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

41 Theme and Character…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: Like what do you think are like the principles of good television writing that you try to teach your students? Like what’s the things you want them to get from your classes.

Rosanne: Well I want them to think that whatever they’re writing is a message. So I think they should start with a theme. What is the message you want to put out in the world and what’s a story that’s like the metaphor or that’s the parable that will tell that idea? Plant that idea in people’s minds? I think you always — you have your own life philosophy. I don’t care how old you are. You don’t have to be old or young to have it right? You have some ideas and those make everything stronger. The stuff you really like is because you really agreed with what was being said about how to live or how to treat other people right and so you really have to think about those things and that’s going to make whatever you do richer. So I like to start from a place of theme and of course then tv is all about characters because I need someone I’m going to want to come and meet over and over again either 20 hours in a row or 20 weeks in a row however I choose to do that. So I need to find someone that I can connect with and I think that’s something that in the movies you know you could do a lot of explosions, fun stuff, tent poll movies and all that. Although I suppose my son would say Transformers were characters he really cared to watch right but they’re a little different than you know the kind of people you’d see let’s say on Grey’s Anatomy speaking of Shonda Rhimes.

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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33 More on How To Change How We Teach History from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]

In researching and writing my book on Giuseppe and Anita Garibaldi and the unification of Italy (A Man Of Action Saving Liberty: A Novel Based On The Life Of Giuseppe Garibaldi) I re-discovered the first American female war correspondent – Margaret Fuller — who I had first met in a college course on the Transcendentalists. I was once again fascinated by a life lived purposefully.

Then I found Tammy Rose’s podcast on the Transcendentalists – Concord Days – and was delighted when she asked me to guest for a discussion of Fuller’s work in Italy as both a journalist – and a nurse. — Rosanne

Watch this entire presentation

Concord Days sends love to Margaret Fuller on the anniversary of her death in 1850.

The conversation focuses on Margaret’s exciting days in ITALY!

Dr. Rosanne Welch takes us through her adventures and enthusiastically reminds us what she was like when she was living her best life!

Transcript:

Tammy: I have this fantasy of doing some kind of like virtual reality thing or some kind of relationship map where yeah you can and as you’re saying like maybe it starts in second grade or maybe it starts young or it can even be something that people can do throughout their lives because there are people who continue to learn beyond you know what actually after they leave college. Believe it or not you know and but just travel from sort of one lesson or one person or one event to the other and be immersed in it because I agree. I feel like this artificial framing of history is this it’s done a little bit like it’s done to be facile. It’s done to be you know these chapters that we can easily finish and I remember not getting past World War II for most of high school because we would always run out of time. So we never got to be right and I was always like wait a minute what about the 60s you know?

Rosanne: …and of course, that was probably because when we were younger that was still too controversial to cover in school. So better that you finished with the Greatest Generation. We saved the world from Hitler. We’re all great and we don’t have to get to the murkier thing where we’re not sure what that was all about.

Tammy: Exactly. End of story. Let’s not even talk about Korea yeah just right yeah yeah just watch Smash and watch like shows from the 60s and that’ll be close enough.

Rosanne: Yeah right. Bewitched will tell you everything you need to know about the 60s.

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Failing to Credit Screenwriters Once Again…

A funny thing happened to me on the way to making my own list of 25 Films Written By Women to counter the “52 Films by Women” put out by the WIF (Women In Film).

Their list only included films directed by women and didn’t even bother listing the names of the writers (some of whom were also women).

So I Googled ’20 Films Written by Women’ to see what someone else may have collected and found this list of “128 Best Movies Written by Women of All Time”.

Can you find the flaw in the way they list the movies?

I can and it’s driving me CRAZY…

…and then I found that even though they list the writers in the opening paragraphs, they omit the screenwriter’s name from the movie’s details.

WTF?

40 Artist-Scholars 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: Lots of people in town actually teach at some of the various schools because of course we’re in LA so there’s tons of schools that have film programs and screenwriting programs and all that stuff. So you get a lot of that blend. Now I really love the fact that in Europe they’re more structured around what I would call a scholar-artist because they get grants to make their films. So a lot of filmmakers are teachers at major universities and then they make movies and they get the money from the government to make the movies. We don’t quite do that here, but we’re seeing a little more of that. Certainly on the film festival circuit and stuff like that or you know for instance Kevin Wilmot, who got the oscar for co-writing Black Klansmen with Spike Lee, he’s a full-time professor at Kansas University. That’s what he does, He doesn’t want to live in LA or New York. He wants to write movies and he met Spike Lee at a film festival and they each had a movie up at the film festival early on in both their careers and they decided they liked each other. Speaking of networking, they started to collaborate and you know two years ago he won an Oscar and he went back — he flew back to Kansas the next day and put his Oscar on the lectern in front of his classroom and started talking.

Host: That’s so funny.

Rosanne: Yes to both worlds. That’s my idea of the best of both worlds.

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

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32 Change How We Teach History from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]

Watch this entire presentation

Concord Days sends love to Margaret Fuller on the anniversary of her death in 1850.

The conversation focuses on Margaret’s exciting days in ITALY!

Dr. Rosanne Welch takes us through her adventures and enthusiastically reminds us what she was like when she was living her best life!

Transcript:

I’ve often said our mistake — and other people are talking about this too — I don’t think we should wait until later to teach you history and I don’t think we should keep doing the whole story in every year that you do it — like eighth grade and 10th grade or whatever. I think we should start in second grade at the beginning of the story and you don’t get to the end of it so you’re in 12th grade and then you don’t have to have women’s history and African American history and Asian American history and in in the east coast I’ve seen Italian American history which we don’t have in California which I wish — put them all in one story. Like all of them in the same and it just takes that much longer to tell it but we have 12 years. They’re in school for 12 years.

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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.

The Courier Thirteen Podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, SoundCloud, and Audible.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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31 Eleanor Roosevelt from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]

Watch this entire presentation

Concord Days sends love to Margaret Fuller on the anniversary of her death in 1850.

The conversation focuses on Margaret’s exciting days in ITALY!

Dr. Rosanne Welch takes us through her adventures and enthusiastically reminds us what she was like when she was living her best life!

Transcript:

Rosanne: I have a friend who just wrote a biography of — I mean there’s a million of them but a new one is part of a group that I’m editing — and she discovered in letters which have only recently been let out — it’s always about what’s recently been let out. Like you were saying, the most recent stuff that the reason that FDR learned about the dangers of the Manhattan Project is because — his people weren’t letting the scientists talk to him but one of them was in a social club that Eleanor was in. So he got her to invite him to the White House. He told her what they were worried about and she told FDR — that she was the leeway for that.

Tammy: Exactly like the contact point…

Rosanne: ..and when she understood how important it was she knew he had to know. So it was all about her and just nobody thinks that. No one gives her that much credit. I mean we give her a lot of credit but there’s so many things we’re learning that women have done so much extra that got left behind.

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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

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30 Fuller, Native Americans, and Sociology from Concord Days: Margaret Fuller in Italy [Video]

Watch this entire presentation

Concord Days sends love to Margaret Fuller on the anniversary of her death in 1850.

The conversation focuses on Margaret’s exciting days in ITALY!

Dr. Rosanne Welch takes us through her adventures and enthusiastically reminds us what she was like when she was living her best life!

Transcript:

Rosanne: …but I also think that’s the difference in their styles. I think that through her conversations, through her own curiosity, she was interested in what other people thought you know and I think Thoreau was always interested in what he thought. Which is fine. That’s what he did but you know I think there’s a difference there. Yeah.
Which is why she could go to other countries and be able to report on them and understand. It’s like sociology — sociological work, too — not just journalism not…

Tammy: It’s not — ethnography and yeah and really studying people up close by you know taking them at like or maybe it’s beyond ethnography because it’s sort of it’s it’s relating to other humans as human rather than…

Rosanne: It’s feminist. that puts her in Eleanor Roosevelt category

Tammy: Exactly and another great woman who doesn’t get the full appreciation for what she’s — for the work that she does.

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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

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