Screenwriting From Iowa

The Princess Bride is the only novel of mine that I really like. And I don’t know how I did it . . . I don’t understand the creative process. Actually, I make more than a concerted effort to not understand it.” William Goldman Four Screenplays with Essays Page 270 P.S. One of the things […]

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I try to make my screenplays as readable an experience as I can, for a good reason and greedy reason— I want the executives, who read them and who have the power to greenlight a flick, to say ‘Hey, I can make money out of this.’ Obvious truism: we all want the movies we write […]

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Here are the first lines of dialogue in the screenplay and movie Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid: BUTCH: What was the matter with that old bank this town used to have? It was beautiful? GUARD: People kept robbing it. BUTCH: That’s a small price to pay for beauty. One of the great true [Butch] […]

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Writer Jack Kerouac died in St. Petersburg, Florida in 1969. On Monday I drove by the last house he lived and took a photo. Neither the photo or the house or anything special, but it was something that I felt compelled to do after receiving my master’s degree from USF, St. Petersburg the day before. […]

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This photo’s from yesterday’s graduation at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg, Florida. Two years ago I began the process of pursuing an M.A. in Digital Journalism and Design. It gave me a chance to not only work on my book based on this blog but begin producing some short teaching videos on […]

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It’s funny, [my quote] ‘nobody knows anything’ has caught on—and what I meant by it was nobody has the least idea what will work. I mean, the big movie that’s opening this weekend is Sex in the City 2—the first one was a freak hit and people loved it, and now they’ve done the sequel. […]

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“Let me tell you the super story that Cliff Robertson told me a dozen years ago, and I think I’m giving the credit properly. It was a story he had been told by Rosalind Russell. I think he met her during the filming of Picnic. She said, ‘Do you know what makes a good movie?’ And […]

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“When I started [my film career] there weren’t film schools. I never saw in my life— not even for a second—I never saw a screenplay until I was 33-years-old. And a lot of kids [today] are finished with their careers when they’re 33, because they’ve been to film school, they got their first movie done […]

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When I began [writing Game of Thrones], I didn’t know what the hell I had. I thought it might be a short story; it was just this chapter, where they find these direwolf pups. Then I started exploring these families and the world started coming alive. It was all there in my head, I couldn’t […]

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“I’m a fast writer. Maybe not the best, but the fastest.” Stan Lee RollingStone printed a “Lost” Q&A with Stan Lee and here’s an excerpt that gives you a glimpse of how quickly ideas for the comic books featuring X-Men, Hulk, the Fantastic Four, and Spider-Man. Books in the Marvel universe that became the foundations for […]

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