Simple is better than accurate
A story in today’s LA Times about chocolate-making got me thinking about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and an error I deliberately introduced. Early in the tour of the factory, Wonka says…
Wrong. The right word is cacao — it’s not cocoa until it’s partially processed, and as a globe-trotting master chocolatier, Wonka would certainly use the right word. And in the book, Roald Dahl does:
The cacao bean, which grows on the cacao tree, happens to be the thing from which chocolate is made. You cannot make chocolate without the cacao bean. The cacao bean is chocolate. I myself use billions of cacao beans every week in this factory.
So why change it? Why be wrong?
Because cacao is a weird word. It’s sounds like it’s supposed to be funny, but it’s not actually funny in context. Then Wonka uses the word six times in the scene. You generally repeat funny things, so when you repeat something that wasn’t funny to begin with, the stench of failed joke begins to waft in.
Worse, cacao is confusing. It demands explanation, but the explanation isn’t particularly rewarding. As the audience, we don’t really want to learn about chocolate. We want to see bad things happen to terrible children.
Cocoa is a synonym for hot chocolate, so it seems reasonable that you’d make chocolate from cocoa beans. For the movie version, changing “cacao” to “cocoa” made it easier to focus on the point of the scene (a flashback to Wonka meeting the Oompa-Loompas), and concentrate on finding things that were actually funny. It’s wrong, but it’s right.
And that’s true in this general rule:
In screenwriting, simplicity should almost always trump accuracy.
I’m going to break that statement down into parts so that it doesn’t get misconstrued.
In screenwriting — I’m only talking about writing for film and television, stories that race ahead at 24 frames per second, give or take. In novels and playwriting, the writer has the time and opportunity to be far more precise and thorough. And in journalism, accuracy is a fundamental responsibility. The journalist’s challenge is to make that accuracy comprehensible to the readership.
simplicity — Simplicity is not the same as idiocy, or pandering. If you’re making a thriller set in the world of international espionage, you can’t have the computer expert “dial in” to something. We need to believe that the expert is an expert, that security is difficult, and yet be able to understand roughly what he’s doing. Consider the crew in the first two Alien movies. We don’t know how their spaceships work, but it’s easy to follow what they’re working on.
should almost always trump — Sometimes, the complicated-but-accurate version is more rewarding than the simple version, so be wary of smoothing out all the wrinkles. And screenwriters aren’t absolved of societal responsibility, either. For example, the pilot episode of Eli Stone had a plotline about childhood vaccines that was widely criticized for its inaccuracies. If there wasn’t time in the episode for a more thorough exploration of the issue, another case should have been substituted, because what remained was inflammatory and (debatably) dangerous.
accuracy — In archery and life, accuracy is measured by how close you come to the target. For movies and television, the target is pretty wide. Looking back at the derivative challenge, it was more important to give a sense of why derivatives exist than explain exactly what they were. For a medical drama, we’ve come to accept a certain amount of time compression, allowing characters to recover from surgery in much less time than they actually would. But if a character became pregnant and gave birth in the same day, we’d protest. That’s not just inaccurate, it’s implausible, and plausibility is a much higher standard.
Granted, even plausibility takes a back seat in Charlie. (c.f. Great Glass Elevator)
38 Responses to “Simple is better than accurate”
Leave a Reply
RSS feed for comments on this article.
Get a Gravatar. They're free and work on lots of different sites.
July 16th, 2008 at 10:28 am
I disagree with most of the things you said.
1 on that list would be cacao. Why deny the audience the real ingredient of chocolate just because it sounds funny and demands a larger explanation which isn’t particularly rewarding. Who decides if cacao sounds funny, and if it demands a larger explanation?
This argument is flawed, as for instance, I might decide that saying Evolution sounds funny if repeated often enough, and I replace it with Creationism, which in my opinion, doesn’t require additional explanation (God Did it) and doesn’t make the whole scene unfunny. (i think this is a fair reductio ad absurdum)
2 On on the other hand you say that screenwriters are not absolved of societal responsibility, as a counter-argument. This is true, and i think that’s why your argument doesn’t fly at all. How do you determine, for instance, when something is inflammatory or dangerous ? Your cacao / cocoa switch might seem perfectly innocuous to you, just as (i assume to some extent) making a story on children’s vaccines relationship to autism seemed innocuous (probably thinking that by using a fake name for the preservative would save them from being taken too seriously).
However, the facts are that fiction takes a far greater influence on people’s minds than most writers seem to admit. Slight alterations to historical fact or taking a side in a debate without proper research might seem fair tradeoffs for a more entertaining story, but consider the fact that many people i’ve met believe that Thirteen Days, Amadeus or a number of other supposedly historical movies actually happened.
I think the proper thing to do would be removing any semblance of fact from a fantastical screenplay, and vice-versa.
I hope i don’t come out as violent or inflammatory. I simply disagree deeply on some of the things you said there. Simplicity should rule, yes, but never at the expense of fact.
July 16th, 2008 at 10:39 am
Excellent.
July 16th, 2008 at 10:40 am
There was a Q&A with Pixar people when “A Bug’s Life” was release. An insect specialist asked, “In your research, you probably learned ants have six limbs and not four. Why did you represent them with four when this was an opportunity to educate people…” etc.
The Pixar person responded, “There’s a short answer and a long answer.
“The long answer is we tried to animate them with six limbs, but the animators found it was a lot more work and we weren’t finding much use for the extra limbs. Also, the extra limbs made our heros look kind of creepy. We ended up giving the extra limbs to the bad guys which worked out well.
“The short answer: bugs don’t talk.”
July 16th, 2008 at 10:46 am
This is one of the better things I’ve read lately, John, because this message applies to things well beyond screenwriting. Simplicity always rules of the alternative is confusion. The only time I see this being an issue, and maybe this is just with my nerd family, is when scientific things that are just not possible occur rather simply in films/television. But then again, if you are targeting a show/movie to a sci-fi demographic, you can probably get away with a lot more detail anyway before really causing confusion.
July 16th, 2008 at 10:55 am
I don’t think I even noticed it. If I had even on some level, I would have assumed Wonka was simplifying it for his audience.
July 16th, 2008 at 11:11 am
No no no. Or, rather, maybe maybe maybe. But when faced with this choice, one should set the threshold pretty high for sacrificing accuracy. People believe what they see and hear, even if it’s in a fictional movie or television show. (I once heard someone lambast our criminal justice system for allowing Al Bundy to make Married With Children after having killed all those people in Florida.) It’s not too hard to imagine that sometime, somewhere, someone will take a stand on “cocoa bean” and cite Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in their defense. If they’re interviewing for a job with Hershey’s… well, better luck next time. But if not, and if their interlocutor says something like “Really? I always thought it was ‘cacao,’ but hey, if you say so…” then what? Every little error we introduce will take on a life of its own.
Not that I would have wanted to sit around and listen to Wonka explain the difference to a bunch of rotten kids. Unless it was funny…
July 16th, 2008 at 11:56 am
Interesting I always assumed Dahl made up the word cacao as a joke. If you watch chocolate commercials on TV they refer to the bean as coco rather than cacao. I guess in a 30 second commercial spot you don’t have time to be accurate either.
July 16th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
An amusing downside to this topic is having a longer-than-usual list under “goofs” in IMDB.
I’m very intrigued by the trailer I recently saw for a movie called “Outlander”, about a man from outer space who lands among the Vikings to battle some space dragon. I’m willing to deal with the Vikings speaking English, but the space hunter? Unless he comes from the future (which just adds another layer to the whole thing) it seems like simplicity becomes, like you said, idiocy.
Oh, and I did notice the cacao thing. I confess to have been miffed.
July 16th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
As simply a consumer of entertainment content, not a producer, I can not disagree more. The dumbing down of mass culture produces misinformed people. If you can’t write on a subject accurately, you shouldn’t write on it at all, rather you should find a way around it that doesn’t lie to people, or leave it out entirely. My perspective is that adopting this rule for screenwriting produces lowest common denominator scripts.
July 16th, 2008 at 1:31 pm
@Rafael:
Done! Granted, we’ll have to scrap pretty much every movie ever made, but think of how much more accurate they’ll be.
@Sean Wolfson:
“But what if someone is dumb enough to believe it and/or try it?” is a valid question, and particularly worth asking when it involves something dangerous. But a lot of things really are unimportant in the grand scheme of things. Cacao/Cocoa is one.
After I wrote this post, I remembered the stories about how juries are much more critical of prosecutors, because they’ve been conditioned by watching CSI to assume that forensic evidence is readily available and always conclusive.
@Andy:
I saw that trailer today too, and had the same question. I think it’s reasonable to assume that it’s explained in the movie.
Also, why did we never question it in the original Star Trek? By the time of ST:TNG, they explained that the communicator badges somehow did realtime translation.
July 16th, 2008 at 1:47 pm
Eventually, cocoa is even more accurate than cacao… Wonka is a really mixed up guy, so why not mix up the letters/words as well!? I truly love the idea! It underlines his sort of naivity and (still) inner child and makes us all laughing!
July 16th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
I think Craig missed the paragraph about “simplicity.”
What would you suggest for dealing with controversial subjects, where accuracy is debatable?
Also, what about when inaccuracy is just cooler?
July 16th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
The Jack Bauer-esque example you give is not a direct parallel to Wonka. On 24, they get away with fake technology shit all the time, but no one ever stands up and says “A mouse is something you type on,” because that’s obviously and specifically wrong. Likewise, 99% of the material in Wonka is completely made-up, so there’s no way you can be inaccurate with any of it (for all we know, squirrels CAN be trained to do that stuff) — but doesn’t it stand to reason, then, that the few factual elements in the story SHOULD be gotten right, so that we’re more likely to believe the rest of it?
July 16th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
I seem to remember that when they adapted FIGHT CLUB into a movie, there were a few things (such as a simple recipe for making napalm in your bathtub) that they deliberately made inaccurate, so as not to give anyone information with which they may hurt themselves . . . in the interest of public safety.
Intent is key, I think, in assessing accuracy of a work. In journalism, accuracy is key (like John points out) because the intent is to inform viewers of the facts (or at least it used to be that way, before Fox News,) . . . in entertainment, the intent is only to entertain, that and only that, so we buy that bugs talk and oompa-loompas exist and boy wizards go to school . . . it doesn’t necessary have to be factual or accurate or TRUE, it only has to FEEL accurate and factual and true.
That’s the key difference, in my mind.
July 16th, 2008 at 4:34 pm
I agree with this article. Especially when you have to read a script. Reading scripts that get too complicated make it harder to get through, so at this stage, you should simplify everything. Especially if you are trying to get your agent or manager to follow…we don’t have too much patience! I’m sure once you get into production, the director can get into detail visually, making it easier for the audience to take it all in.
July 16th, 2008 at 5:14 pm
Sorry John, can’t get behind this one. Detail inaccuracies like the cacao / cocoa switch are totally distracting to me, and make me mistrust both the character and the writer.
July 17th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Hm. I wonder if there is a generational gap going on here between John and the up-and-comers here. See, we’ve been raised on some really raw movies and television, i.e. “The Sopranos” or “The Wire.” Now, both of these shows are obviously fiction, and there are many places where they are intentionally inaccurate (David Chase says he never wanted “Sopranos” to get into CSI ground, so some murders that seem like they should have been solved that day are never investigated). Still, there’s an accuracy in the very mundane facts of life that make everything else seem that much more correct. I guess, then, logic trumps inaccuracy.
Our parents, on the other hand, grew up with “Star Wars,” “The Munsters,” “Bewitched.” They weren’t as cynical when it comes to movie magic as we are (in my eyes, at least). We are very desensitized, so if it’s not real, it’s not worth it.
Couple this with the internet and shows like “Mythbusters,” there’s a new standard for cinema. Look at “The Dark Knight.” Trace the evolution from Tim Burton’s “Batman” in 1989 to Chris Nolan’s. It’s all about reality, how the world would actually accept a Batman. Not only that, but they’ve gone ahead and built a Batpod that really works. I’m 100% there are going to be so many inaccuracies in the movie, but there are probably less than found in Burton’s. Even most of the time travel stuff on “Lost” is rooted in the real. Just imagine what cinema will be in 5-10 years.
Even still, we’re no smarter than previous movie goers. There’s still a lot of crap I totally buy into upon first viewing only to smack my head and realize there’s no way that could be accurate. But emotions, and the little things, must, must, must be real. Tony Soprano’s passive-aggressiveness, or the Major Crimes Unit’s boring paperwork, or Batman’s negative effect on Gotham city all feel accurate because we can say, “That’s probably what would happen, yeah.”
July 17th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
I couldn’t disagree with you more, particularly your choice of examples.
Eli Stone correctly extrapolated a fictional premise from the evidence of actual studies. The fact that a bunch of doctors would eventually protest should not have deterred or forced the writer’s hands in anyway.
Should Michael Crichton have stopped writing “State of Fear” because of the wrath of environmentalists who were sure to hate the book? Should he have also avoided writing Jurassic Park because some say the science was suspect? (p.s. — they can’t really clone dinosaurs, John)
On the other hand, you knowingly substituted “cocoa” for “cacao” because the correct word sounds funny, even though you admit the novel is very careful not to make such a mistake, even as the words are uttered by a chocolate expert.
Here is where you lose me. Instead of saying you did it because you had to pander to the audience, which would have been refreshingly honest, you say you made the choice because “simplicity” trumps everything else. Thus the choice was not mandated by a studio, but by superior screenwriting.
That is where I respectfully disagree. Thank God writers like Aaron Sorkin, Tony Gilroy, and others give the audience a little more faith. The greatest movies educate while they entertain.
Couldn’t your movie about chocolate given me the cacao bean?
PS: In the context of the movie, the error is forgivable. What truly was missing from that movie was the gobtopper beat. That is what made the first movie work on an emotional level - this child transcending the flaws of the other children, truly earning the factory. Oh well, the movie was pretty to look at.
July 17th, 2008 at 5:35 pm
John,
Regarding Star Trek always being in English… well, I’ve never seen it. Not a single movie, episode or spin-off from that entire universe. So I don’t know (one day I’ll get to it, maybe, when I’m no longer obsessed with Firefly).
Brendan,
I agree begrudgingly about Our Cynical Times. Living in NY, where cynicism is ubiquitous, I find myself constantly trying to convince people to give “clean” or “wholesome” entertainment a fair shake. The only way I got some friends to see a charming and non-moody flick like Lars and the Real Girl was to tell them there was a sex doll in it.
July 17th, 2008 at 6:58 pm
I didn’t make it obvious I was talking about a utopia. But I hope my other non-hyperbolic arguments on my other post will also be taken into consideration, and that they won’t be tainted by that utopian dream of a society where fantastical scripts don’t mingle with reality.
A disctintion i’d like to make, is that on one hand you can have scripts of real people, and by that I mean good, layered characters with plausible motivations, doing fantastical things (Big Fish, Being John Malkovich, Kill Bill, Indiana Jones, 90s action movies), and on the other hand you can have fantastical people trying to manage within a realistic setting (every soap opera ever, judd apatow comedies, romcoms in general, the bourne movies). The problem is that on one hand, no one ever learns much from fantastical settings, for instance, I can’t think of a single thing that I learned that was applicable to the real-world from any of those movies i listed with fantastical settings, but they take a tremendous lot from anything that is set within a realistic setting. Take any common housewife from around the World, and try to figure out how much of her knowledge she remember from school books. Then try her favorite soap opera. The soap opera models of behaviour on a Brazilian soap opera for instance (watched by millions around the World) are often disturbingly simplistic (everyone’s constantly strategizing agaisnt each other) and the results are always the same (good prevails). Housewifes take this and try to apply it to reality, resulting in a deeply disturbed view. Add to this the fact that Housewifes are the future model for children.
After all, the standard banner only says “The events depicted in this movie are fictitious. Any similarity to any person living or dead is merely coincidental.” People assume that a story under a realistic setting isn’t completely ficticious, and they assume that these relationships and events must have some real inspiration, and they eventually extend this to most of the facts their common sense doesn’t contradict.
To be fair, all movies are fantastical, as you yourself adressed in a post a while back, comparing your movie kitchen to your real kitchen. I definitly think such a strict separation as i suggested is likely. But I do think it would be an ideal situation.
The problem is that millions of people have access to your movies, and often they’re the only channel to any country or thinking outside of their own community (especially for people who don’t speak english). This might sound odd for an American, but I can tell you that the movies in my tiny town are the only way of escape for the landlocked 150 000 portuguese people living here, and every single weekends the theaters are packed with people wishing for release. Having no other way of learning about the US. The vast majority of these people have never ventured beyond Spain during travelling. Things that Adam Sandler did with lots of CGI are recreated here by youth.
I can understand factual innacuracies when they’re meant as a joke or to improve a joke (such as your own, in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or in every sitcom ever) as long as they’re clearly portrayed as a joke. If Wonka was supposed to be misspelling words, make them misspell a couple more. If, as you say, people only want to watch bad things happen to children, then why leave in the whole line at all? Couldn’t you just replace it with something funnier, yet clearly a joke and not factually sounding at all ?
The thing is that i don’t disagree with your assumptions (people should not be bored by long expositions, and they should be confused by strange words, simplicity trumps everything) but I disagree with your results (this word should be changed). I think if the word simply doesn’t fit, I would simply throw it out. If this wasn’t an option here, I would still keep the actual word.
And I can accept factual innacuracies on movies with lower budgets, where little research is possible, but with Hollywood and major networks, especially with their highly “ficticious fact” presentation, where ficticious corporate leaders are bent to make room for ficticious results in a realistic setting (like in Eli Stone), there should be little room for error.
There are some mistakes and misconceptions that even to me me, seem perfectly innocent, and made out of ignorance and not out of a search for added impact. “The Greatest Show on Earth” has a mistake like that. I saw it recently, and it tells you bluntly that a person with blood type AB negative cannot receive from anyone other than another AB negative. Yet this is completely false, as AB negative people are universal receivers. The problem would have existed only if his blood was O-negative. Seems to me like the screenwriters just made a mistake out of misinformation and not deliberately changed it, as i don’t see how watching James Stewart say O-negative would be less exciting or riveting than AB negative. This is grave misinformation.
Under the rules specified in this post, this switch could be justifiable even if the screenwriter knew all about blood types, as long as he found AB negative to be a more plTeasing blood type to hear. That’s what bothers me, that the screenwriter would have the power to change fact over an aesthetical consideration, without ever informing his audience, if he finds it unimportant enough.
Again, I do this under the possibility that i might be seen just as a total douche. I won’t stop respecting your work, or even reading this blog. But in the grand scheme of things, i do think the principles behind CocoaCacao do matter.
July 17th, 2008 at 9:35 pm
For once, I disagree with you because too many people believe that everything they “learn” from movies is true. Sure, the difference between cacao and cocoa might not be that important to anyone, but why don’t be accurate if you know better? It requires maybe two more sentences of explanation.
And I agree with Samantha, such details can distract viewers who know better.
July 18th, 2008 at 12:51 am
For what it’s worth, an earlier draft of the ELI STONE pilot did have a different case. The suit was not about vaccines or any other “cause” of autism; it was a suit against the insurance company because they would not authorize coverage of a drug that had promising treament potential for autistic spectrum disorders. (The drug had been developed for treatment of something else entirely and didn’t have FDA approval for the new use.)
I actually thought the original was more interesting than the one that aired — and the case seemed more legally sound to boot — and I’ve often wondered exactly who decided to make the change and why.
July 18th, 2008 at 3:05 am
All this conversation is confusing me, because in my French native langage, Cacao IS actually the normal word… and nobody ever said cocoa… and nobody finds cacao funny either… (well, that’s not exactly true: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_yHVBqwLI0)
July 18th, 2008 at 7:05 am
I also disagree with you on this one, John. Your reasons for wanting to avoid the word “cacao” are completely valid, but I think that’s when a writer needs to find a creative way around those issues WITHOUT resorting to inaccuracy. Yes, a lengthy description would’ve been obnoxious, but what if he says “cocoa” and a snotty kid corrects him? Or what if he says “cacao” and the kids giggle, thinking he said the word wrong. but he corrects them (w/o any explanation whatsoever) “it’s not funny… it’s just a bean” & moves on? Those aren’t excellent or anything, but if I was getting paid to adapt Dahl’s work, I would keep trying stuff until it worked.
I agree that the appearance of simplicity should grace the script, but not at the expense of accuracy. To me, that’s taking the easy way out. Simple isn’t easy.
But that said, I agree with you on almost everything else you say about writing, so I’ll give you this one.
July 18th, 2008 at 9:14 am
I ask one thing from a feature or a TV movie - entertainment. I want amazing characters doing amazing things. If I want a lecture or a history lesson, I’ll go to a class or a library. I’m with you 100% on this, John.
I’m writing two historical specs at the moment. Where the facts are entertaining, I go with the facts. Where they’re not, I make up cool stuff. I suspect Mr W. Shakespeare did much the same thing.
July 18th, 2008 at 10:47 am
“Thank God writers like Aaron Sorkin, Tony Gilroy, and others give the audience a little more faith.”
Are you kidding about Sorkin? While he does get a fair amount of correct factual info into his scripts, he also has tons of stuff that is wildly inaccurate. The urban legend about the government spending millions to develop a pen that writes in space while the russians used pencils comes to mind.
Whether Sorkin intentionally fudges things for the sake of better fiction or simply makes mistakes, I don’t know, but nevertheless there are definitely lapses in accuracy.
I agree with the sentiment of this post for situations where accuracy makes things much more cumbersome or confusing, but the cocoa/cacao thing seems like it could have easily had the accurate info - it’s not that big a deal, it’s easily worked around, and in this particular case it seems like an unnecessary cop-out.
July 18th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
I don’t really mind one way or the other, but if you simply replaced the word cocoa with cacao i don’t really see why you would need to explain anything extra. There are plenty of things in the world that no one really cares about understanding and i don’t think anyone would pay two minds to this one…
July 18th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Worse, cacao is confusing. It demands explanation…
If only there was room for an explanation like, “The cacao bean happens to be the thing from which chocolate is made.”
As Scott suggested, this begs the reply: “Don’t you mean ‘cocoa’?” To which Wonka elaborates, “It’s not cocoa until it’s processed.”
The extra beat might serve to demonstrate Wonka’s chocolate wizardry, except that it’s the wizardry of basic vocabulary. The same way Scarecrow stating the Pythagoras Theorem is supposedly shorthand for genius.
Which reminds me: does “isosceles triangle” count as simplicity, or was that plain inaccuracy?
July 18th, 2008 at 8:22 pm
Must also disagree with the august Mr. August. This argument seems predicated on John’s declaration that the word cacao is “weird.” Says you. I understand and agree about the dramatic problem of dealing with an overly repeated word, but shouldn’t one have faith that the actor can manage to convey the proper meaning? Especially when the actor is Mr. Depp.
Also, maybe it’s a case where more work is needed to make an explanation entertaining and authentic. While screenwriters aren’t exactly responsible for the general stupidity of the American public (re: Sean’s Al Bundy story), we’re all generally responsible for seeing that truth carries the day.
July 19th, 2008 at 8:42 pm
The better solution would have been to not have Wonka say either cocoa or cacao in the same scene six times. That feels wildly unnecessary. How about him saying cacao correctly just the once?
July 20th, 2008 at 12:14 am
When I see “simplifications” like cacao / cocoa, I just assume the filmmakers are dumb.
July 20th, 2008 at 8:57 pm
A few notes and further observations:
As far as I can tell by Googling, before this article, not a single viewer mentioned the switch from “cacao” to “cocoa.”
As it turns out, “cocoa bean” is the term preferred by the World Cocoa Federation, though most artisanal chocolatiers still prefer “cacao.”
Wonka refers to cocoa beans so much because it’s how the Oompa-Loompas came to live at his factory.
July 21st, 2008 at 1:28 am
Agree wholeheartedly. Polly want a Cacao? Cacao sounds like a verbal slip, a mispronunciational goof, it doesn’t roll off the tongue, just doesn’t work period.
Everyone has a general idea of cocoa beans, why quibble with being obnoxiously picky? The story flows, the general idea is met, it be but make-believe fantasy, chocolate could be made from anything in Wonka’s world, mowed grass or rotting cabbage, Dahl just happened to go froth-whip run-on explainer mode, which is something you can do in the literatureish format, in film, that’s an oxygen-swoosh-away death sentence. As for “mistrusting” and all such neurotic comparisons, reality doesn’t really apply, in the everlasting gum universe.
July 21st, 2008 at 4:01 pm
I dunno, Mr. August. While I only have a dim memory of the scene in question, and with all due respect, a six-time mention of cocoa still seems a trifle high to me.
July 21st, 2008 at 4:30 pm
July 22nd, 2008 at 3:10 am
Thanks for posting the scene, Mr. August. I’m sorry for the obnoxious tone of my previous post, I didn’t mean to sound at all snarky or condescending. I am very much a great admirer of your work.
In recent years, i’ve become obsessive about eliminating word repetition from my scripts as much as possible. But, as the above example illustrates, sometimes you just can’t.
However, I think I found one superfluous cocoa bean in the above scene.
July 22nd, 2008 at 2:31 pm
I still think “cacao” would have been fine.
August 6th, 2008 at 10:38 am
This dovetails nicely with a core game design principle we like to espouse here in the office, to wit:
“Fuck realism”
TK