John August

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Anthony Minghella

News

I was very surprised and saddened to read that writer-director Anthony Minghella has died. His adaptation of The Talented Mr. Ripley is both justly acclaimed and criminally under-appreciated: every shot, every line, every performance is dead on. Every time I watch it, I’m filled with envy and self-doubt — a strangely empowering combination when seen through the lens of Minghella’s needy and murderous hero.

Minghella himself couldn’t seem more different. The two times I sat down with him, he was funny, charming, and much too polite to make me feel stupid. Both occasions were award-season panels, potentially awkward sessions in which filmmakers are asked to talk about their movies in relation to each other. But I could only gush about how much I loved his work, and pitch him my plan to do a mash-up of the Aliens quadrilogy with his Ripley. (It’s still on the to-do list.)

Just this week, the trades announced that Minghella was doing a series with Richard Curtis based on No 1 Ladies Detective Agency, which had already shot its pilot in Botswana. Here’s hoping that project and his other work can make it to the screen. But I already miss all the other movies he won’t be making.

Failed his last saving throw

Rave

Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, died this morning at age 69.

I haven’t played the game in 15 years, but it remains the single biggest influence in my career as a screenwriter. And I’m not alone: a quick poll of my writer friends revealed a huge number of teenage rangers and magic-users. That’s no coincidence. Building an adventure in D&D requires the same imagination as constructing a screenplay. Running a campaign is like running a TV show, with weekly sessions at the ping-pong table in the basement.

D&D isn’t where we learned to write, but where we learned to think epic. A game could last all night. Or all year. By the time my friends and I stopped playing, our characters had three generations of mythology behind them, with family trees that would bewilder Faulkner.

The game is also where future accountants learned to obsess over convoluted rules. Particularly in the early editions, there were more charts and figures than you’d think a seventh-grader could handle. But we ate it up. In a pre-internet age, a few hundred pages of dense data on mistletoe-gathering and the restrictions on Limited Wish spells was like info-crack. Even when you weren’t playing D&D, you were thinking about the next character you wanted to roll. The next adventure you wanted to build.

I’m sure I’ve read Gygax’s AD&D books — notably, the original Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide — more than any other printed matter I’ve owned, probably by a factor of 10. It’s where I learned what c.f., i.e. and e.g. meant.

I’ve moved 10 times since college, but the crate of D&D books has always come with me, unopened but somehow indispensable.

So, my sincere thanks to Mr. Gygax for what he brought into the world. We live on after death by creating things that outlast us. By that metric, Gygax is nearly immortal.

Scripting a short film

Genres, QandA, Story and Plot, Words on the page

questionmarkI’m about to get cracking on my submission for a prestigious short screenplay competition. I wondered if you had any advice specific to writing shorts? If you were judging a shorts competition, what would you be looking for?

— Kirsty
York, UK

A short film, like a short story, can’t waste any time. You need to give us your principal characters and establish their motivations immediately. There’s very little stage-setting before you get to the inciting incident and the ensuing complications.

The hero’s fundamental problem/challenge/obstacle needs to occur by the time you get to the 1/3rd mark. So, if your short is meant to be three minutes long, the big event needs to happen on page one. If it’s a 10-minute short, it happens around page three. It’s not that you’re worried about your reader getting bored before then — if you can’t entertain us for three pages, there’s a problem — but rather that if you delay any longer, your story is going to feel lopsided: too much setup for what was accomplished.

Beyond that, I wouldn’t worry much about traditional structural expectations. Funny almost always works better than serious for a short, because there’s not enough time to create the narrative movement you expect in drama. But there are exceptions. The Red Balloon for example. And I loved Walter Salles’ chapter in Paris, je t’aime, which was simply a sad rhyme. ((That said, it probably wouldn’t have stood out in a script competition.))

So think funny, or poignant — but only if French.

I’ve put the script for my 1998 short film God up in the Downloads section. ((The short is a bonus feature on The Nines DVD.)) It’s 30 scenes in 11 pages. A lot of story happens, quickly. But many successful shorts take the opposite tack: they’re essentially just one joke, fully exploited. Todd Strauss-Schulson’s Jagg Off is that kind of short, as are most of the SNL and Will Ferrell videos you’ve seen.

For the competition you’re entering, however, I’d be careful not to submit anything that felt too much like a comedy sketch. If I were a judge, I’d be looking for a script that doesn’t seem like it could end up on Saturday Night Live. (Or the British equivalent.)

Good luck!

Saturn Award nomination

Awards, Projects, The Nines

Matt Venne emailed me this morning to point out something I would have otherwise missed: The Nines just got a Saturn Award nomination for its DVD.

It’s a cliché to say, “It’s an honor just to be nominated,” but really, it is. And surprising, too. The Nines isn’t an obvious choice at all.

The Saturn Awards are all about science fiction, and while The Nines ultimately fits in that category, the viewer doesn’t really understand why until the last 10 minutes. When we were doing press for the movie, I called it “stealth sci-fi.” Hearing the logline, you wouldn’t guess it goes into Star Trek territory. (I’m spoiling very little to say it does.)

So, my thanks to the nominators, who obviously did watch it and get it.