Screenwriting From Iowa

“We really were in that rat race, going around in circles. Now there is change for numerous reasons. One is boredom. The American people have a very volcanic emotional life—which is sometimes a good thing and sometimes a bad thing. There is boredom now even with what eight or nine years ago was a shockingly [...]

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“Robert McKee, in his excellent book Story, defines the goal of the screenwriter as ‘a good story well told.’ A story must also be the vehicle for an emotion. The audience wants to be moved. Those elements that contribute to an emotional experience are valuable: those that aren’t are extraneous and probably dispensable. According to [...]

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“I made mistakes in drama. I thought drama was when actors cried. But drama is when the audience cries.” Director Frank Capra (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe, It’s a Wonderful Life)

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“Emotion is your screenplay’s lifeblood.” Karl Iglesias More than 15 years ago Karl Iglesias wrote a book called Writing from Emotional Impact and the first 48 pages alone are worth the 15 or 20 bucks it cost you to buy that book. In those first four chapters he does an introduction on how —”Hollywood is in [...]

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To play off of Se7en director David Fincher’s comment about emotional filmmaking, here is a quote from Alfred Hitchcock: “To be quite honest—content, I’m not interested in. I don’t give a damn about what the film’s about. I’m more interested in how to handle the material to create an emotion in an audience.” Alfred Hitchcock Scott [...]

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“Directors don’t make pictures, directors make things that you are supposed to get an emotional hit off of. You’re supposed to feel something. It’s behavior, it’s color, it’s the quality of light, it’s the setting, it’s the speed at which it moves–all of things that go into making it a visceral response.” David Fincher 2010 [...]

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It used to be that once a year at NAB in Vegas was the place where new production equipment was announced. Now it seems like a major announcement is a monthly occurence. Yesterday (Nov. 3, 2011) took it up another notch when there were two major announcements in the production world. The first was the [...]

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“There is a muse, but he’s not going to come fluttering down into your writing room and scatter fairy-dust all over your typewriter or computer station.” Stephen King On Writing  Ever since my shoot in Maine last week I’ve had Stephen King on my mind. While I haven’t read that many of his novels, I [...]

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Yesterday I showed how Stephen King described Andy Dufrese in his novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, today we’ll look at how Frank Darabont described the same character in his screenplay The Shawshank Redemption: ANDY DUFRESNE, mid-20′s, wire rim glasses, three-piece suit. Under normal circumstances a respectable, solid citizen; hardly dangerous, perhaps even meek. But [...]

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After visiting the prison where they shot the movie The Shawshank Redemption in Ohio (and writing a post about it yesterday), I thought it was time I finally read the novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption by Stephen King. Having been in Maine last week and learning that lobster was once prison food I was [...]

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