Archive for the “Screenwriting From Iowa” Category


After almost 13 years of writing blogs I did my first podcast interview on Alex Ferrari’s Bulletproof Screenwriting podcast. For my first time out of the gate, overall I thought it went pretty well. Alex did a super job trying to keep in on the topic of my book Screenwriting with Brass Knuckles. (Otherwise we […]

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The first film director that I think I was ever aware of was Francis Ford Coppola. I was in middle school when other students were talking about a movie featuring a scene with a severed horse’s head. Being 11-12 years old I didn’t see The Godfather in theaters in its original release—but I learned the […]

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“I can trace so much of what I do every day, when I’m writing, to what I was taught back then by my teachers at Syracuse.”—Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network, A Few Good Men) The first photography class I ever had was as a sophomore in high school. The teacher told me to drop the […]

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“My wound is geography. It is also my anchorage, my port of call.”― Pat ConroyThe Prince of Tides When I finished watching The Peanut Butter Falcon over the weekend it reminded me of seeing Ferris Bueller’s Day Off the Friday it hit theaters back in 1986. In that I greatly enjoyed both and while the titles […]

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Here’s a photo I took yesterday of a rainbow that emerged for a few fleeting minutes. The pixels on the iPhone didn’t quite hold up so I ran it through the Prima app (Thota Vaikuntam) to give it a little texture and magic. P.S. Some time in the next few weeks I’ll hit my 100th […]

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“It is basically Stephen King saw A Nightmare on Elm Street [1984] and did his ripoff of it. The [1988] book It is Stephen King’s ripoff of Nightmare on Elm Street. He just replaces Freddy Krueger with Pennywise. It’s just exactly like he sees Nightmare on Elm Street—Oh wow, that’s goes that’s a really neat […]

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“This is one of the best of all the Abbott and Costello features.”—Marjorie BaumgartenAustin ChronicleAn October 2002 review of Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) “To some degree or another, I even think Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein affected me as an artist—i.e. the fact that at five I was able to make genre distinctions. […]

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“You know, my problem with most screenwriting is it is a blueprint. It’s like they’re afraid to write the damn thing. And I’m a writer. That’s what I do. I want it to be written. I want it to work on the page first and foremost. So when I’m writing the script, I’m not thinking […]

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I’m not saying that signs in movies are my number one pet peeve, but it’s where I’ll start this new category. This is something that I started noticing decades ago. I hate it when signs look movies. You know, the ones that set designers/production designers create to match the script. My problem is they often […]

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“When you’re working well all of your instinctive powers are in operation, and you don’t know why you do the things you do.”—Photographer Dorothea LangeGrab a Hunk of Lightning documentary I’m six chapters into recording the audio version of my book Screenwriting with Brass Knuckles and looking at it with fresh eyes there are a […]

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