writing – Page 20 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

06 The Right to be in the Room 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: …and she’s constantly reinventing herself. Like that one of my favorite things about her is the conversations that she had with women which are kind of like modern-day podcasts where it’s like let’s just get everybody together and just talk. You know.

Rosanne: Well that’s and that goes into the 1960s. Their rap sessions right? That’s it you know consciousness-raising and in every generation, like we often teach that the beginning of women’s right or whatever you know you go back to Mary Wollstonecraft right and then think about that’s England but here in America those same conversations are being had.

Tammy: Yeah Yeah and I and I feel like she had to do so much fighting and but or not even like necessarily fighting but just like to reaffirm her right to be in that room or to you know be working as a correspondent for Horace Greeley’s paper.

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13 Can It Be Edgier? 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 don’t know how you’ll feel — how you feel about this Rosanne but like do you think that’s a problem with a lot of shows in general, that they try to take an approach and just make it more like and it gets too outlandish that you don’t even believe it at a certain point.

Rosanne: I think that is. One of the words that everyone is tired of hearing around town is can it be edgier? Show me something I haven’t seen when in fact what really works is to watch people you care about go through believable situations and come out on the other side — find their way through it, That’s kind of what people look for when they’re watching a drama particularly. You want to see that other people have survived things that might be in your world. As you said before, people you know that we have in our families with addiction or issues of other kinds. People going through divorces. That’s a very dramatic thing for a teenager to see happen to their parents, even for someone in their 20s. I had a friend who her and her husband knew from the time the kid was about 12 they were got to get a divorce but they made the assumption that it would be bad to have divorced parents in high school. So they made a deal they’d wait till the kid was 18 and graduated. So here’s a kid who thought his family was perfectly normal and then you know they graduate from high school. Daddy and I are breaking up and it was like — so everything you believe to be true is all blown up. So that’s a legitimate experience for someone and I think if you just go deeper into those experiences and how people manage, that’s much more dramatic and interesting than oh my gosh, my daughter’s having an affair with the senator and now his you know chief of staff is sending a hitman to kill her so that it won’t ruin his political campaign. Ehhh. No, let me just see a kid get through his parents being divorced because that’s really tough and that’s going to connect me to that person for a long time.

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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39 Even More On Working Well With Others from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video]

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:

Where am I going to find a piece of wood on Christmas Eve that only an angel can deliver that I can’t throw in the trash?

Audience: Christmas tree?

Rosanne: Close. That was the first thought. Christmas tree. Christmas tree is not spiritual. It’s not connected to the Christmas story.

Audience: Cross.

Rosanne: Cross is close but that’s Easter — that’s Easter but you’re close. What involves wood and Jesus and Mary and Joseph?

Audience: The Manger?

Rosanne: Thank you! So I got the idea while I was sitting around the table with everybody but I knew this guy didn’t like to be one-upped and I didn’t want him on my bad side because he helped sign my contract later right, but I got to get this idea out there but I can’t pretend to be smarter than him because that will not make him happy. So I sit there at a table of like 10 people and I got the idea and I thought well luckily I’m a pretty loud person. I’m considered Italian where I come from but clearly not here because my grandparents are from Sicily. So all of a sudden I just went — Uh!

Not the whole table but the guy sitting next to me went what and that’s all I needed was someone to ask me what I was thinking right? I was like oh I just I’ve been thinking about this problem and I had this idea but I don’t know if you’ll like it… Oh, what’s your idea? Well, what if the wood came from the manger and like four people around the table went oh yes and the guy who wrote the story was about to say no. I could see his face but when his colleagues all went yes. he was like oh yeah that’s a great idea. We should — okay that’s what we’ll do. So I wasn’t one-upping him. I was just accidentally having a moment and it allowed me to get my idea out. Now that sounds ridiculous but I got what I wanted out of it right? So you have to learn to read the room. How is it operating? Who are your — who are your allies in the room?

Watch this entire presentation

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* 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

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05 Margaret’s Education 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:

Tammy: …and it got her all over the place.

Rosanne: It did and I often compare her — when i’m talking to students about her — I compare her to John Quincy Adams, right, who at 10 was translating his own father’s paperwork and knew five or six languages and he’s going to be like — in my opinion — our smartest president. So she’s on par with him but not given the opportunities.

Tammy: Exactly and even in her day she was known as the most widely read woman in America and she talked her way into the Harvard library even though she couldn’t actually attend Harvard you know and she made sure that she could get the education that she wanted. She must have had this like internal drive and curiosity that just kept her going throughout her life.

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Jeanie MacPherson – The Genius Behind DeMille — Dr. Rosanne Welch, Script magazine, August 2021

Script contributor Dr. Rosanne Welch shines a light on Jeanie MacPherson, a trailblazing screenwriter from the silent era who would eventually come to write a bulk of famed Hollywood mogul Cecil B. DeMille’s box office hits.

As with many other female Silent Era screenwriters Jeanie Macpherson began her career as an actress (appearing in over 147 films). Then she became a writer/director at Universal (writing 54 films) and eventually met Cecil B. DeMille, for whom she would write the bulk of his box office successes. In 1927, Macpherson became one of only three women, the other two being Mary Pickford and Bess Meredyth (more on her in a future column) who helped found the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (along with thirty-three male screenwriters). She was also a suffragette – and a pilot in those early days of aviation when, like the new world of motion pictures, even the skies were open to female trailblazers.

Read Jeanie MacPherson – The Genius Behind DeMille — Dr. Rosanne Welch, Script magazine, August 2021

Read about more women from early Hollywood

12 90210 & Teenage Lives from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

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

Transcript:

If you go pre-90210 you’re going to find that teenagers were more often in comedies and more often in kind of doing silly things and very superficial things — getting a date — things like that and from 90210 on they had real lives and real things could happen to them and real problems happen to them and as you said continue through Euphoria exactly exactly. You don’t do a teen show these days that doesn’t look at their lives more in-depth. I guess that’s what I’m going to say.

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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38 More On Working Well With Others from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video]

Transcript:

There was this violin and I kept sitting in the room thinking it took 26 years to make this violin and it’s really important. You give it to the kid soon. Throw it away and make a new one. Something’s wrong with the wood right? I said this is my problem is you know he said I’ll fix the problem. The angel will have given this guy the wood and therefore he can’t throw it away right? He’s like well 26 years and making his violin, the angel handed him a crap piece of wood okay? I need to start again. This is — I need a reason why you can’t throw this piece of wood away and it’s a Christmas episode. There’s only one piece of wood an angel can give me that I won’t throw away on Christmas eve. What is that?

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* 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

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04 Sex and Marriage 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: So they knew sex. They talked about sex and they wanted to be careful about it.

Tammy: Right.

Rosanne: Exactly. So funny.

Tammy: Yeah. Well, and Margaret was especially aware of issues about being a woman in a make society and issues of marriage and how it was very hard to actually have an equal balance between two intellectual individuals because it was not something that she had generally seen or that generally happened.

Rosanne: It didn’t. It wasn’t socially acceptable. Women were supposed to accept that, even if you were semi-smart, you had been allowed some learning, which she got lucky because her father believed in that. Then you gave that up when you went home and then you just took care of the kids if you got married.

Tammy: Right and her father started training her when she was a kid. This is not a little thing. He was a strict disciplinarian and wanted her to be translating The Aeneid by the time she was 10 without any hesitation and without any errors and she had nightmares as a child because he was holding her up to such a high standard, but I think she lived by that high standard for the rest of her life.

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11 Even More On Beverly Hills 90210 from Worry and Wonder | The Courier Thirteen Podcast [Video]

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

Transcript:

So those characters became three-dimensional human beings for the five years he ran the show and then he left and a couple of people who mostly worked in — more that’s the word I want — more soap opera kind of things and I like soap operas. I don’t think they’re bad but they’re a different style and they turn the show into who is having sex with who each week but it stayed in the air for another three or four years because of the foundation, the love, for those original characters that the audience had. They just kept wanting to watch them even if the stories got less and less interesting and that’s the power of what he put together in those first two years. So truly believing and caring about those characters — which meant he truly believed and cared about the writing — the stories had to be real and I think that showed. That’s why I mean come on why do you guys still know what Beverly Hills 90210 is? You weren’t around in the 90s right but it’s been around and rerun. There’s a lot of other teenage shows but that one sticks right? There’s a reason for that.

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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37 Working Well With Others from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video]

Transcript:

Let me talk briefly about the kinds of things you learn in a room. One of the things you should take a class in is psychology because reading other people and managing how you deal with them — when you figure out their personalities either love you or don’t love you — but you have to work with them for the next three years because contracts are three years long. So you have to work around them. In this particular case. we were doing an episode about a gentleman, sadly, who was dying of AIDS and coming home for Christmas to tell his parents that he was both gay and dying of AIDS and what happened was the writer who was doing it was very fond of himself and didn’t like to be told anything was wrong with his stories, but your job in the room is to make all the stories as good as possible because if the show gets canceled you all lose your job. So I knew that he didn’t like criticism and he was higher on the hierarchy than I was right? He was a higher rank producer. I was still a co-editor or something like that at the time and I’m sitting in the room and his problem was — this is a story about angels who came into your life and told you how you were messing it up and please fix it — so the father was a violin maker and he’s going to give his son a violin he’d been working on since the boy was born. So that’s about 26 years and it was still not good and he really wanted to give the kid the violin because there was a metaphor that if you played violin again maybe he wouldn’t be gay. I’m not really sure I agree with that but anyway…

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

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

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