Anyone who thinks nature is peaceful doesn’t spend too much time in nature. It can be brutal. Spend a little time around beaches, lakes, and woods and you’ll see the fight for survival up close. Today I grabbed a video clip of something I’d never seen in my life—a hawk carrying a squirrel. The iPhone […]
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Archive for the “Screenwriting From Iowa” Category“In my mind and in my car, we can’t rewind we’ve gone to far.” The Buggles/Who Killed the Radio Star I thought it would be fun to revisit a post I wrote way back on November 15, 2009 called Cocaine Cowboys & the Future of Film. I wrote it the day after I watched my […]
Apr
24
2017
 
The Freak Accident that Makes You OriginalPosted by: screenwritingfromiowa in Screenwriting From IowaOriginal style arises out of personality and the freak accident of the artist’s particular aesthetic experience—the fortuitous combination, during a writer’s childhood of (let us say) Tolstoy, Roy Rogers, and the chimpanzee act at the St. Louis Zoo. Only after the style has begun to assert itself does the writer’s intellect make sense of it, […]
Apr
24
2017
The Myth of Total Creative FreedomPosted by: screenwritingfromiowa in Screenwriting From IowaWhen forced to work within a strict framework the imagination is taxed to its utmost—and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom the work is likely to sprawl.” Poet and Playwright T.S. Eliot
Apr
23
2017
Getting a C Grade in Creative Writing on the Way to Winning Two Screenwriting Oscar AwardsPosted by: screenwritingfromiowa in Screenwriting From IowaI 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. […]
Apr
22
2017
Reversal, Reversal, ReversalPosted by: screenwritingfromiowa in Screenwriting From Iowa“It’s like a good news, bad news joke. The bad news is, you get thrown out of an airplane. The good news is, you’re wearing a parachute. the bad news is, your rip cord breaks. The good news is, you have a back up ‘chute. The bad news is you can’t reach the cord. Back […]
Apr
20
2017
‘I worked in a video store for like years…’Posted by: screenwritingfromiowa in Screenwriting From IowaI worked in a video store for like ten years, which is probably the best film school you can go to…and I get this phone call. They say, ‘My name is Andrea McCall and I work at Dreamworks. I read your script and I was wondering if you could come in for a meeting.’I went […]
Apr
19
2017
‘What matters to us is story…’—Posted by: screenwritingfromiowa in Screenwriting From IowaI’ve always felt that if you look at what lasts, in cinema and in art in general, it tends not to be a modernist or postmodern approach with ironic distance and narrative dysfunction. It would be easy for us to find self-reflexive poets from post-Virgilian Rome, but nobody reads them except for graduate students. In […] “Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.” Marilyn Monroe James Gray is a working writer/director who back in 1994 made his first feature film at age 24, and his latest film (The Lost City of Z) is hitting theater this month. But […] “Every ring is a team story, and this is the Cubs story.” Miran Armutlu, Master Jeweler Last week the Chicago Cubs received their World Series rings. Everyone in the organization got a ring, not just the players. That’s a total of 1,908 pieces. That’s 1,908 stories. Here’s the only one I have a loose connection […] |
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