Schools
College Notes: Rockville Student Dreams Of Writing For Pixar Studios
A Rockville college student majoring in screenwriting at the University of Iowa dreams of one day writing for Pixar.
![A Rockville college student majoring in screenwriting at the University of Iowa dreams of one day writing for Pixar.](https://patch.com/img/cdn20/users/23738464/20230313/034131/styles/patch_image/public/2022-11-18-screenwriting-illustration-jatorner-0182___13151915680.jpg)
ROCKVILLE, MD — Dan Cummins, a double major in screenwriting arts and English and creative writing from Rockville, is currently a student in the Department of Cinematic Arts in the University of Iowa's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, according to a release from Merit News.
Dreaming of one day writing a film for animation studio Pixar, Cummins first came to the Iowa City campus for a two-week summer residential program in creative writing.
Among Cummins' instructors were UI faculty and alumni of the Iowa Writers Workshop.
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"Literature is baked into almost every aspect of the city," Cummins said, in a release. "There's so much literary history here. At the library, you can go to a machine and print out a short story written by a student. We have so many lit magazines and incredible bookstores. For a writer, it's like a haven."
That exposure to what UI had to offer students interested in becoming writers influenced his decision to apply there after Cummins graduated high school.
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UI first began offering a major in screenwriting arts in 2020. Even though the program wasn't offered when Cummins was a freshman, he switched is major over to cinema once it became available.
"Writing, for me, used to be sitting at a computer, often late into the night, banging my head on a keyboard, trying to get words out, and struggling," he said. "But screenwriting and filmmaking demand a lot of collaboration; otherwise, a movie doesn't get made. When you see your classmates two times a week for a couple of hours and read each other's work and share feedback, you become friends. I think that has made our writing better. The feedback is much more personal-and it's a community we're interested in keeping after graduation, hopefully for the rest of our careers."
With the help of program director Anahita Ghazvinizadeh, Cummins secured a three-month internship with Andrew Sugarman, a film producer at Pantheon Entertainment.
"Screenwriting can be a difficult field to be prominent in, but I'm very confident that there will be students out of Iowa who become very well-known and important screenwriters over the next few years," said Ghazvinizadeh, whose debut feature, "They," received a special screening at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. "The quality of their work is undeniable. We're not New York. We're not L.A. We are not a city with a lot of film productions. But we are a writing town, and my goal is to make this program not only a four-year BA program but a residency for writers to produce a lot of quality work."
To shine a light on the accomplished of college students from Rockville, Patch shares information provided by the students' families and Merit News. Don't see your award-winning scholar among those appearing in this academic honors list? Send the details to Patch editor Michael O'Connell at [email protected] and Patch will include them in a future post.
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