John August

QandA

Javier Grillo-Marxuach on craft

Television, Words on the page

The Tiny Protagonist has a good interview with Javier Grillo-Marxuach (a writer/producer on Lost and many other shows), talking about how he got started and the craft of television.

I like his explanation of keeping the reader engaged:

You know what a Gilligan cut is? It’s how on Gilligan’s Island, the captain always goes, “I’m not wearing the chicken suit!” and then bam –- he’s wearing the chicken suit. A Gilligan cut is very much a SMASH CUT TO. So if I have two scenes that are sort of languid scenes of characters, you probably don’t put a CUT TO. But if you’re doing a Gilligan cut, then you put a SMASH CUT, and instead of using a slug line, you turn your slug line into the captain wearing the chicken suit, and you describe the setting later. So you do things like that really to try to get the reader involved with the prose so they don’t just go from dialogue to dialogue.

To get a sense of his style, check out Grillo-Marxuach’s site, where he’s posted a bunch of his scripts, treatments and pitch documents.

He also discusses one thing I’ve come to appreciate over the years: screenwriting does get easier with practice. What you lose in youthful energy you make up for in finesse:

I find that, what experience gives you is craft, which means that when inspiration fails you, you can still build a pretty workable set of bookcases, even if they’re not the prettiest bookcases. And an ability to cope, mostly to cope with the psychological rigors of the job.

Suing to get an agent, cont’d

Film Industry, Follow Up

Justin Samuels, the guy who filed a lawsuit against CAA and WME for not representing him, just wrote in:

Mr. August, you’ve no idea what other things I have or haven’t done to break into the industry. You’ve no proof that I haven’t previously lived in Los Angeles. You don’t know if I’ve had internships or not, or if I’ve done other industry jobs or not. You’re making assumptions without having evidence to back them up.

That’s not an excerpt. That’s the whole thing.

True: I have no proof that he hasn’t done those things. I also can’t prove Amelia Earhart never French-kissed a squirrel. But I trust my hunches.

If Justin is writing in to set the record straight, couldn’t he, you know, set the record straight? For instance, he could say when he lived in Los Angeles. Or had an industry job. Or won screenwriting competitions. Or applied for studio-backed diversity programs.

He’s given me no reason to assume he’s done anything other than write scripts, query letters and lawsuits. Maybe he’ll read this and fill in the details.

Justin followed up his first comment with another one specifically about internships:

I should say something about internships. Internships are often unpaid, meaning the intern is working for free. Exploitation at its finest. Its okay if the intern has parents who are willing to subsidize or is on a government program, otherwise the intern may end up sleeping in a cardboard box (the intern maybe unpaid, but rent, food, gas, and other necessities are never free).

So basically, one need not apply for an internship if one doesn’t have either parents or the government to cover one’s expenses.

Here Samuels has a point. Unpaid internships favor those with enough money that they don’t need to get paid. It’s a concern I’ve seen raised in many industries, particularly ones like art and publishing that are centered in high-cost cities like New York.

But I’d argue that unpaid internships are actually a very small part of the Hollywood ecosystem. All the interns in Los Angeles could get Raptured tomorrow and the town would function just fine. A much more fundamental part of the film and television workplace is the front line of PAs and assistants who toil long hours for a wage that, while meager, is livable.

Justin, if you’re sticking around, the 80+ commenters on the original thread probably have questions for you.

H.P. Lovecraft’s Commonplace Book

Genres, Writing Process

Bruce Sterling publishes a list of Lovecraft’s undeveloped story ideas:

96 Unknown fires seen across the hills at night.

97 Blind fear of a certain woodland hollow where streams writhe among crooked roots, and where on a buried altar terrible sacrifices have occur’d — Phosphorescence of dead trees. Ground bubbles.

98 Hideous old house on steep city hillside—Bowen St.—beckons in the night—black windows—horror unnam’d—cold touch and voice—the welcome of the dead.

Sterling doesn’t discuss the origin of the list, but all 221 entries seem distinctly Lovecraftian. Most of them don’t suggest plots per se, but rather focus on strange words or images. That makes sense for Lovecraft, who was never known for his characters, but rather his mood-making.

There’s not a single line of dialogue to be found. If future historians dug through my notebooks, that’s mostly what they’d find: bits of speech with very little context. Some of those lines are particular to what I’m writing at the moment, but many float untethered to any specific project.

I find myself scribbling down random ideas less now than I used to. Some of that is because of Evernote, which I use as my all-purpose in-box. My Twitter feed also soaks up a lot of these thoughts, at least the ones that can be rewritten to fit in 140 characters.

Get better flashlights

Genres

The Lazy Self-Indulgent Book Reviewer has a few words for futuristic television characters:

Why are, like, graduates of Starfleet Academy lugging around physical cylinders that emit light from one end? Why don’t they all have chip implants in their palms that glow when activated?

I mean, my iPhone has a better flashlight app than I’ve seen used by an actual Time Lord, and the iPhone’s flashlight app sucks.

Glowing palms are an ergonomic disaster. Try it.

But her point is well-taken. Characters generally want to light an area, not simply a narrow cone. The wizards in the Potterverse seem to have a good solution: use your wand like a torch, or fling the sphere of light where you want to see. (But they’re magic, yo. So they could also probably cast a spell to make it less dark, or give themselves ultravision.)

For sci-fi, a good choice would be hovering drones that light the area. As a bonus, keeping the light physically separated from the characters makes them less of a target.

And the best iPhone flashlight app is my friend Troy’s InfinitLight.