Screenwriting From Iowa

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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When John Brady interviewed Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader one of his questions was “What’s the toughest part when you’re writing?
Schrader: Getting an idea. A metaphor. Having one or two lines that describe a film—that’s the hardest part. Once you get that, if you have any common sense, you can execute it.”

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Big college football game tonight between Oklahoma and Florida. That eventually got me thinking about the writer S.E. Hinton. She’s from Oklahoma and pals around with hoods like Mickey Rourke, Matt Dillion, and Dennis Hopper. At least she did back in 1983 when Francis Ford Coppola made her book Rumble Fish into a movie. 
The cast [...]

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William Goldman is great writer. And a pretty good prophet.
His book Adventures in the Screen Trade was one of the first books I read about the movie business. And I read it when it first came out back in 1983 when I was living in Burbank and lusting after that Kaypro II computer that was [...]

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