John August

QandA

Why Harry Can’t Spell

Follow Up, Genres

While I’m worrying about higher education as philanthropy, Samuel Arbesman dares to question the value of a Hogwarts education:

As near as I can tell, if you grow up in the magical world (as opposed to be Muggle-born, for example), you do not go to school at all until the age of eleven. In fact, it’s entirely unclear to me how the children of the wizarding world learn to read and write. There is a reason Hermione seems much more intelligent than Ron Weasley. It’s because Ron is very likely completely uneducated.

The books make mention of the Weasley kids going to another school before Hogwarts — and anyway, they’d be good candidates for home-schooling. But the larger issue is that such an insular and specialized education starting at such a young age is almost certainly a bad idea.

Perhaps some go off to college and graduate school. But that seems unlikely due to the dim view they take of the Muggle world. More likely, they go off to work in such places as a governmental agency, entirely unaware of political theory. Or they write for a daily newspaper, without knowing anything about journalism.

But then again, we live in a Muggle world full of under-educated politicians and journalists. And we don’t get wands.

(via Kottke.)

On film schools, and the business of education

Education

College president Dick Merriman thinks talking about “the business of education” sets the wrong expectations:

This college exists as a philanthropy because thousands of people, many of whom you and I will never know, have built it over the past 125 years. They built it for your benefit, knowing they would never meet you.

The college’s facilities, our endowment for scholarships, our mission—all of these have been built, and protected and sustained, for your benefit. They were built so you can gain a college education, find and pursue your passion, and commit yourselves to living a valuable life. In short, this college exists so you can become a better person and, in turn, help make the world a better place.

I serve on advisory boards for two universities, and find the demarcation between philanthropy and enterprise to be a constant (if sometimes silent) issue.

An athletic program is both a huge expense and a profit center — but to what degree does it contribute to the educational mission? Better marketing can boost applications, but will it result in a better outcome for students?

I went to film school at USC, a traditional non-profit university. I had access to experts and equipment and highly-motivated peers. But as a graduate student, I can’t honestly say that I needed the rest of the university. I didn’t need a quad and a student government and dormitories. The full, four-year experience was invaluable as an undergrad at Drake. It’s where I figured out a lot about my interests. But by the time I arrived in Los Angeles, I knew enough about what I wanted that I didn’t need historic buildings and school mascots.

Many film programs are unabashedly for-profit ventures, unaffiliated with a traditional university. They truly are businesses, not philanthropies. And maybe that’s okay. If a class promises to teach you advanced Avid editing for $900, that can be a business-customer transaction. I took a Final Cut Pro class through UCLA Extension and certainly never thought about a grade or diploma.

The danger is conflating this kind of specialized training with the mission of traditional colleges and universities, which I’d argue is to turn out well-educated citizens, regardless of their major. In both cases, you’re paying to learn, but a traditional university has different and higher expectations of its students. Merriman:

[Y]ou are permitted to change your mind and change your plans here. What you are not permitted to do here is waste our time. Because we have made an investment in you. Because we chose you to receive a fabulous gift. All we ask of you is that you honestly make your best effort to capitalize on this opportunity.

Oh, Jessica

Film Industry, Random Advice

I have to believe she was misquoted, or excerpted in some unflattering way, because Jessica Alba couldn’t have actually said this:

Good actors, never use the script unless it’s amazing writing. All the good actors I’ve worked with, they all say whatever they want to say.

Oh, Jessica. Where to start?

Scripts aren’t just the dialogue. Screenplays reflect the entire movie in written form, including those moments when you don’t speak. Do you know the real reason we hold table readings in pre-production? So the actors will read the entire script at least once.

Following your logic, you’ve never been in a movie with both good actors and amazing writing. That may be true, but it might hurt the feelings of David Wain, Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller.

You’re saying your co-stars who delivered their lines as written are not “good actors.” Awkward.

You’re setting dangerous expectations. So if an aspiring actor wishes to be “good,” she should say whatever she wants to say? That’s pretty terrible advice.

Screenwriters can be your best friends. We are pushovers for attractive people who pay attention to us. I wrote that bathtub scene in Big Fish because Jessica Lange made brief eye contact with me. So if you’re not getting great writing — and honestly, you’re not — ask to have lunch with the screenwriter. I’ve seen you on interviews. You’re charming. That charm could work wonders.

Again: I know that quotes often come out in ways we never intended. It’s lacking context — though the photos are lovely. (Hi, Carter Smith!) I’m calling this out just so we can all hopefully learn something.

(h/t David Dean Bottrell for the link.)

Cut a character, save a scene

Words on the page

Last night, I struggled with a scene that went on too long without really accomplishing its aims. The solution ended up being pretty simple: get rid of a character.

Rachel, I love you, but you don’t need to be in this scene.

I say “pretty simple” because getting her out of the bad scene meant revising the scene just before it to explain her absence. But an extra beat before the cut was worth it. The new scene is a page shorter and a lot sharper.

Why wasn’t this solution obvious from the start?

Well, Rachel is a pretty enjoyable character, and we like seeing her interact with the other characters in the scene. But she’s by nature a peacekeeper. When she’s around, the squabbling heroes tend to put their knives away. In real life, that’s a good thing. In drama, it’s non-dramatic.

As a general (and often excepted) rule, you’re better off with as few significant characters as possible in a scene. Each additional body you add is another set of relationships to keep track of, which helps explain this apparent paradox: the better we establish our characters, the fewer we can support in a scene.

It’s easy to write a scene with two principals and eight background players. As an audience, we don’t care about those eight. But if you put five principals in a scene, you’ve made your life difficult. The audience expects all five to contribute.

On the page, here’s an easy to way to distinguish important characters from unimportant ones: only name the characters who matter. Let SECURITY GUARD be just that. The minute you call him JOHNSON or DEBOERS, the reader promotes him from functionary to full-fledged character, with all the accompanying expectations.