Screenwriting From Iowa

Note: If you’ve followed this blog much you know that I’ve been writing a book based on this blog. It’s been a long in winding road to condense a greatest hits so to speak out of more than 2,600 post, but I’m hoping to actually see the release of it by the end of the […]

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“‘Girl-writer’” is honestly what they called me. This was because comedy shows for people like Bob Hope and Jack Benny were usually written by groups of men who were known as ‘The Boys.’” Madelyn Pugh Davis Madelyn Pugh Davis was kind of the Diablo Cody in the early days of sitcom television, when there weren’t […]

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Unless you’ve been stuck under a avalanche in Colorado the past few days you can’t have missed that Captain Marvel starring Brie Larson opens tonight. Here’s what the IMDB slash page looks as I type this post. But you may have missed that movie has Iowa roots. Captain Marvel co-directors Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck […]

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“The farm was a stage set; the tractor drivers and nurserymen were stagehands.” Steven Bach “When I order a tree at nine a.m., I want to be sitting in its shade by five p.m.” Moss Hart In 1937 Moss Hart (You Can’t Take It with You) was a rich and successful Broadway playwright and Hollywood […]

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“Borscht — beet soup usually served cold with sour cream and the waiter’s thumb — is a metaphor for Jewishness. . . . Thus the Catskills, which catered almost exclusively to Jewish vacationers for two generations, might have been called Pastrami Paradise, Derma Road or the Bagel Circuit. But Abel Green, the editor of Variety, […]

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“The past is not dead. Actually, it’s not even past.” Owen Wilson’s character in Midnight in Paris (A rephrasing of a line from William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun) When I was 20 years old I took my first film history class and I don’t remember a single thing about it—except I dropped the class […]

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“After his first Broadway smash, Hart’s life morphed from the grim black-and-white of poverty to Technicolor.” Meryl Gordon I don’t recall the stock market crash of 1929 getting get mentioned in playwright/screenwriter Moss Hart’s autobiography Act One.. Perhaps because in 1929 he was in his 20s and had never had money in the first place. […]

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“Can success change the human mechanism so completely between one dawn and another? Can it make one feel taller, more alive, handsomer, uncommonly gifted and indomitably secure with the certainty that this is the way life will be? It can and does.” Moss Hart My favorite scene in playwright/screenwriter Moss Hart’s autobiography Act One is […]

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“Very few plays are without faults of one kind or another, but few plays succeed with a bad last act. The best kind of fault for a play to have is first-act trouble, and the worst kind last-act trouble. An audience will forgive a slow or even weak first act, if the second act grows […]

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“Very few plays are without faults of one kind or another, but few plays succeed with a bad last act. The best kind of fault for a play to have is first-act trouble, and the worst kind last-act trouble. An audience will forgive a slow or even weak first act, if the second act grows […]

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