Screenwriting From Iowa

This morning I had a video shoot in Pella, Iowa which if you have never heard about is a taste of Europe right here in Iowa. Not only in terms of the Dutch-inspired buildings, but it’s known for its Dutch letter pastries.
The town was founded in 1847 by Dutch immigrants and the word Pella means [...]

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“In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”
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Do you ever hang out at your local library just reading through things you don’t usually read? I did that Saturday afternoon with a stack of magazines. One of those magazines was Sunset whose cover story was on the “best small towns for ocean and outdoor fun, great food, and green living.” The magazine’s emphasis [...]

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The truth is there won’t be any government bailouts any time soon for Hollywood. They don’t really need one.
If the box office numbers continue at the same pace they’ve  been the first two months of the year then it will be Hollywood’s biggest growth in 20 yeara. Movies like Paul Bart; Mall Cop, Taken, Slumdog Millionaire, [...]

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Hollywood has a problem and it’s not my fault. Really it isn’t. But if you’re a screenwriter living outside L.A., L.A.’s problem is your opportunity.
Don’t blame me if Hollywood is the new Detroit. I just started “Screenwriting from Iowa” last year. L.A.’s runaway problem has been going on for the last decade. Runaway production is [...]

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The Wrestler is the first movie that made me wake up sore the next day. Watching Mickey Rourke on screen had some kind of psychosomatic effect on me where I felt the pain of a lifetime of wrestling. Just as pro wrestling sometimes blurs the lines of fake and reality (even staged body slams have [...]

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Genevieve Jolliffe & Chris Jones have written several books which are packed full of useful infomation for filmmakers including The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook which weighs in at 720 pages. Here’s one little Q&A  from the book.
Q-What single piece of advice would you offer?
Dov S. S. Simens: Read 200 scripts this year. If you don’t [...]

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Maybe I should have said “How to increase your odds of winning an Academy Award.” But who wants to read an article on that? Regardless, I think I have the secret to winning an Academy Award. (Not that I would know first hand—though I did win an Addy Award last week for a commercial I [...]

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I thought  Taken was quite a good film and I wondered how the writers Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen worked as a pair. They come from different backgrounds. Kamen an American who is best known for writing The Karate Kid lives in New York and owns a winery in California. Besson the Frenchman who [...]

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Over the weekend I saw the movie Taken and it made me think back to a few film that feature a son or daughter who disappears—The Searchers with John Wayne,  Ransom with Mel Gibson, and Hardcore with George C. Scott. 
Hardcore was written by Paul Schrader who also wrote Taxi Driver, Ragging Bull, and The Mosquito [...]

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