Screenwriting From Iowa

“I was in a bookstore one day, and I don’t know what happened. It was just like, “Pow!” I sat down and I tore blank pages out of a couple books, and I just started writing. I wrote the whole story of The Bucket List. Ultimately the story is these two guys each have their [...]

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“We all feel like we are pulling teeth, even those writers whose prose ends up being the most natural and fluid. The right words and sentences just do not come pouring out like ticker tape most of the time.”Anne LamottBird by Bird: some Instructions on Writing and Life

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You can file this one under, “we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught”; “The the creative process may be wild, byzantine and scatter shot, the results of that creation should be tightly focused, somewhat linear, and easy to understand. Screenplays are simple stories about complex people. Problems frequently arise when [...]

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“Your work either reflects respect and caring for the rest of humanity or it reflects your baser feelings. As a writer, you have an obligation to write, and you want to think that what you’re doing is the right thing. Maybe it’s not. You can’t be the judge of it yourself, but you can try [...]

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“There is a ginormous disparity between earnings of the average screenwriter and those at the top of food chain.” Scott Myers Go Into The Story “Most writers are middle class; 46% did not even work last year.” WGA (2007)  By far, the number one most viewed post of all time on Screenwriting from Iowa is [...]

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Thanks to Edward Burns for the retweet about the new blog I launch yesterday (E-Filmmaking). It helped give me a nice spike out of the gate. (Many years ago I did a 15-page paper on The Brother’s McMullen, so I’m a long time fan.) Today I came across a 2003 interview of Burns that helps [...]

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“Never in the history of the movie business has there been a better time for the Independents to be entrepreneurial.” Graham Taylor Los Angeles Film Festival keynote speech June 2011 “Beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship.” Benjamin Franklin, Entrepreneur (And one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence) On [...]

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Screenwriter Stuart Beattie was born in 1972 in Melbourne, Australia and raised in Sydney. In 1990, while going to college in the United States he had some script ideas and began writing. It would take nine years of writing before he would become a full-time writer. In 2003, he received a story credit on Pirates [...]

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“As writers true to ourselves, it will always be hard, and if we’re good, we’ll always be in trouble. Let’s be sure we deserve it.” Two-time Oscar-winning screenwriter Waldo Salt (Coming Home, Midnight Cowboy) Quote from his acceptance Speech for receiving the WGA Laurel Award for Screen Achievement, six months before he died.

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“Waldo Salt, the great screenwriter of Coming Home and Midnight Cowboy, among others, when asked about how he went about creating characters, replied that first he chose a simple dramatic need and then added on to it, and colored it until it became a universal chord common to Everyman.” Syd Field The Screenwriter’s Problem Solver 

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