an honesty to it that I didn’t expect. That’s what I want to see.

Host: ..and that’s perspective that gives you that.

Rosanne: Exactly.

Host: I feel like I’ve learned so much today.

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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11 Casting Supporting Characters…from The Difficulties and Delicacies of Writing the First Female Doctor in 50+ years [Video] [Doctor Who]

Transcript:

The other important thing is casting who would be around her. So, as the showrunner, he is casting all of these new characters and he’s inventing them from scratch and so we looked at this group of people and thought OK, who does he surround the first female Doctor with and it was important to him, I also think he promised and mostly came through on diversity and diversity is one of those words that gets tossed around a lot. Some people are saying let’s get rid of that word. Let’s go with inclusion. It just means let’s tell more stories. Let’s tell a wider range of stories that we haven’t had a chance to see before. So he committed to that and by virtue of who he chose to follow her obviously, we are going to get some different stories that had not yet – I mean it’s 50+ years of a TV show. What new things can you possibly write? And, of course, for The Doctor that comes from the people who follow him. So I think that these were very good choices.

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45 Screenwriting Mistakes: Lack of Research… 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: What’s like mistakes that you see in young writer scripts that are like most common? Like just an aspect of writing that a lot of young writers don’t get or have trouble with at first?

Rosanne: There’s probably a couple of things. I see, sometimes, that people don’t take the time to do the research they need into the world they want to write about. It’s really not good to come into class with a first act, let’s say, or an outline and if I want to ask you a question about how doctors would really do that and you say I haven’t looked into it yet. Don’t write it until you’ve looked into it. I’ve had people write cop shows where cops do things they don’t – you can’t do. It doesn’t work that way, right? Oh well, I didn’t know that. Well, you’re writing a cop show. Go figure out what happens the day after they shoot somebody. They don’t just go back to their desk. There are all kinds of stuff that happens or actually, you’re trying to think. I’ve always had examples of that or people who do different things or they have doctors do different things like that’s not how a doctor – that’s not how a hospital works. Didn’t you pay attention to that? Have you ever been to a hospital, you know, you can’t do that. You must know – you must be the expert in the room when you have brought in a story about a certain time or place. I laughed because I had someone once who was writing a piece that took place in the 70s and she had the parents strap their child into the car seat before putting them in the car and I stopped and I said did you research the history of car seats? Do you know that they didn’t start until the mid-80s? In the 70s you strapped your kid into a seat belt – if you bothered with that at all – because not all cars had seat belts. She had no idea. She thought since there had been car seats since her childhood they had always existed and I was like I now know that you didn’t do your homework. I’m not going to hire a writer onto my show who didn’t take the time to look into the period they were writing about. So you got to do your research. I think that’s probably the biggest mistake I see.

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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19 Conclusion 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:

…But we can say it took from Treva in the 60s and early 70s, it takes until 2017 for an African-American woman to win an Emmy for writing again a comedy and that’s Lena Waithe who was writing on Master of None. She won the Emmy in 2017. She was also a performer on the show so much like Molly Goldberg she was in the show. She wrote an episode for her character and that episode was so honest and so beautiful that she won the Emmy award for it. So this is where we have come to right? This is where we have come to in our world. I am happy again to say that I work for Stephens College and we are all about bringing out these stories of women. We want more people to read about women, read books like Phantom Lady, who read books like my book on the Women of Early Hollywood, and know more of the names of these important women. For my world that’s pretty much what I’m here to say this morning. So we have I see 10 minutes on the clock here, so that if we would like to have any questions or chatting that’s totally optional. I’ve unshared my screen and I’m going to remake Janice the host again so I am no longer in charge of the screen. So that Janice can go from there.

Janice: Thank you very much Dr. Welch. It was just lovely. A wonderful, wonderful, wonderful program. You do so much to illuminate women and to rescue them from oblivion. As many of our women speakers have said women in various fields, we’ll do our part.

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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Ranking TV Shows by Percentage of Female Writers

What wonderful work journalist Hope Lasater did for BuzzFeed in ranking 50 famous TV shows, from fewest to most episodes written by women. Episodes co-written by a woman and episodes with a woman on a “story by” credit were counted. I Love Lucy ranks 1st with 95% written by a woman – most all the work of the marvelous Madeline Pugh. Other shows that are fun to see on the list are The Mary Tyler Moore Show (since I was able to interview Treva Silverman for my book on The Monkees so we also talked about the 2 Emmy Awards she won while writing on the MTM show). See how your favorite TV shows past and present ranked (or if they made the list at all). – Rosanne

Here are 50 famous TV shows, ranked from fewest to most episodes written by women.
Episodes co-written by a woman and episodes with a woman on a “story by” credit are being counted.

Read 50 Famous TV Shows Ranked By What Percentage Of Their Episodes Were Written By Women

10 Previous Hints At A Female Doctor …from The Difficulties and Delicacies of Writing the First Female Doctor in 50+ years [Video] [Doctor Who]

Transcript:

Even Steven toyed with it between Matt and Peter, And I love Peter Capaldi. He’s an excellent actor, but there was a moment there and he just kind of went no…not yet, right? So I think that Chris had the guts so we have to give him credit for that. And it’s important that Jody recognized it was going to be a little shocking to people and, again, love Peter but Peter was like well, I think boys are losing a role model and then somebody said, Dude, women can be role models to men. It’s ok. Right? And boys can see strong women in the world. That’s actually going to be good for them later in life. So, it was a little delicate and he took the shot.

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44 More On Your Personality Is Your Writing… 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:-Obviously, like the fantasy of the shoe but actually like, you know, incorporating it into a day that I had with my friends. That I went out with. So…

Rosanne: so that tells me all about you, right? The friendship means something to you. So think about all the TV shows built around – hello – Friends – and the importance of friends and if you look back at TV history Most earlier comics and all the way up through for a long time even in the 90’s shows are built around families and then we have kids flying farther away to college and all of that and then getting a job in another state which really wasn’t a normal thing for a long time. People might have gone away to college. They’d come home and find a job in their hometown. but now we have more of this stay away – stay farther away – so your friends become your family and learning how to make a friend–family to be a group that always want to be together like that – that was a new lifestyle and so the message of how you be a good friend – hello – that’ behind a ton of TV shows, right? So that’s the theme that somebody like you would be working with and you discover it that way.

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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