Screenwriting From Iowa

“If I were a California writer, I would try to describe this sense of easiness and perhaps tie it to the landscape and the climate. I’d write about people in love with their home. But they must deal with the same troubles that afflict other humans, and not only mudslides, earthquakes, and brush fires, but […]

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Way back when I studied acting it was years before the Internet came along. So you’d hang out at the Samuel French bookstore on Sunset Blvd. flipping through plays searching for a monolgue that you hadn’t seen 100 times. (“I coulda been somebody…) There were also a few books that had collects of monologues. I […]

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“I don’t want film to be a ‘slice of life’ because people can get that at home, in the street, or even in front of the movie theater. They don’t have to pay money to see a slice of life. And I avoid out-and-out fantasy because people should be able to identify with the characters. […]

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“I was eighteen and an aunt gave me a copy of Mixed Company, a book of his (Irwin Shaw) collected stories. I’d never read a word by him, never heard his name. But I remember the lead story in the book was The Girls in Their Summer Dresses. About a guy who looked at women. Followed by The […]

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Most books about screenwriting talk about the importance of creating a strong protagonist, and don’t understand the important structural role the antagonist plays in defining the protagonist. As someone said, ‘You want to see Muhammad Ali fight Joe Frazier, not Pee Wee Herman.’ Too often scripts make the mistake of making things too easy for […]

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Like a rhinestone cowboy Riding out on a horse in a star-spangled rodeo Rhinestone cowboy Gettin’ cards and letters from people I don’t even know And offers comin’ over the phone Glen Campbell signature song written by Larry Weiss This is as good a time as any to go back to 1975 when Rhinestone Cowboy […]

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“When I first got to Hollywood, I attended acting classes for three years…I wanted to understand the acting process so I could write for actors. Watching them, I learned how to streamline my dialogue—where to hesitate, where to rush—so that the writing itself would give the actor all the clues he needed to find his […]

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Yesterday Jason Taylor, the great defensive end who played for the Miami Dolphins was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio. So I thought this was as good as time as any to post a photo I did of a shoot I did with Jason back in 2012 down in South Florida. […]

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“‘I just dropped out of nowhere,’ Sam Shepard said of his arrival in New York, at nineteen in the fall of 1963. ‘It was absolute luck that I happened to be there when the whole Off-Off Broadway movement was starting.’ Shepard, a refugee from his father’s farm in California, had spent eight months as an […]

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“Sam’s voice was very singular. It was very distinctive.” Playwright Tracy Letts

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