Screenwriting From Iowa

Though writer John Steinbeck has been dead for more than 40 years he’s been in the news a few times this year. Earlier in the year producer Brian Glazer announced he was going to remake East of Eden, last month the DVD was release of the six-hour production of East of Eden that first aired on [...]

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“I think what makes a film stick to the brain is the theme.”
                                                                   William C. Martell 
“There’s no place like home.”
         [...]

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Shane Black stormed on the scene back in early 80s when as a 23-year old he sold his script Lethal Weapon. The film came out in 87 and was a hit and he was paid a reported $1.75 million for his script for the 1991 film The Last Boy Scout, and then made $4 million [...]

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So where did the Ark idea come from for Raiders of the Lost Ark?
The credit apparently goes to Philip Kaufman who received a story credit on the script. (Kaufman is best known as the writer and director of The Right Stuff.) Kaufman was born and raised in Chicago and his grandparents were German-Jewish immigrants. [...]

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So Lucas came up with the bullwhip idea and Spielberg scored with the snake concept, where did the girl come from in Raiders of the Lost Ark?
Well, first let’s back up a step and realize that Casablanca did influence Raiders. And Casablanca is many things, part a detective story, part mystery, part wartime story, and [...]

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 I hate snakes, Jock. I hate ‘em. 
                                       Indiana Jones
                                       Raiders of the Lost Ark 
How did Indiana Jones come to [...]

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I just learned through Mystery Man on Film that there is a downloadable transcript of a story conference for Raiders of the Lost Ark. It includes George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and Larry Kasden walking through their ideas back in 1978 for the blockbuster film that would eventually be released in 1981. 
There’s great stuff there and [...]

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So after Kevin Smith was inspired by seeing Slacker, he wrote the script Clerks. After he wrote a the script he basically shot the film with a few friends who he could not afford to pay and covered the hard cost of production using basically personal credit cards.
In Smith’s mind if he was going to [...]

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Orson Welles? Sunset Boulevard? Horton Foote? None of those posts have done what quoting Kevin Smith has done–basically double my numbers of views. Maybe there are other factors at play but I’m staying on the Kevin Smith gravy train for a couple more days. I should point the way to Stephen Lowenstein’s book My First [...]

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Boy, I should have mentioned Kevin Smith before yesterday as that post brought the second highest number of views since I started this blog. I’m glad I didn’t say anything negative about 21-year olds living in the basement of their parent’s homes surrounded by comic books and possessing a burning desire to make a film.
Which [...]

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