Screenwriting From Iowa

“Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County is what [Eugene] O’Neil would be writing in 2007.” Jeremy McCarther New York magazine “Killer Joe has a strong moral code, bent as it is.” Screenwriter/Playwright Tracey Letts (on a character he created) A couple of years ago I drove to Chicago just to see a play Tracy Letts had [...]

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Well I never been to heaven But I’ve been to Oklahoma Well they tell me I was born there Never Been to Spain, hit song performed by Three Dog Night Lyrics by Hoyt Axton “I call it a little small city that’s booming.” Rod Meyer Owner of Deep Fork Grill restaurant in Oklahoma City Tonight the [...]

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“Lake Pepin ought to be visited by every poet and painter in the land.” William Cullen Bryant Last week I spent a couple of days on the Wisconsin side of Lake Pepin, mostly in the villages of Stockholm (founded by immigrants from Karlskoga, Sweden) and Pepin. It’s an area I try to get to once a [...]

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From Shaft to the Little House on the Prairie—that’s how we roll here at Screenwriting from Iowa. In yesterday’s post I mentioned how Shaft screenwriter Ernest Tidyman didn’t start writing screenplays until he was past the age of forty. Laura Ingalls Wilder actually didn’t start writing novels until she was in her 60s. And though [...]

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“He was a complex man who was full of rage and civility, but he also played violin beautifully.” Chris Clark, fourth wife and widow of screenwriter Ernest R. Tidyman (Clark also co-wrote the script for Lady Sings the Blues.) “Words are a licensed weapon and I never pull them out on people who aren’t good [...]

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To paraphrase the Clint Eastwood character Dirty Harry, “A screenwriter’s gotta know his limitations.” And one of those limitations is how many characters you can really follow in a screenplay. We’ve all read screenplays where you have to flip back and forth in the script trying to keep track of characters. One antagonist and one [...]

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“The fact is, when I wrote Juno—and I think this is part of its charm and appeal—I didn’t know how to write a movie.” Diablo Cody If you took all the books on screenwriting and all the blogs on screenwriting—even those from produced screenwriters— and mashed them together you’d get some great lessons and great insights, [...]

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Jason Weinberger is the music director/conductor and artistic director of the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Symphony Orechestra (WCFSO) here in Iowa. We’ve worked on a couple of multimedia projects together and when he heard I was going to be shooting in Louisville a couple of weeks ago he gave me a short list of restaurants to try [...]

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“Daniel Boone, American folk hero and trail blazer was our mascot while developing Pilgrim Song. Not only is his name synonymous with the great outdoors, he also settled the land that is now known as the Commonwealth of Kentucky.” Writer/director Martha Stephens It would have been nice to be in Louisville next week instead of last [...]

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“This successful life we’re livin’s got us feudin’ Like the Hatfields and McCoys…” Luckenbach Texas Lyrics by Waylon Jennings The History Channel’s miniseries Hatfields & McCoys pulled in some big numbers in the last few days—more than 13 million viewers each night. As AP television writer David Bauder pointed out, “Those are huge numbers in [...]

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