Screenwriting From Iowa

In the past week I watched two modern classic films (Deliverance & Scent of a Women) and read the script again for Juno. Though these movies are different in genre and were made in three different decades they have at least one thing in common – they are simple stories.
Four guys go take a boating [...]

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“It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed but not bought. It may be used but not owned. It gives itself in response to love and tending, offers its seasonal flowering and fruiting. But we are tenants and not possessors, lovers and not masters.”
                     [...]

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“The United States is the only country with a known birthday.”  
                                           James G. Blaine
July 4th not only marks the birthday of the United States of America (and the signing of the Declaration of Independence [...]

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For some reason my last post about a bar in Minneapolis and a film about a man named Walt Kowalski somehow made me think of the writer Charles Bukowski who had more than 20 of his stories made into films including Factotum that was film in Minneapolis. 
“I never realized that there were so many movie [...]

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Stephen King says his muse is a working class guy down in the basement chomping on a cigar. I think his muse is related to screenwriter Nick Schenk’s. Schenk wrote much of Gran Torino while sitting at the bar at Grumpy’s in northeast Minneapolis. I stopped in there yesterday late afternoon and was told that [...]

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I’m up in the Twin Cities again for a shoot and happened to be driving through St. Paul yesterday when I heard the news that Al Franken was officially declared the winner of the Senate race that has been in limbo for eight months. It was a good day to be a talk radio host [...]

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“Making it up as I go along. I write with a ballpoint pen and scratch out lines and paragraphs, revising them as I make my way into the story, the characters letting me know what comes next. Once I’ve handwritten a page until I like it, I put in on the IBM Wheelwriter 1000. If [...]

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But, somewhere back there in the dust,
That same small town that’s in each of us.
                                    The End of the Innocence 
                                    Don Henely 
Got nothing [...]

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But, somewhere back there in the dust,
That same small town that’s in each of us.
                                    The End of the Innocence 
                                    Don Henely 
 
Got nothing [...]

Original Source…

While Natalie Goldberg wrote about the bliss of writing in her first book,  a few years later she added this:
“I have not seen writing lead to happiness in my friends’ lives. I’m sorry to say this, I, who fifteen years ago published a book telling everyone to grab their notebooks and write their asses off. [...]

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