Screenwriting From Iowa

Rarely do you get a full glimpse into the behind the scene making of a film, so although Project Greenlight 2 first aired on HBO in 2003 there are some valuable things to learn watching the DVD series.  While I’m sure some of the conflict is contrived during the 13 episodes, there are some basic [...]

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The winners directors of Project Greenlight 2 back in 2002 were two filmmakers from Maine, Kyle Rankin and Efram Potelle. They had got their start in production while  in middle school and high school with a Maine Student Film and Video Festival. In 1996 the made a feature in Maine called Raindeer Games (not to [...]

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“After I read the script The Battle of Shaker Heights I was dying to get in touch with the writer. I read a lot of scripts and it’s almost never happened to me that I found material that I connected to so much that I wanted to direct it and it’s pretty ironic and amazing [...]

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Many years ago I was told I should watch Project Greenlight 2. I loved the first Project Greenlight where Matt Damon, Ben Affleck and Chris Jones help Pete Jones write and direct his first feature film, Stolen Summer. So I finally picked up the DVD for Project Greenlight 2, The Battle of Shaker Heights on [...]

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“When Earl Newton was 10, he convinced his friends he was born on another planet.” The Destin Log  “Long before Robert Rodriguez, (Russian filmmaker Seigei Eisnstein) was the original writer/director/editor.  Here was a man, similar to myself, far from Hollywood, figuring out movies without a film school (in his case, none existed yet).” Earl Newton [...]

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Oscar-nominated screenwriter Arthur Laurents died earlier this month at the age of 93. While his Oscar nominations were both for the 1977 film The Turning Point, he’s better known for his screenplays Rope (1948) and The Way We Where. But perhaps he’s most well-known for writing the book of the musical West Side Story for [...]

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 “My approach to directing is to figure out what the movie’s about, how each section contributes to that, figure out how each scene contributes to that section, and figure out how each beat contributes to that scene; and then get the movie shot by shot so that you’re telling the story the best way possible; [...]

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Austin-based food photographer Penny De Los Santos has traveled extensively throughout the United States and to more than 30 foreign countries shooting assignments for National Geographic, Martha Stewart Living, Saveur Magazine and others. Yet she has advice for those who think you must travel far away to find interesting stories: “There are great stories in [...]

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“I’ve always said: If it sounds like writing, revise it. After World War II, I found Hemingway. I loved his style, the white space on his pages, that you could tell a story with dialogue. Reading Hemingway inspired me to think about my own sound on the page. I would copy down a paragraph from [...]

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Monday was the single most viewed day in the three plus years of “Screenwriting from Iowa”—largely due to an influx to my post from last November The 10 Film Commandments of Edward Burns. Someone must be talking that post up. That was the post where I unpacked how Burns made Nice Guy Johnny in 2010 [...]

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