Screenwriting From Iowa

Kelly Slater is larger than life—so is his statue in Cocoa Beach, Florida. As a surfer he’s won 11 ASP Surf Championships. As a statue he’s bronze and built to withstand 140 MPH winds. The statue was designed by Sam Drazich and his sister Tasha. Slater began surfing in Cocoa Beach, and for a town [...]

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When the outer bands of what would become Hurricane Isaac passed through Florida a few days ago it brought a lot of rain. Though the waves were mushy, it did bring out a few surfers. I took this picture by the pier at Cocoa Beach. As a nice screenwriting connection to yesterday’s post on screenwriter [...]

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At the end of my post on Neil Armstrong (Shoot for the Moon) I wrote that Academy Award-winning screenwriter Dudley Nichols was also born in Wapakonita, Ohio where Armstrong was born. I’ve mentioned Nichols a couple of time on this blog but decided to dig a little deeper to see what I could find. After [...]

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 ”The Eagle has landed.” Neil Armstrong Before Neil Armstrong took that historic step of being the first person to walk on the moon, he took his first steps in the small town of Wapakoneta, Ohio where he was born in 1930. It was reported that as teenager he worked in a pharmacy there, ‘saving money for [...]

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“Somebody who worked as a crime reporter for two years in Raleigh-Durham is gonna have a lot more interesting things to talk about than some 22-year-old kid who grew up in Brentwood, who wants to be a writer because he likes the way the life looks.” Writer/Director Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton, The Bourne Legacy) Deadline [...]

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Over the past 15 years, I’ve had the opportunity to see many different aspects of Chicago (The Loop downtown, Ukrainian Village, Cabrini Green, Wicker Park, Hyde Park) but yesterday was the first time I ever went to The Heart of Chicago. I was doing a video shoot in the Pilsen neighborhood, which is Chicago Mexican [...]

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I’m in Chicago today for a video shoot and it’s always interesting to see what eclectic mix of movies are playing. Beyond the usual Hollywood fare, on this summer day in 2012, you could see everything from the 60th Anniversary event of Singin’ in the Rain, This Gun for Hire (1942) starring Alan Ladd & [...]

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“I always say [The Fastest Runner] is the most Indian movie ever made. It’s much more Indian than Smoke Signals.” Chris Eyre, director of Smoke Signals “We picked up a camera and started recording our own history. Stories that we used to hear when we were children. What we really belive and why we are [...]

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“In that one character [Billy Jack] you have embodied pretty much all of the 70s angst and anger that one could have in America. “ Jesse Wente Ojibway Film Critic [Chief Bromden] in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest started out as the sterotypical Indian and it rose to a level of humanity as the picture unfolds. [...]

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“My ancestors didn’t come over on the Mayflower, but they met the boat.” Will Rogers “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among those are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” 1776 USA Declaration of Independence [...]

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