Screenwriting From Iowa

“Inspiration is never really very far away if you look for it. It’s all around you, you know…. When a song comes, it’s kind of magical. You know you’re picking up some kind of signal.” Tom Petty Interview with Charlie Rose in 1999 Here’s how Petty said he wrote the song Wilflowers: “I just took […]

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I’ve listened to more Tom Petty songs in the past week than I have in any week over the past 20 years. I didn’t even know the song I Forgive It All (2016) existed until yesterday and it’s already in my top ten all-time Tom Petty songs. He performed it with members of the band (Mudcrutch) […]

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One of the great things about the arc of Tom Petty’s career is he got to have an entire musical experience that’s almost impossible to do these days. He learned to play guitar as a teenager and worked hard on his craft, had a regional following in Florida, and after a decade of performing landed […]

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Well she was an American girl Raised on promises She couldn’t help thinkin’ that there Was a little more to life Tom Petty/ American Girl You’ll probably never watch a double feature one night of Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982) and Silence of the Lambs (1991), but one thing that connects those movies together is […]

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I got my own way of talkin’ But everything gets done With a southern accent Where I come from Tom Petty/ Southern Accents “The reason to make it in Florida was to make it out of Florida.” Warren Zanes Petty: The Biography  The Beatles had Hamburg to refine their sound, Tom Petty had Gainesville. When […]

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You can stand me up at the gates of hell But I won’t back down I Won’t Back Down written by Tom Petty and Jeff Lyne I wrote [I Won’t Back Down] with Jeff Lynne. We wrote it in the studio while we were mixing another song. And it came very quickly. And I was […]

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It’s a crazy world we live in and I’m not even going to try to add to the noise in the immediate aftermath of the shooting in Las Vegas. It’s been a heartbreaking couple of days. But in hopes of keeping this blog on track, here’s a clip from the movie Jerry Maguire starring Tom […]

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“The Juice is loose” was a phrase used back in O.J. Simpson’s pro football days when the running back would break into the open field on the way to another touchdown. It’s a phrase you’ll undoubtedly hear and read a lot in the coming days since Simpson was freed from prison in the middle of […]

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Mark Twain’s one of my favorite writers from the South. [My character in American Made is a] kind of southern rascal, Huckleberry Finn kind of character in modern day. And also the fact that, the kind of flying that you could have in the 80s, that kind of adventure, those kind of escapades – that […]

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The thing I try to instill in students is like the only thing you have to offer is you. Your individual stories, your individual perception, your individual humanity, and figuring out a way to communicate that humanity to humanity at large—that’s the beauty of cinema one again, that you can have a six-year-old Iranian girl, […]

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