I’ll be leading a Q&A with the filmmakers right after the screening, talking not just about the film but the challenges and opportunities in making and releasing a microbudget movie.

If you’re considering making a little movie, you should keep a close eye on OTMM. It’s good — a tiny, Swingers-esque two-hander. And the filmmakers are smart guys, not just how they made the movie, but how they’re putting it out in the world. They’re doing everything I would try, but will it work? It’s a great case study for indie films in 2010.

Here’s the info:

Tuesday March 16th – 8:00pm

Downtown Independent
251 S. Main Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012

Tickets are $7, available in advance at Brown Paper Tickets.

Longtime friend-of-the-site Nima Yousefi (he coded Scrippets) will be coming on board to handle a few special projects in the meantime.

With ridiculously good candidates to choose from, it’s not just protocol to say it was a tough decision. I learned quite a bit, both from video-chat interviews with applicants and calling references. I would have been happy with any of my final few choices; hiring just one was difficult. It forced me to focus on what I saw this person doing two, six and twenty-four months down the road.

I largely followed my original plan for the hiring process, starting with reviewing portfolios and emailing follow-up questions. I assigned a special project to my top few contenders, both to see what they could do and how they would discuss it afterwards.

You can read the assigment if you like. I’ve left it to the candidates whether they want to share what they did with the world.

If you feel like doing your own riff on the project, by all means go for it. If you’re using my text, I’d like attribution, but otherwise it’s free and clear.

Amazon prices Kindle books at $9.99, while Apple will apparently let prices float higher on iPad books, with $12.99 being a frequently-quoted number.

With data drawn from publishing sources, these articles break down costs and profits. Poorly. They don’t differentiate between one-time costs (designing cover artwork) and variable costs (printing each additional copy). And how much of the marketing budget would be identical with or without the ebook version?

The number that sticks out most is the bookseller’s take. A 50% cut makes sense when dealing with a physical book sold through a brick-and-mortar bookstore. A 30% cut is crazy when dealing with atoms pushed out through a virtual retailer. As a reference, I sell pdf and ePub versions of The Variant and only give up 11 cents on the dollar.¹

Amazon makes the Kindle to sell books; Apple makes the iPad to sell iPads — selling books is sort of gravy. That gives Apple more price flexibility, and should hopefully avoid absurd situations where the digital version costs much more than the paperback. ²

The publishing industry wants to keep prices up so they can make money. Can’t blame them for that. But you know something’s amiss when Anne Rice is the voice of reason:

The only thing I think is a mistake is people trying to hold back e-books or Kindle and trying to head off this revolution by building a dam. It’s not going to work.

One last point: How soon can we agree to spell ebooks with a lowercase e, and no hyphen?

The Times likes the hyphen, while Gizmodo feels the need to capitalize. I’d suggest that email is the best antecedent. That’s a term that has largely swallowed its hyphen, probably due to its verbification. Can we embrace the future and simply lose the hyphen now?

(Thanks to Quinn for the link.)

1. But I give up 65 cents of each dollar earned through the Kindle version, which sells much better.
2. I’m not ignoring the Nook or the Sony readers, but they’re not steering the ship.

Since several candidates live outside Los Angeles, we did video interviews by iChat — which was a remarkably good second-best solution. It’s odd meeting someone on video, but once you push past the first 30 awkward seconds, it feels remarkably natural. I feel like I have a much better sense of the individual than I would on a phone call.

The contenders are each working on a short challenge project, which is due later this week. I’ve left it up to the candidates whether to make their work public.

The movie’s achievably ambitious. The team figured out exactly what assets they had, and how to maximize those strengths. More crucially, they sliced away a lot of the cruft that usually comes along with shaggy indie films. There are no guns, no teary poems, no bad fathers. Its protagonists are a wuss and an asshole, but the script lets them be more than that.

And it looks great, largely thanks to its black and white photography.

Could anyone pick up a camera and make a movie like this? No. There’s talent required. But the film is great example of how little actual money you need to make an honest-to-God movie.

The film’s distribution strategy — allowing viewers to buy it online, or rent it on YouTube — makes it simple for aspiring filmmakers to check it out.

I have one of the 18,000 California same-sex marriages that remained in effect after the proposition passed in 2008. But it’s a piecemeal situation: the State of California considers me married, but Illinois doesn’t. Iowa does; Idaho doesn’t.

And as far as the U.S. government, I’m a single man.

This lawsuit challenges Proposition 8 on grounds that it violates the equal protection and due process protections of the U.S. Constitution. And if it turns out right, it could be a game changer like Loving v. Virginia, which struck down state laws on interracial marriage.

When the U.S. Supreme Court decided last week to block video from the trial, I lost my chance to see what was happening in the courtroom. Sure, I could follow the updates on Twitter, but the fortune cookie-length summaries didn’t feel like enough connection to a landmark case.

So I flew up to San Francisco to watch the trial.

The proceedings are open to the public. All that’s required is a civic interest and a photo ID.

There’s already ample online coverage about what’s happening, and what’s being said. But none of them put me in the room. With that goal, I want to provide a sketch of what it feels like to be there, since most Americans will never sit inside a federal district court.

Setting

The 17th-floor courtroom is impressive, both in appointment and scale; you could fit a basketball court snuggly in its footprint. Grooved planks of cappuccino-colored wood stretch up to a barrel-vaulted ceiling. At the front of the room, a massive wall of pale polished stone backs the judge’s bench. A single, undersized judicial seal hangs above. To the right of the judge, an American flag drapes around its pole, making it seem like the cloth is simply tacked to the wall by the brass eagle on top.

The court clerk and reporter sit on an elevated platform directly in front of the judge, a tangle of cables dripping over the edge.¹ The witness sits to the judge’s left. A single podium faces the judge, and it’s from this spot that attorneys must direct their questions to the bench or the witness. There’s no pacing around. There’s also no way to physically approach the judge for a sidebar conversation.

Every courtroom drama you’ve seen has long tables for the prosecution and defense teams. Take those tables and rotate them 90 degrees. Place twelve chairs around each and you have room for a lot more lawyers, each working off a laptop or a black flat-panel monitor. The plaintiffs’ team fills every seat at their table, while the defense has between five and seven staffers at work, with additional support staff at side chairs or tables. Wire shelves hold rows of binders. It’s all very tightly packed. Any attempt to approach the podium means stepping around others.

There is no jury in this trial. The space where a jury box would be has consumer-grade videocameras on tripods² and two sketch artists. One of them, a man who looks like actor Richard Jenkins, keeps raising binoculars to get a closer look at his subject.

Roughly a third of the floor space is devoted to six divided rows of benches for observers at the back of the courtroom. They’re pews, really, which adds to the churchy feel of the chamber. The first two rows are devoted to counsel and badge-wearing media. The back rows are open to the public. Altogether, maybe 100 observers can watch.

Unlike a conventional trial, the plaintiffs (a gay couple and a lesbian couple) sit with the crowd. There is really no other place to put them.

The chamber has no windows. Occasionally, you can hear thunder from the storms, but the room otherwise seems detached from the outside world.

Characters

Everyone springs to their feet when Judge Vaughn Walker enters. Now in his mid-60s, his Cronkite-ish voice would make him a good narrator for a History Channel documentary. Beyond an opening conversation with the opposing attorneys about newly-filed motions, he says little during the day. Based on recaps of previous days’ events, I expect him to be asking more questions directly of witnesses and counsel, but he mostly seems content to listen. ³

You see little visible difference between the two legal teams. They are both predominately white, predominately men, and invariably dressed in dark suits. ⁴ Crossing paths at the bathroom, you are never sure who is on which side. But everyone is polite, holding doors and squeezing tight in the elevator.

For each witness on the stand, one member of each legal team is empowered to speak. Everyone else keeps to leaning-in whispers or silently mouthed words as binders are passed. Post-It notes are passed back and forth, with additional staffers squeezing in through a side door that’s partially blocked by a large monitor.

Witness testimony is often accompanied by demonstratives, PowerPoint slides that show a graph or related text excerpt. Both teams have staffers assigned to getting these on-screen, along with other pieces of evidence such as video clips. The defendants had brief trouble getting video to play with a clip from the Yes on 8 campaign, but the day was otherwise free of technical issues.

Structure

For each witness, there’s a direct questioning, a cross-examination, and a redirect. During each phase, everything is more or less locked down. Attorneys and observers can (quietly) enter or exit the room, but everyone is expected to sit down and shut up. Judge Walker permits laptops and cell phones for email and tweeting, but beyond the light tapping of fingers on keyboards, it’s library-quiet in the room.⁵

That all changes the moment it moves from direct to cross, or cross to redirect. Suddenly, it’s a flurry of pent-up action and re-setting. It reminds me most of film production, with crews swarming the set the moment the director yells cut. Staffers bring new binders and huddle for quick conversations.

The judge calls a ten-minute break in the morning, and another one later in the afternoon. At lunch, everyone heads downstairs to the commissary on the second floor. I have lunch with the plaintiffs. It’s a small world; Jeffrey Zarrillo manages the same movie theaters in Burbank my husband used to run, and we know some of the same people.

While there is a lot of trial coverage online, I don’t see any traditional media all day. No cameras, no tape recorders, nothing.

The day’s work ends at 4 p.m., after the plaintiff’s redirect of Professor Lee Badgett.

Dialogue

In a trial without a jury, attorneys are not trying to elicit sympathy. That’s not say there are not emotional moments; several witnesses have teared up on the stand. But feelings are not as important as facts. Both sides are trying to get things on the record, which means getting witnesses on the stand to say what they need to say.

For direct testimony, this is pretty straightforward. The attorney asks a structured series of questions that allows the witness to make the required points.

During the cross-examination, the opposing attorney tries to make his case, either by presenting contrary evidence or drilling into a something the witness said. As an observer, this often feels like hearing the setup to a joke, trying to anticipate the punchline. The attorney asks a series of questions, and you wonder, “Where is he going with this?”

A few years ago, I had to give a deposition in a civil trial. I started the day giving very detailed answers, treating it like an EPK interview for a movie I’d written. Then I realized that every new thing I said introduced four more questions. By the fifth hour, I’d figured out the advice generally given to witnesses: listen, evaluate, formulate, talk. And then shut up.

We have a natural instinct to move things along and fill awkward silences, but the best witnesses take their time, unhurried and unflappable. When asked, “Would you also agree..,” they don’t. They restate their points in simple terms.

It’s nothing like movie or TV courtrooms with their zippy rhetorical boxing. Rather, it’s slow and calculated, like a chess match. During one particularly soporific stretch, the defense asked Professor Badgett to work through a lot of hypothetical math. Written figures are dry; spoken figures are numbing. To her credit as a witness, she cooperated without ever indulging his conclusions. But the audience thinned noticeably as the cross-examination reached its third hour.

The verdict

The trial is expected to wrap up as early as next week, so anyone hoping to see it in person should plan on getting there soon.

Depending on the testimony, it can be riveting or dull. Like church, you may find yourself squirming, trying to find new ways to sit on the benches without your tailbones breaking through your flesh.

But no matter how strongly you feel on the issue of same-sex marriage, it’s a fascinating opportunity to see a part of government that otherwise functions off-screen. I’d recommend a day in court to any interested citizen.

For a broader overview of the issues in this case, I’d point you to an excellent piece in the New Yorker.

1. The court reporter’s transcript shows up in real-time on attorney’s laptops. I found myself reading it at times, amazed at her ability to keep up.
2. The video is carried via closed circuit to a spillover courtroom for the public.
3. Except this: Judge Walker admonishes San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera for an underling’s poorly-executed deposition, saying that the aide needed a “woodshedding.” It’s a really uncomfortable moment, like a professor announcing a student’s failing grade while passing back exams.
4. After a careful census, I decided the men on the plaintiff’s team had slightly longer, shaggier hair.
5. I had forgotten my iPhone charging cable, so I kept my phone switched off to save the battery. This e-chastity ended up being a good thing, as it forced me to pay attention and take notes on paper, which became this sketch. A kind-hearted woman let me borrow her cable to charge up before my flight home.

I found it very straightforward until the “surplus rule”:

In this case, “Up in the Air” and “Avatar” have significantly more votes than the 501 they need to be nominated, and more than the 601 (501 plus 20 percent) they need to trigger the surplus rule. “Up in the Air” has twice as many votes as it needs, and “Avatar” has 50 percent more.

So those two films get their nominations, but their ballots aren’t taken off the table. Instead, they’re all redistributed into the piles of the films listed second — where they count not as a full vote, but as whatever fraction of the vote wasn’t needed. A sliding scale determines exactly what percentage is used.

The “Up in the Air” ballots, for instance, will count as half a vote, because that film only needed half of each of its 1,002 votes to reach the magic number of 501. “Avatar” needed two-thirds of its 771 votes to reach the threshold, so its redistributed votes will count as one-third – i.e., the unneeded portion of each vote.

Each voter will still only get a single vote – but in this case, that single vote will be split between two different films.

It ultimately makes sense, but it very much feels like a system devised by accountants.

But until Mr. Jobs decides we’re ready for the future, reader Douglas has a suggestion that is surprisingly close. Turn your laptop on its side, and hold it like a hardcover book.

No, really. It works much better than you’d think, particularly with one of the unibody MacBooks.

I suspect there’s a way to get the screen rotated in the proper direction on almost any laptop. But on a Mac running Snow Leopard, it’s pretty easy to get a .pdf turned the right way.

1. Open the .pdf in Preview.
2. Click on one of the pages, then Select All (⌘-A) to highlight all the pages.
3. Choose Rotate Right (⌘-R) or Rotate Left (⌘-L).
4. Choose Full Screen (Shift-⌘-F).
5. Click the zoom-to-fit button.

I’ve found it more comfortable to read with the screen on the left-hand side, using my right hand to advance pages with the arrow keys. But experiment to see what works best for you.

Update: Several readers have pointed to a free utility called ReadRight which basically does steps 1-6 all at once, with some other handy options thrown in. I particularly like being able to advance pages with a click on the trackpad.

Since Preview is already included on every Mac, I’ll keep it as the general-case solution.

Emailing a .pdf would result in mangled margins and bizarre gaps. Converting to a .doc format with a very specific template would give me something almost acceptable, but meant a lot of extra labor, and wouldn’t work for .pdfs of existing scripts.

So it was with great anticipation that I installed the free 2.3 software update that finally gave my little Kindle the option of using honest-to-goodness .pdfs.

It works just as I had hoped, except for the fact that the type is pretty damn small. Like, list-of-ingredients small. My friend Cort pointed out that the Kindle screen is only as wide as a buck slip, so there’s only so much real estate available.

After all this wishing and hoping, I’m not sure I’ll be reading many scripts on my Kindle. (The upcoming Nook from Barnes and Noble has essentially the same size screen, and will likely have the same kind of problem.)

The update gives you the option of rotating the screen, so you can see it much closer to full size, but then you have to read half a page at a time. The update is also supposed to increase battery life dramatically.

Bottom line: if you have a small Kindle, install the update. You might be willing to live with the tiny type (or half-pages) for reading screenplays.

If you’re thinking about buying a Kindle, take a second look at the bigger Kindle DX, which has a screen better suited for scripts. I know a lot of people who are using it daily to read screenplays.

1. I started with the original model, and later replaced it with the Kindle 2 .

This will be the first time someone is acknowledging me as a writer rather than as an assistant (my boss is kind enough to let me take off work for the meeting). Do you have any advice for how one should conduct oneself in such a meeting? They’ve already passed on picking up the pilot, and staffing season hasn’t started yet, so it appears that this is just a “get to know you” meeting. Should I prepare pitches for alternate projects? Do I dress casual or professional? What should I do as far as follow-up goes?

– James

I have much more extensive answers to your questions in two previous posts, How to Meet and What to do in a general meeting. But for newcomers, I can offer a bit of a summary.

Your goal in a general meeting is to figure out what they might be able to hire you to write — if not now, then at some point in the future. They want to put a face with the name with the words they’ve read.

At a certain point, they’ll talk about the kinds of projects they have in development, and the things they’re looking for. If anything sparks, pursue it. Talk about it in the room, then follow up the next day, and the next week. You’ll be chasing a lot of half-baked projects, most of which will never come to be. But one or two might. And that’s what you need.

Your advantage at this point is that you’re cheap and available. A producer could likely hire you with discretionary funds to rewrite a mediocre project she has sitting on the shelf. A show might bring you on at the lowest level of staff writer. And if that opportunity comes up, take it. Do an amazing job, then let that momentum carry you into your next assignment. And your next.

You don’t have to put on a suit. In fact, it’s better to be the worst-dressed person in the room.

My overall advice is to not freak out over any given meeting. Pretend it’s just having coffee with somebody who went to your same school. Unless you’re pitching a specific project, don’t approach it with any particular expectation — simply enthusiasm — and it’s likely to go fine.