Screenwriting From Iowa

“If you’re going to play music or do any art form, just as a hobby or as purely a source of enjoyment, then yeah, you should enjoy it. But I do believe in pushing yourself. If you actually take the idea of practice seriously—to me, practice should not be about enjoyment. Some people think of […]

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“What I like is that the secret to the mystery that [Jack Nicholson’s character J.J. Gettes is] eventually going to uncover is right in front of his eyes almost at the very beginning. And like Oedipus you have the mystery in front of you. (He was the killer and he didn’t know it.) In a […]

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  Here’s a “recently revised” guideline that The Academy Nicholl Committee uses in judging screenplays for  Nicholl Fellowships. I found it on the January 14, 2014 Facebook page for the Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting. Related posts: The Magical Power of Stories Enchantment Making Dramatic Writing Dynamic ( Tip #98) ‘The Twilight Zone’ Secrets (2.0) Find […]

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   “Last Sunday, more than eight thousand of us started on a mighty walk from Selma, Alabama…” Martin Luther King Jr. March 25, 1965 address at the conclusion of the Selma to Montgomery march Back in 2006 after a video shoot in Jackson, Mississippi I made a point on my way to Atlanta to drive […]

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“I know this may sound silly but if you write something great it just gets seen. I can’t explain it but it does. If that’s not enough for you, then put yourself out there to anyone who will read it. Target your brand, who you are as a writer, and follow other writers and directors […]

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“There’s Hong Kong, Tokyo, Paris, and Cedar Falls. That’s the company you’re keeping.” President Barack Obama speaking in Cedar Falls January 14, 2015 If you followed this blog for long you may know that I started writing it in January 2008 while living in Cedar Falls, Iowa. Well, earlier this week President Obama was in […]

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I’m a little late to the party but I just saw the Oscar-winning “Best Documentary” Twenty Feet From Stardom (2013) that’s currently on Netflix. Great stuff from writer/director Morgan Neville and a wide variety of people he brought together to create something special. (It also fits nicely into my thread of musical related posts.) Scott W. Smith Tagged: […]

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Turns out writing songs and writing screenplays have some things in common: “Around nine in the morning I’d hear Jackson Browne’s teapot going off with this whistle in the distance, and then I’d hear him playing piano. I didn’t really know how to write songs. I knew I wanted to write songs, but I didn’t […]

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“Linden, Texas is my home town. It’s a small town in northeastern Texas. When I was growing up the population was about 2,500—2,600. It’s primarily an agricultural area. Some people worked at the steel mill —it’s just a typical small Texas town. There’s an old courthouse dating back to before the Civil War and one […]

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This is a blog about screenwriting, but there is also an emphasis here of a sense of place. And since tonight is the first college football national championship playoff game between the University of Oregon and The Ohio State University it’s as good a time as any to talk about Eugene and Columbus. Eugene, Oregon […]

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