There really are bridges in Madison County located in central Iowa. I took this photo back in 2008 on my way back from watching the College World Series in Omaha. Every city, town, region that’s a little off the radar dreams of getting a Hollywood close-up because it has a positive economic impact on the area. People are still traveling to Madison County to see those bridges more than 20 years after The Bridges of Madison County first hit the theaters.
Author Robert Waller died today and since this blog originated in Cedar Falls, Iowa—where Waller wrote The New York Times best-seller The Bridges of Madison County—I think it’s fitting to give a nod to Bridges & Waller. Here’s the spark of the idea that became a book that sold over 12 million copies in the ’90s, and eventually became a movie with the same title starring Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep. (The 1995 movie version made $182 at the worldwide box office.)
In the summer of 1990, Robert James Waller—then a 50-year-old economics professor and sometime folk musician—was on his way home to Cedar Falls after a day of photographing the old covered bridges of Madison Country, southwest of Des Moines.
Driving through the heat, Waller says he began to heat a line from a song he’d been working on recently, ‘an old bossa nova tune,’ about a woman named Francesca. He got a wondering about her. What if Francesca lived in Iowa? And what if she met a man, a man named—Robert? Robert Kincaid. Back home, Waller began to write his first novel, which would become, by early this year, the best-selling work of fiction is the United States. He says he didn’t stop writing, except to eat and sleep, for 14 days. ‘I never wanted it to end.’ True Life: The Best-Seller From Nowehere by William Souder
Washington Post Service
“Bridges leapt to the top of the best-seller lists and stayed there, eventually outselling Gone With the Wind. It took root on The New York Times’s list and remained there for three years, becoming, as Entertainment Weekly put it, ‘The Book That Would Not Die.’” William Grimes New York Times/March 10, 2017
“Tornadoes are an ideal film subject, because unlike most meteorological phenomena, they are small enough to fit within the film frame, and they last a short time, changing rapidly. By comparison, a hurricane is hundreds of miles across, too big to see in a single image, and it goes on for hours, with little change. Tornadoes are much more contained, and visually compelling.” Michael Crichton
Introduction to Twister: The Original Screenplay
“If you want a spiritual experience, you should go spend April to June in the Midwest, because you have never seen cloud formations like this! You watch everything in the sky happening in front of you as if you were watching time-lapse photography. We would literally watch cloud towers shoot into the sky and within fifteen minutes one little cloud would rise to become one 30,000 feet high.” Twister producer Kathleen Kennedy
P.S. Crichton wrote the Twister screenplay with his wife at the time Anne-Marie Martin. He explains in the introduction to the printed version of the original script, “Eventually, with some trepidation, we decided to write the script together, and we began in January 1994. It was not clear to either of us how this would work out, or whether it would work at all. We had plenty of advice that collaboration was a good way to end a marriage. But, as it turned out, we had an easy time working together; the structure was unusually clear, dictating what should happen next. And, invariably, we drew our episodes and details from actual recorded events, making up nothing. This was important because tornadoes are so inherently dramatic, it is easy to become excessive in the usual Hollywood manner, and we wanted the incidents to remain true to underlying reality….As is so often the case with big Hollywood movies, other hands took over the project, and moved it off in other directions. What audiences will see includes the work of many other, uncredited writers, but readers may be interested to see how the project appeared at an earlier time.”
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.” Rick (Humphrey Bogart) in Casablanca
If it’s true that there are only two kinds of stories— “a stranger comes to town” and “a man (woman/child/_____) goes on a journey”— then as far as Oscar-nominated Best Pictures “journey” stories are the winner.
This isn’t an exhaustive list, but the ones that jumped out to me as either being stranger or journey stories.
“JOURNEY” STORIES: (Limited to just the last 20 years)
Moonlight 12 Years a Slave Argo The Artist The King’s Speech The Hurt Locker Slumdog Millionaire Lion The Revenant Manchester by the Sea Hacksaw Ridge The Martian Brooklyn Bridge of Spies Mad Max: Fury Road Whiplash Birdman Nebraska Gravity Dallas Buyers Club Django Unchained Les Miserables Moneyball Winter’s Bone. Toy Story 3 The Social Network Silver Linings Playbook Ray 127 Hours Up Up in the Air Juno Little Miss Sunshine Capote Sideways The Pianist A Beautiful Mind Traffic Erin Brockovich Saving Private Ryan Good Will Hunting Titanic
“STRANGER” STORIES:
(All the way back into the 1930s)
Spotlight Captain Phillips Room Field of Dreams Dead Poets Society Driving Miss Daisy Fatal Attraction E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial On Golden Pond Jaws Chinatown Mary Poppins The Music Man The Caine Mutiny High Noon A Streetcar Named Desire Sunset Blvd. Great Expectations It’s a Wonderful Life Double Indemnity Casablanca
You could say there are hybrids. A stranger comes to town (Juno’s baby) and takes Juno on a journey. The police officer is the stranger that comes to town in Winter’s Bone that sets Rea on a journey to find her father. In Driving Miss Daisy, Hoke is the stranger that comes to town, so to speak, to work for Miss Daisy and they journey through life together.
No hard and fast rules here, but worth pondering. And I did say “if it’s true” regarding the stranger/journey concept often attributed to Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky.
I’m not sure if I’ll develop this further so let me end with two of my favorite “stranger comes to town” movies. Hitchcock’sShadow of Doubt(which Gordon McDonell earned a story Oscar-nomination) back in the ’40s. While Uncle Charlie is technically not a stranger, the movie revolves around his coming to town and doing some pretty strange shenanigans.
The second movie, High Plaines Drifter, is the only non-Oscar nominated film on this list, but it’s the quintessential stranger coming to town movie.
When I was first starting out as an actor, I was under contract to Lucille Ball at Desilu Studios, which was owned by Lucy and Desi Arnaz. Lucy knew I had this passion for movie history which at that time was not a normal thing. Most people weren’t interested in movie history. She said, ‘You know, you would have a happier life as a writer than as an actor. You should be writing about movies, because nobody is.’ She told me that she thought being an actor would never make me happy, but writing would. She knew I was a journalism major at the University of Washington. She told me that if I took up writing as a profession, the first thing I had to do was write a book because people would look at you differently if I did. She told me it didn’t even have to be a good book, but that everyone is impressed with anyone who writes a book because most people lack the discipline to do it. I knew she was telling me this for my own good, not some other agenda, so I quit being an actor and became a writer. Film historian Robert Osborne (1932-2017) Cinema Retro interview with Lee Pfeiffer
“There are only two possible stories: a man goes on a journey, or a stranger comes to town.” Unknown (Though often attributed to Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky)
I’ve always been fond of the above quote, and over the weekend I realized that the last two Best Picture Oscars were examples of each. Moonlight being “a man goes on a journey,” and Spotlight representing “a stranger comes to town.”
Moonlight and Spotlight are not only one word titles with nine letters that end with “light,” but there is a Miami connection as well. Moonlight is about a boy raised and Miami, and the stranger coming to town in Spotlight is when the Boston Globe hires Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) who was the executive editor at The Miami Herald.
As the editor at the Boston Globe, Baron oversaw the investigative team that earned a Pulitzer for their coverage of sexual abuse in the Catholic church. If the movie version is true, it was Baron’s being a stranger to Boston culture that helped him pursue truth at whatever the cost.
“Over the course of 2002, we probably did almost 1,000 stories on the topic. We went to the court to have documents unsealed that the church had hoped to keep secret, documents that addressed the fact that the church knew these priests had abused and continued to abuse children. It forced the church to address issues that had essentially been swept under the rug for 40 or 50 years.”
Marty Baron Leigh University / Department of Journalism & Communication
P.S. Baron is currently the editor of The Washington Post and says, “I see a lot of people getting out of law school who can’t get jobs, but the ones with journalism majors still can. The people who have learned the tools and who are open to working in a variety of different media will find opportunities, and they will succeed.”
Journalism may have hit a wall around 2008, but it’s being revamped offering opportunities for storytellers with multimedia skills. So if you’re a film school grad looking for work, don’t ignore the chance to use your producing, shooting, writing, and/or editing skills in journalism.
The goal is to tell a story for people who don’t have that exact situation in their lives at all. I’m very inspired by people like the Hungarian director István Szábo. He did a film titled Father (1968) and a film titled Lovefilm (1970). I love those films, and I know nothing about growing up in Budapest during World War II. But I can completely relate to them because they’re very concrete and specific about his life.
When you have real, concrete details of human life that don’t feel like tropes or story conventions, and you have characters that don’t feel like film characters but feel like real people, they communicate to an audience in way that can even be commercial. People will relate to it.
I do believe in writing for other people. I’m not trying to do therapy or make a memoir; I’m exploiting personal things to make what is hopefully a unique film. I take from my life to hopefully make a good movie, not a good memoir.
Oscar-nominated screenwriter Mike Mills (20th Century Women) Creative Screenwriting interview with Christopher McKittrick (@ChrisMcKit)
Yorgos Lanthimos: We make observations about the way we live and organize our lives — and structure our societies — so we wanted to do something about romantic relationships and how single people are treated within society. The pressure that is on them in order to be with someone and … the pressure that they put on themselves to be with someone. What we like to do is push those situations to extremes in order to reveal the absurdity behind them, behind things that we consider normal in our everyday life.
Note: The Lobster won the Jury Prize at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival and received a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination this year.
“It took me a while to get into screenwriting and filmmaking. I started out as a playwright, and I’m still a playwright, but I was in my early thirties before I ever tried to write a screenplay for myself. The theater taught me to respect actors, the advantages of rehearsal, the magical power of theatricality, the plain fun of putting on a show, and the unique thrill of creative collaboration.” Oscar-winning screenwriter Kenneth Lonergan(Manchester by the Sea) Writers Guild of America, East interview
P.S. I should add that according to Wikipedia the Lonergan began writing in high school when he went to a private school in Manhatten that had an arts program, had a play selected for the Young Playwright’s Festival when he was 20, and graduated from the playwriting program at NYU. He had several plays produced in New York and worked as a speechwriter for the Environmental Protection Agency before his success as a screenwriter.
Screenwriting from Iowa 