The 'Fargo' characters, they're the characters of my people. They're stoic, hardworking, uncomplaining, and I loved them.
I grew up in Batavia, Ill., a small town out in the corn fields, west of Chicago. It was boring.
Reagan grows up in 1920s Dixon, Illinois, and it's the heartland of America. It's a time when Americans are particularly drawn to this small town world because it's beginning to pass.
Donald Trump and Mike Pence will restore the American dream for the next would-be visionary from small-town America.
My parents came to this country after World War II, Jews from Czechoslovakia who had survived Auschwitz and Dachau. They settled with my sister in rural Ohio in the 1950s, where my dad became the town doctor and I was born.
I developed a theory that, in many ways, the early 'Andy Griffith' episodes especially were an awful lot like a Capra movie. They were a lot like 'Mr. Deeds' or a lot like 'It's a Wonderful Life' in tone and presentation.
I want to make more films in the heartland, the forgotten America.
All my roots are still in the prarie country of the Middle West.
I grew up in Columbus, Indiana, a kind of industrial and farmland place.
Bloom County was set in a tidy, rural environment probably because of Harper Lee's 'To Kill a Mockingbird.'
Main Street, U.S.A. is America at the turn of the century--the crossroads of an era. The gas lamps and the electric lamp--the horse-drawn car and auto car. Main Street is everyone's hometown- the heart line of America.
I come from Indiana, the home of more first-rate second-class men than any other state in the Union.
I'm a big road trip guy. I'm the guy who gets in the RV and drives across country. And when you do that, you really get to see small-town America.
What I want to do is tell stories about normal people in the American suburbs. I don't write the book where it's a conspiracy reaching the prime minister; I don't write the book with the big serial killer who lops off heads. My setting is a very placid pool of suburbia, family life. And within that I can make pretty big splashes.
If you're looking for light entertainment, you can't get much lighter than 'Bye Bye Birdie,' a flyweight farce about the coming of rock n' roll to small-town America.
In Delaware, citizens still celebrate the day after Election Day as “Return Day.” In some counties, rivals parade together and in others they bury a ceremonial hatchet. Especially in small-town America, the post-campaign reconciliation was as routine as the pre-election combat. These rituals, once widespread, restored civility by shifting everyone’s identity as active partisans to their more transcendent identity as patriotic Americans.
For much of America, the all-American values depicted in Norman Rockwell's classic illustrations are idealistic. For those of us from Vermont, they're realistic. That's what we do.
I would like to be the chronicler of something that I think is going down the drain very swiftly, and that is small-town, middle-class southern life.
It turns out, the bikers and the truckers and people in dive bars are the nicest people in the world.
I came to the plain fields of Ohio with pictures painted by Hollywood movies and the works of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. None of them had much to say, if at all, about Dayton, Ohio.
I grew up in Kilmichael, Mississippi. It's a dot on the map 100 miles north of Jackson.
If you've seen 'Friday Night Lights' - that was just like my town.
I grew up on Stephen King, reading the books. I love the small town, 1950s feel to it, that nostalgia, and that old America. What happens when something weird starts happening to all these people, something other-worldly, something demonic?
'Friday Night Lights' was an incredible show.
I used to be sick of the backroads of Minnesota. I had to drive 30 miles to get home every day, take the schoolbus for two hours. But to drive through America and see the backroads, from Nashville to Memphis, Lovick to New Mexico, was incredible. It was probably the greatest trip of my life.
