”The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.” —Mark Twain
This past weekend I went to a movie in a movie theater for the first time in over 14 months. I saw A Quiet Place II—and so did a lot of other people. The movie pulled in over $57 million to top a healthy Memorial Day weekend box office that signaled that the movie going experience still has a place in American culture.
Writer/director/actor John Krasinski—and all of Hollywood— breathed a sigh of relief. Hopefully, it was a positive turning point in a world previously shutdown by COVID-19.
And here are a couple of videos on Krasinski directing the original A Quiet Place that you may not have seen before.
Scott W. Smith is author of Screenwriting with Brass Knuckles(original co-screenwriters of A Quiet Place wrote the introduction to the book)
“The hilltop is lined with corn. Golden and brown. Shimmering in the morning heat.” The opening like of an early draft of A Quiet Place by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods
I started this blog Screenwriting from Iowa …and Other Unlikely Places in January 2008 soon after seeing Juno and could have ended it in 2018 after The Quiet Place. The screenwriter of Juno screenwriter (Diablo Cody), and the original screenwriters of A Quiet Place (Scott Beck and Bryan Woods) all graduated from the University of Iowa. Cody wrote Juno in Minnesota and the original concept for A Quiet Place began in Iowa. Both were massive hits. They make nice bookends and my point that the creative outliers can make an impact and become insiders.
(Heck, outlier Tyler Perry and his studio have more than a few Hollywood moving trucks heading to Atlanta. If this pandemic lasts for years, Perry is going to be making an offer on the Hollywood sign.)
Their cinematic touchstones include the silent films of Chaplin, the silent-like movies of Jacques Tati. their “gold standard” write/directorM. Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense, Signs, Unbreakable, The Village), Alfred Hitchcock, Alien, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Night of the Living Dead, Attack the Block, and Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. The later shaping the opening of their first draft of A Quiet Place. Here’s a couple quotes pulled from the excellent podcast Script Apart hosted by Al Horner.
Scott Beck: “I think it’s our love of The Twilight Zone series where they do such a good job of throwing you into an environment that you slowly realize in some of these episodes that something is slightly off-kilter. To a degree that by the end of the episode you’re at such a different place than when you started. I think for us it was interesting for us that in the first draft of A Quiet Place where it felt like our own backyard here in Iowa, where you’re just going about your daily chores on a farm, and then all of the sudden five pages in you realize that you’re not in Kansas anymore, you’re not in Iowa any more. There’s something terrifying out there that’s going to kill you if you make a sound. And all of the sudden changing the rules right on page five and then telling the audience like you’re in for a hell of a ride for the next 90 minutes of your time.”
And because I have been accused of overstating how brutally competitive the film business is, here is Woods from the same podcast unpacking the path to getting A Quiet Place made. (One in which they are also grateful to John Krasinski for bringing his talent and sensibilities to the script and pulling of as actor and director.)
Bryan Woods: “Scott and I have been writing scripts ever since we met each other as 12-year-olds. In other words we’d written 30 scripts that never got made—throughout high school, college and into adulthood. And we were trying to crack the code and one of the things you start to realize as you forge a professional career in the film industry is that everybody’s job in film—executives, studio, producers—their job is basically to not make movies. Their job is to read scripts and go ‘Well, we’re not going to make this film because of A, B,C, D, E, F. G.’ So we started about a decade ago to think let’s start writing movies that are scalable. Let’s start writing movies that could be done for a lower budget, or a medium budget, or a bigger budget, and write scripts that are effective at all those levels. That check all of those boxes so that we remove one of the barriers to getting a movie made which is budget, or logistic, or production. A Quiet Place is a perfect example of that. We always talked about that worst case scenerio this is a movie we could go back to Iowa and we could make it for half a million dollars. Use our friends farm that we know out in the country. Assemble a small cast—it could be done. Nothing was going to stop us for making this movie.”
I would actually like to see that low budget version of A Quiet Place. Maybe Paramount can give Beck and Woods half a million to pull that off. Shoot it in three weeks and call it A Quiet Place: Pandemic Version. That could start a whole new trend. They’ve already finished shooting one film during the pandemic,65. It’s produced by Sam Raimi and stars Ariana Greenblatt, Adam Driver, and Chloe Coleman.
P.S. Juno hit theaters in 2007—only seven years after Diablo Cody graduated from the Iowa. That was the same year that Scott Beck and Bryan Woods had a short film in the Cedar Rapids Film Festival in Iowa titled The Bride Wore Blood. And I actually had a film called Elephant Dreams at that festival. And things were percolating to start this blog. Things were happing in the Midwest in 2007. My blog eventually resulted in the book Screenwriting with Brass Knuckles (which Beck and Woods wrote the introduction to). And now in 2021, things are percolating again. This spring I plan to launch a screenwriting podcast and hope you’ll come along for the journey. I’ll spend a week or so starting tomorrow talking about what I learned at the recent virtual Podfest. I do believe that if Cody was in college today, or Beck in Woods in high school today, that there’s a good chance they’d be cranking out narrative podcasts.
If you’re on Twitter, two writer/directors that I’d recommend you follow are Scott Beck and Bryan Woods (A Quiet Place, Haunt) who go by @beckandwoods on Twitter. Here’s an example of one of their tweets.
“Convincingly creepy while also slightly thought-provoking, it warns about deceiving facades, because what hides underneath masks is possibly much worse.”
Carlos Aguilar review of HAUNT Los Angeles Times
Filmmakers Scott Beck & Bryan Woods were working on the screenplay for their new movie Hauntat the same time they were working on the script for A Quiet Place. Last year A Quiet Place found a worldwide audience and made $340 million at the box office. Yesterday Haunt opened in select theaters with a wider release next week.
It’s not playing in Orlando yet, so I’ll round out my extended run of posts on Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood in the next few days. Then I’ll turn my attention toward Beck and Woods’ recent film.
But if you happen to be in Davenport, Iowa tonight Beck and Woods will be returning to their hometown Quad Cities area for a screenwriting at the Putnam followed by a Q&A session. Next week Haunt opens in Iowa City where Beck and Woods went to college and they’ll also be on hand for a Q&A there as well— September 21 at FilmScene as part of the theater’s grand opening of their Chauncey location.
“To come back to meet some of the founders of FilmScene who just have a love for film as much as people in California is incredible. We couldn’t be more excited to come back to Iowa.”
Bryan Woods Isaac Hamlet, Iowa City Press-Citizen
The next project for Beck and Woods is adapting Stephen King’s short story The Boogeyman. They’re not doing too bad for a couple of guys who started out screenwriting from Iowa.
Congrats both of them. May they be a major inspiration to you—especially to those of you working on screenplays and making movies outside of Los Angeles.
P.S. Haunt is also currently available On Demand and digitally.
“I was astounded at how really useful ‘thematic thinking’ turned out to be.”
Stephen King On Writing, page 207
A Quiet Place
While I have found many quotes from talented writers and directors talking about their disdain for the topic of theme, I will say I have found more from equality talked writers and directors who embrace theme in their work, and in the work of others.
When Oscar-winning Francis Marion wrote the following words in her 1937 book keep in mind that talking pictures were not even a decade old. And feature films had only been made for about two decades.
“Throughout most of the Depression, Americans went assiduously, devotedly, almost compulsively, to the movies.”
Carlos Stevens
I don’t know how many other filmmakers in the 1930s agreed with her, but there were some fine films made during that time. In fact, many consider 1939 as the single best year in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Some would say the best year for films ever.
Gone with the Wind The Wizard of Oz
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
Wuthering Heights
Stage Coach
Of Mice and Men
Ninotchka
Dark Victory
Goodbye Mr. Chips
Gunga Din
Young Mr. Lincoln
Beau Geste
Union Pacific
Golden Boy
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
This was at the tale end of The Great Depression when millions of Americans went to movies weekly. World War II and television were a few years away from changing movie going habits forever.
Marion embraced theme and spent seven pages covering the topic from her point of view. Here’s another excerpt from her book:
Examine any good plot and you will find a theme imbedded in it; it is the theme that gives the plot objective and purpose. A plot that does not prove anything is diffused and uninteresting. It ‘doesn’t get anywhere.’ As a matter of fact, a plot is merely the more or less mechanical invention that gives opportunity to the characters to portray a theme; and the theme keeps the story from being just a series of episodes concerning the same characters.
The theme rarely is mentioned in the story; it is never rubbed in. The audience may not put it in words at all, but will recognize the theme and the fact that the story keeps in line with it. Suppose that you have taken for your theme the slogan, ‘It pays to advertise.’ These words may never be mentioned in the story, but the story itself will demonstrate the truth of that statement.
. . . The theme which Sinclair Lewis definitely proved, and which certainly gave purpose to his Main Street, might be stated simply as, ‘the ugliness of life in middlewestern town.’ The theme of Sorrel and Son by Warwick Deeping might be, ‘No sacrifice is to great for a father to make for a beloved son’; of The Four Horsemanof by Ibanez, as ‘Want, disease, famine, and death forever follow war’; and that The Miracle Man*, ‘Spiritual regeneration is possible even in the worst of men.’” Screenwriter Frances Marion How to Write and Sell Film Stories (1937)
pages 106-107
*Since Marion does not give the author for The Miracle Man I am not sure if she is referencing the movie versions—there were two; The Miracle Man(1919) starring Lon Chaney, The Miracle Man (1932)—or the 1914 Broadway play version , or the original source material—The Miracle Man novel by Canadian Frank L. Packard.
P.S. You could paraphrase Marion’s quote about Sorrel and Son to be “No sacrifice is to great for a father to make for his beloved family” and I think that theme that transcending A Quiet Place (2018) beyond just a monster movie. And a big reason for its box office success. And the father’s sacrifice in that movie, according to screenwriters Scott Beck and Bryan Woods, was an idea that they hit on early.
The photo that’s been at the top of this blog all these years is a quintessential farm shot I took one morning outside of Decorah, Iowa where I was shooting a short film. The anchor in the shot is the barn and silo in the left part of the photo.
That’s classic Iowa. And I hadn’t thought about that photo in years until today when I read this quote about the silo used in A Quiet Place.
“Where we grew up [in Iowa] was a healthy mixture of city life and farm life. We lived in the city, but you would hear about grain silos being one of the most dangerous things you can fall into. It’s basically like drowning, but in dry grain. It was terrifying to drive by them on country roads. Early in the writing process we said, ‘That has to be part of the setpieces.’” Screenwriter Scott Beck (A Quiet Place) Filmmaker Magazine interview with Matt Mulcahey
Here’s a clip where the young actors Millicent Simmonds and Noah Jope discuss shooting that scene inside a silo surrounded by corn.
Here’s what part of that scene looked like on the page of the original screenplay.
That silo scene reminds me a little of the Mt. Rushmore scene in Hitchcock’s North By Northwest.
P.S. You want to know an odd connection between North By Northwest and A Quiet Place. Cary Grant, who starred in North By Northwest, died in Davenport, Iowa. Where did A Quiet Place screenwriters (Beck and Bryan Woods) grow up and begin making movies? Davenport/Bettendorf, Iowa. (Part of what’s known as the Quad Cities.) Check out my 2010 postCary Grant and T. Bone…”somewhere in Iowa.” I don’t just make this stuff up. Check out Cary Grant’s IMDB page and see where he died. Then look up Bryan Woods IMDB page and see where he was born.
“The perfect movie doesn’t have any dialogue. So you should always be striving to make a silent movie.”
David Mamet On Film Directing
“It’s good not to follow the herd. Go the other way.” Filmmaker Robert Rodriguez From the post Are You an Anomaly?
Over the weekend I went to see A Quiet Place in theaters for the third time. I’ve only seen a few films three times in theaters in my life. They include this eclectic mix:
Tender Mercies Jean de Florette Hoop Dreams
Grand Canyon Good Will Hunting
Seabiscuit The Artist Ida
The only connection I can make to that list and A Quiet Place is there is a strand of contemplativeness in all of them. (That and Ida is a Polish film and A Quiet Place director/actor/co-writer John Krasinski has Polish roots.)
But since the other screenwriters of A Quiet Place (Scott Beck and Bryan Woods) have Iowa roots I thought it would be fun to go back over the past decade of posts here at Screenwriting from Iowa…and Other Unlikely Places and find some things that resonate between this blog and A Quiet Place.
(I realized after writing this post that it essentially curates a greatest hits shortlist of sorts from posts over the years gleaned from various sources— books, DVD commentaries, interviews, etc.— where writers and filmmakers talked about some of the most common visual storytelling principles.)
“For me, it was a matter of years of trying to develop my writing in the same way that some people spend years learning to play the violin.” Writer/director Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption)
A Quiet Placehas now been out in theaters for a whole month and still came in #3 at the box office this weekend. You could also say it entered full culture iconic status over the weekend when Saturday Night Live spoofed it with their A Kanye Placeskit.
And also over the weekend, Scott Myers at Go Into the Story concluded a six-part interview with A Quiet Place screenwriters Scott Beck and Bryan Woods. Here’s an excerpt that touches on the great opening of that movie without really spoiling it for those of you who haven’t seen it yet.
Very early on, the idea that attracted us was opening with a completely idyllic farmscape and what appears to be the perfect family living out the perfect life. Little by little, as this family starts to move about their farmhouse, we start to realize that there are weird things going on.
They’re putting padding on the walls. They’re wearing shoe covers on their feet. They don’t seem to be speaking very much. Everything is really quiet. It all builds up to that Monopoly scene where there’s a noise and we realize, ‘Oh, there’s creatures out there. If they make a noise, then they’re in danger.’
“John Krasinski is not the name you’d think of like ‘Can’t wait to see a horror movie by that guy.’ And the reason why is I wouldn’t think that either. Until I read this script originally by these amazing writers Beck & Woods (Scott Beck & Bryan Woods), and they had this incredible idea of a family that had to live quietly or else they would die. And to me, this whole movie is about family. It’s not a horror movie—I mean it is a horror movie, but to me the theme of family and what would you really do for your kids is the reason why I did the movie.”
Director, writer, actor John Krasinski (A Quiet Place)
Box Office Mojo had A Quiet Place stepping back into the top of the box office over the weekend and crossing the $200 million mark worldwide. Pretty amazing for a non-franchise that cost $17 million to make.
Congrats to both Scott Beck and Bryan Woods who originally wrote the script, and to John Kransinki who directed the film and honed the script.
Because Beck and Woods are from Bettendorf, Iowa (and are familiar with this blog) this is as good a time as any to make them the poster boys for “Screenwriting from Iowa…and Other Unlikely Places” (even if they’re in their 30s now). They join Oscar-winning Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody who I named years ago as the poster girl for the blog.
It just so happens that Beck, Woods, and Cody are all graduates of the University of Iowa. I’ve been asked if I teach at U-Iowa (or was when I lived in Iowa) or was a student there and the answer is no and no. I have no connection at all to the University of Iowa.
I simply started this little blog in 2008 after seeing Juno and here we are a decade later. It just so happens that the University of Iowa turns out some talented people.
Shortly before Thanksgiving I made a stop in Longmont, Colorado which is about a 45 minute drive north of downtown Denver. I’d never been there before, nor had my wife who spent a good deal of her life in Denver. On the Visit Longmont website they call the town “Colorado’s Best Kept Secret.” I think […]
Screenwriting from Iowa 