John August

fixed

Spring cleaning

Hive Mind, Meta

spring cleaningThis site has 1,440 posts, stretching back to 2003. Unlike many blogs, most of these articles are still relevant. The basics of screenwriting haven’t changed much in a decade.

Yet some problems inevitably creep in with age. Links break as external sites vanish. Formatting glitches arise. Graphics get misplaced.

To help fix these issues, we’re doing a few days of Spring Cleaning on the site. And if you have some free time, we’d love your help.

At the bottom of this post is a list of articles that need checking. (It generates a fresh list each time.) Click on an article, read it, and look for mistakes or issues. Repeat as often as you choose.

If you notice any problems (typos, missing graphics, broken links or other mistakes) click on either the “Flag for Spring Cleaning” button at the end of each post or the Send To button. This will send a report to Ryan, who will verify and correct.

Use the "Spring Cleaning" links at the bottom of each post, or in the "Send to" menu.

Once a post is marked “Flagged for Spring Cleaning,” you can’t send additional reports on it until Ryan checks it out.

Yes, private, this is a bug hunt. Twice daily, we’ll be posting results showing who has caught the most mistakes.

Ryan is the final arbiter of who gets credit for what.

UPDATE: You can see the leaderboard here.

We originally had a checkbox marked “Outdated,” but too much was getting flagged. Some posts are old and not exactly actionable (e.g. anything related to the 2008 WGA strike). That’s okay. History counts too. The publication dates are there for a reason.

As with the Scene Challenges, the winner gets public acclaim and bragging rights. But I’ll also happily send the victor his or her choice of movie swag, such as a signed script, DVD or poster.

I’m sure there will be issues we haven’t yet considered. Feel free to ask questions in the comments. Thanks, and happy hunting.

Anatomy of a script series

Education, News, WGA

Each year, the Writers Guild Foundation holds a series of discussions with film and television writers focusing on one of their past or current projects. This year, I’ll be a guest, talking about Big Fish.

The lineup for the series looks great:

Tuesday February 22: Debra Granik on Winter’s Bone (screening at 5:15 pm)

Wednesday March 2: Glenn Gordon Caron on Medium (screening at 6:10 pm)

Wednesday March 9: Steve Levitan on Modern Family (screening at 6:30 pm)

March 16: John August on Big Fish (screening at 5:00 pm)

March 23: Marta Kauffman & David Crane on Friends (screening at 6:30 pm)

March 30: Mike Werb & Michael Colleary on Face/Off (screening at 4:45 pm)

Winnie Holzman (Wicked, My So-Called Life) and Robin Schiff (Romy & Michelle’s High School Reunion) are hosting.

It’s a pretty small room, and the event always sells out. So if you’re interested, you may want to get tickets now.

Introducing Less IMDb

Geek Alert, News

Less IMDb IconI love IMDb. I’m forever thankful that such a great and free resource exists.

But the new layout blows.

They’ve made it more difficult to do the one thing I come to IMDb to do: look at credits. New sections for photos, videos and trivia (star signs!) push credit lists below the fold, forcing you to scroll.

Rather than complain about it, Ryan and I decided to fix it.

Less IMDb is a Safari extension — and now Chrome and Firefox — that rearranges IMDb’s name and title pages to bring credits to the top. So instead of this:

IMDb Profile Page

You get this:

Less IMDb Profile Page

Just install the extension and you’re done. It will automatically update if something changes on IMDb’s end. And if you need to turn it off for a given page, the switch is always available on the right-hand side.

Check it out, and pass it along if you find it helpful.

Update:

A few readers have written in with suggestions about how to get back to the pre-updated layout by changing settings at IMDb. I think this is a case of rose-colored nostalgia, however. It was always pretty bad.

Here’s the same screenshot with the original layout:

original IMDb layout

Credits are still buried deep on the page, under quite a bit of junk. It’s familiar, but it’s hard to call it “better.”

(Quick tip: Add a + to the end of the URL to force it to use the original layout. Helpful if you want to compare old vs. new layouts. Works with the extension installed or not. Thx Hannes.)

Try out Less IMDb.

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.