writing – Page 42 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 1: The plot point, the darkest moment, and the answered question: three ways of modelling the three-quarter-point by Patrick Keating

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

The plot point, the darkest moment, and the answered question: three ways of modelling the three-quarter-point by Patrick Keating

Many contemporary screenplay manuals, following Syd Field, encourage writers to place an act break approximately three-quarters of the way through the story. Although this would appear to be an area of widespread agreement, this essay argues that the manuals do not always define the 3/4-point in the same way. One common approach is to define the 3/4-point as a causally significant plot point; another approach is to regard it as an extreme point on an emotional curve, typically the darkest moment; and a third approach is to conceive of the 3/4-point as the answer to a previously introduced question. Taking a closer look at these three competing models of the 3/4-point can help us uncover the manuals’ competing assumptions about narrative structure, showing how they conceptualize causality, emotion and comprehension.

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.

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24 Carrie from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (48 seconds)

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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

I presented this holiday lecture “When Women Write Horror” on Tuesday, October 29th, 2019. Researching the many, many women who have written horror stories – in novels, films and television – brought new names to my attention who I am excited to start reading. I hope you will be, too!

Transcript:

So now I want to focus for a second here also now on what happens when women are in horror films and what kind of women kind of female role models are we seeing in that world right? So, in movies, we didn’t have for a long time women doing a lot of writing so the women were represented as the characters in this piece so right? Popular, most famous, of course, being Carrie so now we’re back to Stephen King who wrote that right? So not written by a girl and the movie was actually adapted by Lawrence Cohen, but Carrie’s an interesting study in a girl revenge movie right? This is a chance for “You misused me and I’m going to get you back,” and that wasn’t something frequently that girls had a chance to get. They just got bullied and hurt and then gee who saves the day? She’s going to save her own day when she rises from the dead.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 1: If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage: screenwriting, national specificity and the English-Canadian feature film by Janice Kaye and Charles H Davis

If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage: screenwriting, national specificity and the English-Canadian feature film by Janice Kaye and Charles H Davis

Like other film-producing nations, Canada’s movie landscape was long ago colonized by US interests. While other nations also welcome American movies, the Canadian case is extreme: Canada has the lowest market share in the world of its own movies on its own screens. Living next to the world’s most powerful country, Canada occupies geographically, economically, linguistically and culturally a position unique in the world. The historical and ongoing predicament of the lack of success of English-Canadian feature films has been variously attributed to similarities to the United States in language and culture, lower production budgets, and weaknesses in distribution, exhibition, marketing and quality. The role of screenwriting, however, is little understood and rarely broached. In this article, we argue the importance of screenwriting in understanding national cinemas; show that it has institutional, sociological and nation-specific dimensions; and present Canada as an ideal case to begin examining such factors. The first dimension the institutional is defined by auteurism as well as the collaborative nature of production. The second the sociological is greatly affected by exclusionary networks and various levels of discrimination based on such factors as gender, ethnicity/race, age, sexuality and economic class. The nation-specific area pertains to diverse historical, cultural and institutional practices particular or exclusive to the country or region. English-Canada, for instance, experiences a unique and complex cultural policy environment. Moreover, its fractured and regional history is one that has resulted in the production of obsessively performed narratives of national identity, particularly imbricated with Qubec, the United States, Britain and France. Our analysis draws together strands of intersecting disciplines, combining film theory and history with production studies, close textual analyses, political economy and nation theory, calling for a more complete picture of the role of screenwriting in national cinemas.

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23 Taking Horror Seriously from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (43 seconds)

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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

Transcript:

It’s one of those questions you find yourself — you know people think, “Oh you’re doing a class on horror. That can’t be anything you take seriously.” Well, we have to because it’s information people are taking in. What is it making you think right? If you’re with a dude who’s scary, do you think oh yeah it was good for her. It all worked out in the end for he.r Maybe not right? Let’s reconsider how we’re taking these fictional stories into our life. So I think that’s really interesting. Twilight of course was put together by Melissa Rosenberg who had come off the tv show, Dexter. So what an interesting background before you’re gonna write about Twilight and vampire romance, she’d written about a serial killer who you know kills once a week. I don’t know but uh she made a good ton of money off that and obviously was pretty successful.

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 1: An evolving present within a past a history of screenwriting practices in popular Hindi cinema by Anubha Yadav

An evolving present within a past a history of screenwriting practices in popular Hindi cinema by Anubha Yadav

This article studies the mutual and exclusive relationship between the history of popular Hindi cinema and the writing of the screenplay by finding dominant points of reference in their individual and overlapping histories. It connects the unique storytelling tradition of Hindi cinema with the subsumed creative identity of a screenwriter. To do this the article focuses on significant historical markers in Hindi cinema: the Silent era, the Talkies, the Golden era of the 1950s, the New Wave of the 1960s, the SalimJaved era of the 1970s and the New New Wave of today. The New New Wave in Hindi popular cinema aims to recognize and legitimize the presence of the story and the screenwriter. The article studies the evolution of this recent phenomenon and examines the academic and industrial variants that have led to the coming of this change in Hindi cinema.

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22 Modern-Day Vampires from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute)

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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

Transcript:

We also then, of course, know about The Vampire Diaries. Julie Pleck put that out, but now she has Legacies which is a sequel to that and Origins which is another one. Interesting because here she’s also turning them more into the sexy dudes and we’re starting to talk about that concept. The problem behind it is at what point does the super-sexy guy really become a way to hide the toxic romance that’s going on when we think about vampires, because vampires are, in fact, capable of killing you. This is a boyfriend who can kill you and you are agreeing to be with him knowing how dangerous that is. That’s a definition of domestic violence in its own way and yet we’re turning it into pop culture hot oh boy which one do I pick? Which team are you on? Right? so is that, again, defanging them, or is that accidentally empowering those kinds of relationships?

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From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 1: The aesthetic independence of the screenplay by M.-R Koivumki

The aesthetic independence of the screenplay by M.-R Koivumki

The aesthetic independence of an artwork is usually defined by the direct relationship between the viewer and the artwork. The screenplay, however, is actualized for the viewer only via cinematic performance. Therefore, we should ask how the viewer experiences the performance and to what extent this experience is created by the contribution of the screenplay, and especially which elements are realized in the presentation and contribute to building up the performance for the viewer to experience.The approach I am leaning on, and through which I am hoping to gain new insights into the aesthetic independence, is dramaturgical and thus practice-based. The common hermeneutic approach in artistic research usually defines what the artworks are and how they exist in our world as cultural phenomena. Through the dramaturgical approach I explore how the screenplay functions within the presentational process.I discuss the contribution of the screenplay as a literary artwork by asking how the literary characteristics of the screenplay appear in a film and their function in the performance. I also explore the screenplay’s contribution from the viewer’s point of view. Here I am not leaning on the perception theories; instead I am using my own observation of the cinematic performance. Lastly, I discuss the dramaturgical process as an interpretive continuum that leads from the screenwriter to the viewer.

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21 Buffy and Masculinity from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 9 seconds)

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In honor of Halloween – and in service to my teaching philosophy —

“Words Matter. Writers Matter. Women Writers Matter.”

Transcript:

The other thing that was going on with Buffy and a couple of other shows we’ll talk about, is that we’re taking vampires who were the other and the scary and the bad and we’re making them sexy and hot, which is a female perspective but then we have to ask ourselves is that good or is that bad? Is that good because in a way when you make the men the objectified sexual object are you taking power away from them and therefore giving that power to the women? That’s a question because you can’t deny David Boreanaz was hot. This is all there is to it. He’s still hot. I know through Buffy through Bones and through Seal Team that man just… but I think it’s a great credit to this actor. We have to recognize he could manage to be deeply, deeply masculine while not being the most important person in the story. He could be the supportive man beside her and that made him all the more man and that’s a different way to define what manhood is and that’s I think a really important thing we’re seeing in some newer literature. So that I think is fascinating.

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Rosanne Hosting Screenwriting Discussion at The Athena TV Lab

Many thanks to the many great MFA mentors who are doing double duty as mentors to this year’s Athena TV Lab. You can find them on the last two lines of this (now familiar) Zoom grid (starting on the 3rd tier/4th spot): Dawn Comer Jefferson, Jon Vandergriff, Rashaan Dozier-Escalante (also alumna of the MFA Class of 2018), Amy Straus, and Laura Brennan. And there are 2 MFA alums here, too (Sydney Haven and Pam Winfrey).

The Athena Film Festival Virtual Writers Lab

The Athena Film Festival at Barnard College Virtual Writers Lab is for emerging women writers who have not had a feature-length narrative script produced within the past 10 years. Writers must submit a screenplay that includes a woman or women characters in a leadership role or position at the center of the story. Scripts must be feature-length narratives (between 80 and 120 pages).

The Athena Film Festival at Barnard College Virtual Writers Lab provides women identified storytellers with training, skills, and a robust supportive network. Participants will have several one-on-one mentoring sessions with experienced screenwriters as well as peer-to-peer and group sessions.

The Athena Film Festival at Barnard College Virtual Writers Lab will also include industry events where participants will learn about how to navigate the industry as well as a keynote conversation from an established filmmaker. Past panels have included: The Fluidity of Writing, How Does Representation Work, and The Art of Pitching and past keynotes have come from Gina Prince-Bythewood and Kat Candler.

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V2 Issue 1: Competitive writing: BBC Public Service television light entertainment and comedy in the 1970s and 1980s by Heather Sutherland

Competitive writing: BBC Public Service television light entertainment and comedy in the 1970s and 1980s by Heather Sutherland

Comedy has always been the least plausibly public service genre. It is entertaining and consequently seen as trivial, closest to commercial and often close to vulgar. Yet comedy remains the key to attracting audiences and is the aspect of programming most greedily eyed by the BBC’s competitors. This article examines how, facing severe competition during the 1970s and 1980s, in the shape of ITV and the arrival of Channel 4 in 1982, the BBC responded to the challenges of this competitive landscape, highlighting the Corporation’s approach to comedy writers and writing as a key competitive tactic. Whilst ITV and Channel 4 had their successes, the BBC, through its emphasis on organic as opposed to formula comedy forms, was able to articulate clearly the differences between its light entertainment and comedy scripts and those of the competitors. For instance, the absence of a commercial break allowed the development of more intricate plots and sub-plots, alongside in-depth characters; the structure of joke-telling adopted a more dramatic form, bringing to light wider themes, and resulting in comedic work that could inform, educate and entertain all at once. Furthermore, the nurturing approach experienced by writers working for the Corporation allowed the encouragement of new writers (to address new niche audiences) and the taking of risks in writing (particularly those under the heading alternative comedy), ultimately enabling writers to produce scripts that allowed the BBC to not only match its competitors, but to exceed them, principally with regard to the idea of what is termed here popular quality programming. As such, the history of the BBC’s approach to comedy writers and the styles and forms of BBC comedy writing can be a means of access to the core debates about what the BBC should do and produce as a public service; here is one strategy that was key to the Corporation’s defence of its public broadcaster status and its funding by licence fee. Its comedy department, scriptwriters and scripts act as an illustration of the shifts and tensions being experienced behind the scenes in the Corporation overall at this particular point in time.

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!