Screenwriting From Iowa

How about that Kurt Warner? If you follow pro football at all you know his underdog story is one of the greatest in sports history. And now the 37-year-old adds another chapter to his hall-of-fame career by leading the Arizona Cardinals to the Super Bowl. If you like comeback stories Kurt Warner is your guy. [...]

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On this day in 1859 the local paper where I live was established. As The Courier turns 150 today I want to look at its most famous reporter, Sinclair Lewis. Yes, the novelist, playwright, short story writer Sinclair Lewis worked for a brief time in Waterloo, Iowa before going on to publish over 20 books [...]

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Though screenwriter Robert Siegel grew up in New York, he got his Midwest roots by graduating from the University of Michigan and then made headlines in Madison, Wisconsin. Literally. As the editor for the great fake newspaper The Onion Siegal came up with those crazy headline.
But after 13 years he quit and began to write [...]

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This has been an unusual week for plane crashes. First there was the guy who jumped out of his plane to fake his death and then the crash yesterday of Flight 1549 that landed in the Hudson River.  When was the last time the news was about two airplanes crashing in the same  week where [...]

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Yeah, it’s kinda cold throughout the Midwest these days.  According to the weather channel’s website as I type this it’s -13 and feels like -35 here in Iowa. Is that legal? 
The cold weather is one of the reasons that half the people in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin drink so much and why the other half [...]

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“The marks of the artsy-craftsy film are withholding basic exposition and leaving the viewer confused. The illusion of profundity is not the same as being profound.”
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“Characters should primarily be revealed through behavior, not dialogue.”
                                                  Linda Stuart
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Fifty years ago today Barry Gordy founded what would become Motown Records with $800 borrowed from his family. At the time he was unemployed and a divorced father of three.  Not exactly a sure bet. But here we are 50 years later looking back on a company that has had amazing influence on the United [...]

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Most people would point to Syd Field’s book Screenplay as the book that started a modern day trend in screenwriting theory. It was in fact the first book I ever read on screenwriting, but it is not the oldest book I own on screenwriting. That honor goes to The Technique of Screenplay Writing by Eugene [...]

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It’s January in Iowa, it’s cold and snowing outside, and I’m blogging about a screenwriter from Minneapolis—-so what else is new? What’s new is the screenwriter is not Diablo Cody. She’s so ‘08. No this Twin City screenwriter is not a former stripper…he’s a former construction worker/liquor store clerk/fruit truck driver who likes to ice [...]

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