writers – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

02 Early History Episodes from The Real History Behind the Historic Episodes of Doctor Who with Dr. Rosanne Welch – SD Who Con 2023

In this presentation given at the 2023 San Diego WhoCon I talked about what really happened at Pompeii on volcano day; the agricultural knowledge of the Aztecs; when Robin Hood began appearing in literature, and the bravery of Noor Inayat Khan and Rosa Parks.

Transcript:

What we’re talking about today is the real history behind the history behind Doctor Who. We know from the beginning the show was meant to teach history. It was a children’s program and I think that’s a really lovely idea and so they began with two teachers as companions. That was so intentional and it worked. It was a great way to warm people up and you had to have people who knew something about where they were going. Who had something to say and of course we had a student. You have to have someone you can talk to right? So it was a really lovely blend of characters.The very — one of the earliest ones they did went into the world of the Romans. Everyone’s always fascinated by the Romans and I think what’s really interesting is, sadly, just a little bit later, Highlanders was the last historical one they produced in that early period. They decided it wasn’t what the audience wanted. What did the audience want? Audience:Gimmicks and Robots? Duh, Daleks, right? The Daleks showed up and that was it they were like oh no no this is what the audience is coming for. Forget that history. Forget that study. Don’t learn anything.It’s okay. Also we know that once we get to John Pertwee and he’s trapped on Earth he can’t travel. So there’s no way he’s going to go into the past. So we lose a chunk of time where there was this moment to do something about history and then new Who showed up and we gained it back.
What we’re talking about today is the real history behind the history behind Doctor Who. We know from the beginning the show was meant to teach history. It was a children’s program and I think that’s a really lovely idea and so they began with two teachers as companions. That was so intentional and it worked. It was a great way to warm people up and you had to have people who knew something about where they were going. Who had something to say and of course we had a student. You have to have someone you can talk to right? So it was a really lovely blend of characters.The very — one of the earliest ones they did went into the world of the Romans. Everyone’s always fascinated by the Romans and I think what’s really interesting is, sadly, just a little bit later, Highlanders was the last historical one they produced in that early period. They decided it wasn’t what the audience wanted. What did the audience want? Audience:Gimmicks and Robots? Duh, Daleks, right? The Daleks showed up and that was it they were like oh no no this is what the audience is coming for. Forget that history. Forget that study. Don’t learn anything.It’s okay. Also we know that once we get to John Pertwee and he’s trapped on Earth he can’t travel. So there’s no way he’s going to go into the past. So we lose a chunk of time where there was this moment to do something about history and then new Who showed up and we gained it back.

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01 Introduction from The Real History Behind the Historic Episodes of Doctor Who with Dr. Rosanne Welch – SD Who Con 2023

Transcript:

well welcome everybody very nice to see everybody um I’m glad that the title sounded interesting I hope that the entire presentation will prove interesting um I am Rosanne Welch I teach at a couple places actually because that’s how you do it these days uh Steven’s college is actually in Missouri but we run an uh MFA in screenwriting here in Los Angeles well here north of here in Los Angeles um and so that’s my specialty I was a television writer for about 20 years and then I got into Academia so I studied history because I wasn’t sure I wanted to study writing so I ended up doing a lot of history stuff which was fascinating um and so today we’re going to look at this show that we all love which started out to teach history and how much of it you know is real and how much is fake um and these are kind of the breath of the place that I want to cover um I come from as I said TV writing so I was on all these shows in the past and even on a show like Touch by an Angel we would deal with history because angels of course last forever it was a traveling Angels show where the Angels happen to be Angels but right stylistically The Fugitive is a traveling Angel show MacGyver is a traveling Angel show Doctor Who is a traveling Angel show someone who just goes from place to place and helps other people out and I think that’s really really cool um and then like I said I got a PhD at Claremont University also in slightly above us a couple hours and that’s where I focused on history for a while before I went back into working and writing so that’s where I’m sort of interested in both of these areas and I think we see that show up in Doctor Who um I’m also on the editorial board for these various journals so very interested in how writing is presented to people and how stories are told um I was extremely lucky uh the the magazine of The Writers Guild written by magazine uh I was on the board for that like I said and the editor knew that I was a huge Doctor Who fan so in that period when Russell came to town and did that fourth season of Torchwood here in town um he called me the editor called me and said we’re going to interview him would you like to be the one to talk to him to which I said uh yeah can I do that right away and it was great because as most of these things go the pr person set me up in a room with Russell and it was this Glass Room in the middle of this fancy place in in in Santa Monica and uh the guy said well you have 20 minutes and I was like I can do this in 20 minutes right I’m happy to be here and 20 minutes passed and you saw the pr guy open the door and poke in and Russell was like I’m not done yet and you kicked the pr guy because I knew what I was talking about and I was asking him these really interesting questions and he was having such a great time we ended up talking for an hour and you just saw the man walk around looking but he didn’t want to poke his head in again and get yelled at so it was a marvelous and fun time and this um interview is online uh on this particular website um which is on the writer Guild website and I’ve I’ve also written a bunch of books not all about Doctor Who these three happen to be about Doctor Who and just got me very interested in analyzing the show and why has it been so popular for so long we know it’s provided us a really interesting character who obviously there are many versions of and we’re all very happy to see all those different versions but why else right why else does it stick with us the latest book is the one that’s right up here and it’s about Jodi’s era hello um because that was of course a very iconic moment in all Television right

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The Real History Behind the Historic Episodes of Doctor Who with Dr. Rosanne Welch – SD Who Con 2023 (Complete)

RMW Rosanne Signature for Web

17 We Stand On The Shoulders…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”

Transcript:

I think that we stand on the shoulders of the people who came before us and it’s our job to make sure they are not forgotten. So, we have to be the people who do our own research and don’t trust all of those narrators that we study when we go through our research and – I do love and archive so I don’t want people to think I don’t – but there you go. That’s me. That’s my book. That’s what I want to talk about and I hope that you remember those names and if you haven’t heard of them before and you feel like looking them up and learning more about them, because women did run Hollywood for a long time.

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16 Joan Didion & John Gregory Dunne from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

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”

Transcript:

Again, as I said, Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne who wrote all these wonderful things together. John Gregory Dunne actually would have Joan go to meetings first because the men you work with in Hollywood, if you went to a meeting together would look at John while they talked. So, if they sent Joan alone and pretended John was sick one day the men got used to looking at her and then when they came together they looked at both of them. so, they were pretty brilliant about making sure she didn’t get forgotten in the writing process like that.

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15 Nice Guys and Allies from When Men Forget Women: The Many Ways Male Screenwriters Fail to Mention their Female Colleagues [Video]

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”

Transcript:

I very briefly want to be fair to all the lovely nice men in the world because they are –they do exist and they do credit the women in their lives. These husbands all – from Garson Kanin to Albert Hackett to John Gregory Dunn all credited their wives with equal or more work on all the projects they did together and you’ll recognize of course Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon having done these films which won them all Academy Award nominations and Garson always talks about how much of a writer Ruth was even though we as a culture remember her as an actress but he does complain about the fact that they call it George Cukor’s “Adam’s Rib” when in fact much of the direction was written into the script by Garson and Ruth. Having been theater people they understood exactly where they wanted the camera to go, So they get erased by Cukor. Albert and Francis, of course, are brilliant. They wrote for almost 50 years in Hollywood but when you look at the posters of their work it’s the director Frank Capra who essentially erases them from the picture. Their names are down here very tiny and here’s the crazy thing about that. They also in their career are going to write “The Diary of Anne Frank” for which they’re going to get the Pulitzer Prize. Capra don’t have no Pulitzer Prize but it’s called Frank Capra’s “It’s A Wonderful Life” right? No thank you. They also wrote Nick and Nora Charles the real “The Thin Man” which is Nick and Nora Charles. I’m talking fast because I want to use up all my time. I’m sorry and that’s normally put off on Dashiell Hammett who wrote the novel but if you look at the movie the couple in the movie is actually Francis and Albert.

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

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”

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

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”

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

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”

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

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”

Transcript:

Film reviewers are lousy unreliable narrators because they claim every movie belongs to a director right? So in this case we’re crediting how wonderful this Academy Award-winning adaptation is and they never once mentioned Sarah or Victor for that matter. Give him a break right? I blame these film reviewers. As we all know it was Francois Truffaut who helped create the whole authorship theory in his journal and of course Bogdanovich built on that because he loved it so much and by hearing the idea that directors own films we lose writers and we doubly lose women writers. We also blame Ben Hecht a little bit as a joke because he was an early writer and he didn’t care about credits. He just was used to working as a writer for hire. You know in the early days the original Copyright Act said that author shall include employer. So the studios are going to take credit as the authors of these films which begins to erase the names of these women who worked on them. All these studio heads are terrible unreliable narrators. They never credit the women that worked for them for many years and as we know when they started to take monetary control over the business they took women like Francis Marion and Anita Loos and they told them they could be junior writers if they wanted to stay on at the studios and so they left right? They wrote themselves out of history because of the behavior of these gentlemen. They thought of course that movies were like assembly lines and so who could trust that there was one author. There were many authors which ruined everything. They felt the playwright sold the product and a screenwriter sold a service.

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