Screenwriting From Iowa

“Security is kind of a death, I think, and it can come in a storm of royalty checks beside a kidney-shaped pool in Beverly Hills or anywhere at all that is removed from the conditions that made you an artist, if that’s what you are or were or intend to be. Ask anyone who has […]

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“With fourteen plays and a novella adapted for the screen, no other dramatist has equaled Tennessee Williams’ record for having plays produced in Hollywood.” Naomi Greenberg-Slovin How Hollywood Got Shocked by Tennessee Williams “I am widely regarded as the ghost of a writer, a ghost still visible, excessively solid of flesh and perhaps too ambulatory, but […]

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“My work is emotionally autobiographical. It has no relationship to the actual events of my life, but it reflects the emotional currents of my life. I try to work every day, because you have no refuge but writing. When you’re going through a period of unhappiness, a broken love affair, the death of someone you love, or […]

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“I was born in Mississippi, but I got the name of Tennessee when I was going to the University of Iowa because the fellows in my class could only remember that I was from a Southern State with a long name. And when they couldn’t think of Mississippi, they settled on Tennessee. That was all […]

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“The idea for The Glass Menagerie came very slowly, much more slowly than Streetcar, for example. I think I worked on Menagerie longer than any other play. I didn’t think it’d ever be produced. I wasn’t writing it for that purpose. I wrote it first as a short story called ‘Portrait of a Girl in Glass,’ which is, I believe, […]

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“The process by which the idea for a play comes to me has always been something I really couldn’t pinpoint. A play just seems to materialize; like an apparition, it gets clearer and clearer and clearer. It’s very vague at first, as in the case of Streetcar, which came after Menagerie. I simply had the vision of […]

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“The truth is your friend.” Nicholas Kazan “Truth is not found in the sunshine, truth is found in the shadows.” Novelist Paul Lieberman (Gangster Squad: Covert Cops, the Mob, and the Battle for Los Angeles) Interview with Jessy Williams “When I write I don’t aim to shock people, and I’m surprised when I do. But […]

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“One of the greatest pictures ever made!” N.Y. Daily News on Sergeant York Since today is Veterans Day I decided to look at a film centered around war to write about and landed on Sergeant York. The 1941 film directed by Howard Hawks received 10 Oscar nominations and won 2 including Best Actor for Gary […]

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On this repost Saturday I’m going to actually do a mash-up of two posts I wrote years ago. This was inspired after I visited the first boyhood home of Tennessee Williams in Columbus, Mississippi earlier this week and learned that when he was in his early 20s his shoe salesman father had Tennessee drop out […]

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“Home is where you hang your childhood, and Mississippi to me is the beauty spot of creation, a dark, wide spacious land that you can breathe in.” Tennessee Williams   He was born on March 26, 1911 and named Thomas Lanier Williams III. But he always thought Thomas Lanier sounded like bad poetry so welcomed […]

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