“Be prepared at all times for rejection, even after you break in.” —Writer/director Garry Marshall (Pretty Women)
“Here’s a secret I have learned in 20 years as a screenwriter. Failure is constant for everyone.” Oscar-nominated screenwriter Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich)
“To do any kind of creative work well, you have to run at stuff knowing that it’s usually going to fail.” —Radio and Tv producer/host Ira Glass (This American Life)
My goal in starting the ”Filmmaking with Brass Knuckles” YouTube channel was to do 100 videos in two years. At the end of 2025, I’m about 40 videos short. Will I make it? (With only a week before my self imposed 2 year deadline.) Will I fall short? Will I quit? This video explores that some and ends with an extended quote by legendary TV producer/creator (“Happy Days”) and film director (“Pretty Women”) Garry Marshall. He mentioned in his book ”Wake Me When Its Funny” his first flaming rejection he experienced after a run-in with a famous comedian in NYC early in his creative career. It’s a reminder that everyone won”t love your skillset. But Marshall found enough people who did think he was funny to have a career than spanned six decades. Just think, if Marshall would have quiet the business after his first flaming rejection there would have been no Fonzie (Henry Winkler) and probably no Vivian (Julia Roberts), because the original script for ”Pretty Woman” by J.F. Lawton was not a light romantic comedy.
Multimedia Content Producer Scott W. Smith is the author of Screenwriting with Brass Knucklesand runs the YouTube Channel Filmmaking with Brass Knuckles.
“When John started his blog, his idealized reader was a kid in Iowa who was curious about screenwriting but had no good way to learn about it. That’s one target audience for this book: the aspiring writer who want to learn about the craft.” From the introduction to the book Scriptnotesby John August and Craig Mazin
The long awaited Scriptnotes book by screenwriters John August (Big Fish) and Craig Mazin (The Last of Us) is now out in the wild. I purchased the audio version and Kindle digital version and will have the hardback version next week. That means I have enough hope in this content to purchase it three times.
When I started the blog Screenwriting from Iowa…and Other Unlikely Places way back in 2008 it was my version of a Purple Cow inspired by the then recent success of the movie Juno written by Diablo Cody who was a fairly recent graduate from the University of Iowa and had written the script in the suburbs of Minneapolis.
So I was pleased to read in the Scriptnotes introduction that when John August started his blog that “his idealized reader was a kid in Iowa who was curious about screenwriting but had no good way to learn about it.” That’s where his blog and my blog intersected. I was a video producer living in Cedar Falls, Iowa at the time (with tons of notes from film school on looking for a home) and August was an established Hollywood screenwriter who’d done his undergraduate work at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.
Around the time Juno was in theaters, two young filmmakers were also graduating from the University of Iowa: Scott Beck and Bryan Woods. After years of struggling, they found success when their script for A Quiet Place became a surprised critical and financial success in 2018. I was pleased to learn they were familiar with my blog coming up and thrilled when they agreed to write the introduction to my book Screenwriting with Brass Knuckles.
I imagine that Beck and Woods were also familiar with John August’s blog and, eventually, the Scriptnotes podcast with Mazin as well. It would be a mistake to look at August, Beck, Woods and Cody and assume there’s something special in the water in Iowa. The truth is the success they’ve all found is rare—just as rare as Iowa native Kurt Warner rising from the University of Northern Iowa to become a Super Bowl-winning MVP. His football journey was so unlikely that it became the movie American Underdog. (One of my most read posts is How Much Do Screenwriters Make? where I compare NFL football players with professional screenwriters.)
But all the examples above show that great success is not impossible—even if you come from an unlikely place like Iowa. And there are many more examples of creative people from all over who have found various degrees of success and long lasting careers in the arts. (Recently, I heard the quote ”You’re fortunate if you find something you love to do. If you find someone to pay you to do it—it’s a miracle.”)
While I’ve just started the listening to the audio version of the Scriptnotes book and reading the Kindle version, I can easily recommend the book as a great resource because it’s the “greatest hits” from August’s blog and the over 700 episodes of the Scriptnotes podcast. (I estimate that I’ve listened to well over 500 episodes being a listener from the start.)
I’ll pull some quotes from the book in the coming weeks on this blog. And I will also lean into the book for some YouTube shorts on my YouTube channel Filmmaking with Brass Knuckles.
Until then here are just 15 of links I’ve written over the years inspired from the Scriptnotes podcast:
P.S. Here’s an interesting quote from Steven Spielberg back in 1991: “I think that the Internet is going to effect the most profound change on the entertainment industries combined. And we’re all gonna be tuning into the most popular Internet show in the world, which will be coming from some place in Des Moines.”
As of 2025 a photographer turned YouTuber I knew in my Iowa years, Tim Dodd, has a YouTube named Everyday Astronaut that currently has just under 2 millon subscribers. His Space X tour video with Elon Musk has over 7 million views and his Blue Origin tour with Jeff Bezos has over 2 million views. Suddenly, Spielberg’s predication doesn’t seem like SciFi fiction.
Screenwriting from Iowa 