Writers are important.
Writer comes before director when people are writer-directors because writers are more important. You cannot direct some people walking around a room.
Somebody has to say why they’re there and what they’re doing.
Tag: writing
Where’s Her Movie? Civil Rights Activist, Elizabeth Peratrovich – 5 in a series
“Where’s HER Movie” posts will highlight interesting and accomplished women from a variety of professional backgrounds who deserve to have movies written about them as much as all the male scientists, authors, performers, and geniuses have had written about them across the over 100 years of film. This is our attempt to help write these women back into mainstream history. — Rosanne
from Wikipedia…
Elizabeth Peratrovich (née Elizabeth Jean Wanamaker, Tlingit name: Kaaxgal.aat; July 4, 1911 – December 1, 1958)[1] was an American civil rights activist, Grand President of the Alaska Native Sisterhood,[2] and member of the Tlingit nation who worked for equality on behalf of Alaska Natives.[3] In the 1940s, her advocacy was credited as being instrumental in the passing of Alaska’s Anti-Discrimination Act of 1945, the first state or territorial anti-discrimination law enacted in the United States.
In 1988, the Alaska Legislature established February 16 as Elizabeth Peratrovich Day “for her courageous, unceasing efforts to eliminate discrimination and bring about equal rights in Alaska”.[2][4] In March 2019, her obituary was added to The New York Times as part of their “Overlooked No More” series,[5] and in 2020, the United States Mint released a $1 gold coin inscribed with Elizabeth’s likeness in honor of her historic achievements.[6] The Peratrovich family papers, including correspondence, personal papers, and news clippings related to the civil-rights work done by Elizabeth and her husband, are currently held at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian.[7]
“Let us simply celebrate good television” and Bridgerton [Opinion]
“Let us simply celebrate good television” and Bridgerton [Opinion] by Dr. Rosanne Welch
Leave it to NPR to get it right, which is why I’m posting this piece they did on Bridgerton (Netflix), the new show executive produced by Shonda Rhimes and created for television by Chris Van Dusen from the romance book series by Julia Quinn.
See ‘Bridgerton’ Is A Delicious, Raunchy Tale Of One Very Hot Family
Far beyond explaining the show’s popularity, this article interested me because it understood instantly that what works best and most binge-ably about this show is that
“Let us simply celebrate good television, made by a shop run by a woman who loves good television and written by people who are experienced in television.”
In fact, I found one of the cleanest, clearest descriptions of the difference between movie screenplays and television screenplays while listening to this.
“Writing television requires writing to the rhythm of the episode, not just the season. An episode must have its own shape, its own rise and fall… Obviously, in a serialized story, one episode will not be complete on its own when it comes to plot, but it should work on its own structurally. It should have a beginning, middle, and end.”
You could spend a whole semester in a writing class and not yet be able to define it so cleanly – or create a piece that demonstrates having digested that delightfully delectable tidbit.
I also appreciated the note about how we may think streaming services invented binge-watching but
“Remember, binge-watching really came of age with DVDs, which didn’t have the Netflixian boosts of the auto-play and the credits-skipping and the part where they almost bodily shove you from one episode to the next episode. If you watched 10 episodes of Grey’s Anatomy on DVD, it was because you affirmatively said yes, over and over.”
I would go so far as to say TV in general invented that because before streaming it had to make characters and stories so compelling you would remember to be in front of the TV set at the same time every week in order to keep up.
That’s quite a lot of television writing (and history) information to glean out of one short public radio piece. Kudos to NPR pop culture correspondent Linda Holmes. And because we learn so much from any writer’s origin story – don’t miss her story at the end of the online post:
“She began her professional life as an attorney. In time, however, her affection for writing, popular culture, and the online universe eclipsed her legal ambitions. She shoved her law degree in the back of the closet, gave its living-room space to DVD sets of The Wire, and never looked back.
Holmes was a writer and editor at Television Without Pity, where she recapped several hundred hours of programming — including both High School Musical movies, for which she did not receive hazard pay. Her first novel, Evvie Drake Starts Over, will be published in the summer of 2019.”
Rosanne Welch serves as Executive Director of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting. Television credits include Beverly Hills 90210, Picket Fences, Nightline and Touched by an Angel. Award-winning publications include When Women Wrote Hollywood, runner up for the Susan Koppelman Award for best edited book in feminist studies and Women in American History, named Outstanding Reference Source and added to the list of 2017’s Best Historical Materials, by the ALA.
The Civil War On Film – 12 in a series – Reformer Jane Addams condemned the film as ahistorical and prejudiced…
Though the NAACP had little success banning the film, in part because film boards were all white and in part because the film was a monster success, they did prompt a national discussion about the film’s racism. Reformer Jane Addams condemned the film as ahistorical and prejudiced, while President Woodrow Wilson, himself an ex-historian (if such a creature can be said to exist), believed the film “terribly true.”
Movies profiled in this book:
From The Journal Of Screenwriting V3 Issue 2: Giving credit where credit is due: Frances Goodrich Hackett and Albert Hackett and The Thin Man by Dr. Rosanne Welch
Highlighting the articles in the past editions of the Journal of Screenwriting, of which I am the Book Reviews Editor. Hopefully these abstracts will entice you to did a little deeper into the history and future of screenwriting. — Rosanne
This article addresses the long-lived literary and popular culture assumption that the beloved characters of Nick and Nora Charles in the MGM film The Thin Man (1934) were representations of the relationship between novelist Dashiell Hammett and his lover, playwright Lillian Hellman. However, in a comparison of the screenplay to the novel, the screenplay’s specific dialogue and plot changes incorporated by married screenwriters Frances Goodrich Hackett and Albert Hackett can lead to a different conclusion. I will explore the Nick and Nora marriage that has served for so many years as a benchmark in romantic comedy relationships and propose that, in fact, this relationship was based largely on the marriage shared by the Hackett’s. The results of my exploration suggests credit to the screenwriting couple and serves as evidence that some screenplay adaptations often prove more enduring than their original source material.
The Journal of Screenwriting is an international double-blind peer-reviewed journal that is published three times a year. The journal highlights current academic and professional thinking about the screenplay and intends to promote, stimulate and bring together current research and contemporary debates around the screenplay whilst encouraging groundbreaking research in an international arena. The journal is discursive, critical, rigorous and engages with issues in a dynamic and developing field, linking academic theory to screenwriting practice.
Get your copy and subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting Today!
* 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!
A Woman Wrote That – 8 in a series – Something’s Gotta Give by Nancy Meyers (2003)
This new “A Woman Wrote That” post is an echo of the Writers Guild campaign of a few years ago (“A Writer Wrote That”) where they noted famous movie quotes and credited the screenwriter rather than the director. The difference here being that we will be posting lines from films written by female screenwriters. Feel free to share! — Rosanne
ERICA
The truth doesn’t have ‘versions’.
03 Why Writers Matter from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (41 seconds)
![03 Why Writers Matter from There And Back Again: Writing and Developing for American TV [Video] (41 seconds)](https://rosannewelch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/rmw-oxford-brookes-03.png)
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:
Likewise, writers are important. Writer comes before director when people are writer-directors because writers are more important. You cannot direct nothing. You cannot direct some people walking around a room right? Somebody has to say why they’re there and what they’re doing. So writers are very important and women writers — well this is one of my reasons why writers are important too — when you talk to friends about a movie you love, you do not generally say “remember the camera angle in scene five.” You say “remember the dialogue.” You quote dialogue to your friends. That’s the writer. That’s why the writer is more important. That’s why more people should want to be writers.
Watch this entire presentation
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† Available from the LA Public Library
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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V3 Issue 2: Frances Marion: Censorship and the Screenwriter in Hollywood, 1929-1931 by Leslie Kreiner Wilson
Highlighting the articles in the past editions of the Journal of Screenwriting, of which I am the Book Reviews Editor. Hopefully these abstracts will entice you to did a little deeper into the history and future of screenwriting. — Rosanne
Frances Marion: Censorship and the Screenwriter in Hollywood, 1929-1931 by Leslie Kreiner Wilson
The careful study of the screenplay – including archival study – can clarify our view of film history. While some film historians argue studios and studio bosses disregarded censors in the early 1930s before the Production Code Administration (PCA) was formed, archival research reveals screenwriter Frances Marion faced escalating censorship pressure at MGM in 1929 and 1930 as she moved through several drafts for Anna Christie (1930), The Big House (1930) and The Secret Six (1931). This research provides insight into the nature of the problems Marion faced and exposes the day-to-day frustrations and complications in the life of one screenwriter struggling to create art within a convoluted matrix of censorship negotiations as the Production Code was being drafted and ratified.
The Journal of Screenwriting is an international double-blind peer-reviewed journal that is published three times a year. The journal highlights current academic and professional thinking about the screenplay and intends to promote, stimulate and bring together current research and contemporary debates around the screenplay whilst encouraging groundbreaking research in an international arena. The journal is discursive, critical, rigorous and engages with issues in a dynamic and developing field, linking academic theory to screenwriting practice.
Get your copy and subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting Today!
* 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!
A Woman Wrote That – 7 in a series – Love & Basketball by Gina Prince-Bythewood
This new “A Woman Wrote That” post is an echo of the Writers Guild campaign of a few years ago (“A Writer Wrote That”) where they noted famous movie quotes and credited the screenwriter rather than the director. The difference here being that we will be posting lines from films written by female screenwriters. Feel free to share! — Rosanne
MONICA
When you’re a kid, you see the life you want, and it never crosses your mind that it’s not gonna turn out that way.
- Love & Basketball Script (PDF)
- Love & Basketball on IMDB
- Gina Prince-Bythewood on Wikipedia and IMDB
- Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting
Announcing the Journal of Screenwriting Special Issue: Women in Screenwriting with Editors, Dr. Rosanne Welch and Dr. Rose Ferrell
I’m happy to announce the publication of a special issue of the Journal of Screenwriting focused on “Women in Screenwriting” that I co-edited with my SRN colleague Rose Ferrell, lecturer at the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts, at Edith Cowan University.
While focusing on females was our first mandate, our second mandate was to be as international as possible. This issue, then, includes articles about women in screenwriting covering five continents including countries such as Japan, China, Syria, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Zimbabwe and Canada. — Rosanne
Contents
Volume (11): Issue (3)
Cover date: 2020
- Editorial introduction by Rose Ferrell, Rosanne Welch
- Tang Cheng: The first female animation screenwriter and director in the People’s Republic of China by Shaopeng Chen
- Scouting for scripts: Mizuki Yōko and social issue film in post-war Japan by Lauri Kitsnik
- Who is the author of Neria (1992) – and is it a Zimbabwean masterpiece or a neo-colonial enterprise? by Agnieszka Piotrowska
- The Hakawati’s Daughter: How the Syrian revolution inspired a rewrite by Rana Kazkaz
- The silent women: The representation of Israeli female soldiers in Israeli women’s films by Mira Moshe, Matan Aharoni
- How the scripts of Latin American screenwriters Lucrecia Martel (Argentina), Anna Muylaert (Brazil) and Claudia Llosa (Peru) have made a mark on the world stage by Margaret McVeigh, Clarissa Mazon Miranda
- ‘Polite, no chill’ for the win: How Emily Andras engaged fans and overcame problematic tropes in Wynonna Earp by Tanya N. Cook
- Battle of the sketches: Short form and feminism in the comedy mode by Stayci Taylor
- Anita Loos Rediscovered: Film Treatments and Fiction, Cari Beauchamp and Mary Anita Loos (eds) (2003) by Cierra Winkler
- Modern Film Dramaturgy: An Introduction, Kristen Stutterheim (2019) by Andrew Wickwire
- Nobody’s Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood, J. E. Smyth (2018) by Toni Anita Hull
- How to Write for Moving Pictures: A Manual of Instruction and Information, Marguerite Bertsch (1917) by Diane Barley
The Journal of Screenwriting is an international double-blind peer-reviewed journal that is published three times a year. The journal highlights current academic and professional thinking about the screenplay and intends to promote, stimulate and bring together current research and contemporary debates around the screenplay whilst encouraging groundbreaking research in an international arena. The journal is discursive, critical, rigorous and engages with issues in a dynamic and developing field, linking academic theory to screenwriting practice.
Get your copy and subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting Today!
* 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!
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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