Moon Over Nebraska
Alongside Syd Field and Robert McKee are the likes of Lew Hunter, whose life has been deemed worthy of its own documentary.
Friday, September 21, 2007 at 10:20 PM
By FilmStew Staff



While earning a second Masters Degree at UCLA in the late 1950's, Lew Hunter asked author and visiting lecturer John Steinbeck what he could do to be a writer. After pondering the question for a moment, Steinbeck replied, ‘Write!,’ and then walked off.


So that’s what Hunter did; more than 150 screenplays in all, on a typewriter stolen from early TV show host Ernie Kovacs. Today, as an author and retired UCLA professor, he travels around the country to teach screenwriting and runs the Indian Summer Screenwriting Colony, an annual two-week intensive workshop in his new hometown of Superior, Nebraska.


The 2007 edition of the Superior event is currently underway, running from September 15th through the 28th, but it is a student who attended a few years ago that really got the attention of Hunter: Megan Steinbeck, the aforementioned author’s granddaughter. What goes around comes around, in this case, gloriously.


Hunter, who still teaches a course at UCLA and is a Chairman Emeritus there, is keeping busy beyond the classroom as well. There’s his next book, the tantalizingly titled Naked Screenwriting: 22 Academy Award Winning Screenwriters Bare Their Hearts and Souls To You. And there’s Once in a Lew Moon, a long-germinating documentary about Hunter's life journey from TV director to Hollywood producer and prolific screenwriter to academic.


Amazingly, today’s Lew location filming stop at Sandy Creek High School in Fairfield, Nebraska brought 23 months of production on the doc to a close, with Hunter and former Cornhuskers football coach Tom Osborne warning students about the dangers of addiction to crystal meth and other drugs.

Surely, if someone in one of Hunter’s classes suggested that their screenplay was going to take 23 months to get filmed, that person would get an F. But the rules of documentary filmmaking are different, as are those of Hunter’s semi-retirement.

Following his Superior colony session, it’s off to Portland, Maine in October for a weekend seminar session.

http://www.filmstew.com/showArticle.aspx?ContentID=16435