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WINSTON-SALEM — Nearly four years later, after writing what some called North Carolina’s most important North Carolina art film, Angus Mac­Lachlan still gets the itch.

And boy, he had it Monday.

He wanted to calm down. He wanted to take notes. He wanted to find inspiration and not be afraid of staring at creative emptiness, that wicked beast that has kept him sleepless a few nights.

He knows it’ll come. That germ of an idea. So, as a jackhammer tap-danced outside his third-floor window, MacLachlan talked about a central truth of any creative endeavor: The belief that what you’re doing has value.

“That gives me inspiration,” said MacLachlan from his writing studio’s thrift-store couch in downtown Winston-Salem. “It’s very easy as a middle-class person to believe that what you’re doing is ridiculously futile and stupid.

“But you have to try, try, try to believe that what you’re doing has value.”

It does for MacLachlan. And he’ll talk about that tonight at UNCG’s Weatherspoon Art Museum, with a screening of “Junebug.”

It made 50 best-of lists for 2005, got Amy Adams an Oscar nomination as best actress and scored for Mac­Lachlan a nomination of best first screenplay at the Independent Spirit Awards, the Academy Awards’ free-spirited cousin.

Four years later, “Junebug” still opens doors.

He’s juggling at least three film projects, including one with actress Rachel McAdams (“The Notebook”), as well as another with Adams and Phil Morrison, the Winston-Salem filmmaker who directed “Junebug.’’

But maybe there’s no better place to tap into our own pop-culture sensibilities than on Facebook, everyone’s social networking Web site.

Two weeks ago, MacLachlan’s wife, Jennifer Snowhite, found on Facebook her next-door neighbor from 30 years ago. They grew up together in Indiana. When she gave him the thumbnail sketch of her life, including the name of her husband, his response said, well, everything.

“Isn’t that the guy who wrote 'Junebug’?”

MacLachlan penned “Junebug” nearly 20 years ago. Really, it was first called “Divertimento,” a play about the estranged relationship between two brothers in North Carolina.

In the audience, filled with people in folding chairs in Winston-Salem, was a teenager named Phil Morrison. He never forgot what he saw.

Morrison turned “Junebug” into a beautiful film.

He filmed it in Winston-Salem for less than $1 million and captured the emotional landscape of family and the unspoken clash of cultures: South vs. North, world-wise vs. world-weary.

And there was no better place to feel that than in MacLachlan’s script.

MacLachlan has an incredible knack for catching the Southern subtleties of language and finds instances that resonate on both sides of the Atlantic.

“That’s my family,” someone from a small town in Belgium told Morrison three years ago.

And that’s what MacLachlan strives for. He’s 50, a father, a husband, a Winston-Salem native who graduated from what’s now known as the University of North Carolina School of the Arts.

He’s written scores of plays, screenplays and short stories, been called the Twin City’s poet laureate and heard from director Mike Nichols and actor Brad Pitt about the excellence of his work.

All for work he’s done in Winston-Salem, mainly in his downtown writing studio, a one-bedroom apartment off North Broad he has rented for nearly a quarter-century.

There, behind a wooden door that bears a taped baby photo of his daughter Lilly, now 7½, he punches in like a first-shift worker and chases his creativity from 9 to 5.

When he misses it, he gets the itch. But when he finds it — that humor, that depth, that “humanness,” as he calls it — he knows he’s onto something.

Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com