Screenwriting From Iowa

It always comes back to Diablo Cody doesn’t it. It took being in Kansas City several days field producing some stories before I realized that Diablo Cody in fact has a connection to Kansas City. I don’t have cable and have never seen the show The United States of Tara, so until now I didn’t [...]

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Actors, like screenwriters, come from everywhere. While in Kansas City for a few days I’ve learned about a few local actors from there who went on to make a name for themselves. Before actor Chris Cooper had roles in Seabiscuit, The Bourne Identity, American Beauty, and his Academy Award-winning performance in Adaptation, he born Kansas [...]

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When you think of writer Ernest Hemingway there are many places you connect with him—Key West,  Chicago-Oak Park, Paris, Idaho—but one place that might never come to mind is Kansas City. But according to a 1999 article in The Kansas City Star, “Kansas City fascinated the young Ernest Hemingway.” Ernest had an uncle named Alfred [...]

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This week I’ve been on a shoot in Kansas City Missouri and that’s made me think of filmmaker Robert Altman who was born there in 1925. I found this interview shortly before he died in 2006 in the Minneapolis Star Tribune: Star Tribune: You’ve been described as a maverick for most of your career. Now you’ve been [...]

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“We have already heard every story ever told. Like little kids who ask for the same tale over and over again, told in exactly the same way, we too respond to hidden patterns. The elements that vibrate in us like a running fork — the stories that truly resonate — are based on patterns deep [...]

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I was a big fan of Blake Snyder’s book, Save the Cat from the moment it first came out in 2005. Snyder’s blog was also one of the first blogs on screenwriting that I ever read, and he was encouraging to me when I launched the Screenwriting from Iowa blog in 2008. We’re into the eight month [...]

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Every writer is different in how they work, but in The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters Karl Iglesias quotes three top screenwriters on how they handle the task of getting script pages done every day. Akiva Goldman: When I’m laying down the first draft, I try to write 10 pages per day, and then it’s [...]

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The truth is William Goldman wrote the first draft of script for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kidin just four weeks. He won an Oscar for his script.*  But that’s not the whole story if you factor in all the research he did on the outlaws: “When someone asks how long it takes to write [...]

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This is the kind of quote you expect to find on a blog titled Screenwriting from Iowa…and Other Unlikely Places: “I think all writers should have a voyeur nature. You have to look and listen. That’s why some writers might run out of material; they’re not looking, they’re not listening. I think the problem is [...]

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“I’m a dinosaur. The things that I’m trying to achieve are not things that are terribly valued in my business. The window of opportunity for the movies that interest me is literally getting narrower and narrower by the day. If I could be happy making comic book movies, my life would be a lot easier. [...]

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