Screenwriting From Iowa

It’s not uncommon for writers to talk about how quickly they wrote a play, book, or screenplay. For instance Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesmen in six weeks, Jack Kerouac wrote On the Road in three weeks, and six weeks is also how long it took Diablo Cody to write Juno.
But those numbers are deceptive. For ideas [...]

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But February made me shiver
With every paper I’d deliver.
Bad news on the doorstep.
I couldn’t take one more step.
                                                            Don McLean
                 [...]

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Though Iowa’s own Kurt Warner and the Arizona Cardinals came up a little short it was another case of the Super Bowl being super. And that game winning ballet catch in the closing seconds of the game by Santonio Holmes brought memories of Lyn Swann.
The game being played in Tampa this year also brought back memories to [...]

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Screenwriter William Blinn has been at it for more than 40 years. He won two Primetime Emmy’s for his work on Roots and Brian’s Song, and was nominated for three more for his work on Fame. He also wrote scripts some of the classic TV programs; Gunsmoke, Bonaza and Eight is Enough, as well as being [...]

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While studying acting for three years in L.A. I learned a few things about the craft. When I inquired about classes at the The Actors Studio in West Hollywood I was told, “If when your feet hit the ground in the morning you don’t want to be an actor more than anything then don’t even try, [...]

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Yesterday I videotaped Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa as he was honored with the Graven Award. The third son of Bobby Kennedy spoke a little about Riverkeepers and how they have fought to protect the waters of the Hudson River from being polluted and how those efforts have spread around [...]

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The well is deep with writer John Updike who died a couple days ago. So I thought it was fitting to quote him one more time. These insights coming from a Q&A he did with Salon when his novel In the Beauty of the Lilies first came out:
Dwight Garner: There’s a place in the new book where [...]

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There was a big spike in readers here at Screenwriting from Iowa yesterday and I think it’s because author John Updike died. Not because I’ve written anything about him, but because people probably confused him with writer John Irving who I have written a little about. 
Both are known as east coast American authors around the same [...]

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Since I like to focus on dramatic writers with origins outside L.A. I think Lope de Vega qualifies. The playwright was born in Madrid, Spain in 1562 is thought to have written around 1,500 plays. I was unaware of him until I read The Tools of Screenwriting by David Howard and Edward Mabley.
In the book’s [...]

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Changeling was nominated for three Oscars last week. It’s success has made the writer,  J. Michael Stracynski, an A-list writer in Hollywood. And though he has been writing for TV for 20 years before Changeling sold he wrote in Script magazine ,”Nobody in features knew me from Adam.” 
They didn’t know about his Emmy winning work on [...]

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