Thanks to the gracious invitation from my Screenwriting Research Network colleague Paolo Russo – and a grant he was able to procure (and in the before-Covid time) I was able to spend a week at Oxford Brookes University working with the screenwriting masters students in Paolo’s course. At the culmination of the week, I gave this lecture on how writers rooms worked in the States.
Transcript:
For me, teachers make good writers. Right? Obviously Icatered this to where I have come and been happy to be. I actually — went too fast — this was my facebook post the other day. I don’t like a lot of words on the screen but I couldn’t resist this because I’ve never been to Oxford before.
So I found this little church just off Wharton Road where he was once a congregant and I had to find the picture and send it back to my husband and the cat just found me which I thought was cute but seriously I mean how long has the guy been dead and I’m still fascinated by the things he wrote? They still mean something to me and my family. Likewise, writers make good teachers.
Watch this entire presentation
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! † Available from the LA Public Library
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.
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: It’s this you know long terrible voyage. Everybody gets sick. I think her child gets all like almost violently ill for a couple of days and they’re actually concerned that he’s not going to survive but then you know he miraculously gets better and it’s like this it’s this Hollywood story of like you know just you just have to keep fighting because you know. Fight through one more trial. Fight through one more trial and they literally get to Fire Island in New York, just off the shore of Fire Island, and do you want to talk about the storm, or do you want to talk about this moment?
Rosanne: The combination of the storm and the crashing and what kills me is you’re so close but you can’t swim that far unless you’re like an excellent swimmer and that nobody — there are people that literally loot the boat and the stuff that’s falling off in the water. They’re more interested in getting the free stuff they can sell than the people from there to here and it’s not that far. It’s so not that far and you’re on the boat — just like the Titanic — knowing that you have no way out. I mean that’s — we’re talking a good eight or ten hours of understanding that you’re going to die and you can’t do anything about it. I can’t even — I can’t even — I can’t even imagine that.
Host: Was there a specific instance where you had written an episode of a television show and the networking was like, we don’t like this. We don’t like this. We don’t want this and you had to be like, No and how did you do — how did you do that? How did you go about that?
Rosanne: That actually happened in my actually my second episode was a show called Picket Fences which was by David E Kelly who’d come off of LA Law and he’s done a million things since then. Quite brilliant. He wasn’t there anymore. He left the show to another producer named Jeff Melvoin who’s quite another wonderful producer in town — writer/producer — and he’s got Emmys and whatnot is brilliant, but came in to do that and it was a show about small-town America. Dad was a cop — sheriff — and mom was a doctor. So you kind of had the mix of cop and doctor shows all in one. You could decide what the episode would be and I thought that was brilliant. They had three kids right they lived in a small town and we had done — I was still a partner then — we did an episode where the younger boy, who’s about 10-ish or 11, wanted to be popular in school and we were looking at the internet and wanting to say the good and the bad. So overarching dramatic question is the internet a good influence or bad influence and of course, there’s much good about it. You can watch all kinds of educational things. You can be exposed to all kinds of things from the past that we didn’t know about. We can learn so much more about history, other countries, like I just said about Netflix shows all of that, but we wanted to balance that with okay what are the problems?
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.
Thanks to the gracious invitation from my Screenwriting Research Network colleague Paolo Russo – and a grant he was able to procure (and in the before-Covid time) I was able to spend a week at Oxford Brookes University working with the screenwriting masters students in Paolo’s course. At the culmination of the week, I gave this lecture on how writers rooms worked in the States.
Transcript:
What I hope you learned from me today is that a writer’s room requires collaboration. It’s always about sharing and talking with the other people to make the product better and participation. You can’t just sit in a corner. You have to be part of that conversation or your perspective will not be included and that’s bad for you and anybody else who looks like you. It’s your job to represent when you’re in the room. So you need to be able to do that. Plus I love this quote of Einstein’s — Imagination. You’re selling your imagination. Who gets to do that? What job do you get to do that in except writing? I think that is the coolest thing in the world.
Watch this entire presentation
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! † Available from the LA Public Library
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.
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.
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 mean it sounds like such a smart idea. I mean you know it is the classic let’s ride the Titanic because it’s the opening voyage and it’s going to be the coolest thing to do and you’re like no no no no no. Take the next boat.
Tammy: Exactly yeah and so I had mentioned, she had nightmares when she was a kid and these were nightmares that involved drowning and being subsumed in the waves and this is like a recurring idea in her life and even before she takes off she tells, I think one of her one of her poet friends, I’m gonna forget her name now but she tells this dream to one of her friends like the night before she leaves and she’s afraid of not surviving the trip and the trip is horrible right? I think the captain actually dies. So the first mate or whatever is in charge and he doesn’t really know how to read things like maps. He doesn’t really know about things like rocks.
Rosanne: Yes well the idea of the shoals and how close do you get and all those things…
Host: Do most production companies, most executives, once the pilot is out there and people respond to it, do they normally just kind of back up after that. They’re like okay it seems like you’ve got a show on your hands. We’ll let you do it the way you want to do it.
Rosanne: It depends on your relationship with the network. Obviously, the kinds of people like Shonda Rhimes, as I mentioned, someone who’s got a track record like that can say I know what I’m doing leave me alone. Netflix basically promises that. That’s how they wooed people away from broadcast and cable. They’re like we promise not to give you notes. Just whatever you like to do, you go do it, and yay for you, right? So Ryan Murphy’s doing Pose and things like that. They’re not going to give a ton of notes. If you’re new, they might still because they’re trying to form what is going to be a sort of a Netflix brand. If you’re new in the network world or the cable world yeah you’ll get that kind of stuff for a little bit until you have a track record and can say I don’t — or you’ll still get notes but you have much more ability to say no can’t do that changes the trajectory of the show or that’s wrong for my character. Whatever those things are and that’s part of what I was saying about them earlier, you learn how to manage notes. You learn how to say all right I’ll give you this but I’m keeping that. Or we going to do this because we want this kind of an episode and if you don’t like it that’s too bad. Next week we’ll do this kind of episode which will you know smooth down some feathers if people have a problem with whatever storyline we gave last week. So your ability to be more autonomous grows as your career grows.
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.
Thanks to the gracious invitation from my Screenwriting Research Network colleague Paolo Russo – and a grant he was able to procure (and in the before-Covid time) I was able to spend a week at Oxford Brookes University working with the screenwriting masters students in Paolo’s course. At the culmination of the week, I gave this lecture on how writers rooms worked in the States.
Transcript:
…and I really say that to the girls a lot because when I have my classes, often when I just open pitching up — anyone can start pitching their ideas — who’s first? We’ll go through a line of like four guys and then I have to stop and go “Does anyone notice anything odd right now?” and I promise you it will be a boy who says “None of the girls have pitched yet.” The girls haven’t even recognized that they are waiting their turn. No one will give you a turn. You have to take a turn or you won’t move as far as you like as fast as you like. So speaking of the big deal and I hate to say it but I learned how to cuss in a writer’s room because sometimes that was the only way to get attention. If I threw out a good four-letter word, all of a sudden everybody was looking at my section of the table which doesn’t make my mother very happy, but it was a silly thing right? So you have to think about managing yourself and managing the other people that you are around. That’s a big deal.
Watch this entire presentation
Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!
* A portion of each sale from Amazon.com directly supports our blogs ** Many of these books may be available from your local library. Check it out! † Available from the LA Public Library
It was a pleasure sitting down in front of some microphones with Lucas Cuny who now teaches Film, TV, and media full time at San Bernardino Valley College.
He also hosts this podcast interviewing people from those areas and he invited me to be the first guest of his second season.
We had the chance to chat about my background as well as the state of the media industry today – and I had the chance to relish the success of this former MFA candidate of mine. One of the best things about being a professor is seeing careers take off like Lucas’ has.
Rosanne Welch is a screenwriter, author, professor, and all around iconoclast in the field of media education. She wrote on Beverly Hills 90210, written a book about The Monkees, but got her start as a teacher. Hear her journey from the classroom to the writers room.
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.
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: She’s right at the front lines. She’s doing all of these dispatches and then she’s also writing essentially the history of this very tight period right? So she goes like what was it like 1847 something like that. The quote that I read was from 1848…
Rosanne: …and her plan was to document the whole thing which would have been such an incredible (thing) from an American perspective and with this idea of we did it and now you’re doing it too and of course, Italy will complete this in 1860 which is when we’re breaking apart right? So it’s an interesting parallel history. Yeah, I think my biggest regret is I want — I wanted to read that book right and it’s gonna go down.
Tammy: Let’s talk about the most heartbreaking piece of this story because Margaret has been fighting her whole life to get recognized. She has done all the hard work. She’s literally shown up at the battlefield right and in addition to all of the work that she’s done for women, she’s also fought to have a beautiful marriage — that is a love marriage. It’s legal and she has a child which I you know as a as a woman you know we wouldn’t necessarily call her a feminist but I like of her day I think she was a pretty strong feminist and she might not have ever had that vision for herself. So she has this beautiful vision. She has a manuscript. She has like an 18-month-old child. She has a new husband and she says, “Why don’t I go back to America”, right?
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