The 10 Minute Film School

As this year winds down and a new year begins tomorrow I thought I would offer some help with your new year’s resolutions.  Perhaps you’ve always wanted to go to film school but are concerned about the time or money. Or maybe you just want to make a film but aren’t sure where to start. [...]

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Rocky: The Anti—Antihero

“Do you believe that America is the land of opportunity?” Boxing promoter in Rocky At the time that the New York Times interviewed Sylvester Stallone in 1976 he was living in a 1 1/2 bedroom apartment in LA with his wife and 6 month old baby. Rocky was about to be released and as the [...]

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Writing “Rocky”

“If you want to go toe to toe with any foe, you’ve got to be fearless.” Boxer Chuck Wepner Much has been written about Sylvester Stallone writing the first version of the Rocky script in just a few days, but little is mentioned about Rocky actually being his 8th script. (The other seven were never [...]

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Writer David Morrell

“I have a theory that compulsive fiction writers are subconsciously working out traumas that happened to them when they were young. I call this process self-psychonalysis.” David Morrell While David Morrell is most known in film circles as the writer who created Rambo, he is also a writer who can walk in both the worlds [...]

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Writing “First Blood”

“They drew first blood, not me.” John Rambo “You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path.” Joseph Campbell The road to the first Rambo movie being released in 1982 was a long journey. The novel First Blood was published in 1972 and reports are that the property went through three studios, 16 scripts, [...]

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Writing Quote #22 (Dara Marks)

For Christmas I received a book that I’ve heard a lot about over the years but have never read. I’m sure I’ll be pulling a few quotes from Inside Story: The Power of the Transformational Arc by Dara Marks in 2011, but here’s one for 2010. “The single most important connection authors make with their [...]

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A True POW Christmas Story

“What gets me is that there never was a movie about POWs — about prisoners of war.” From Billy Wilder’s 1953 film  Stalag 17 This week I had a video shoot that took me through Algona, Iowa and I was reminded of a little known piece of American history. And  an unusual Christmas story. During [...]

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Merry Christmas George Lucas

Judging from the Christmas list (or Cristmis list) that my wife and I received recently from a seven-year-old, LEGOs are a little different then when I was a kid. (And, yes, this list is 100% authentic.) And if this is a common list this Christmas, and every kid gets one or two Star Wars LEGOs this [...]

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The Courage to Write

Here are several quotes pulled from the Ralph Keyes book The Courage to Write: “I admire anybody who has the guts to write anything at all.” E.B White  “The best work that anybody ever writes is the work that is on the verge of embarrassing him, always.” Arthur Miller  “If we had to say what [...]

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Blake Edwards (1922-2010)

“(Blake Edwards) is not a trick director. A number of directors, for no reason at all, will suddenly shoot a scene through a keyhole or over a doorway just because it seems like a clever thing to do. Blake doesn’t do those things; he doesn’t try to show his ego on film.” Julie Andrews “Characters [...]

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