Archive for the “Screenwriting From Iowa” Category


I took this photo around 6:45AM yesterday just about 15 minutes after sunrise. A massive dust storm off the coast off Africa—nicknamed “Godzilla”—made its way across the Atlantic to Florida this week causing unusually hazy conditions. The Spanish moss hanging from trees is not only common in central Florida where I took this photo, but […]

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“I was going into hiatus on Rawhide, a month layoff. And they said, well, we got this western we want to make in Europe. Italian company. Made in Spain. German co-production. About a $200,000 budget. And I said, I don’t think so. I‘d really rather take the time off. I got a job and I’m […]

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“Originality is just undetected plagiarism.” —Anonymous (Some version of this quote is attributed to William Ralph Inge, Mark Twain, Herbert Paul, Paul Chatfield, Katharine Fullerton Gerould, and others.) “I steal from every single movie ever made. I love it—if my work has anything it’s that I’m taking this from this and that from that and mixing them […]

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Director Joel Schumacher died a couple of days ago and while he’s known for many films (St.  Elmo’s Fire, The Client, A Time to Kill, Phone Booth, Batman Forever, Phone Booth) the first film of his that came to find when I heard he passed was Falling Down. Written by Ebbe Roe Smith and starring […]

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“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” —Martin Luther King (Rephrasing a 1853 sermon by abolitionist minister Theodore Parker.) Over the weekend I saw the screenwriter Paul Schrader posted on his YouTube page this interview with Marlon Brando and Johnny Carson from May, 5, 1968. Except that this two […]

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“We have to be on the outside so we can see things other people can’t see and tell those stories. Don’t follow. Set trends. Lead us. Tell your stories or help others to tell theirs in your ways. A culture needs its creative people to tell its story, to reflect itself, and to reflect what’s […]

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“A good character always has a crisis lurking inside them like a ticking time bomb. Once I’d decided who the characters would be in Little Miss Sunshine, it was just a matter of figuring out when those crises would happen. You also want those crises to happen in ascending order of importance. It all fell […]

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“The question is ‘How do you meet an agent?’ or get your script to an agent—It’s a mystery to me. Everyone sort of is able to find a different path, and usually it just comes to referrals. You can submit your script to contests, blah, blah, blah crap like that. For the real top-tier agents […]

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In a day and age of $50,000+ a year film schools, you’ll be hard pressed to find a better 90 minutes of screenwriting advice than Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine, Toy Story 3)—talking about insanely great endings. And this is totally free. (For years this talk was only rumored to exist, now you can link to […]

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This video by Toy Story 3 screenwriter Michael Arndt is one I return to often. It’s so well done. Just click on the “Watch on Vimeo” and enjoy.    

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