John August

fixed

In which I attend the Grammy Awards

First Person, Los Angeles

As I might have mentioned, I got nominated for a Grammy Award (along with Danny Elfman) in the Best Song TV/Movie/Visual Media category for “Wonka’s Welcome Song” from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

The nomination came as a surprise, in that (a) I didn’t realize the Grammys were coming up, (b) I didn’t know the song was eligible, and (c) it’s an absurd choice for Best Song. It’s a fun ditty, sure, kind of a riff on “It’s a Small World” from the eponymous Disney theme park ride. But there it was, on the list.

I promptly called Danny Elfman. After making plans for a play-date for our respective offspring, I asked if he planned on attending the awards. He was horrified at the prospect, which I guess makes sense for a professional musician with a shelf full of awards.

But me, hell. When am I going to get nominated for a Grammy again?

So I went.

Here’s my first-hand account.

To begin with, “Music’s Biggest Night” is actually “music’s longest afternoon.” They give out awards in 108 categories. Of those, only 11 are televised. The other 97 are passed out during the pre-telecast ceremony, which begins at 1:30 p.m. We left the house at noon to get there in time.

The pre-telecast was held in the West Hall of the convention center, next door to Staples Center, where the main awards would be held. It was friendly and low-key. Anoushka Shankar and Michael Bublé performed (separately), and most award-recipients were quick to get on and off stage.

My category was #31 on the list. The whole time, I was thinking about what I would say in the (admittedly unlikely) event that my name was in the envelope. I settled on:

Hi, wow. [Stare at trophy in disbelief] I’d like to thank the Grammy academy. Of course, Danny Elfman, for writing really catchy music. And especially Tim Burton for saying, “Sure, yeah, melting puppets. Singing. Great!” Anyway, this means a lot. Thanks. [Hold up trophy]

And then I’d start to go off stage in the wrong direction, only to be corrected by a pretty young woman who would take my elbow and lead me the right way.

As it turned out, it ended up being a lot simpler. I clapped politely while Glen Ballard accepted the award for the song he wrote for The Polar Express. He was gracious, so I certainly can’t begrudge him. And I’m happy I lost to someone who at least showed up.

We ducked out of the pre-telecast awards during the gospel section (sorry, Jesus), in the hopes of getting properly liquored before the grown-up Grammys, which started at 5 p.m. The instructions on the so-you’ve-been-nominated-for-a-Grammy sheet noted that alcohol would be not be served after 4:30 p.m. While this was technically true, the more accurate description of the situation could be found on signs at all of the food stations:

SORRY, NO ALCOHOL AT THIS EVENT.

No, really. There was a kind of sad, strange comedy in eavesdropping:

  • GUY IN SUIT
  • Could I get a vodka tonic?
  • SERVER
  • Sorry, there’s no alcohol.
  • GUY IN SUIT
  • How about wine?
  • SERVER
  • No, there’s no alcohol.
  • GUY IN SUIT
  • Just beer, then.
  • SERVER
  • There’s no alcohol at all.
  • GUY IN SUIT
  • Anywhere?
  • SERVER
  • No, sir.

Now, in reality, if Kanye West had wanted a mojito, someone, somewhere would have found some mint leaves to muddle. But for the hoi polloi, the event was drier than a Kansas wedding. I was left with Diet Pepsi and rage to wash down my nachos.

Fortunately, the Grammys themselves were fun.

Having been to quite a few premieres and fancy shindigs, I can say that the Grammys were the most consistently entertaining. The musical performances were good, the groan factor was low, and every celebrity had to walk by my seat at least once.

Our seats were on the floor, next to the aisle. Whenever a performer and/or presenter needed to go from their seat to backstage, they were walked by us. Even better, running across the aisle next to our seats were thick cables covered with a floor mat. Although marked with white tape, this hazzard was very easy to trip over. Many celebrities did.

Celebrities who tripped and/or wobbled included:

  • Sting
  • Sir Paul McCartney
  • Teri Hatcher (meta-alert!)
  • Jennifer Love Hewitt
  • The woman in Destiny’s Child who is not Beyonce or Kelly

In general, I’m not star-struck. But the combination of mild danger and celebrity almost made up for the lack of alcohol. The guy sitting next to me won a Grammy for mixing the Green Day album. So that’s cool.

The official after party was back at the West Hall. Everyone knows that the official party sucks and that all the cool people go to their own secret after parties. However, we were not invited to any of the secret after parties. So we went to the normal one.

It took forever to get in, but the food was fairly tasty. And the drinks? Free-flowing. On the whole, it felt like a big Hollywood premiere party, with good production design and some questionable entertainment choices. (Interpretative dancers, for a start.)

We were home by midnight. There’s no Grammy to set on the mantelpiece, but on the whole, it was a fun 12 hours. I haven’t watched the show on the TiVo yet, but I doubt I’ll see myself. The closest call probably came when Chris Martin of Coldplay galloped down the aisle.

God, I wish he’d tripped.

Footnotes on the footer

Meta

In my previous post about the redesign, I glossed over what was actually was a fair amount of thought and logic behind what I did (and re-did). Based on the comments, some of that thinking might not be clear.

Why not just stick them on their own page? If you want archives, click on archives, and go to the archives. Seems unnecessary to hang them on the bottom of every page whether they’re wanted or needed for that visit, or no.

All that stuff at the bottom of the page seems overkill and excessive server to client material.

So here’s my rationale. (Beware, this is all very information-design-y, and may make your eyes glaze over. Caveat lector.)

If you read the site frequently, you’ll never see the footer anyway.
Since I only post every two or three days, only the top article will be new to most readers. You’d stop scrolling once you hit an article you’d already read.

So the footer isn’t overkill if you never see it.

Many of my visitors come via search engines.
Looking through the logs, it’s clear that a significant percentage of traffic on the site ends up here because of a screenwriting-related search. If a visitor lands on an article about what I/E means, he’d likely have no sense of what else was available on the site. To reverse a metaphor, he’d only see the tree, not the forest.

Yes he could click on a link for an Archives page, but I wouldn’t. By sticking the footer on every page of the site, I can help anyone landing on any page get a sense of how much is available.

It increases the stickiness.
“Stickiness” is an awkward term to describe how much time a person spends at a given website, which helps determine ad rates. This site doesn’t have any ads, but it does have a lot of information I’d like people to have. So, unlike my house, I’m happy to have people hang around for a while.

An Archives page means another layer of clicking.
Let’s say you want to find an entry about Big Fish. With the fat footer, you click on “Big Fish,” and you get a list of all the articles in that category. Pick your article and read it.

With an Archives page, you’d first get a list of categories, then a new page with the entries. That’s not complicated, but it’s an extra step, and an extra kind of page to keep straight. (That is, a main Archives page, and a Category page.)

For the same reason, I’ve chosen to have the Archives page list all the articles in a chosen category, rather than breaking it down into chunks of 10 or 20 articles. The smaller chunks look nicer, but are ultimately harder to mentally process. (Was that other article I was interested in on page 2 or 3 of the results?)

Yes, there are slick AJAX-y ways of doing all the category stuff on a single page. However, a lot of these solutions reset every time you come back to the page, which makes churning through a bunch of articles frustrating.

It’s not that much more work for the server.
The server is off-site, so I can’t give any quantitative figure. But in testing, I haven’t seen any difference in page-loading times with or without the fat footer. Generating the archive list for the footer is exactly one line of php:

If generating the footer were slowing things down, it would be (almost) trivial to cache it. But I don’t see that being a factor.

Still, the footer means extra information to deliver to the client. That’s one reason I’ve dropped the default number of articles per page, and why I’m pretty conscientious about keeping images reasonably-sized.

Does the site sometimes load slowly? Yes. And too often, it goes down altogether. It’s a hosting situation that I hope to have resolved in the near future.

The archives listing helps search engines index the site.
This is debatable, honestly. True, it puts every article in the site just two links away, making it easier to spider through the site. In the old days of search engine optimization, this was a major goal. Now it’s probably much less important, because there are now many different ways for the Googles of the world to find, process and deliver the information on the site.

I mentioned before that this is part one of the redesign. The second phase will occur this week, and will make it more clear why I changed some of the things I did.

The word escapes me

Words on the page

For the past few months, I’ve been at a loss for word. Not words, but one very specific word. It refers to knowledge that would only be known by people in a specific group. One would use it thusly…

“The distinction between italic and oblique is obvious to a type designer, but is frankly a little too blank for everyone else.”

I really needed the word. But I couldn’t remember it.

I started asking people, smart people, if they could help me figure out the word. No one could.

I Googled “pertaining to a specific group.” I got page after page of words, but not the right one.

I was 90% sure the word started with ‘e.’ So I actually went through the dictionary, page by page, looking at every entry for the letter ‘e.’

But I couldn’t find it.

Then last week, while walking through an almost empty theatre, I heard someone say something magnificent: esoteric.

From the American Heritage Dictionary:

es•o•ter•ic (es-uh–ter-ik) adj.

Intended for or understood by only a particular group: an esoteric cult. See synonyms at mysterious.
Of or relating to that which is known by a restricted number of people.
Confined to a small group: esoteric interests.
Not publicly disclosed; confidential.

I have no idea what the person was talking about. I just heard that one word, and felt the relief of an agonizing itch being scratched. I immediately emailed myself the word, just in case.

Just today, I found a Reverse Dictionary Search site, which I’ve already bookmarked for the next word I can’t remember.

Why most scripts never become movies

Film Industry, QandA

questionmarkOn September 5th you had said that “most scripts don’t become movies, and a hundred things could go wrong in the process.” What exactly was meant by this, and of the scripts that you have written and you deemed worthy of the silver screen, how many actually made it there?

–Sweta
via IMDb

We’ll start with the second part first. By my count, I’ve written 18 feature-length scripts. I have seven produced credits, which means I have a 39% production rate.

That’s actually not bad. It gives the illusion of being prolific when in fact it’s just a combination of luck and careful picking. As I’ve said before, my favorite genre is “movies that get made.”

I’ve also done significant-but-uncredited rewrite work on seven other screenplays, five of which have been made.

Your question includes the qualifier, “[that] you deemed worthy of the silver screen.” I can honestly say that at the time I wrote them, I considered every one of my scripts worthy of the screen.

Now? Not so much.

But for the sake of example, let me list my never-made scripts and briefly explain why they won’t be playing soon at a theatre near you.

Here and Now
My first script. Nicely written but largely plotless.

How to Eat Fried Worms
Was actually made this year, but with a script by a different writer.

A Wrinkle in Time
Was made for television, with a draft that pre-dated mine.

Untitled Zombie Western
Will probably get made at some point, in some form.

Fenwick’s Suit
The studio didn’t like my script, and let the underlying rights lapse.

Demonology
The studio thought it was too expensive for what it was.

Thief of Always
The director and the author hated my draft. Hated.

Secret Project I Can’t Talk About
Will hopefully get made soon.

Barbarella
The two studios bickered and dickered until the underlying rights fell out.

Fury
Probably will get made at some point, in some form.

Tarzan
In a perpetual holding pattern at the studio.

Studios develop a lot of projects that never end up getting made. Every few years, an outsider with a lot of money will come to Hollywood and vow, “We’re not going to waste money. We’re only going to develop the projects we’re going to make!”

And a few years later, they’ll have a dozen projects in various stages of development, and maybe one or two movies. Because it’s not just the script that determines whether a movie gets made. You need the right director, the right stars, the right way to market the movie. You can be a week from shooting when a hurricane destroys your location, or a strike shuts down production. Or the exchange rate takes a dive.

As the screenwriter, there are hundreds of variables I can’t control. So I consider it a minor miracle any time a movie gets made.