Screenwriting From Iowa

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing [...]

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 ”Time. We live by it, ladies and gentlemen, it doesn’t live by us.”
                                                                       Chuck Nolan (Tom Hanks)
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“The pivotal character knows what he wants…Without him the story flounders…in fact, there is no story.”
                                       Lajos Egri
One of the hang-ups that some people have with the classic writing book The Art of Dramatic Writing by Lajos Egri is that its focus in on theater. And while some of the references are more well known [...]

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This week I called one of the most respected make-up artists in Iowa for an upcoming shoot and I found out she’s booked into August. Turns out she’s working in Des Moines on a feature with Forrest Whitaker (Oscar winner for The Last King of Scotland) and Adrian Brody (Oscar winner for The Pianist).
That’s some [...]

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“The premise is the motivating power behind everything we do.”
                                                    Lajos Egri
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So it’s been just over six months since I had the crazy idea to go daily with this Screenwriting from Iowa blog. Like Lance Armstrong I don’t know if I’m going to return next year or if December 31, 2009 will be the finish line for the daily gig. In the meantime, I continue to hunt [...]

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“People who wouldn’t know an emotion if it slapped them in the face usually aren’t good storytellers. The good storytellers are the people who are attracted by the mystery of things that ‘don’t make sense’ rather than fearing those things. The human part of you is the part that doesn’t make sense. This is the [...]

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I often wonder what Arthur Miller would do if he were setting out to be a writer today. What kind of writing would the author of “Death of a Salesman” be doing? I think the same for Tennessee Williams, Eugene O’Neill, Ibsen, Chekhov and so on. Would they even be writing plays?
I found the following [...]

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Long before Diablo Cody wrote Juno in a Starbucks in a Minneapolis suburb, and before Nick Schenk wrote Gran Torino at Gumpy’s Bar in Minneapolis another screenwriter from Minnesota had jumped into the scene with his first script Grumpy Old Men
Screenwriter Mark Steven Johnson is another example of talent coming from a small town in [...]

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“Any character who is going to drive the story has to grab and hold the audience’s attention at all times. There must be no dead time, no treading water, no padding in the story (and no more metaphors to hammer home the point). Whenever your lead character gets boring, the story stops.”
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