Screenwriting From Iowa

“You can’t handle the truth!”
                       Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men 
                       Voted as #29 in AFI’s 100 Movie Quotes in 100 Years. 
 
The truth is at this place in time the Los Angels Lakers [...]

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“A man’s got to know his limitations.”
                                  Clint Eastwood (as Harry Callahan in Magnum Force)
 
John Grisham didn’t get to see his dream come true. His childhood dream was to play professional baseball and he made it all the way to [...]

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Kevin Williamson failed. But at least he failed to the tune of $103 million at the box office when his script Scream became his first screenwriting credit in 1996. And that launched a career for the New Bern, North Carolina native who studied film and theater at East Carolina University. A career that includes being [...]

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“I like strong narrative drive, even though some of my very favorite films are more internal and meandering, like The 400 Blows, Terms of Endearment, 8 1/2,  Wild Strawberries, or Lost in Translation. One of the greatest filmmakers to never win an Academy Award, Alfred Hitchcock, felt that making a movie was ,  ‘like telling [...]

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It is a small world after all when tonight begins the first ever Disneyland verses Disney World NBA championship when the L.A. Lakers face the Orlando Magic. 
And while this is the first championship showdown between these two teams they made their big screen debut in 1991 in the Lawrence Kasden film Grand Canyon. The film [...]

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Walker Percy (1916-1990) was as much a philosopher as he was a novelist and essay writer. If you’re looking for southern writer who was influenced by Soren Kierkegaard (and who isn’t?) then Percy is your man. Perhaps best known for his novel The Moviegoer I greatly enjoy and am challenged by his non-fiction work The Message [...]

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“When it comes to screenwriting, it’s the writing. You don’t hear people who want to play professional tennis ask to be introduced to the head of Wimbledon. No, they’re out there hitting a thousand forehands and a thousand backhands. But for some reason, in the case of screenwriting, people don’t think that way. The format [...]

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When The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien premiere’s tonight it marks the end of one era and the beginning of another one.
The show will no longer be taped at the NBC studios in Burbank, but across the way at Universal Studios. Though The Tonight Show began in New York in 1954, since 1972 the show [...]

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“I wasn’t trying to predict the future. I was trying to prevent it.”
                               Ray Bradbury
                               On writing Fahrenheit 451 
It would be a fitting end to writing about [...]

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Before Ray Bradbury wrote his masterpiece Fahrenheit 451, and before his over 500 other short stories, and TV shows and movies based on his writings he put in his 10,000 hours of learning how write.
“I wrote at least a thousand words a day every day from the age of twelve on. For years Poe was [...]

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