Screenwriting From Iowa

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 [...]

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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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 I sometimes write on the inside cover of books where and when I bought the book. Inside Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones I have written, “Georgetown, CO, 9/2000.” Once upon a time there was this wonderful little bookstore in Georgetown, Colorado that was the perfect stop between Denver and the Vail/Breckenridge area. The bookstore [...]

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Farrah. Michael. They are part of the small, but elite club in pop culture that are known by one name. Before their deaths yesterday, both Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson had their share of time in the spot light as well as time getting lost in their own versions of never never land. Seems to [...]

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That kind of thing isn’t supposed to happen in a place like this.
Highly regarded and admired high school football coaches are not supposed to be killed. Especially in a small town in Iowa. But that’s what happened yesterday when Parkersburg High School football coach Ed Thomas was shot and killed.
When I moved to Cedar Falls, [...]

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