Screenwriting From Iowa

“Aesthetics is for the artist as Ornithology is for the birds.” Barnett Newman “Aestheticism is a search after the signs of the beautiful. It is the science of the beautiful through which men seek the correlation of the arts. It is, to speak more exactly, the search after the secret of life.” Oscar Wilde I’m not sure [...]

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“There was certain quality of melanchloy that Connie (Conrad Hall) carried with him that he was very in touch and you feel it in the films.” Director  Glenn Gordon Caron Melancholy can be defined as a pensive mood or depressing spirit. If you read many bios of artists across the board (painters, writers, musicians, etc.) [...]

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For just over two weeks I’ve been writing about the role of emotions in filmmaking and screenwriting and somehow I missed that Richard Walter has a whole chapter in his book Essentials of Screenwriting simply titled Emotion. Here is part of what the Professor of Screenwriting at UCLA’s MFA program wrote: Film is for feeling. [...]

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The following quote from the Oscar-nominated director of Crossfire  (and more than 50 other films including The Cain Mutiny) seems like a fitting quote to follow yesterday’s post Emotional Manipulation; “Today, many film-makers are afraid to deal with sentiment, dismissing it as sentimentality. But the ability to properly handle sentiment and its underlying emotion, to get the most out [...]

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“Isn’t the whole point of making a trip to the movie theater that you’re actually hoping to be emotionally manipulated? Because you want someone to tell you a story that will then make you laugh or cry? Jim Hill  “Our results suggest that film-makers manipulate sounds to create non-linear analogues to manipulate our emotional responses.”ABC Science, Movies [...]

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“Give the reader an emotional experience or you’re wasting your time. It doesn’t matter what emotion it is, but make damn sure he or she feels something. “ William M. Akers Your Screenplay Sucks! 100 ways to make it better One of those 100 Ways to make your script better  in William M. Akers’ book [...]

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“(James Cameron) gets a lot of points for being a techno-brat, but he is a very emotional storyteller.” Steven Speilberg  “James Cameron has made the two biggest movies ever made, and say what you will about his dialogue or his characterizations, but every single one of his movies obviously have resonated with a HUGE audience across [...]

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“Storytelling is innate to the human condition. Its underpinnings are cerebral, emotional, communal, psychological. One of the storyteller’s main responsibilities is to resonate in the audience’s psyche a certain something at the end of it all, to emotionally move the audience, to compel the audience to ‘get it’ on a visceral level.” Oscar-nominated director Arthur [...]

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For the last several days I’ve been exploring the topic of emotions and why saddness in particular seems to  get quite a bit of stage time throughout theatrical history.  The great American playwright Euguene O’Neill (1888-1953) wrote his share of downbeat stories (Long Day’s Journey, The Iceman Cometh)  and was once asked if he was “the apostle [...]

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“Some of my main influences in the documentary world are David Guggenheim and Lesley Chicott, who taught me about finding the story and its emotional heart through the people (being filmed), and all of Earl Morris‘ films, which bring narrative form to the documentary.” Logan Scheider American Cinematographer magazine November 2011 Scheider was the cinematographer [...]

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