Screenwriting From Iowa

“Contacts are easy. Writing a great script — that’s hard.” Terry Rossio You, The Expert “At the beginning of a screenwriting career , the most important thing is to get those calling card screenplays written. For this you could live in Nome, Alaska. Geography simply doesn’t make any difference. Once you have those scripts you [...]

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“If you’re a writer or filmmaker who wants to connect with an audience, who wants to touch as many people as you can with your work, you must devote time and energy to the marketing process, just as you would to your craft. You can’t remain the shy, withdrawn, introverted artist you’d probably like to [...]

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“The fact is that every single one of us or our agencies take on new people. We have to. It’s the lifeblood of the business. I mean, things turn over. Clients leave, clients leave the business altogether — we do have overhead; we do need to pay attention to those clients who make a lot [...]

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“My writing teacher at USC said this profession is a marathon, not a sprint.”
 Allison Schroeder “I paid 140,000 dollars to attend NYU film school, and luckily had a teacher who believed in me enough to refer me to her manager. I was working at a restaurant in NYC, partying, and having a generally great [...]

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The Juno logline in yesterday’s post set the tone for today’s post which I found in a book that was recently published called Now Write! Screenwriting; Screenwriting Exercises from Today’s Best Writers and Teachers, and edited by Shelly Ellis and Laurie Lamson. Good stuff—and will give you a break from those longer posts I’ve been cranking [...]

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Part of the roots of this blog go back to screenwriter Diablo Cody & Juno.  Though I had been gathering notes on writing and production for my own purposes for years, it was Cody’s open appeal to anyone to start a blog and see what happens that got me in the game. So it’s always fun to [...]

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“Any time a character gets injured and needs medical care, either from a doctor or romantic interest, we feel empathy.” Karl Iglesias Writing for Emotional Impact  “Art is a microscope which the artist fixes on the secrets of his soul and shows to people these secrets which are common to all.” Leo Tolstoy  Yesterday I [...]

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“Screenwriting’s one unbreakable rule: Don’t be boring.” Richard Walter Essentials of Screenwriting  The above quote was how I ended yesterday’s post after seven straight days of posts taken from an interview I did with UCLA Richard Walter. And as a perfect segue for today’s post I picked up the book The Paris Reviews Playwrights at [...]

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“For me, it was a matter of years of trying to develop my writing in the same way that some people spend years learning to play the violin.” Oscar-nominated screenwriter Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile) “I wrote maybe 10 screenplays before I was able to sell one.” Oscar nominated screenwriter Nicolas Kazan, [...]

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“Art is not only a vehicle for self-expression or exclusively for the pursuit of the spiritual. From the very beginning, drawing an animal on the wall of a cave—you would be able to control the animal and this magic would help the tribe.” Milton Glaser Art is Work (Popularly known as the artist who designed the [...]

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