Archive for the 'Follow Up' Category

e 17 Hiring complete
I’ve picked my Director of Digital Things.
e 31 How much should ebooks cost?
Adding up the publisher’s expenses shows there is plenty of room for flexibility in pricing.
e 12 Update on the job
I’ve culled 66 applications down to a final few candidates for the new Director of Digital Things job.
e Comments Off Update on the job
I’ll be narrowing down my top choices for the Director of Digital Things job beginning Thursday, February 4.
e 13 Watching OTMM
One Too Many Mornings is lo-fi funny, a mumblecore Swingers, with a refreshingly clear sense of what it is.
e 41 Sitting in on the Prop 8 trial
Yesterday, I flew up to San Francisco to watch the federal trial regarding Proposition 8.
e 7 It’s all a bunch of piles
As an add-on to my earlier post, The Wrap has a detailed article about how nomination votes are tallied.
e 23 Reading scripts on a MacBook, book-style
Turn your laptop on its side, and hold it like a hardcover book. It works much better than you’d think, particularly with one of the unibody MacBooks.
e 28 Reading scripts on the Kindle
The 2.3 software update adds pdf support for older Kindles, but it’s not as excellent for screenplays as you’d hope.
e 5 How to handle a meeting
For newcomers, I can offer a bit of a summary
e 15 Taking indie films on the road
Todd Sklar is back with Range Life, taking eight indies on tour around the country.
e 13 How I Became…on NPR
I twittered about it while it was happening, but if you missed it, author Steve Hely gave a nice interview on NPR’s Fresh Air this afternoon.
e 5 Popcorn Fiction
A new online anthology features short stories written by top screenwriters.
e 82 Challenge results
We’ve got a winner and a slew of honorable mentions in the Superheroic Scene Challenge.
e 10 Cablevision and the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal on the Cablevision case, allowing the Second Circuit Court’s decision to stand. Cablevision can begin introducing its service.
e 24 Per-screen average
Indies have high per-screen averages because they’re on so few screens, not despite it.
e 1 NPR on Twitter and The Variant
NPR’s All Things Considered tonight has a piece by Alex Cohen about how artists use Twitter, including me with my short story The Variant.
e 42 Greeks
This comes from Greeks, a comedy I never finished — and barely started, honestly. It’s set in ancient times, and would have retold several of the great myths in significantly less epic ways.
e 18 Spelunking the Kindle market
How many books does Amazon sell on Kindle each day? Is there a classic long tail — and is it even worth being on it? Amazon is incredibly opaque with the details, even when you’re publishing on their system.
e 18 How much does a short story earn in a magazine?
I really had no idea what people were getting paid for short stories, so I asked Matt to dig up some numbers.
e 3 Welcome, NY Times readers
The NY Times has an article today about The Variant, the Kindle, and my Twitter followers.
e 15 A week of The Variant
My short story has been on the market for a week. As promised, here’s an update on how the 99-cent experiment has gone.
e 20 Leftover questions
Some readers had questions they didn’t get to ask on the call-in show last night, so I answered them this morning.
e 40 On the present tense
The present progressive tense can be your friend.
e 25 Adam Davis, year two
I asked Adam Davis, a young alum from Drake University, to write about his first year starting out in Hollywood. He’s back with a follow-up.
e 17 Aliens abroad
In a precautionary move to ward off pirates, Paramount supplied only dubbed prints of “Monsters vs. Aliens” to Russian and Ukrainian theaters.
e 8 Los Angeles myths, answered
In February, I linked by Eric Morris about pervasive Los Angeles transportation myths. Here’s a follow-up.
e 6 Preschool, NYC edition
Following up on my post about getting your kid into preschool, a reader tipped me off to an upcoming documentary on the subject.
e 16 Cams, rips and release dates
I’ve been asking around to find more information about studios’ anti-piracy efforts.
e 13 Show your work, pt. 2
Nearly every browser lets you “View Source,” showing how the page was constructed…up to a point.
e 21 The Kindle is not good for screenplays
Kindle 2: great for books, but not ready for screenplays.
e 67 Notes on the state of the industry
Matt gives the full report from a WGA panel about the film industry.
e 25 Authors’ Guild vs. Kindle
Cory Doctorow makes many of the points I would about the Authors’ Guild’s grumpiness over the Kindle’s text-to-speech function.
e 39 Official badasses
MTV released its final list of top-ten badasses, which included contributions by me and a lot of other folks.

Dirty Harry – “Dirty Harry” Ellen Ripley – “Alien/Aliens” John McClane – “Die Hard” Mad Max – “Mad Max” Walker – “Point Blank” Sarah Connor – “Terminator” Pike Bishop – “The Wild Bunch” Khan Noonien Singh – “Star Trek” Boba Fett – “Star Wars” John J. [...]
e 41 iMovie 09 is much better, still maddening
A few weeks ago, I expressed exasperation upon seeing demos of iMovie 09, which seemed to be working hard to fix exactly the wrong problems. Now that I have it installed, I’ve been able to spend a few days playing around with it. And you know what?

It’s actually a lot better.

Yes, that could [...]
e 9 The biggest TiVo in the world
The thin line between unlimited DVR and video-on-demand.
e 7 The rat is dead
Last month, a visitor made an unwelcome appearance in our kitchen, eating oranges on the counter. He was first caught virtually by my laptop’s iSight camera, then later physically by a classic spring-lever trap.

It was loud; it was unsettling; it was over.

I actually like rodents as pets. I grew up with gerbils and hamsters, [...]
e 49 The Duluth Dilemma
In Banging a chainsaw against a tree, I expressed my frustration at those who complain how unfair it is that screenwriters in, say, Duluth, aren’t taken seriously. It got a lot of responses.

Mike writes:

Why can’t he complain if no one takes a screenwriter in Duluth seriously? If he wrote a damn good screenplay that [...]
e Comments Off Follow-Up Week
My favorite episodes of Intervention are the follow-up ones, in which they track what’s happened with the addicts in the months and years after treatment. Some have stayed clean, others are off-the-rails disasters. I always guess wrong.

Here on the site, I rarely do follow-ups. In fact, once an entry gets pushed off [...]
e 33 Slumdog Coincidentalist
A reader writes in requesting a reexamination of my post “The Perils of Coincidence” in light of an acclaimed movie which is already a screenwriting award contender:

This weekend, I saw Slumdog Millionaire, a story that is succinctly described by the equation: “I knew the answer to this obscure question because this farfetched event happened to [...]
e 31 Postmodernism will eat itself
In the comments thread to my post on Charlie Brown, advertising, and whatever comes after postmodernism, reader Michael makes an important point:

If everything is a reference to a reference to a reference, as so much creative work is currently, then audiences are forced to either “get” everything, or else be alienated by everything. [...]
e 36 Six week bug
I’m finally over the annoying illness that’s kept me on a reduced schedule these past few weeks. I’m calling it bronchitis, though my doctor never used that term, and it’s possible it was something else entirely. In general I’m not a person who gets sick for more than a day or two, so [...]
e 6 Splinter, tonight
Following up on my earlier post about alternative distributions for indies, Splinter has its debut on HDNet Movies tonight, in anticipation of its theatrical roll-out this weekend. (And in competition with a certain presidential candidate’s national address.)

I haven’t seen the movie, but it got a nice review today in Variety, and awards at Screamfest.
e 9 Insomnia 2008
I’m going to be one of the judges for the 2008 Insomnia Film Festival, an Apple-sponsored competition for U.S. high school and college students. Entrants get 24 hours to write, produce, edit, score and deliver a three-minute short film incorporating specific elements they only announce on the day.

The competition begins at 9:00 a.m. on [...]
e 8 Indie film, cont’d
How some are navigating distribution of indie fare.
e 5 WGA membership approves credit proposals
The WGA announced this afternoon that all three proposed revisions to the Screen Credits Manual passed handily, ranging from 83 to 90 percent yes votes.
e Comments Off Vote yes on credit proposals
Just a reminder for WGA members: ballots are due Thursday for the three screen credit proposals, which I wrote about in more detail a few weeks ago. It’s an easy Yes for all three. They’re basically just closing loopholes.
e 31 Self-distributing an indie feature
Todd Sklar, who I know from his work up at the Sundance Labs, wrote in to agree with a lot of the points I raised in my post-mortem of The Nines. His experience with the indie film he made and self-released is alternately inspiring and exhausting, but worth careful attention for anyone considering making [...]
e 28 I never told Robert Redford to suck it
I want to expand, redirect and challenge some of the discussion on my earlier post about Sundance, The Nines, and the death of independent film.

For starters, many in the P2P world were all too happy to declare victory over, well, logic. (The Nines Director: Forget Sundance, Use P2P Instead). That’s incorrect on a lot [...]
e 92 I got married
On Saturday evening, one hundred friends and family members got together for our wedding at a house in the hills. There were rings and toasts and food and cake. It’s all a bit of a blur. The photos I’ve seen so far have me grinning idiotically, which I’m sure I was.

We had [...]
e 18 Scene challenge winners
Y’know, I think we learned something today: Derivatives were maybe not the best choice for the third-ever scene challenge.

I deliberately picked something tough because in real life, screenwriters are often faced with challenging topics to explain. For example, last night I spoke with Ron Bass about the Einstein project he’s working on. Quick: Show special [...]
e 64 More on the torrents
There’s been a lot of feedback and reaction on this site and others about my c’est la vie attitude towards The Nines showing up on BitTorrent. Some felt I was tacitly endorsing piracy (no), while others wondered if I’d feel the same if I had financed the movie, rather than writing and directing it. So [...]
e 24 Not a word
Last week, I wrote how much I admired the Pencils Down ad, in which TV’s top showrunners said they would be doing no writing on their shows during a strike. I said that I’d be delighted to sign a similar ad for feature screenwriters. I’m happy to say the WGA took me up on the [...]
e 22 Heroes: Origins: Gone
The WGA strike kills a spin-off, and my episode with it.
e 6 Authorship in the digital age
A few weeks ago, my friend Howard Rodman was asked to give a talk at the 2007 Rencontres CinÃ©matographiques de Dijon, speaking on a panel entitled “Copyright and Droit d’Auteur in the Digital Age.”

Being a reader of the blog, Howard asked if he might incorporate a few of the observations from my Challenge of Writing [...]
e 7 Defeat keeps on going
“My Glorious Defeat,” the article I wrote for Men’s Health, is now up at MSN.com. (No, I don’t get residuals.)
e 29 Trailer Competition: The Winners
We had 57 official entries. That’s a lot, and it’s about the most I could handle without my eyeballs exploding.1 I’m happy to report that many of the entries were quite good, and it was genuinely a pleasure to watch them. Most of them.

I feel like I should pad this opening bit with [...]
e 8 Trailer competition judging in progress
Wow, that’s a lot of entries. I’ll be announcing the winners tomorrow morning.

Erik Beeson, who so generously helped with the hosting and torrenting, sent along stats:

total torrent file downloads for both torrents combined: 808 (includes search engine crawlers) dv torrent: 162 completed downloads mpeg4 torrent: 79 completed downloads mpeg4.zip: 242 (the direct download) total completed (torrents+direct): 483

Thanks [...]
e 22 T-Minus one day
The trailer competition is nearing its end, and entries are starting to stream in. Some are quite good.

If I have one general observation, it’s that many of the trailers are trying to be respectful to the (supposed) tone of the movie. That’s fine, but it’s hard to distinguish yourself when aiming for the same [...]
e 13 Trailer competition, teaser
Tomorrow, full details of the long-gestating trailer competition will be announced here (and at the lookforthenines site). You’ll have two versions of footage to choose from: DV and MPEG-4. The DV is big and beautiful. The MPEG-4 is small and nimble — and not as bad as you’d think.

To get ready, Erik Beeson [...]
e 4 Google-Mapped, part two
Matt sent me an LA Times article this morning which confirms that Google has been busy adding Street View to Los Angeles.

My earlier suspicion that I’d been van-captured has proven true. So far, my mug doesn’t show up in any of the shots, but that’s likely because they seem to have only commercial streets [...]
e 2 Filmmaking, permitted
Update on New York City’s struggle with what to charge productions.
e 11 Location scouting vs. reality
Looking through my YouTube account, I realized that I’d actually posted (and blogged about) our location scouting footage more than a year ago, shortly after we’d wrapped shooting.

I thought I’d go back and grab screencaps from the movie to show you what some of these places looked like as shot. (The following are in [...]
e 6 An air duct speaks back
From the comment thread on the Air vents are for air post:

I am an Air Conditioning Duct and I find this entire conversation incredibly ignorant and offensive.

On the rare occasions that I do see my Community represented on screen, it is invariably unrealistic and below industry standard. All the Air Conditioning Ducts of my acquaintance [...]
e 22 The Nines goes to Venice
A reader alluded to it in the comments of an earlier post, but today we can officially announce that The Nines was chosen to play the Venice Film Festival as part of Critics’ Week.

(At least, I assume we can announce it. We were sworn to double-super secrecy, which is presumably now over, since it [...]
e 35 Silent Evidence
A few weeks ago, while answering the Grey’s Anatomy question which generated so much talkback, I found myself searching for a specific term I knew had to exist: the human tendency to consider only the samples presented, ignoring other relevant items.

It felt like a fallacy, but it didn’t quite match up to any of the [...]
e 16 Summer Sundance, part two
What exactly do you discuss at Sundance? Theyâ€™re entering with completed scripts, which I assume are perfect to them at the beginning, so where to next? And if you participate in the Screenwriting Lab are you automatically given a Directors Lab spot, if that is what you so choose to do with your completed work?

– [...]
e 13 Trailer competition update
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 [...]
e 7 I talk with my hands
Video links explaining how film and television writers should approach promoting themselves and their work through the media.
e 9 Fish food for thought
One benefit of leaving the comment threads open is that sometimes a long-dead post gets a surge of new activity. Over the past month, I’ve noticed a few new comments on a 2004 post featuring this photo…

…which is, according to Snopes, probably real in the sense that it’s not Photoshopped — though it’s probably [...]
e 39 Blood stains and clown pants
I had a hunch there would be a lot of entries to the second Scene Challenge, but by the hammer of Thor, I never expected 162.

It’s taken hours to go through them, winnowing it down from a list of 25 to ten to the winner. There were so many solid entries that I found [...]
e 11 Publicity 101
It would be nice if the general public had some sense that movies are actually written, and that the actors aren’t making up their dialogue.
e 51 All-new MySpace beta
I now fully regret my earlier ambivalence about MySpace. As it turns out, the site is only lame when you have 600 or 700 friends. Having crossed the magic threshold of 1,000 MySpace pals, I truly understand what all the fuss is about.

The difference is MySpace Advanced, and you can only access it [...]
e 18 After the digg
I’ve seen a lot of articles about the Digg Effect and what a site can expect after having a bunch of new visitors arrive to check out an article, as happened with my recent post on Warcraft.

The general prediction is that readership drops to normal levels pretty quickly, and that’s borne out by the stats.

Page [...]
e 44 Blingons and despair
Measured by the number of entries, the first-ever John August Scene Challenge was a surprising success. In terms of quality, well, there was a disappointing sameness that I’m going to blame on the limited nature of the assignment.

Many entries were just a slightly-better version of the existing scene. While a lot of rewriting [...]
e 20 MTV Overdrive on The Nines
Josh Horowitz from MTV News wrote in to point out that The Flash business wasn’t the only thing they ran from our Sundance interview. In fact, the full version, now up on MTV Overdrive, succeeds in making both Ryan and me sound coherent, which is no small feat.

Here’s what you can’t see in the [...]
e 24 Clarification on point one
Update on “How to write a scene” post. Does the character drive the story or the storyteller?
e 15 Little Children, a little late
2007 Screeners update.
e 5 Follow up: What job should I beg for?
A blog reader helps steer another reader towards his dream job.
e 6 Follow up: Advice not taken
The cavalcade of follow ups continues today with this guy, who got conflicting advice and chose to ignore all of it. And somehow still ended up okay. If anything, it’s encouraging to see that my guidance isn’t necessarily that crucial. Most people who are going to make it would make it without [...]
e 6 Follow up: That crushing doubt
Today’s follow up comes from a reader who asked a question on my imdb column, which somehow never got copied over to this website.

Yes, for the record, I’m aware that this “Follow Up” feature has become self-congratulatory. If it’s any consolation, I hate myself. (Not really.)

The original Q and A went like this:

That [...]
e 12 Follow up: How to write a bio
The first of the follow up emails came in last night. I fully anticipate that several will be, basically, “Yeah, I took your advice but nothing much happened.” This one, however, was particularly encouraging, especially considering my glib-in-retrospect reply.

Here’s the original question and answer:

Iâ€™m submitting a script to a screenplay competition and to an agent [...]

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