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.
At the end of Ted Hope's book Hope for Film he has an appendix that lists 141 Problems and Opportunities for the Independent World. The list flowed from a blog post he wrote back in 2010. You can find the entire list here, but I'm just going to highlight one problem today.
124. Artists cannot afford to live in our cultural centers. It's a real Catch-22. Artists make cultural centers, but these places become too pricey for their creators to live in. If you are in the middle class, you can only afford 14 percent of the currently available homes in San Francisco. The number drops to only 2.5 percent in New York City. I love both cities, but can't see my future in either of them as a result. And I don't really want to move to Akron, Ohio, either (no offense intended, Akron!).
If you don't have wealthy parents or a trust fund to support you for a few years until you get some traction in New York or L.A. what is one to do? Many articles over the years have talked about the struggle of creative people trying to pay their bills in the big cities. And if you tack on a large film school debt, forgetaboutit.
It makes me wonder where people like Jim Jarmusch (Stranger than Paradise) would go today if they were starting out in 2018 instead of the 1970s.
I started writing this blog in 2008 after seeing Diablo Cody's Juno and learning that she went to school in Iowa City and wrote the Juno screenplay in the suburbs of Minneapolis. She went on to move to L.A. and win an Oscar for that script. A Midwest success story.
As of this weekend, we have another Midwest success story. And, yes, one also with Iowa roots.
The original screenplay for The Quiet Place was written by Scott Beck and Bryan Woods. After the script sold to Paramount in 2016, John Kraninski came on board to further develop the script, and direct and star in the finished version that this past weekend finished at top of the box office.
So which "cultural center" did these guys develop their filmmaking chops? I'm glad you asked.
They're based in L.A. now but made their first short films and Nightlight (2015) back in Iowa.
Of course, this doesn't exactly address Ted Hope's question that I started off this blog addressing. But the drum I've been hitting for the past decade is there are filmmakers rising up all over the world finding support and inspiration from their communities.
The Beatles had Hamburg to refine their sound, Tom Petty had Gainesville.
When Petty died earlier this week a few places mentioned that he was born and raised in Gainesville, Florida before his success as a musician on the world stage. But since a part of this blog is about a sense of place, I'd like to spotlight just what it meant that Petty was from Gainesville.
The first time I visited Gainesville I was struck how it was unlike any place I'd ever been. I was 17 years old and hadn't ventured far from the Orlando suburbs where I was raised. I was part of a high school football team that made the two hour drive north to play a game on the same field where the University of Florida played their games.
This was not the part of Gainesville where Petty came from, but it helped pave the way for his success.
I was in the redneck, hillbilly part [of Gainesville]. I wasn't part of the academic circle, but it's an interesting place because you can meet almost any kind of person from many walks of life because of the university. But it's really surrounded by this kind of very rural kind of people that are — you know, they're farmers or tractor drivers or just all kinds of — game wardens, you name it. So it's an interesting blend.
The closet Petty got be a student at the University of Florida was working as a groundskeeper at the University of Florida. But the large campus, and the Lipham Music store where students and local muscians hung out, did help him get his musical education.
Gainesville has long had a reputation as a party school, and in Petty's day that gave bands nightly musical opportunities to play. A step up from the teen dances and Moose Lodges he started doing when he was 14.
A lesser know fact is Petty took guitar lessons for 18 months as a teenager from Don Felder—as in Don Felder, member of the Eagles (1974-2001)—and co-writer of the song Hotel California. Felder himself took slide guitar lessons from Duane Alman. That's the kind of musical talent kicking around Gainesville in the 60s and 70s.
"Tom Petty came in [the music store where I taught] one day, gosh, he must've been 12 or 13. He had been playing bass in a band called the Epics that I knew as the Rucker Brothers Band and he wanted to play guitar… so I started teaching him to play and went over to his house a couple of times and hung out and heard him play and went over to two or three of the Rucker Brothers' shows 'cause it was a bit of a train wreck. I kind of helped put them together in the sense that one of them would play rhythm and one of them would play lead while Tommy was playing bass and just help sort through their band to help these kids put their garage band together…. Growing up together in Gainesville and seeing one of my students blossom as an incredibly gifted musician and songwriter has been one of my most fulfilling experiences in this life.
Both Petty and Felder would both go on to become more than local legends. And they weren't alone.
As Petty and third band Mudcrutch (after the Sundowners and Epic) became a popular regional band playing clubs and large music festivals ("mini-Woodstocks") and they even opened for the Jacksonvile-based band Lynyrd Skynyrd. By the time Petty headed to Los Angeles in 1974 the 24-year-old had a solid ten years of playing and performing experience. He would go on to sell 80 million albums. But the seeds were planted and nurtured right there in Gainesville, Florida.
In the world of film outside of Los Angeles, Austin and Portland have an excellent track record of having that kind of iron sharpens iron vibe that Gainesville had musically back in the day. And over the years I've tried to show little pockets around the world where people come from on their way to bigger success.
Yes, screenwriters can even have roots in Iowa. Three solid examples are Fight Club screenwriter Jim Uhls and screenwriter/podcaster John August (Big Fish), who both studied journalism and/or theater at Drake University in Des Moines, and Oscar-winning Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody (who was media studies student at the University of Iowa in Iowa City).
Today I interviewed screenwriter Rick Ramage (Stigmata) and his 25 year journey has been an interesting one. If I told you he optioned his first screenplay for only $5,000 you may not be impressed—until you learned that it was while he was still a student at AFI. And that it quickly led him to working on projects with Sydney Pollack and Steven Spielberg.
And if that doesn't impress you, what if I told you he once sold a spec script for 2.5 million dollars? If none of the above impresses you I'll have to result to playing my "unlikely places" card and tell you that he was born in Fargo, North Dakota and raised—and mostly remained— in Denver, Colorado through all the highs and lows of working in the Hollywood film business.
I'll unpack his journey more next month, but for now here's a sample of our Q&A earlier today.
SWS Question: What encouragement do you have for a screenwriter who doesn't want to uproot and move to L.A.—can they succeed from North Dakota or South Africa?
Christopher Lockhart Q&A (Part 1) The WME Story Editor says you don't need a great script, but the right script.
P.S. Any produced screenwriters who are interesting in being interviewed and passing on their knowledge and insights to other writers send me an email at info@scottwsmith.com.