John August

QandA

Terminated

News, Television

Josh Friedman recounts the cancellation of his excellent show Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles:

Everyone says having your show cancelled is like a death but I’ve been dead before and at least when you’re dead you don’t get thrown off the Warner Bros. lot for haunting your old parking space. They probably mean it’s like the death of a friend or a family member but that shit only hurts when it’s YOUR friend or family member and even then it’s mitigated by age, lifestyle and whether that person was a Hollywood friend or a real one and whether that family member left you money.

Losing your show is more like a surprise divorce where you get served papers in the morning and your (ex)wife is fucking Human Target by three in the afternoon using the same time slot your child was conceived in and also where she did that one thing that one time on your birthday.

Josh’s post are so long and so infrequent he’s more an essayist than a blogger. Still, we should cherish what we get. Read the whole thing.

How to format an on-screen note

Formatting, QandA

questionmarkSomething I have to deal with at least three times in the screenplay I’m currently working on that I have NO idea how to do. A character is handed a postcard, note or reads a list. Cue insert shot for audience to read-along. An example:

Dear Dad – okay, it’s better than I expected.

There have been some interesting developments

but I still miss baseball. I still want to visit you

in Florida.

Love, your son, Nathan.

How on earth do you format something like that in Final Draft? The few screenwriter friends I have are similarly perplexed by this, simple though the answer may be.

— Tim
Brooklyn NY

Pretty much answered here: Formatting text shown on screen. ((Folks, try the Answer Finder.))

First off, if you’re doing it “at least three times,” you’re doing it too much. Audiences don’t go to movies to read. Limit yourself to once, and keep it short.

If a character reads the note aloud (either on-screen, or in voice-over), just keep the text in his dialogue block. You may want to italicize it for clarity.

If the audience needs to read it, try using dialogue margins with no character name — if your screenwriting software will allow you. Otherwise, break it into lines roughly the width of a dialogue block and center them. Again, italics may help.

A sharp-eyed reader may prove me wrong, but in 30+ scripts, I don’t think I’ve ever had a block of text the audience needed to read. It’s something you can almost always write around.

How much does a short story earn in a magazine?

Follow Up, Genres, QandA, The Variant

questionmarkWould a writer of your stature have made more by publishing The Variant in a literary magazine?

— Brett

I really had no idea what people were getting paid for short stories, so I asked Matt to dig up some numbers based on The Variant’s 7,123-word length.

These are rough and gathered from feedback writers give to duotrope.com and various publication websites. If any short story writers have more firsthand information, please share.

Matt chose a range of literary and genre magazines — but to be honest, I’m not sure The Variant would have found a home in any of them, with or without my name value.

Literary magazines

  • The New Yorker: $7,500 (estimate based on Dan Baum’s
    tweets)

  • Kenyon Review: $356 ($.05 per word)

  • New England Review: $230 ($10 per page)

  • Ploughshares: $575 ($25 per page)

Genre magazines

  • Asimov’s Science Fiction: $427 ($.06 per word)

  • Strange Horizons: $356 ($.05 per word)

  • Carve (Raymond Carver): $20-50

Given these numbers, I doubt I would have been better off trying to get The Variant into a printed magazine. It made less than $1,000 in its first week, but it will be available online — and earning money — for at least the next few years. And if a reader likes the short story, it’s much easier to send a link to a friend than a printed story.

Pixar

Film Industry, QandA, Travel

I flew up to Oakland yesterday for a lunchtime lecture and Q&A at Pixar. And wow. It’s really nice up there.

If I had to work in an office, I’d work there. It combines everything I like about Dreamworks/Amblin (lunch, toys, a noticeable lack of evil) with everything I’ve read about Google (daylight, servers, smart people on scooters). They even showed me the secret cellar where they mine joy.

My presentation was on Expectation as it relates to story. It was brand-new material that I was trying out for the first time, and I was fairly happy with how it went. Once it’s in a bit better shape, I’ll post some of the lecture on the site.

As frequent readers know, my geekery is almost limitless, so it was great to be able to ask questions about 32-bit color spaces and whether model articulation and prop interaction relied on message-passing. Sample inquiries: If an animated character picks up a can of soda, does that can of soda become part of the character’s domain or does it remain a separate object? (Answer: the latter.) If an explosion casts light, is that handled by VFX or the lighting department? (Lighting will probably get the last word.)

Many thanks to the Pixar folks for good questions and better answers. And a special thank you to Stephan Bugaj and Michelle Lindsey for setting it up.