John August

John

Weekend Read, for your consideration

Awards, Weekend Read

weekend read iconWeekend Read, our app for reading screenplays on the iPhone, now features scripts from 21 of this year’s award contenders.

  • A Most Violent Year
  • Belle
  • Big Eyes
  • Birdman
  • Boxtrolls
  • Boyhood
  • Calvary
  • Dear White People
  • The Fault in Our Stars
  • Foxcatcher
  • The Gambler
  • Get On Up
  • The Grand Budapest Hotel
  • Into the Woods
  • Kill the Messenger
  • Locke
  • Love Is Strange
  • St. Vincent (de Van Nuys)
  • Still Alice
  • Unbroken
  • Whiplash

Weekend Read doesn’t host any of these files; we’re always linking to the official PDFs hosted on studio websites. In most cases, those scripts work great, but there are exceptions.

This year, the troublesome scripts are Gone Girl, The Imitation Game and Theory of Everything. Weekend Read 1.0.8 — in review now at Apple — handles these screenplays fine. It should be out later this week.

Weekend Read is free, with a paid upgrade option to increase your library storage.

Don’t use “thought” verbs

Words on the page

I love Chuck Palahniuk’s advice to writers:

From this point forward – at least for the next half year – you may not use “thought” verbs. These include: Thinks, Knows, Understands, Realizes, Believes, Wants, Remembers, Imagines, Desires, and a hundred others you love to use.

Palahniuk argues that every time you use one of these verbs, you’re robbing yourself of the chance to describe something fully — to show rather than tell.

For example: Waiting for the bus, Mark started to worry about how long the trip would take..”

A better break-down might be: “The schedule said the bus would come by at noon, but Mark’s watch said it was already 11:57. You could see all the way down the road, as far as the Mall, and not see a bus. No doubt, the driver was parked at the turn-around, the far end of the line, taking a nap. The driver was kicked back, asleep, and Mark was going to be late. Or worse, the driver was drinking, and he’d pull up drunk and charge Mark seventy-five cents for death in a fiery traffic accident…”

In screenwriting, we’re already forced to do a lot of this self-restriction, since we can’t directly state characters’ inner lives. And Palahniuk’s absolutism isn’t always suited for screenplays; there will be times when a parenthetical (realizing) is exactly what you need.

Still: it’s great advice.

Left or Right

Directors, Story and Plot

This link has been sitting in my queue for months, but it’s still worth sharing. Tony Zhou looks at how character choice is framed as going left or right.

You see this technique in movies going back to the dawn of cinema, but no recent movie has used it as fully as Snowpiercer, in which the entire film moves on a linear track.

On the page, you’ll rarely call out “right” or “left.” But that sense of forcing characters to choose between two visual possibilities is a fundamental and frequently-useful paradigm.