Screenwriting From Iowa

Only three more days left in my Month of Marhsall, where I’ve been finding bits of wisdom from writer/director Garry Marshall. Long before his success in films (Pretty Woman), or as the creator of TV shows (Happy Days, Mork & Mindy), he was a comedy writer for some of the biggest names in the 60s; [...]

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You can file this one under, “What they don’t teach in film school”: “Penny [Marshall] and Cindy [Williams] would plow through writers, leaving me constantly looking for replacements. Sometimes I would go over to Happy Days and entice a writer or two to come and take a spin on Laverne & Shirley. I pretended it [...]

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 ”Happy Days was for me the quintessential television success story. I had followed my instincts, and they had turned out to be right.” Garry Marshall The early 70s were not happy days. A sweeping snapshot of the United States during that time might look like this; Viet Nam, Watergate, oil crisis, rising drug use, Taxi Driver. Gritty [...]

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You can’t base a month of posts on Hollywood legend Garry Marshall without touching on one of the most popular TV shows he created—Happy Days. Especially, when his book is called My Happy Days in Hollywood. The show was not only a hit for 11 seasons in its first run, but helped coined one of the [...]

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I’m going to be flying by memory today, but feel confident I have my facts straight. There’s a scene in Pretty Woman where Julie Roberts and Richard Gere are having a conversation in their hotel room one morning. On one of the director’s commentaries Garry Marshall says that scene was edited down from either a [...]

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It’s mash-up Monday here at Screenwriting from Iowa…and Other Unlikely Places. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but the past four weeks have been the highest weeks of views I’ve ever had on this blog. And most of the posts in the past four weeks have been insights from producer/writer/director Garry Marshall. So I’ll continue that trend [...]

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“Film directors should jump at any chance to direct a play because it can improve their relationship with actors. What’s wonderful about theater is that you get to move the actors around and stage scenes. You don’t have to worry about things like flattering closeups or intricate lighting. Theater features an actor from the top [...]

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“For the sake of the story, you never want to mislead the audience, unless it’s intentional, a method Jackie Gleason used to call the Wild Turkey theory. If a guy walks into a bar and says, ‘I’d like a scotch and water, please,’ that’s a straight line and if you follow it with a joke [...]

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“The original writer [of The Flamingo Kid] Neal Marshall, no relationship to me, had written a solid script based on his youth spent in the Catskills. Neal and I rewrote the script with notes from the producers, then the screenwriter Bo Goldman took a pass at a rewrite but would not ask for screenwriting credit [...]

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Yesterday I did a shoot in downtown Chicago and thought I’d take brief detour from giving some of Garry Marshall’s directing tips and talk about his own detour to Chicago on his journey from the Bronx to Hollywood. “Academically, Northwestern opened many new doors for me. It was the first place I learned that words mattered and [...]

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