Screenwriting From Iowa

“Drama has rules. We’re given a premise. The hero wants something. To find the cause of the plague on Thebes, or to free the Jews, or to establish civil rights, or to fly the Atlantic. We get it. We are going to follow his or her journey until the end. And the end is going […]

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  There is a tendency to think that art is finally the place where there are no rules, where you have complete freedom. I’m going to sit down at the keyboard and it’s just going to flow out of me onto the paper, and it’s going to be pure art. No. What you’re describing is […]

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Here’s the difference between an idea and a premise; An idea is ‘what if I wrote a show about gangsters?’ A premise is really filling that out. It’s ‘what if I wrote a show about modern day gangsters who lived in New jersey, and that gangster went to see a therapist on a weekly basis […]

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  “Is there a thematic narrative question that’s being asked? And is it answered? Because without that it’s not very fulfilling storytelling? Director Ron Howard (On one of the questions he asks when considering a screenplay.) The screenplay for the 1984 film Splash received an Acadamy Award nomination (Bruce Jay Friedman, Lowell Ganz, Brian Grazer, […]

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“Anyone who does anything to help a child in his life is a hero to me. ” Fred Rogers If you time it right next Tuesday you can’t catch the unusual double feature of Mr. Rogers and Full Metal Jacket at the Enzian Theater in Maitland, Florida.  Catch the documentary on Fred Rogers Won’t You […]

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Below is an excerpt from a Go Into The Story interview that screenwriters Bryan Woods & Scott Beck did with Scott Myers. This exchange is from part 6 of the interview. Bryan Woods: With A Quiet Place, we weren’t comfortable writing the script until we knew that the theme was going to be about communication. We liked how […]

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The photo that’s been at the top of this blog all these years is a quintessential farm shot I took one morning outside of Decorah, Iowa where I was shooting a short film.  The anchor in the shot is the barn and silo in the left part of the photo. That’s classic Iowa. And I […]

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“Context and memory play powerful roles in all the truly great meals in one’s life.” Anthony Bourdain Saturday night I had an enjoyable meal at Isabelle’s located at The Historic Peninsula Inn in Gulfport, Florida. I took this photo the next morning because I knew it’d be bathed in the early morning light. (The blue […]

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Yesterday I finished listening to The Wright Brothers by David McCullough on Audible and I couldn’t help make the connection between the two brothers from Dayton, Ohio who pulled off the first powered and controlled flights of an airplane and filmmakers Scott Beck and Bryan Woods who wrote the original drafts A Quiet Place screenplays. […]

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“When you open the script and realize that it’s 67 pages with drawings and a map. There were only three or four pages of dialogue in the whole movie. I started reading it the day we got it.” Andrew Form on reading the initial script for A Quiet Place  by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods […]

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