Screenwriting From Iowa

Moral; of or relating to principles of right and wrong in behavior.
                                                    Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary 
No we’re not going to talk about your morals, but your stories moral. The moral of the [...]

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I’d hate to admit to how many books on screenwriting I’ve read. I tend to agree you need just one to get you on track and then start writing. (And this blog, of course. Just for a little inspiration.) But with that said, I just starting reading John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story. 
Truby has been [...]

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When Henry Miller died in 1980 at the age of 88 he had over 40 books published. On Wikipedia it was written that Miller “was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of ‘novel’ that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, [...]

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“I am not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”
                                  Woody Allen 
“It ought to be the business of every day to prepare for our last day.”
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In the past week I watched two modern classic films (Deliverance & Scent of a Women) and read the script again for Juno. Though these movies are different in genre and were made in three different decades they have at least one thing in common – they are simple stories.
Four guys go take a boating [...]

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“It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used but not owned. It gives itself in response to love and tending, offers its seasonal flowering and fruiting. But we are tenants and not possessors, lovers and not masters.”
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“The United States is the only country with a known birthday.”  
                                           James G. Blaine
July 4th not only marks the birthday of the United States of America (and the signing of the Declaration of Independence [...]

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For some reason my last post about a bar in Minneapolis and a film about a man named Walt Kowalski somehow made me think of the writer Charles Bukowski who had more than 20 of his stories made into films including Factotum that was film in Minneapolis. 
“I never realized that there were so many movie [...]

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Stephen King says his muse is a working class guy down in the basement chomping on a cigar. I think his muse is related to screenwriter Nick Schenk’s. Schenk wrote much of Gran Torino while sitting at the bar at Grumpy’s in northeast Minneapolis. I stopped in there yesterday late afternoon and was told that [...]

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I’m up in the Twin Cities again for a shoot and happened to be driving through St. Paul yesterday when I heard the news that Al Franken was officially declared the winner of the Senate race that has been in limbo for eight months. It was a good day to be a talk radio host [...]

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