writing – Page 47 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 1: Teaching screenwriting in a time of storytelling blindness: the meeting of the auteur and the screenwriting tradition in Danish film-making by Eva Novrup Redvall

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

Teaching screenwriting in a time of storytelling blindness: the meeting of the auteur and the screenwriting tradition in Danish film-making by Eva Novrup Redvall

This article analyses how the approach to screenwriting in Danish cinema has undergone major changes from an auteur-oriented film culture in the 1960s with basically no professional screenwriters, to a collaborative auteur industry where screenwriting is now a recognized craft and screenwriters are established professionals in the film industry. Focusing on the historical development of the Screenwriting Department at the National Film School of Denmark, the article discusses how the educational emphasis on teaching screenwriting has had an impact on Danish cinema both by introducing a basic understanding of screenwriting models and tools for a new generation of Danish film-makers, and by developing a common awareness of the importance of screenwriting as well as successful collaborations in creative teams. The article highlights how, after widespread enthusiasm over the emergence of successful screenwriters, there are currently debates about the dangers of professionalization as well as critical voices calling for a return to a more personal kind of auteur film-making. Finally, it is suggested that further investigation of the nature of close collaborations between directors and screenwriters, now more prevalent in Denmark, can provide interesting material for new perspectives in discussions of authorship.

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!

03 Elizabeth Gaskell from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 3 seconds)

Watch this entire presentation

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

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:

In also just a little bit post her period when I was researching this I found it so interesting. There were not many women who we teach in our schools, but here they were living full, professional careers as writers in eras when we don’t even think about women having jobs at all, right? So Elizabeth Gaskell really interested me. I love the fact that you can see full shelves of books written by women and books based on horror stories which again, we don’t really relate to women. So what was that about and why were they getting away with that? I think she’s really cool because we mostly know these women for the drama novels they wrote. The things that were proper books. If you wrote a book at all it was about a proper society. So Cranford is what she’s mostly known for which was turned into a miniseries with some famous ladies who’ve you seen in other sorts of Harry Potter-like stories, but she really wrote all kinds of ghost stories and she began her career by being published by Charles Dickens. So Dickens was doing magazine publishing and he’s publishing a lot of women which I thought was very interesting. I had not equated that with him. So Elizabeth Gaskell is one of the names we should know more.

* 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

Subscribe: RSS

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 1: So it’s not surprising I’m neurotic The Screenwriter and the Screen Idea Work Group by Ian W Macdonald

So it’s not surprising I’m neurotic The Screenwriter and the Screen Idea Work Group by Ian W Macdonald

The Screen Idea Work Group (SIWG) is a flexibly constructed group organized around the development and production of a screen idea; a hypothetical grouping of those professional workers involved in conceptualizing and developing fictional narrative work for any particular moving image screen idea. In this article, I use the notion of the SIWG to draw together the views of key workers about how the process of screen idea development works or doesn’t. My findings are based on a small ethnographic study I undertook in 2004, in which, through in-depth semi-structured interviews with seven SIWG workers, I attempted to understand how they came to occupy their role, how they felt their judgements were made and received, and how far the SIWG’s view of the screen idea accorded with the screenwriting doxa (characterized as how to do a good piece of work). As detailed below, their answers were concerned with status, a sense of self-worth and respect, points of tension, power, control, collaboration and trust, and the nature of the doxa itself.

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!

02 Women and Horror Writing from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (45 seconds)

Watch this entire presentation

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

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

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

Transcript:

The best horror — and I’m gonna come to some examples as we travel through — is stuff that involves social commentary along with the scare because that’s the stuff that sticks with us. So I think Mary is very important. I made a point to mention I think it’s useful we think about women writing. Back in the day, it wasn’t acceptable for women to READ novels because it would rot their brains. So they certainly couldn’t write them. So you’ll notice when the book was first came out there was no author on the book. Nobody bothered to wonder how come there’s no writer there. It was because she could not admit that she had written it and then when it came so ridiculously famous and so profitable then she was able to say “well I’m cool enough that’s fine I’ll take the ding for doing this,” right? So I think it’s really important to think about what women had to go through just to be writers right?

* 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

Subscribe: RSS

01 Introduction from When Women Write Horror with Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 18 seconds)

Watch this entire presentation

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

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

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

Transcript:

Alright, so welcome everybody. Today because we’re just two days outside of Halloween, we want to talk about horror but we want to talk about women in horror because you don’t get a lot of that right? When we think about horror we think about a lot of famous male authors. Now we do think about some of the women — both writers and we’re gonna think about some stories that are famous stories that are female focused and how that affects us as we watch these types of things right? What they make us think about. What we should be thinking about? So when I think about horror, I think about this lady first, Guesses? Mary Shelley. Mary Shelley. When we think about Mary Shelley we think about what book she wrote? Frankenstein. Right? Frankenstein does double duty. It’s kind of a double genre piece. It’s science fiction but it’s also horror. When we think about Frankenstein, we think about the monster and the movies that we’ve seen. The costumes people wear for Halloween. A lot of people — until they read Frankenstein — don’t understand that’s not the name of the monster. That’s name of Dr. Frankenstein who made the monster right? So this was all concocted in the brain of a 19 year old young woman and that’s how important her work was. We’re still reading it to this day right and we’re still thinking about what does it mean.

* 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

Subscribe: RSS

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V1 Issue 1: After the typewriter: the screenplay in a digital era by Kathryn Millard

After the typewriter: the screenplay in a digital era by Kathryn Millard

This article aims to contribute to contemporary debates about screenwriting as a process of developing the screen idea; about the ways in which formatting conventions from an earlier era of cinema may restrict innovation in screenwriting; and about shifting practices of screenwriting in a digital era in which images and sound play a potentially more significant role. Additionally, it questions the use of terms such as blueprint to describe the relationship between the screenplay and the proposed film that it represents. The article draws on the author’s body of practice-led research as a writer and director of feature films and documentaries, as well as histories of screenwriting, film production, comics and the graphic arts.

Get your copy and subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting Today!

Join me at the Screenwriting Research Network’s Annual Conference in Oxford, UK

* 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!

40 Conclusion from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 42 seconds)

Watch this entire presentation

The Sisterhood of Science Fiction: A Walk Through Some Writers and Characters You (Should) Know And Love

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

This one allowed me to riff on some of my favorite female science fiction writers across time, whether they be novelists or television writers. It also opened up a good conversation on what art we support and include in our lives – and what that art says to us and about us. — Rosanne

Transcript:

We’ve moved to the world thankfully where now we’re gonna have female superheroes even and that’s the big deal. Likewise I love this meme. It’s been going around on Facebook but you probably saw it — makes a difference that little girls are now seeing women in charge and all these kinds of films makes a big difference. I like this one too. I’ve live long enough to see my child princesses become generals right? That’s Princess Buttercup — kicking some butt and what — exactly — in Wonder Woman. As you wish exactly. As I wish that someone take care. That’s pretty cool. and we’ve come to a place where there’s a new movie opening this weekend or next weekend that’s about an African-American girl who has superhero powers and so does her mother and her grandmother. It all comes through three generations of women who have to use those powers well and they have to deal with them and not cause violence and issues like that. So the fact that we’ve moved all the way here from Frankenstein is pretty amazing I think and I think we always have to go back to what Octavia Butler said, we have to think what we don’t see we assume we can’t be. So whatever that is, we need to see those depictions of all of our different selves because diversity isn’t about getting more money at the box office. Those make much richer, better stories because we are a hugely diverse world and it’s not just actually here in America. It’s all over the world. There’s all kinds of different people everywhere. We really need to think about all of them living on into the future. That makes the best science fiction, in my opinion. So there we have it. Thank you all for coming.

* 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

Subscribe: RSS

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V3 Issue 1: ‘To see a script’: Jean-Luc Godard’s re-envisioning of screenwriting in Passion (1982) and Scénario du film Passion by Jill Murphy

‘To see a script’: Jean-Luc Godard’s re-envisioning of screenwriting in Passion (1982) and Scénario du film Passion by Jill Murphy

In the film Passion (1982) and its video scenario, Scénario du film Passion (1982), Jean-Luc Godard attempts to re-envision the conventional script by placing an emphasis on visual rather than verbal forms. In this article, I examine Godard’s development of narrative through image in Passion and his description of this process in Scénario du film Passion. In addition, I consider the concurrent emphasis he places on the visualization of narrative in the diegetic film around which the storyline of Passion is based. To contextualize the process of narrative construction that Godard applies in the films considered in the article, I present some earlier examples of his screenwriting practice that illustrate how Godard’s screenwriting evolved towards an image-based approach..

Get your copy and subscription to the Journal of Screenwriting Today!

Join me at the Screenwriting Research Network’s Annual Conference in Oxford, UK

* 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!

27 Fandom and The Monkees from “Why The Monkees Matter: Even 50 Years Later [Video] (1 minute 14 seconds)

Enjoy This Clip? Watch this entire presentation and Buy Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture

From Denver Pop Culture Con 2019.

Wherever you go, you find Monkees fans and the Denver Popular Culture Con was no different. Amid rooms full of caped crusaders and cosplay creations, I was initially not sure how many folks would attend a talk on a TV show from the 1960s – but happily I was met by a nice, engaged audience for my talk on Why the Monkees Matter – and afterward they bought books! What more could an author ask for?

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

Transcript

Fandom matters on The Monkees. Zilch is a podcast where every couple of weeks they put out a podcast. Lots of information about the show. Interviews with the guys. Updates on what’s happening with them. I do a thing called Monkees 101 with another woman who’s a Ph.D. — we’re both PhDs and we take one episode at a time and sort of pick it apart. Find all the stuff that’s in it. Talk about what was happening in history at that moment and in the music world at that moment and it’s really kind of fun. They do a lot of really cool stuff. 7000 or 8000 people follow that one podcast. Just because of this fandom and it’s international. As I said, they’re in New Zealand right now. They were going to Australia. They’ve in Japan. They’re everywhere. I’ve met them. Because fandom even means like people with Ph.Ds want to pay attention to them. This was on their last tour that Davy — uh, no, Peter — and Micky did together. And that’s how fast I talk. That’s how much I have to say. I have a lot more to say, but that’s the prepared stuff. I thought if people wanted to chat or perhaps had questions about stuff I would be glad to answer them. What interests people about why The Monkees are still famous?

Buy Why The Monkees Matter: Teenagers, Television and American Pop Culture

Amazon

Bookshop.org

A hit television show about a fictitious rock band, The Monkees (1966-1968) earned two Emmys–Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Comedy.

Capitalizing on the show’s success, the actual band formed by the actors, at their peak, sold more albums than The Beatles and The Rolling Stones combined, and set the stage for other musical TV characters from The Partridge Family to Hannah Montana. In the late 1980s, the Monkees began a series of reunion tours that continued into their 50th anniversary.

This book tells the story of The Monkees and how the show changed television, introducing a new generation to the fourth-wall-breaking slapstick created by Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers.

Its creators contributed to the innovative film and television of 1970s with projects like Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Laugh-In and Welcome Back, Kotter. Immense profits from the show, its music and its merchandising funded the producers’ move into films such as Head, Easy Rider and Five Easy Pieces.

McFarland (Direct from Publisher) | Amazon | Kindle Edition | Nook Edition

Want to use “Why The Monkees Matter” in your classroom?

Order Examination Copies, Library and Campus Bookstore orders directly from McFarland

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

39 Buffy The Vampire Slayer from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (48 seconds)

Watch this entire presentation

The Sisterhood of Science Fiction: A Walk Through Some Writers and Characters You (Should) Know And Love

Subscribe to Rosanne’s Channel and receive notice of each new video!

Transcript:

Moves us into the world of Buffy which is part horror/part sci-fi I would say blending and I think really finally a powerful woman though yes she does use weapons but it’s also about her inner strength and her buddy Willow who doesn’t have to be sexy she’s just a cool really smart girl. So we’re trying to get some more normal representations of women. However when they sell the box set, uhhh, that’s a pretty like it yeah, an overtly sexual pose that doesn’t really thrill me, but the series is pretty brilliant and she’s pretty powerful in it and there’s an ending to it — not gonna spoil it — but there’s a choice made in the last episode in terms of how men would take having to deal with their power issues and how a woman decides to save the day. — what she does and it’s a big interesting thing.

* 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

Subscribe: RSS