Rosanne Welch is a TV writer, author, professor, and feminist, who’s able to combine her passion in one place thanks to her current position as an adjunct professor at Stephen’s College (the oldest women’s college in the U.S.) for its screenwriting M.F.A. program.

The Stephen’s College screenwriting M.F.A. program is certainly unique: it’s the first low-residency program specifically for TV and screenwriting, and is explicitly designed to increase the number and impact of women working in film and TV. It’s the perfect fit for Welch, who teaches all four of its History of Screenwriting courses, from the Silent Era throughout modern day, as well as a One Hour Spec Script course, and Writing the One-Hour pilot.

The idea for the program came from Ken LaZebnik, who Welch had met decades earlier when they both wrote for Touched By An Angel.

According to Welch, “Ken LaZebnik came up with the idea for the program, to create a Master’s program for screenwriting, opposed to extension or continuing education screenwriting programs where there is no degree at the end of it, you just have the experience of writing in the program.

“He needed someone to do curriculum, he needed someone who had a PhD on staff, and he also only wanted to hire writers who were part of the Writer’s Guild, because he wanted the students taught by working writers and writers who had experience.”

Fortunately Welch fit the criteria. “I was really excited because a lot of Master’s programs focus on directing or film production or being a master of all trades, and he just wanted to focus on screenwriting.”

Welch’s current life as an academic is a far cry from her days as a secretary at Stephen J. Cannell productions, back when he was the biggest independent TV producer with shows like The A-Team and 21 Jump Street.

Welch had moved to Los Angeles from Cleveland where she had been a high school Drama and English teacher at an all-girls Catholic school. She took writing classes at night and resumed teaching after relocating to L.A., but soon quit her teaching job and took a position as a receptionist at Cannell’s company because, as Welch tells it, “The advice I kept getting was that, if you want to be in the business, you have to be in the business. You have to meet people who are willing to read your work.”

At the time, Welch recalls, “Women had been secretaries for years, and writers wrote. So there wasn’t this line that was usually crossed. You had to let the male writers know that you weren’t there to get coffee until you were 65 years old.

I would sit and write between answering phones, so people would see me write. I wasn’t making a grocery list, I was writing a spec script. That would make them go, ‘Oh, interesting.’”

It took Welch and her writing partner at the time ten years to land their first, full-time writing position on 90210 where they would stay for one season. Soon after, Welch landed a temp job for Northern Exposure, where she met executive producer Jeff Melvoin, who, thanks to Welch’s crafty networking skills, ended up giving her a writing job when he became executive producer of Picket Fences.

From there, she headed to Touched By An Angel (“It was the most steady, stable job in town,” recalls Welch of her time on the CBS drama. “And it was the number two drama in town, after E.R. It was an anthology, and you could write about any family, any situation, every week. So the variety was too much fun”) where she would meet LaZebnik, a fortuitous meeting that would ultimately come full circle fifteen years later at Stephen’s College.

“It’s the writers we focus on,” says Welch of the M.F.A. program. “And that’s so dear to my heart that I can’t stand it.”

Creative Screenwriting spoke to Welch about the power of research, early female Hollywood pioneers, and the importance of having a woman’s voice in the writer’s room.

You’ve said one of your major themes is how important is it to have a woman’s voice in the writer’s room. Why is that theme personally so important to you, and why do you think it is important for the entertainment industry?

All my life, from reading as a child to being a teacher, I realized the importance of the fact that I wasn’t being spoken to by the kinds of things that I was told that I should pay attention to. I noticed by teaching in an all-girls school what was being offered to them, and what wasn’t being offered to them.

Even as a kid, growing up and watching television, I knew who my female heroes were, and there weren’t that many of them. We had The Bionic Woman back in the day and that was big stuff, but that was pretty much it. I read about historical women heroes, that’s how I got empowered, but I found it wasn’t really being spread around.

I didn’t have much power to do anything about that until I got into TV, which allowed me to step in and say, “Do you realize how that might sound to your wife?” [Laughs] “Do you realize how insulting what you just wrote on paper really is?”

And it was crazy because a lot of times the men who I was working with were feminists, and yet there’s that inherent “Okay, here’s the funny joke where we make the smart woman look bad,” which is just as bad as in kids’ comedies when they make fat jokes. Where’s the creativity in that? Let’s move forward.

So to tell good stories and to be successful — which is why I think Hollywood is finally paying attention to diversity because we have a diverse country and world, and our material goes all over the world — there are more stories that can be told other than the small core stories from the perspective of white men from the ages of 12 to 42.

So that’s been a personal mission of mine. All of the things that I’ve written focused on interesting questions for women.

It’s so funny because writers can write anything. That’s the point of writing. We can research everything and then write it. But you do have something inside of you that thinks a certain way that other people might not.

I’m watching reruns of The Rockford Files on Netflix and there was only woman writer and her name was Juanita Bartlett. In one episode I watched the other day, Rockford needed a lawyer and the lawyer that appeared was a woman. And I thought to myself, “That’s not an accident.”

There weren’t a lot of women lawyers on TV at that time, so a woman writer put one in there so little girls could look up and see and think, “Wow, I could be a lawyer one day.”

You’ve got to be able to see that stuff. There’s this great piece in Sonia Sotomayor’s memoir where she talked about being a kid and a Puerto Rican immigrant in New York, and she didn’t know what she could do in the world. But she watched TV, and her favorite show was Perry Mason and that’s how she learned what lawyers were. So she decided that’s what she would be. Without that exposure she would have never had that chance – no one in her family were lawyers – so without that she wouldn’t know what a lawyer was. Representation is huge.

In your TEDTalk, you talk about how simple it is to change a pronoun from “he” to a “she” in a script. Like how a doctor is usually written for a man, but by tweaking it and making the doctor a woman, you automatically get a woman’s voice in there. I’ve had similar occurrences where mostly male writers assign the roles of doctors and lawyers to men, while the women are written as wives and secretaries. Why do you think that still occurs?

Movies are written for money, TV is written for time, so when you’re writing in a hurry, you go to the first thing you know. A doctor walks into the room. “He says.” Because that’s the bulk of what we think.

One of my favorite things that happened on Touched by an Angel – wherein which the angels would come down and become human in every episode — we had a story that featured a family that had a maid. So it was decided that Della Reece, the African American angel, would play the maid in the family, while Roma Downey, the Irish American woman, would be a lawyer.

We were sitting around the table and discussing the episode, and my best friend happens to be African American. So I am watching this conversation in the writer’s room and I thought, “Again she has to be the maid? Why?” So I said, “Wouldn’t it be really cool if we switched it this time, and Roma would be the maid and Della would be the lawyer?”

In fairness to people, at that time Ms. Reece, who was a pastor, only worked four days a week and we had to fly her from Utah where the show was filmed to Los Angeles on Fridays so she could work with her church all weekend. Whereas Roma worked the six or seven days, and usually got the bigger roles because she could work more.

So everyone said, “Yeah, that’s a really good idea, but how would that work?” And instead of stopping the conversation there, I said, “Well, why don’t we just ask her if she would work an extra day for this particular episode?” And you know what she said? “Heck yeah!” She was totally for the idea of playing a lawyer rather than a maid.

So we go for the clichés because it’s short hand and we can easily move onto the writing, which is the thing we really want to do, but we forget that we can enhance the writing by rethinking and not going for the quick choice.

For male writers who might say they don’t know enough about the female mind to write a female character convincingly, what would you say to them?

It’s called research, my friend. [Laughs]. I wrote an episode about a gang kid, which I use in my class. But I don’t have any gang members in my family. I don’t know anyone in a gang. So I read three different biographies on men who were in gangs and who got out.

There’s this point in the episode where the gang member is forced to move out of his house and ordered to live in the garage, and I point out to my students that I included this because I read in one of those books where that actually happened. That a mother ordered her son to live in the garage because she knew he had a hit put out on him and these kids were ordered to kill him whenever they saw him and knew where he lived, so her solution was for him to live in the garage.

I can’t make that up. It would never have occurred me had I not done my research. So we can learn things. We can learn things in order to write more three dimensionally, but we need to put in the time.

In your syllabi, for the research paper, you highlight the works of the female early pioneers of Hollywood. Why is that particular information and knowledge of the past so important and relevant to today’s writers?

That’s a great question. Well, it’s important for a couple of reasons. It’s important to realize that if you don’t write your own history, someone else will and will forget to put you in it. Secondly, we have to combat the idea that there aren’t that many women writers because it’s always been a “boy’s” job. It hasn’t always been that way, but history has recorded it that way, so we have accepted that as “Oh, it’s a big deal to be a woman writer,” but it didn’t used to be, and it still shouldn’t be.

So that information helps people with that idea. And these women did work that was the same quality as the names that are still widely known, like D.W. Griffith, for example. The fact that we don’t know them or study them because men have written history books is wrong, so we have the chance to counteract that, which is one of the goals of the program.

Do you notice a difference in terms of how female characters are written for TV between when you were writing for TV back in the ‘90s and now?

Yes, I do. It’s a little bit sad that it largely comes from shows that are helmed by women, like Shonda Rhimes. Of course, the big talk these days, is we talk about how women have taken over Game of Thrones, which isn’t an entirely women-run show at all. Those characters are becoming more interesting than the male characters.

So, yes, we are seeing a change, but the fact that it’s being discussed means we haven’t put it in a normative state. In the same way that Shonda Rhimes has said we need to stop saying “diversity,” we need to say, “It’s the real world.”

The world looks like Grey’s Anatomy. It doesn’t look like E.R., which only had one black doctor. The world is more diverse and interesting.

We are getting there, and I don’t mean to say that it’s just because of women-run shows. Look at Joss Whedon. We still study his work from Buffy the Vampire Slayer in many college classes because it’s a brilliant show and because it’s told from the female perspective. It’s not just girls who act like boys because that is not being fair to girls. That isn’t how girls solve problems and we shouldn’t memorialize the way boys things do as the only way to do things.

In the Buffy series finale, instead of taking on the bad guy on her own, Buffy shared her power with hundreds of other girls, which diminished her own power but it meant that with having more power behind her, they were able to take care of the problem. And that’s hugely interesting.

From now on, every girl in the world who might be a slayer, will be a slayer. Every girl who could have the power, will have the power. Can stand up, will stand up. Slayers, every one of us. Make your choice. Are you ready to be strong?”

Buffy, Season 7

You also teach on the subject of the history of film adaptations. What are some of the challenges that screenwriters often face when adapting a source of material for the screen?

I’m very interested in that whole concept because there’s so many wonderful books out there that you want to have the movie treatment because that gives them so much more exposure.

I think the best stuff that I heard about adaptation came from Steve Kloves who adapted the Harry Potter novels into film.

I’m on the editorial board for the Written By magazine from the Writer’s Guild. We did a talk with him a few years ago and he was asked, “How do you take an 800-page novel and turn it into a two-hour movie?” He said: “You must decide on the theme of the movie, which is going to be one of the themes of the book, but not all of them. Once you decide on your theme, you must throw away any tangents or stories that don’t address it, and only focus on the bits from the story that address your theme.”

I think that’s why all the Harry Potter movies work well. That’s step one. And I think step two is to be as true to the emotional message of the book as possible.

With Percy Jackson, which they adapted after Harry Potter, the boy in the book is 12 years old – like Harry — but the studio wanted to make him 17 because they wanted him to have a love interest who is just a friend in the original book.

But by making him 17, they ruined the whole thing because by making a seventeen year old do and say those things that a twelve year would do and say, they made him look like a whiny child opposed to this brave twelve year old who had a mission.

So they ruined the franchise. They made one movie, and for the second one, they put all the other books in there so they could say, “Okay, we made the books into movies, we’re done.” That’s a huge lesson. It should have been a huge moneymaker, and it wasn’t. The kids that loved the book series, they couldn’t stand the movie.

You have a list of movies in your syllabi. What are a few essential movies that you would recommend to a screenwriter, and why?

We often use Rocky as the perfect script, alongside Back to the Future. They both star boys, but if you look at the character of Adrian in Rocky, she is just as interesting as Rocky, and her journey is just as important.

When I show that movie to students and I ask them who’s seen the movie and who hasn’t, many of the girls haven’t because they have been told it’s a boxing movie, and it’s not – it’s a love story. It’s totally a love story. It’s watching their love story grow.

And with Back to the Future, there isn’t a line in that movie that isn’t perfect and that has to be said in order to set something else up later. It’s so meticulously well planned yet has so much personality. The plot doesn’t overwhelm the characters, it’s just so perfectly balanced.

Casablanca is the first movie we start with. It’s a classic movie, you have to know it. Every scene, every line is perfect, as are the side stories. When people are planning a big movie, they have to remember that the side stories are just as important. They all tend to have the same theme and that just builds up your main story.

In Casablanca, there’s a scene with a young girl who needs the same papers as Ilsa who wants them for her husband to leave Casablanca. She’s been told by the policeman that if she has sex with him, then she will get the papers.

So she goes to Rick, played by Humphrey Bogart, and asks, “Do you think if your girlfriend did this for you, would you be able to forgive her?” And to show that Rick is actually a sweetheart, he says, “I don’t think he would and I don’t think you should and I don’t think you have to. And tell your boyfriend to go to this roulette wheel in an hour and play this number twice,” and of course he does and they end up winning a big chunk of money so they can buy the passes to leave. And it’s great because it’s essentially the same story as the bigger story, so everything feeds and supports the main storyline. Brilliant script.

What female screenwriters do you like?

We just lost Nora Ephron not too long ago who could do anything. From Silkwood to Heartburn to Julie and Julia, so she’s a brilliant person to study.

Nancy Meyers, who did The Intern last year. She does great stuff with a message but doesn’t bang you over the head with it.

Melissa Rosenberg, who came from Dexter and went to do the Twilight movies, and Linda Woolverton who wrote Beauty and the Beast and Maleficent, which was a better movie than it needed to be. She thought of who that character was and offered a backstory as to why she became who she was later in life. It wasn’t maudlin. I think she is doing the strongest work in movies; it just happens to be in animation or life-action movies that are based on animated movies.

What’s next for you?

I wrote a book based on The Monkees, the television show. I like deconstructing television – I spent a long time writing it — and I like making people take it more seriously.

So that book was a chance to take a show that was viewed as nothing more than goofy, but was actually pretty innovating and took new ideas to the people in the ‘60s on the cusp of the civilized movement. Television is important because it brings ideas into your living room that your parents might not want you to know, and it gives you the opportunity to think about them. And the Monkees did that.

One of my chapters is about feminism and you wouldn’t think a show about four rock ‘n roll guys is about feminism, but it was. Throughout the four seasons they were on the air, they never dated a girl who didn’t have a job or had a mission in life.

Even if they dated a princess, she wasn’t a Disney princess who needed help. She had a country that she was in charge of, and she wasn’t going to run off with one of them. She had a job she had to do.

And that was important for little kids to see in the ’60s. The boy isn’t the thing that you win; it’s what you have to do in the world that makes you somebody.

[addtoany]

Before You Go

Don’t forget to check out Rosanne’s books on Amazon.com!