When writing a screenplay (under contract) that is based on a book that you also wrote, do you still include the “Based on the book by…” line on the title page? Or would that be seen as pompous overkill?
In the same vein, if you have a PhD is there any reason to put it at the end of your name on the title page? (My personal opinion is that only a douchebag would do either of those things, but then again I’m not yet qualified to make that call.)
– Daniel Portland, OR
Yes. “Based on his novel,” might be another way to handle it. It’s not boasting, really. It helps explains the rights situation, and might clear up confusion down the road.
No. A PhD means nothing in screenwriting, and to include it would only invite mockery..
Thanks to many readers, I think there’s a pretty clear game plan emerging for how to do The Nines Trailer Challenge. Several people have offered specific help, both advice and hosting. Bless you. Your email addresses have been duly noted for future follow-up.
Here are the questions I asked, and the answers I got.
1. What’s the best video format for sending out the trailer footage?
For good quality, DV or Motion JPEG are platform-agnostic choices that will end up in solid web video. I’m meeting with the editor tomorrow to start figuring out just how big the files would end up being.
Some participants will want smaller files for an easier download experience. MPEG-4 is super-compressed, but can be up-rezzed acceptably. It will never look as good as the DV footage, but that’s a trade-off that some people will accept.
There are other possible formats, but at a certain point, the paradox of choice kicks in. Offering the footage in six flavors could actually make it less useful, increasing confusion and limiting torrent seeds.
2. One clip, or many?
Almost everyone felt that separate clips in a .zipped file would make life simpler. Some readers suggested distributing project files for Final Cut or Avid. My gut is that a folder of clips is pretty much just waiting to be dropped into a bin, so there’s no great advantage in creating separate templates for FCP or Avid (or whatever editing system you chose to use).
We’ll also include portions of Alex Wurman’s musical score, perhaps as a separate download. Using the “official” music won’t be a requirement.
3. Should it be a competition? If there’s a competition, how long of a deadline?
Across the board, yes on a competition. A week would be enough time; adding in a second weekend might be even better. At this point, the start of August is looking like a possibility, but the exact dates are TBD. The prize would be bragging rights, and inclusion on the DVD if we can clear rights issues.
4. What’s the best way to get the footage out there? Torrent? Download?
A torrent is pretty much a must for the big (DV) file. With good initial seeding, a clear start date, and fair practices on everybody’s part (i.e. keep seeding), it should work out. But I’d still like more information and examples of people who’ve done this thing successfully.
In terms of traditional downloading, generous offers of bandwidth should help with getting the smaller files distributed — and possibly setting up the initial torrents.
Back in March, I was a panelist on a Writers Guild Foundation forum about publicity — specifically, how film and television writers should approach promoting themselves and their work through the media. As I wrote at the time, it seemed to go pretty well.
This afternoon, I was ego-Googling and discovered that clips from the seminar are available on YouTube:
The audio’s not terrific, and so you’ll probably need to turn your speakers up. This is the main section with me; there are two otherparts focusing on other panelists, which you can find if you click through to the main YouTube site.
Chris Day, the head of publicity for UTA, references a memo I wrote around the time of Big Fish. You can find a .pdf of that here.
Like the old song goes, “Smoke gets in your eyes.”
It seems the MPAA is taking that quite literally. Recently, they decided to include on-screen depictions of smoking as one of the criteria that can earn a film an “R” rating.
I’ll take a somewhat unpopular (among Hollywood types) view on this.
I think it’s a good idea.
Naturally, most smoking in movies occurs as a general reflection of the fact of smoking itself. Smoking, like driving, is a part of visible life. However, movies have made something of a fetish of smoking for a few additional reasons. Actors are often looking for “business,” that catch-all word to describe hands-on activities that take the burden of undue focus off their dialogue.
Smoking is a great bit of business. Watch Bogie roll his own cig, then light it up in The Maltese Falcon. Great business.
And the reward?
The smoke itself.
Cigarette smoke is Hollywood’s cheapest special effect. It curls around the actor’s face. It lights beautifully. The simple act of taking a drag can shorthand misery, suspicion, anger…
Smoking is a great window to the soul, as visually informative as a smile or a tear. The way the actor exhales, the way they stub the cigarette out, the ritual of the “light,” the snap of a Zippo, the flick of the butt…
It’s all wonderful.
I don’t care what anyone says. Smoking DOES make you look cool, and movies make the already cool act of smoking even cooler-looking.
The one-sheet for Chinatown, which you see above, was illustrated by a friend of my named Jim Pearsall. It’s my favorite movie poster of all time, and that’s in no small part because Jim nailed the noirish essence of smoke. Jake Gittes is a man’s man, a tough private dick whose oxygen is the very stuff of smoggy L.A. And Evelyn Mulwray is a vision, a bit of smoke curling in the air. Beautiful, seductive…and then gone. Disappearing into the Chinatown air.
It’s movies like these that made me want to smoke. Yes, I’m actually someone who can safely say with 100% surety that I started smoking because of the way movies made smoking look. So did Jim Pearsall. In fact, that’s how Jim and I met. We were two smokers working at an ad agency in 1992. I’d stand outside sucking down my Marlboro Menthols (I know, I know…), and he’d rip the filters off his Carltons and tell me stories about old Hollywood.
Two years later, he was dead. Cancer, naturally.
The week before I got married, I quit smoking. I quit cold turkey, and I haven’t had a cigarette since 1996.
Still, is this a moral crusade we need?
Here’s my basic view of the MPAA and their ratings system. I don’t always agree with it. I know that I’ve personally had my share of issues with the MPAA on every movie I’ve done, and I have no doubt I’m in for plenty more. However, the MPAA ratings system is not censorship. The MPAA ratings system is designed to help parents figure out whether or not a movie is appropriate for their children. Simple as that.
We can argue about whether or not it does that well (although most parents apparently seem to think it does). I do know that every time I’ve gone in to recut a scene in order to avoid an R rating, I did so not under the threat of censorship, but out of a personal concern for my own bottom line. In other words…greed. I wanted a PG-13 so that the film would be seen by a wider audience, and I made the personal choice to sacrifice some moments in order to get that rating.
Even the dreaded NC-17 isn’t censorship. It’s just a rating. As an aside, however, I do believe that newspapers that refuse to run ads for NC-17 films and theaters that refuse to exhibit those movies are way out of line, and I think the MPAA should make a concerted effort to kill that practice…at least with the major newspaper and exhibitor chains.
Anyway…the operative question is simply this: do parents want their unaccompanied children to see a movie that glamorizes smoking? And yes, the ratings board seems pretty specific about the glamorization aspect. Context counts.
I’ll be honest. I don’t want my children to have that option. I was able to quit smoking, but I’m sure damage was done. It’s a risk I’d rather not leave to my children and the film industry to take together. I want to be a part of that decision. I’m not supporting the nanny state, nor am I attempting to legislate morality. An R rating doesn’t mean the film is evil, or it’s taboo, or it’s sinful or it’s shameful. It means that it includes certain content that parents should have the right to decide whether or not their children see.
I don’t agree with many of the criteria for R ratings (and I think there’s too much violence permitted in PG and PG-13 films), but I agree with the MPAA on this one. After all, I wasn’t just being an idiot when I decided to smoke.
I was being a 16 year-old idiot who had seen a lot of movies.
I accept responsibility for my choice as a child. As a parent, I’d like to accept responsiblity for the choice as well. The MPAA gave me one. I think that’s a good thing.
I’m a USC student, and I have a summer job as an assistant at one of the big agencies in town. Would it be a faux pas to ask someone, like an agent, to read my spec script? The assistant who sits next to me has a script, too, but is submitting it to Disney rather than asking someone here to read it, which makes me think it’s not done, to ask someone here to read my spec. Any thoughts?
– J.G.
Here’s the thing: Every intern has a script. So don’t shove your spec on anyone at the agency. Buckle down and do your internship, asking smart questions or becoming invisible as the situation warrants.
As the summer progresses, figure out which of your fellow interns are not evil. And if the situation warrants, invite them to read your script — and do the same for them. These peers are actually far more helpful in the long run than your superiors.
If, as the internship is winding down, you’ve really hit it off with one particular agent, you can mention that you wrote a comedy about vampire wrestlers in Tucson. If he says, “Hey, I’d like to read that,” great. If he nods and looks uncomfortable, don’t push it. You’ll ruin a possible contact later on.
My question is not about screenwriting per se, but rather about writing about films. Screenwriters, myself included, are not fond of essays about movies that ignore the contributions of writers. Do you have a stylistic preference for attributing authorship when writing about a movie, when each person’s individual contributions are not known? As an example, here’s a sentence from an essay I wrote about Armageddon:
In the real world, [a mission briefing] would probably happen in a briefing room. Michael Bay decided he wanted it to happen in the shuttle assembly building with a B-2 and 2 SR-71 Blackbirds.
Now I don’t know that this was Michael Bay’s decision — it may have been in one of the drafts of the script — or it may have been decided by Jerry Bruckheimer. But if I wanted to cover my bases, I would have to say:
Michael Bay, Jonathan Hensleigh, J.J. Abrams, Tony Gilroy, Shane Salerno, Robert Roy Pool, Jonathan Hensleigh, and Jerry Bruckheimer decided they wanted it to happen…
This seems incorrect. Alternatively, I could recast the sentence as:
“In the film, this happens in the shuttle assembly room…”
or
“In Armageddon, this happens in…”
But doing this consistently means treating the film as essentially authorless. This is probably truer of Armageddon than of most movies, but I don’t like it stylistically. What’s your preference? Say I was writing about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and specifically about something that happens in the film. Furthermore, assume I know nothing about the differences between the book, the script, and the finished film (which is usually the case when writing about a film). Would you prefer:
“Dahl, August, and Burton’s characters,”
“Dahl and August’s characters,”
“August’s characters,”
“Burton’s characters,”
“The characters in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,”
Or some formulation I’m not seeing?
This isn’t entirely an academic question — I write about movies at Criterion Collection, and recently someone in the comments criticised me for saying things like “Scorsese’s version of Jesus” when writing about The Last Temptation of Christ. So I revised the essay to be more precise — but that meant a lot of sentences that read “the film’s version of Jesus,” and I’m hoping you can think of something more elegant.
Thanks for your time. I enjoy your blog immensely. My little sister recently graduated from Trinity, and hearing you deliver your “Professional Writing and the Rise of the Amateur” lecture was one of the highlights of her college career.
– Matt Los Angeles
Normally, I lop off these thanks-for-your-blog comments, but I was feeling a little down, so that perked me up. Now, on to your question.
I don’t think there’s a perfect way to address authorship of a movie, but you’re right to be sensitive to the ambiguities. The characters in Charlie and the Chocolate factory are mine, and Dahl’s, and Tim’s, and the actors’. At every step in the process, choices were made by many people for many reasons. The same can be said for the sets, the music, the wardrobe, and the choreography.
If you’re writing about Tim Burton’s body of work, I think it’s absolutely fair to use a phrase like, “Burton’s characters tend to…”, since you’re pointing out a consistency across many different films. (You could do the same for characters in the films I’ve written, or the characters Johnny Depp has played.) Even if the person you’re talking about didn’t create these characters, the fact that there’s similarity between them indicates a certain mindset. An actor or a director might be consistently drawn towards artistic outsiders, for example.
It’s only when you’re looking at one specific film that you need to be careful not to hand out credit indiscriminately. Constructions like, “The characters in Burton’s film,” make it clear you’re not talking about the 1970 version.
I have no issue with the attributive apostrophe. It’s Tim Burton’s film; it’s Richard Zanuck’s film; it’s Warner Bros.’s film. Nor do I mind “A Joe Schmo Film” — it’s including the film in the director’s (or a star’s) canon. The only credit that sets my teeth on edge is “A Film By Some Director.” Both on-screen and in print, the “by” feels like an unwarranted grab for authorship. Even a writer-director is working with a crew of talented professionals to make the movie you’re seeing. That’s why I refused the credit on The Nines. But I know a lot of smart and good people who do use the credit, so I’m not slamming them for it.
In a previous post, I’d mentioned that the screenwriter’s name seems to be much more likely to show up in a negative review than a positive one. No one’s taken me up on the challenge to see if that’s really true, but the offer’s still out there. If anyone wants to do a statistical study of a few films on Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic, I’d love to publish what you find.
A few things around the site to mention and discuss:
Chinese in the feeds
This was my bad. I misconfigured a plug-in, and it started to grab some random Chinese Twitter feed. I’m going to be traveling a lot in July, well outside of traditional internet access, so I’ll be needing to use an alternative method (like Twitter) to post from the field. I’m still debating whether it’s best to generate traditional posts, or just a persistent header (like I did for Sundance).
Follow-Up Email plugin
AndrewJS wrote in about troubles with this plug-in:
Your WP plugin that emails people regarding new comments for certain articles seems to be overly ambitious lately. I left a comment on your Finale PDF thread and checked that box, but am receiving follow up emails for several other articles also that I never subscribed to. I rarely leave comments on your site, and I checked those other articles just to make sure I hadn’t commented on them. This included the Marvel thread and something about a Screenwriter’s Dinner, and one or two others. They all poured in
overnight at once. Seems a bit odd.
Is anybody else having troubles with this plug-in? Is anyone else using it? I’m happy to troubleshoot it if people are finding it useful, but if not, the simplest solution would just be to remove it.
Live preview on comments
Some readers are having trouble with the live previews on the comments. If you’re one of them, shoot me an email at ask@johnaugust.com. Be sure to include which browser you’re using (e.g. Internet Explorer). Some readers have had success by breaking long comments into shorter sections. That really shouldn’t matter, but if it works, go for it.
The other award-winners are more deserving quite interesting, and worth a click-through. I’m particularly enamored by Mindy Kaling’s awesome Things I’ve Bought That I Love. Not that I really need to know about the best elixir for whiteheads and why they’re a unique challenge for Indian women. It’s just very funny, particularly if you read it in her Kelly Kapoor voice.
Last week, I attended the First Annual WGAw Screenwriters’ Dinner. I’m not sure one should call a first-ever event “annual,” but it was successful enough that it merits a repeat in 52 weeks.
Since screenwriters tend to work alone, there’s not a lot of water-cooler talk on a daily basis. Message boards help to some degree, but WGA events are often the only venues for catching up in person. For example, it had been 23 months since I’d last seen Simon Kinberg. I know because our kids were born the same week.
The event also gave me a chance to meet a lot of writers I’d only known by name — Billy Ray and Jeff Nathanson, to pick two tablemates. Seeing my nametag, Iris Yamashita said she’d just pitched a project as being “Big Fish meets Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” which was flattering. I wanted to point out that she has the Oscar nomination, but we were already being urged to take our seats. I introduced Jessica Bendinger to Robert Towne, even though I didn’t really know Mr. Towne. It felt like the kind of event you could get away with that.
I got roped into recording an interview for a video podcast. If it ever hits the inter-waves, you might notice my hands shaking. I had just arrived, and was incredibly hungry. The mini-pizzas hadn’t made their way over yet.
One advantage of having a brilliant and devoted readership like mine is that I can occasionally reverse the Q&A process and appeal for your insight. Here’s the situation…
At Sundance, I talked about my plan-slash-pipe-dream of releasing the underlying footage of The Nines simultaneously to its DVD release. Essentially, you could load it into your Avid or Final Cut system and it would show up neatly divided into bins. From there, you could cut your own version — or better yet, mash in other content to create something unique: The Nines vs. The Grifters, or Donnie Darknines: The Koalapocalypse.1
Yes, you could do some of this just by ripping the DVD, but having the original material allows for much more sophisticated re-cutting, just as the a cappella version of Jay-Z’s The Black Album enabled a thousand remixes and reinterpretations.
There are legal and political hurdles to be sure, but all of that’s months away.
Right now, we’re surprisingly close to having an official trailer.2 After seeing vastly different approaches–comedy to thriller to existential drama–it became clear that no matter what the tone, there are approximately 15-20 shots which were in nearly every version of the trailer. Which is a pretty small number. Which raises a natural question…
Why not let people cut their own trailer?
Surprisingly, everyone who could veto the idea hasn’t. So I think we’re going to do it. But that means there’s a lot to figure out, much of which falls well outside my area of expertise. I know this blog has a significant readership beyond aspiring screenwriters, so I’m hoping that editors, web-heads and other folks with useful insight will de-lurk and offer some of their genius.
Format
My hunch is that most of these trailers will end up on YouTube, where the ideal input format is MPEG-4, 320×240. It’s certainly compact. The trouble is, editing systems like Final Cut would rather ingest almost anything other than .mp4. Which leads to my first question:
1. What’s the best video format for sending out the trailer footage?
We’re trying to strike a balance between a few competing goals. First, it needs to look and sound pretty good, both as edited, and ultimately, as re-compressed by YouTube. Second, it needs to be fairly compact, so that it’s feasible download (or torrent) the footage.3 Third, it should be something fairly industry-standard. No doubt there is a clever proprietary format out there, but if it requires special plug-ins, people are much less likely to bother.
2. One clip, or many?
Would it be more efficient to offer one long clip (perhaps with chapter marks) or a folder of the individual clips? The latter seems more convenient — you could just drop it into your system as a bin. But does more clips mean more chances for things to go wrong?
Logistics
Beyond the video format, there are other questions about the smartest way to do this. Such as…
3. Should it be a competition?
I suspect many people would participate just because they thought it was interesting, but my experience with the Scene Challeges is that even a phantom prize gets a lot more people invested. Assuming the trailers end up on YouTube, would a standard tagging scheme be enough to help identify the contenders, or should there be a forum for people to list/hype their entries?
3A. If there’s a competition, how long of a deadline?
Assuming the footage came out on a Thursday, would the following Monday be enough time? I suspect there’s a sweet spot between enough time and too much time.
4. What’s the best way to get the footage out there? Torrent? Download?
I’ve barely torrented, and have never set up any seeding situations, so I’m almost fully ignorant on the best ways to make this sizable file available. (In coming up with solutions, you can safely assume we have almost no money to spend on this.)
No doubt there will be other smart questions asked amid the answers in the comments thread. If you’re addressing any of the technical issues, it would be helpful if you mentioned your experience, or provided links. Thanks in advance.
Just typing that makes me eager to shoot new koala footage. ↩
Once the official trailer comes, you’ll find a link here, and no doubt a lengthy talkback on a certain site. ↩
I’m going to guess and say that we’re looking at about six minutes of raw footage, if that helps the back-of-the-envelope calculation. ↩
When writing a screenplay (under contract) that is based on a book that you also wrote, do you still include the “Based on the book by…” line on the title page? Or would that be seen as pompous overkill? 
Thanks to 
I’m a USC student, and I have a summer job as an assistant at one of the big agencies in town. Would it be a faux pas to ask someone, like an agent, to read my spec script? The assistant who sits next to me has a script, too, but is submitting it to Disney rather than asking someone here to read it, which makes me think it’s not done, to ask someone here to read my spec. Any thoughts?
My question is not about screenwriting per se, but rather about writing about films. Screenwriters, myself included, are not fond of essays about movies that ignore the contributions of writers. Do you have a stylistic preference for attributing authorship when writing about a movie, when each person’s individual contributions are not known? As an example, here’s a sentence from an essay I wrote about Armageddon:
