John August

QandA

When is it okay to write for free?

Film Industry, QandA, Rights and Copyright

questionmarkI’m a relatively new screenwriter, also working as a PA and doing script coverage. I’m loving it but it’s not helping me on actually getting my writing out there at all. While the coverage is helping me grow as a writer it’s not helping me get a foot in the door, so to speak.

This has left me looking around for any writing gig I can land to help get my name out there, but I’m quite unsure as to if I should even approach an unpaid writing position. Not that I’m not willing to put the work in but I just don’t want to get screwed over.

Am I right to be wary of these types of positions? I just don’t know how to get my work out there.

— Tim
Toronto

Any work you’re not getting paid for should be yours and yours alone. That’s why aspiring screenwriters write spec scripts. That’s what you should focus on writing.

Still, there may be situations in which it makes sense to write a script for someone else without getting paid. You become friends with a promising-but-broke young director who asks you to write her screenplay. You might say yes. And while it would be smart to have some kind of contract at the outset delimiting rights and responsibilities, it will ultimately come down to trust.

As the writer, you own copyright until you don’t — either by signing a contract transferring copyright, or by entering an agreement to make it a work-for-hire. Yet in many of these situations, someone is coming to you with a property, an idea, or some pre-existing material that makes ownership much less clear-cut.

So again, you’re ultimately going to decide based on how much you trust your collaborators.

You may find writing gigs that are more work than simple coverage but less than a whole screenplay. Say a scrappy young producer asks you to write three webisodes for him, unpaid. Run the cost-benefit analysis in your head. Would you get enough out of the experience to make it worth the hours you spent? If so, do it.

But my first advice remains my final advice: most of what you write should be for yourself or people who can pay you in money, not experience.

One dash, two dashes

Formatting, QandA, Words on the page

questionmarkI’m thinking this might boil down to “personal preference”, but I can’t seem to find any direct answers as to whether it’s best perception-wise to use one hyphen, two hyphens (as I see more and more) or no hyphen at all? The trend seems to be going towards two, but I can’t see or find what the relevance is. Can you elaborate?

— Chris
The OC

There are at least three distinct names for those little horizontal lines used in English.

A **hyphen** is the shortest of these, and is used to break a word into syllables (i.e. hyphenation). You also use hyphens to make compound words like inside-out. On your keyboard, it’s probably next to the plus sign, so it’s fair to conflate it with “minus.”

A **dash** is a punctuation mark. An **en-dash** is commonly used for ranges, such as “6–10 years.” An **em-dash** is longer, and used to set off a phrase—often a parenthetical thought, like this—from the rest of the sentence.

With most typefaces, you can and should use en-dashes and em-dashes instead of just automatically hitting the hyphen. You can use a special key combination, ((On a Mac, you make an en-dash with option-hyphen and the em-dash with shift-option-hyphen.)) but many applications will automatically choose the right one based on context, such as converting two hyphens into an em-dash.

Em-dashes in particular just look better. And you don’t need to put spaces around the dash.

Screenplays are set in monospace fonts like Courier. Because every letter takes up the same amount of space, a lot of what looks good in normal typefaces looks wrong in Courier. ((Notably, we still double-space after the period in Courier.)) Traditional typewriters never had “real” dashes, so the convention was to use two hyphens instead, generally set off with a space on either side.

TODD BLANDERSNOT (14) is the homeliest kid at Miskatonic Academy -- and two of Cthulu’s kids go here.

That’s what I use: two floating hyphens. Other writers jam two hyphens right at the end of a word, ((The Wibberleys do this. We rewrote once each other on a project, and it involved a lot of dash-redeployment.)) or leave a single hyphen dangling at the end of a line when cutting before the end of a sentence.

You can also simply stop a line early, with no punctuation. I often do this when the next thing will be an intermediate slugline:

Dazed, Todd scrambles to feet just as

THREE GRIFFONS

swoop down from above, snatching random classmates in their talons.

It’s all to your taste. The important thing is to pick a style and stay consistent throughout the script.

Are parentheticals overused, cont’d

Follow Up, Formatting

Following up on last week’s article, Synthian took it upon himself to count how often screenwriters are actually using them, resulting in “a semi-random sampling of successful multi-decade, multi-genre writers vs their own parentheticals.”

The following numbers do not include non-dialog parentheses such as (O.S.), (V.O.) (MORE), or (CONT’D). They represent only dialogical parentheticals such as (through the megaphone) as well as (beat)s and (pause)s.

Brian Helgeland

THE POSTMAN: 137 pages
161 parentheticals
1.17 parentheticals per page

LA CONFIDENTIAL: 110 pages
99 parentheticals
.9 parentheticals per page

MAN ON FIRE: 128 pages
76 parentheticals
.59 parentheticals per page

Brian Helgeland’s average parentheticals per page: .88

John August

BIG FISH: 124 pages
97 parentheticals
.78 parentheticals per page

THE NINES: 100 pages
57 parentheticals
.57 parentheticals per page

CHARLIE’S ANGELS: 104 pages
109 parentheticals
1.04 parentheticals per page

John August’s average parentheticals per page: .79

Other writers

DAVID WEBB PEOPLES, 12 MONKEYS: 150 pages
144 parentheticals
.96 parentheticals per page

AARON SORKIN, A FEW GOOD MEN: 149 pages
225 parentheticals
1.51 parentheticals per page

J.F. LAWTON, PRETTY WOMAN: 126 pages
143 parentheticals
1.13 parentheticals per page

TED ELLIOTT & TERRY ROSSIO, PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: 139 pages
152 parentheticals
1.09 parentheticals per page

With this (obviously limited) sample of 10 screenplays, we find a cohort of successful screenwriters using an average of .97 parentheticals per page. That’s higher than I would have guessed. I’m also surprised to find myself on the lower end of parenthesists.

Learn more about the basics of parenthetical usage here!

Those who can’t write, teach seminars

So-Called Experts

Craig Mazin came back from Austin with some strong words about script consultants:

Listening to and questioning the people who do the job you want is a smart move.

What is NOT a smart move is listening to the people who DON’T do the job. And who are they? Oh, you know who they are. They’re selling books. They’re selling seminars. They’re “script consultants.” And for a small fee, or a medium fee, or a goddamned flat-out ridiculous fee, they’ll coach you right into the big leagues!

Horseshit. Let me say it loudly and clearly: IF THEY WERE ANY GOOD, THEY WOULD BE DOING WHAT I DO, NOT DOING WHAT THEY DO.

Dig? Simple rule of thumb: don’t spend a dime on a book, a lesson, a seminar or advice if the person selling DOESN’T HAVE A REAL MOVIE CREDIT.

Craig focuses on Linda Seger, but the fact is that very few people who write screenwriting how-to books have meaningful writing credits. They make a living selling advice to aspiring screenwriters, either one-on-one or at seminars.

I don’t endorse any of them. I haven’t found any I’d recommend to readers.

But here’s where I disagree with Craig: I think you can learn from people who have spent a long time analyzing a craft, even if they’re not particularly good at practicing it.

Sports are the easiest analogy. Many of the best coaches were never star players. Rather, the top coaches have the ability to extract the best efforts from the athletes they train. They recognize weakness and focus attention. It’s conceivable that the same could hold true for screenwriting. There might be individuals with a remarkable sense of both the broad narrative form and the precise on-the-page details.

And yet: in Hollywood, someone with this set of skills could make a much better living as a producer, manager or development executive. Rather than charging screenwriters, they would work with them to get movies made. And they do. I’ve worked with a half-dozen non-writers who taught me a lot about screenwriting. None of them charged me a dime.

When I see “script consultant,” I don’t think failed screenwriter. I think failed producer.