Archive for the “Screenwriting From Iowa” Category


“I can understand the validity of showing people the ugliness of the world, but I also think there is a place for movies to leave people with a sense of hope. If your film isn’t going to do that, I just don’t think it’s worth making.” Producer/Director/Writer Chris Columbus Last weekend “The Help” again took [...]

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“All filmmakers spend time on aborted projects… At any one time in Hollywood 90 percent of the writers and directors are busy working on scripts that will not get made.” Writer/Director John Boorman What’s worse that a Box Office Failure? The much more common practice of writing a screenplay that never gets made. (Or the [...]

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“Any filmmaker who tells you s/he ‘doesn’t read reviews’ just doesn’t want to admit how much they sting.” Screenwriter Sean Hood Yesterday, I wrote about Spectacular Failures in general—today we’ll look at what happens when a screenwriter has a box office failure.  The $90 million Conan the Barbarian movie was released earlier this month and stumbled out of [...]

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“If you aren’t prepared to fail, you’ll never do anything creative. So you have to put yourself in a position to go outside of what you know, and when you’re there you’ll fail, and when you fail you’ll learn, and then you’ll become a better artist. And then you can even fail harder the next [...]

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Yesterday I mentioned that one of the 100 plus writing credits for screenwriter Jules Furthman was To Have and Have Not. There were a few hands in that pot; The novel was written by Ernest Hemingway, Howard Hawk directed the movie that starred Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, and novelist William Faulkner is credited alongside [...]

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“There should be no sorrow at this funeral because The Great Santini lived life at full throttle, moved always in the fast lanes, gunned every engine, teetered on every edge, seized every moment and shook it like a terrier shaking a rat.” Pat Conroy A Fighter Pilot’s Eulogy Today the Thunderbirds where in Waterloo, Iowa. [...]

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The photograph from Rockford, Iowa taken this week of the black lab Hawkeye lying by the casket of his owner, fallen Navy SEAL Jon Tunilson, is one touching photograph. Tumilson was one of 30 American troops killed earlier in the month in Afghanistan. The photograph was taken by Lisa Pembleton, Tumilson’s cousin, during funeral service [...]

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For the past 15 years virtually every video project and short film I’ve produced has been edited on an Apple computer, and 99% of every Screenwriting from Iowa post has been written on an Apple. Yes, I think the Apple iPhone is one great useful invention. And I’m sure someday I’ll even warm up to Final [...]

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“When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can [...]

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“I think what’s interesting about The Help and why it’s become the phenomenon that it is is it’s so truthful. And it’s in a period when truthful stories aren’t being told that much. I mean aside from the literary world—just in movies—I mean people the entertainment they’re getting these days—it’s just genre. And people grabbed [...]

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