John August

fixed

Good interviews about Father Knows Less

Film Industry, Projects

UPDATE: 4/28/2011 — Links to “Father Knows Less” IMDb listing no longer active.

UPDATE: 4/28/2011 — All podcast links have been updated.

podcastOkay. It’s not actually podcasting, but behold the site’s the first-ever audio links.

I’m currently rewriting a script called Father Knows Less, originally written by Aline Brosh McKenna. It’s the story of “a loving but aloof guy (Dustin Hoffman) abandoned by his trophy wife, [who] finds himself in charge of raising his young kids. In order to connect with them as their father, he turns to his children from his first marriage for help.” (synopsis by IMDb)

Tonally, it’s a dramedy in the James L. Brooks mode. More Jerry Maguire, less The Pacifier. New Line is the studio.

As it happens, Claude Brodesser of Variety has been tracking this project on his KCRW radio show The Business, and has had various members of the production on to talk about the process. It’s a refreshingly candid discussion of how a movie wends its way through development.

You can start with the initial conversation with McKenna, agent Devra Lieb, and producer Laura Hopper about the pitch, and how the project was set up. The discussion starts at 11:08.

Next, there’s a follow-up conversation with McKenna and Hopper as they start looking for a director. Starts at 2:51.

Finally, Brodesser talks with the movie’s director, who explains his decision to take the project, and the discussion about bringing on a different writer (which ended up being me). The talk starts at 9:20.

Answer: You are an American male in his twenties

General

Thanks to the 470 of you who were gracious enough to fill out the not-especially-scientific survey, I can now state with confidence that the typical reader of johnaugust.com is a North American college graduate in his 20’s who has a Y chromosome, but no WGA card.

Now, before anyone protests, I should point out that not all readers are typical. Some are women in their 30’s from South Africa with graduate degrees; others are older, younger, or more international. And one could easily fault the methodology: it relied completely on self-reporting, with no particular incentive for readers to click the link to take the survey.

Yet the trends in the data are so clear that there’s not a lot of point keeping the survey running any longer. If you don’t believe me, maybe some charts will prove the point:

chart: male/female

The vast majority of readers are men. That’s no surprise, but I wasn’t expecting almost 90%. I don’t know whether this reflects the reality of the male/female split among screenwriters or not. Regardless, I try to vary to my pronouns, so that I’m not always talking about “a screenwriter and his script.”

chart: age

Readers are a little older than I thought. Had I known that the under-20 categories would be so sparsely populated, I would have broken up the age groups differently. Given the average age, I may feel a little more liberty to swear.

[Read more…] about Answer: You are an American male in his twenties

Who are you? Where do you come from?

News

surveyOn Sunday, I had lunch with Mary Edrington, my former marketing professor from Drake. She was one of the best teachers I ever had, because she did the near-impossible: she made me care about boring numbers. Even though I was much more attuned to the creative side of marketing, I always appreciated her zeal for research. It wasn’t enough to come up with a clever slogan for some product; you had to prove that there was actually a customer out there to buy it.

At lunch, she asked me who the average reader of johnaugust.com was. I confessed that I didn’t really know. I can speculate about education level of some readers based on the comments. Checking the logs, I can tell you what browser he or she uses. But my actual demographic data is an empty set.

So if you don’t mind, would you be willing to answer 10 really simple questions? I’ve timed it — it only takes 35 seconds, unless you write a big essay in the (optional) final comment box.

You can take the survey here. (Update March 2011: Link removed, outdated.)

After a week or two, I’ll put up the results.

Annoying Trend Watch: Technorati spam blogs

Charlie, Rant

I use a Technorati watchlist to keep track of mentions of me, this site, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Technorati follows blogs, so it’s a nice way to gauge what topics people find interesting enough to write about. For instance, teenage girls tend to point out that “JohNny DePP iz SOOOOO HOOTTTTT!”

Over the last two weeks, I’ve noticed a disconcerting rise in the number of faux-blogs. They look like blogs, and they’re hosted on genuine sites like Blogspot. But they have no actual content, just a bunch of gibberish targeting a certain term, like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.” I assume they’re computer-generated. Here’s an example.

So why would anyone make a useless blog like this? Presumably, to drive traffic to other sites. The left-hand column on the example blog has links to various other sites, each of which either sells something, or has Google ads which make money on a pay-per-click basis.

It’s really annoying, because up until now, Technorati has been a terrific clutter-buster. I don’t know if the spam-blog problem is readily fixable. Unlike Google, which has algorithms to help it weed out junk sites, I think Technorati basically relies on self-reporting. The system would need to find a way to detect which blogs are real, and which ones are fake. That’s a tall order.