Screenwriting From Iowa

In light of Super Bowl LI today I thought I’d repost this from 2012: “When we speak of silent comedy we speak instantly of three names—Chaplin, Loyd, Keaton.” Walter Kerr The Silent Clowns   I thought it would be a fun challenge  to see if I could connect the silent film era with the Super […]

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Shortly before he died I had a brief email exchange with Save the Cat author Blake Snyder.  I asked him if he had any encouragement for screenwriters living outside of L.A. and this is what he wrote back: “I have said often that geography is no longer an impediment to a career in screenwriting. I know of […]

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“The length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.” Alfred Hitchcock It’s not uncommon for me to walk out of a film these days and think, “that was about 20 minutes too long.” I’m not sure why that is. Maybe the Internet has stunted our attention spans. Or […]

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“Primary exposition is telling and showing to the audience the time and place of the story, the names and relationships of the characters, and the nature of the conflict.” Irwin R. Blacker The Elements of Screenwriting “I crack up every time I’m watching a movie and a character says, ‘Let me get this straight…’ and […]

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“Who is your hero, what does he want, and what stands in his way?” Three-time Oscar winning screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky (Network) From the book The Craft of the Screenwriter by John Brady Note: I pulled this quote from my 2009 post, Starting Your Screenplay.

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“For decades he was the chief justice of the film industry — fair, tough-minded, and innovative. I feel that all of us have lost our benevolent godfather.”  Steven Spielberg quoted in the LA Times after the death of Lew Wasserman When Lew Wasserman died in 2002 he was considered the last of Hollywood’s moguls. Variety […]

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“For decades he was the chief justice of the film industry — fair, tough-minded, and innovative. I feel that all of us have lost our benevolent godfather.”  Steven Spielberg quoted in the LA Times after the death of Lew Wasserman When Lew Wasserman died in 2002 he was considered the last of Hollywood’s moguls. Variety […]

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“Write six pages of script a day. Stick to this schedule no matter what. You’ll have a finished first draft in roughly twenty days. Then go back and edit what you’ve written. Spend no more than five days on this edit.” Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas (Basic Instinct) The Devil’s Guide to Hollywood

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They are playing the NFL Pro Bowl in Orlando tonight and I went out to the ESPN Wide World Wide of Sports at Disney yesterday to see the last practices of the AFC & NFC teams and other events. Got to see wide receiver Odell Beckham Jr. be covered by cornerback Richard Sherman—two of the […]

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“I’m Mary Tyler Moore and I am…an actress, an animal lover, the chairman of the Juvenile Diabetes Reseach Foundation, the wife of Dr. Robert Levine, and…I don’t want to give away the whole story from the vert start. Suffice it to say there are a lot of ways to end that sentence, and I don’t […]

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