John August

QandA

Habits, heavy lifting, and the possibility of suck

Charlie's Angels, Video, Writing Process

MakingOf has part two of my interview up on the site. (You can see part one here.)

Some notes on certain sections:

0:07 Writing process

In How to Write a Scene, I go into a lot more detail on “looping” and “scribble versions” of scenes.

0:49 How scripts have evolved

My hunch is that the modern era of writing action begins with James Cameron. Every screenwriter I know read and devoured his scripts for Terminator, Aliens and Point Break. We’re all probably channeling him a bit.

1:30 When I write

I really do try to do most of my work during “office hours.” But during crunch times — which has been a lot more, recently — I find myself going back to work after dinner, or setting the alarm for 5 a.m. to get stuff written before breakfast.

Writing is an inherently selfish act: you’re shutting the world out to live in a fantasy. You don’t really appreciate that until you have a family.

2:18 This could possibly suck

One of the main reasons we procrastinate is to give ourselves an excuse for why things might be terrible: “I know it’s not great, but I wrote it in three days.” Suck early and fix it.

3:30 Writer’s block

You know who gets writer’s block? Non-writers. They think it’s cool and romantic to struggle to make Art. They make sure everyone knows how torturous the process is, so when they finally squeeze something out, it won’t be judged on its merits but rather the emotional anguish involved in its creation.

Writers write. Hacks Posers whine about how hard it is. ((“Hacks” was really the wrong term, because there are some very prolific hacks. There are also some genuinely talented writers who go through spells of low productivity. I find stories glamorizing their travails really tedious, however.))

4:09 Heavy lifting

The twenty minute timer actually works. Do twenty minutes of solid work, then give yourself ten minutes of freedom.

Ideally, you want finesse: a combination of strength and dexterity that uses a scene’s natural momentum to make everything look effortless. But sometimes, that’s not possible: there isn’t time, or there’s some major impediment. With enough craft, an experienced screenwriter can often muscle a scene that shouldn’t otherwise work.

4:35 You can always cut something

I’m obliquely referencing a meeting for Charlie’s Angels, during which the studio president ripped ten pages out of the script and told me to write around what was missing.

5:10 Most people aren’t screenwriters

If you want to work in film or television, you need to work on films and television shows. Screenwriting is mostly writing, but without experience in how stuff is actually made, you’ll never be very good at it.

Groundhog Day and Unexplained Magic

Genres, Story and Plot

An observation made halfway through a five-hour meeting in Beijing: in the movie Groundhog Day, it is never explained why Bill Murray’s character is stuck in a time loop.

Yes, the emotional reason is clear: he’s a selfish asshole, and needs to learn to be less of one. But the actual supernatural mechanism is never part of the movie. There’s not a magic clock, or a nuclear wristwatch. Punxsutawney Phil isn’t secretly a wizard.

Rather, weatherman Phil Connors is stuck in a time loop because, well, he is. We buy it, and we don’t demand further explanation. ((According to Wikipedia, at least one draft of Groundhog Day did include an explicit reason for the time loop — a voodoo spell cast by a coworker. Not only did the movie not need it; I’d argue that being so specific would have hurt the premise by focusing attention on her rather than him.))

Most movies would make a point of singling out some physical object or act that brought about the situation. The hero would find something, break something or do something (an accidental birthday wish, pissing off a witch) as an inciting incident. It wouldn’t just happen.

But maybe it should.

You can often get rid of magic items and explicit wishes/curses, even in stories that seem to require them.

* Dorothy doesn’t do anything to summon the tornado that takes her from Kansas.

* Clark Kent doesn’t wish he could fly; he can fly because the story says he can. ((Or more broadly, the universe put baby Kal-El on a world with a certain color of sun.))

* The Connor family is marked for death not because of something they did or said, but because evil computers from the future worry about a threat. (Ditto for Neo in the Matrix.)

As the audience, we don’t demand proof. We accept the magic as part of the premise, and don’t require a prop to ground it.

To be clear: I’m not arguing to ban all magic props. Let Frodo have his ring. The Pevensie children can climb through a wardrobe into Narnia. And once in Oz, Dorothy should feel free to grab some dead woman’s shoes.

But when developing a story with a supernatural premise, fight the temptation to embody it in a thing. These MacGuffins ((A MacGuffin is a thing or idea that serves as a focal point to the plot, but is not what the movie is really about, and could easily be substituted with something else. TV Tropes has a long list of MacGuffins, which it considers “plot coupons.”)) get added with the aim of keeping things simple, but too often distract from the character’s real journey.

In your romantic comedy, Misfire, does your hero need to break up two ill-suited lovers, or get Cupid’s bow and arrow back? The former is funnier. The latter has more props and rules.

Always explore doing it the way Groundhog Day did: by letting magic questions go unasked and unanswered.

Quoting books in a script

QandA, Rights and Copyright, Words on the page

questionmarkIn my script, characters quote from several articles and textbooks to reinforce the validity of their discourse.

My question is: Besides in-text quotation marks, how should I go about crediting the books referenced? Are bibliographies fairly common or allowable in the screenplay format? Or is this only necessary in academic-type publications?

I’ve searched myriad style guides but I find little regarding endnotes/references/bibliographies for screenplays. And I’d like to get it right.

— Dave
New York City

Do you hear that? That BEEP BEEP BEEP sound? That’s a metaphorical truck carefully backing out of the wrong alley you’ve driven it into.

Screenplays don’t need to cite references because they don’t quote things. Or at least, they shouldn’t. Remember: a script is really a transitional document on the way towards creating a movie. Is your film going to have footnotes? Will a bibliography be printed on the popcorn bag?

Sure, you could have a character reading aloud from a textbook:

MARY

Maybe the enthalpy was increasing?

Todd grabs a chemistry textbook off the shelf. Flips through to find a dog-eared page.

TODD

No, see, it says here on page 56 that “exothermic reactions result in higher randomness -- or entropy -- of the system as a whole. They are characterized by a decrease in enthalpy.”

But this would be terrible. *Terrible.*

In fact, I believe this can be generalized into a rule:

**Any scene in which a character quotes from a real or imaginary text will be awful.**

I will quickly add the Whedon corollary:

**”…unless the unlikely existence of the text is part of the joke.”**

Dave, the reason you’re tempted to quote articles or textbooks is that you’re desperately looking for some authority to support your ideas. But the authority needs to come from within your script, not outside. Some examples:

* In The Matrix, anything Laurence Fishburne says has authority.

* In Iron Man, Tony Stark’s suit works because the movie says it does.

* In Up, a bunch of helium balloons can lift a house because it’s charming, damnit.

Cut those quotes. Let characters say what they need to say in their own voices.

Setting is not story

Film Industry, Genres, Pitches

This article from Sunday’s LA Times makes a great case study in the difference between an interesting setting and an actual movie idea:

Pagasa may be a 75-acre speck of sand and rock, but that hasn’t stopped a swarm of countries from battling over the hundreds of specks of sand and rock that make up the Spratlys, which may be the most disputed island chain on Earth.

So, in 2002, the Philippines decided to establish a small colony of hardy civilian settlers on the island, augmenting the two dozen military workers who earn special “loneliness pay” to live on the far-off spot — and bolstering its claim that possession is nine-tenths of the law.

The result is sort of “Cast Away” meets Plymouth Rock.

It’s worth reading John Glionna’s entire article, because it’s quickly clear that Cast Away is only one of many different kinds of movies you could set on the island.

Here are some elements I found compelling:

  • Isolated, together. The “volunteers” are far from home, but never alone. In fact, the island is so tiny you can’t get away from someone.

  • Primitive and modern. Despite the airstrip, most of their food comes from fishing. A bad typhoon can destroy them. Yet they keep blogs.

  • An international dispute over an unimportant piece of dirt. Is it really the airstrip the Philippines wants to protect, or its ego?

What is a Pagasa movie?

Is it a thriller? Most thrillers rely on something to isolate the protagonist, either literally (Panic Room) or figuratively (The Bourne Identity). Islands work well for this. In 2002, I pitched a version of Alien v. Predator set on an island in Maine during a massive storm; Pagasa could work similarly.

Is it a comedy? Pagasa is a military installation, so it’s not hard to envision a version of Stripes, cast with a bunch of funny younger actors.

Is it a romantic comedy? Given its isolation and lop-sided male-female ratio, it’s a natural and cinematic setting.

My point is that there’s a big difference between the world of a movie (the setting, the rules, the background color) and the movie itself. And that bridging that gap is what screenwriters do.

When you’re a newish-but-working writer in Hollywood, you get sent articles like this all the time. The producer or creative exec will say, “We think there’s a movie here. Come in and pitch your take.” Generally, they’ll give you some kind of direction, like, “We see it as The Piano, but, you know, funnier.”

As the screenwriter, your job is to come up with the characters, conflicts, goals, themes, reversals and set pieces that make the story worthwhile. (In TV, you call this breaking a story.) You’re not getting paid for this, even though it may take a week of your time. Rather, you’re auditioning for a job. You want them to hire you to write it.

Most of the time, you won’t get the job. But breaking story after story is amazing practice, and each pitch helps you figure out not only how plot works, but how the movie industry works.