Screenwriting From Iowa

Over the weekend I watched the movie Mask for the first time since it was released in 1985. It’s a terrific film. Mask is not to be confused with the Jim Carrey comedy The Mask (1994), it’s more in line with David Lynch’s The Elephant Man (1980). Mask is based on the life of Rocky Dennis [...]

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There’s a lot to learn from looking back at the journeys that filmmakers take on their way to being a part of film history. In the case of writer/director/actor Peter Bogdanovich, one of the things that jumps out is his education. Not his formal education—as far as I know he didn’t attend college—but his film & [...]

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“I remember I was having a conversation with Orson Welles one time and we were talking about Greta Garbo. He loved her—I do too—but he was rhapsodizing about her. And I said, ‘I agree with you, but isn’t it too bad that she only made two really, really good pictures out of forty?’ And he [...]

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“What I react against in other people’s work, as a filmgoer, is when I see something in a movie that I feel is supposed to make me feel emotional, but I don’t believe the filmmaker shares that emotion. They just think the audience will.  And I think you can feel that separation. So any time [...]

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“I had a couple of big influences. When I was 16 I read a Graham Swift novel, Waterland, that did incredible things with parallel timelines, and told a story in different dimensions that was extremely coherent. Around the same time, I remember Alan Parker’s The Wall on television, which does a very similar thing purely with imagery, using [...]

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“I’ve always made films and I never really stopped, starting with little stop-motion experiments using my dad’s Super 8 camera. In my mind, it’s all one big continuum of filmmaking and I’ve never changed. I used to noodle around with the camera but I didn’t go to film school. I studied English literature at college [...]

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“Montage is conflict.” Sergei Eisenstein It’s not always easy to comprehend a Russian book of essays more than 50 years old and translated into English (and reduced to a blog post), but that doesn’t mean we should totally shy away from something more than a traditional sound bite. So here’s some meat to chew on [...]

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“I was the world’s worst student. I hated it with a passion.” Woody Allen “I am plagued by doubts. What if everything is an illusion and nothing exists? In that case, I definitely overpaid for my carpet.” Woody Allen Over the weekend I stumbled upon Woody Allen: A Documentary on Netflix and was surprised how little I [...]

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“The American dream is raising way above what you started with…” From the promo trailer The Queen of Versailles You know, it’s common to think that the great stories to be found are out there somewhere —”out there,” places far from where we live. I remember a photography class my first year of college in Central [...]

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“For the love of money is the roots of all sorts of evil.” 1 Timothy 6:10 “Great broker! Would recommend them. They’ve started TV Advertising which I think is always a sign of confidence from a broker looking for new wealth to manage.” Online user review April 16, 2012 (Less than three months before that [...]

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