writing – Page 50 – On Screenwriting and Media with Dr. Rosanne Welch

32 Characters: Uhura, Guinan, Star Trek from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 16 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:

Because of him talking to her at that event, she stayed on the show and as we know, she went through the movies– as an older woman, which is also a big deal an — older woman doing empowering things very cool. She influenced Whoopi Goldberg who at that point was an Academy award-winning actress. She did the TV show, The Next Generation, for the very same reason. She said I grew up watching Nichelle Nichols. I want to give that same message to children in the next generation. So she would guest frequently on Next Generation and while we’re busy thinking about people who got very very influenced, you may not know this lady? Anybody? She’s the first African American female astronaut. Her name is Mae Jemison, all right, so she’s an American woman who saw Star Trek as a kid and said I’m gonna get that job and she did which is pretty amazing. So much so that she guest-starred on the show to say thanks for what influence you gave me in my childhood and I want other young girls to see me in the future. That’s an amazing piece of powerful message coming from one character, right, one character being invented in a show. So it’s fascinating to me what we can learn from that.

* 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

Journal of Screenwriting 10.3 is now available (Historiographic Research in Screenwriting Special Issue)

I’m always happy to announce the latest issues of the Journal of Screenwriting and 10.3 — a Special Issue discussing ‘Historiographic Research in Screenwriting’ — is now available!

For me, as Book Reviews editor it’s especially nice to note that 2 alums of the Stephens College MFA in TV and Screenwriting program, one current student and Friend of the Program Anna Weinstein are among the reviewers of books this month, with current MFA candidate CJ Ehrlich having reviewed a text used in our History of Screenwriting courses – Tom Stempel’s Framework.

Does your college library have a subscription? Order one today to read all these reviews PLUS the articles noted below:

Crash! Boom! Bang! How to Write Action Movies, Michael Lucker (2017)

JENNIFER ANNE MARTIN

Words in Action: Forms and Techniques of Film Dialogue, Paolo Braga (2015)

JACKIE PEREZ

Off the Page: Screenwriting in the Era of Media Convergence, Daniel Bernardi and Julian Hoxter (2017)

ANNA WEINSTEIN

FrameWork: A History of Screenwriting in the American Film, 3rd ed., Tom Stempel (2000)

C. J. EHRLICH

For more information about the special issue and journal, click here >> https://www.intellectbooks.com/journal-of-screenwriting

Issue 10.3 Included:

Editorial

STEVEN PRICE AND CLAUS TIEBER

Articles

Die Filmprimadonna (The Film Primadonna, 1913): A case study of the fiction of a screenplay and the process of filmmaking in German early cinema

JAN HENSCHEN

Once again into the cabinets of Dr. Caligari: Evil spaces and hidden sources of the Caligari screenplay

ALEXANDRA KSENOFONTOVA

Reel by reel: Jan Stanislav Kolár’s narrative poetics in the context of transition to feature-length format in Czech silent cinema

MARTIN KOS

Walter Reisch: The musical writer

CLAUS TIEBER

Network television writers and the ‘race problems’ of 1968

CARYN MURPHY

From dialogue writer to screenwriter: Pier Paolo Pasolini at work for Federico Fellini

CLAUDIA ROMANELLI

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!

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!

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V10 Issue 1: Colonizing, decolonizing: Bad-faith liberalism and African space colonialism in Doris Lessing’s screenplay The White Princess By James Arnett

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

Colonizing, decolonizing: Bad-faith liberalism and African space colonialism in Doris Lessing’s screenplay The White Princess
By James Arnett

Although Doris Lessing frequently wrote about Africa over the course of her career, and her relationship to colonialism is undeniably critical, changing theoretical paradigms have complicated readings of her anticolonial critique. From a treasure trove of unpublished African material contained in her papers at the Harry Ransom Center Archives at the University of Texas, this article looks at one of her unpublished screenplays, The White Princess, as a complex and fraught attempt to generate an ethos of decolonization well in advance of its contemporary, post-postcolonial preeminence in twenty-first-century theoretical discourse. Lessing’s positing of a speculative future African recolonization of Britain would have emerged into a smattering of British speculative fictions of the late 1960s and 1970s that likewise imagined African colonialism, but did so, this article argues, hampered by a bad-faith liberalism. Despite the subversive potential of exploring inverted colonial dynamics, this article argues that Lessing ultimately cannot break free of generic conventions, political and theoretical limitations, or colonial discursive structures to achieve real decolonization work in The White Princess – although she may succeed elsewhere in her oeuvre.

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!

19 More Popular Culture and The Monkees from “Why The Monkees Matter: Even 50 Years Later [Video] (52 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

Their popular culture travels through the decades. This is where people start going “why is anyone still talking about them. The show is canceled? The show is over. It’s done” but it’s not, right? In the seventies, the show was rerun on Saturday mornings so a lot of another level of fandom came to them as children watching the Saturday morning TV. So, of course, Davy is still a big name. So he comes on to The Brady Bunch because Marcia has written a letter asking him to come and perform at her prom and he doesn’t get it on time. He doesn’t get it fast enough and eventually, he gets told about it and then he decides to be her date which is adorable and is apparently the most has been rerun more than any other. Which means — which means that Davy was also then voted the number one teen idol of all time at a certain point, so that’s a big deal.

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

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

31 Characters: Nyota Uhura, Star Trek from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (1 minute 20 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:

In terms of characters that we need to pay some attention to, if you don’t know the original Star Trek you should but you’ve seen some of these characters and memes all over the internet right? Nyota Uhura. It was a big deal. They’re putting an African-American woman in the future. Now there was some chit chat about the sexism going on because she was just answering the phone. She’s running the radio on the ship but she’s still on the ship on the main place and she often was involved in stories, but what’s really important about her character and why these two are connected in these pictures is that after the first season on the show, she was kind of like “I’m just answering the damn phone like I don’t really feel like I’m empowered very much I don’t really want to do this show anymore” and she was a big band singer, she could go back out on the road , sing, tour America, make money. I don’t need to do this cheesy science fiction show and then she met him at some event– I forget — some fundraising event and she said she kind of apologized for kind of how stupid her role was in the show and told him she was quitting so she’s proud of I want you to know I’m not gonna do this anymore and he was like “Oh no no no no. You have to stay. You are the only African-American who is seen in the future. You do not understand the power of little children looking up and saying okay we survive. She made it. I’ll make it. This is a big, big deal.

* 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

18 Popular Culture and The Monkees from “Why The Monkees Matter: Even 50 Years Later [Video] (56 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.

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

Transcript

They were their own comic book. I’m sure somewhere in this place this weekend at one of the big comic cage upstairs might have a copy. I don’t know. It’s probably pretty rare. They were drawn by who knows who the drawer — the artist — Hirschfeld — thank you very much. That’s a huge thing that he would choose them right? This was for a piece in TV Guide at the time but he did all the great Broadway stars. So and I just think that’s beautiful (Audience: Is his daughter’s name in there somewhere?) You know it should be and I think it’s in Peter’s hair I think or it might be at the end of Mike’s hair. It’s got to be in this hair somewhere. He always had the name Nina — his daughter’s name. That’s a fun fact of Hirschfeld and if you go online you can google Hirschfeld Nina and it will show all the photos where her name appears. So I’m guessing if we looked hard enough it would be in there. So they’re making it all over popular culture. Obviously, there’s other Hirschfeld’s where you can see more of them and look at all the famous people that he’s covered but there in that world. Nina’s definitely in her Marilyn Monroe’s skirt.

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

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

New Essay Published: The Twenty-First-Century Western: New Riders of the Cinematic Stage

Once again I’m happy to have co-written a chapter with editor Doug Brode. — Westward Ho! The Women!: Frontier Females in Postfeminist Films

Our first was collaboration came in The American Civil War on Film and TV: Blue and Gray in Black and White and Color – this one gave me a chance to analyze female characters in westerns produced after 2000.

Sadly, you’d think their new-ness would have made for more interesting, nuanced female characters but, as I say in the chapter, the most well-rounded, honest and real representations of females in westerns in the (supposedly) 21st century came from one of the youngest characters (Mattie Ross in True Grit) and from one of the animated characters, who is not even a female human, but a female lizard (Beans in Rango). And once again, as I am finding more and more, whether the screenwriter was female or male often made a difference.

Focusing on twenty-first century Western films, including all major releases since the turn of the century, the essays in this volume cover a broad range of aesthetic and thematic aspects explored in these films, including gender and race. As diverse contributors focus on the individual subgenres of the traditional Western (the gunfighter, the Cavalry vs. Native American conflict, the role of women in Westerns, etc.), they share an understanding of the twenty-first century Western may be understood as a genre in itself. They argue that the films discussed here reimagine certain aspects of the more conventional Western and often reverse the ideology contained within them while employing certain forms and clichés that have become synonymous internationally with Westerns. The result is a contemporary sensibility that might be referred to as the postmodern Western.

30 More On Jane Espenson from The Sisterhood of Science Fiction – Dr. Rosanne Welch [Video] (58 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:

Likewise, she wrote many Buffy’s but one of the best is an episode called Earshot and Buffy’s all streaming for free on Facebook right now so you can watch. (Audience: I grew up watching that.) I Iove Buffy, I know. It’s really brilliantly written show. Earshot was a brilliant episode about Buffy who is the Vampire Slayer being cursed with the ability to hear what everyone is thinking — so mental telepathy and the problem is the cacophony in your head starts to make you crazy because if you can hear what everyone was thinking you couldn’t think your own thoughts and along the way — she’s in high school — she hears someone say “It doesn’t matter tomorrow by noon they’ll all be dead.” So now she knows she’s in a school with a shooter but who is it because she can’t pinpoint where the voice came from. So the whole episode is about trying to find the kid and of course, you trace the kid who looks the most bullied and seems to be the most stereotypically that kid. I’m not going to tell you you did it but — spoiler alert — it ain’t that kid right? So it’s really again excellently written episode using all the tropes of the era so Jane Espenson a pretty important writer.

* 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 V10 Issue 1: Creative resistance tactics in the work of English Canadian screenwriters by Kerry McArthur

Creative resistance tactics in the work of English Canadian screenwriters by Kerry McArthur

This article analyses how eight successful English Canadian screenwriters negotiate various norms of screenwriting practice, in particular the criteria for three-act structure, character development and closure as advocated by Hollywood. The writers discuss their interpretations of what they consider essential narrative elements in screenplay projects, while dismissing other edicts of the screenwriting industry. Analysis of interview transcripts reveals that most of these writers take their inspiration from their own experience of screenwriting and their interpretations of other screenplays and historic texts on narrative rather than from contemporary screenwriting textbooks. The focus for almost all of these screenwriters is on writing screen stories in original ways, rather than adopting standardized narrative directives, even when elements of these directives have their uses.

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!

From The Journal Of Screenwriting V10 Issue 1: An insider perspective on the script in practice by Vincenzo Giarrusso

An insider perspective on the script in practice by Vincenzo Giarrusso

The machinations of industry, the exigencies of film funding and the producer’s prominent role in setting fiscal and marketing objectives for film production seem incongruous with scriptwriting as a generative creative practice in the filmmaking process. This article presents a case study that investigates the agency of creative practice from the insider perspective of a scriptwriter. In mobilizing the concept of the boundary object, the case links the problematic and transitional status of the script – as it passes out of the hands of the writer – to other roles under the control of filmmaking practitioners. In combining a practice-based reflexive narrative with theoretical observations, the article explores the processes and imperatives that mediate the script and scriptwriting as an embodied experience for the scriptwriter.

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!