If you’ve heard other interviews with me, there will probably be nothing revelatory. But it’s amusing to hear how fast we both manage to speak. It really sounds like we’ve been artificially sped-up, but it’s just a lot of caffeine.

As screenplays tip perilously close to production, the rules suddenly change. Producers start asking for pages the same day. Directors tell you to stay close, because they’ll have some new ideas they want to add after they talk with the stunt coordinator. You find yourself sitting in an office surrounded by people frantically performing the work of making the movie you scripted.

For Big Fish, my office was a giant classroom in an abandoned high school. For Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, it was a little room at Pinewood Studios with a phone no one could operate. For Titan A.E., it was a half a cubicle at Fox. Regardless of the square footage, I was expected to write on demand. In each case, it wasn’t just small changes, but major new scenes that had to blend into the rest of what I’d written.

Novelists are never asked to do this.

This past week I’ve been in New York, working on an unannounced project that is still a long ways off from production, but facing a Very Big Meeting on Thursday. We’ve been renting studio space at a venue that couldn’t exist in Los Angeles: thirteen little rooms that alternate, hour-by-hour, between karate classes, choir rehearsals, commercial auditions and classrooms for the kids in Billy Elliot.

Number of kids in tears I’ve seen: three.

Number of adults: two.

It’s so different from my normal writing life, in which my only distractions are a snoring dog or the gardeners on Thursday. But the chaos is also kind of exhilarating, a chance to remember that writing isn’t something that only happens in hermit-mode.

Some of my favorite scenes have come out of this process. I think that’s because they tended to have very clear objectives. Meeting with Jessica Lange during her wardrobe fitting for Big Fish, I noticed that she was picking much sexier outfits than I expected. “Sandra wants to look good for her husband,” she explained. That was kind of genius, but I hadn’t given her any scenes that really supported this idea. I wrote the bathtub scene on hotel stationery and showed it to Tim Burton that same evening. That kind of insight only happens on location.

This afternoon, I walked 18 blocks to retrieve an inkjet printer, then cabbed it across town so I could print new revisions tomorrow. I’m not using any of my normal stuff — I don’t usually do “real” writing on my laptop, and hadn’t even activated Final Draft — but it’s reassuring to see that writing is the same regardless of the tools or location.

Tonight, I’m off to see West Side Story. Which is another great thing about being in New York.

Six weeks is a long time. I say this not to panic you, but to make sure you understand that employable screenwriters need to be able to produce on demand.

In the comment thread that followed — and subsequent emails — many readers wondered exactly how long was too long, and what was a reasonable timeframe in which a screenwriter should be expected to deliver a script. So let’s try to answer those questions.

When a screenwriter is hired to write a project (like Shazam!, or Big Fish), the contract generally allows for a 12-week writing period for the first draft. Subsequent rewrites and polishes are given shorter time period, anywhere from eight weeks to two weeks.

In practice, I’ve never seen these contractual writing periods enforced. ¹ Rather, a few weeks into the process, a producer or studio executive calls the screenwriter and the following conversation takes place:

I’ve encountered some version of this conversation on every project I’ve written. Follow-up phone calls try to narrow the time frame down even more, with the goal of getting you to deliver the script on a Thursday or Friday so everyone can read it over the weekend.

I’m hesitant to give a firm number for how many weeks it should take to write a script. Every project is different. Big Fish took me the better part of four months, while Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was three weeks. But part of the reason Charlie was only three weeks was because that’s all the time there was. There was already a release date, and sets were being built.

And that points to the better question to ask: How quickly should a professional screenwriter be able to turn around a script, given some urgency? In my experience, the most successful screenwriters are the ones who are able to accurately estimate how much time they’ll need. That’s part of the craft, just like a cabinetmaker promising a delivery date. For my work on Iron Man, I told them exactly how many days it would take to address certain issues, and delivered pages every night.

For feature films, I’d be reluctant to hire a writer who couldn’t deliver a script in eight weeks. For television, writers sometimes have less than a week to get a one-hour episode written. You’d like to give every writer as much time as she needs, but in my experience, the deadline is often the main force getting the script finished.

1. In a few cases where a movie was rushing to production, my contracts have had special language like “Time is of the essence” or similar, which I suspect is a giant flashing arrow to indicate that the studio really would consider withholding payment if delivery were late.

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)

Plotting a movie is mostly figuring out who the characters are, and what obstacles they’ll face. In film school, we were taught to look at character motivation as the combination of two questions:¹

1. What does the character want?
2. What does the character need?

The implication is that your characters should be able to articulate what they want (true love, the championship, revenge) at or near the start of the movie, but remain clueless to what they truly need (self-respect, forgiveness, literacy) until quite late in the story.

The screenwriter-creator leaves explicit prayers unanswered, but performs subtle psychological revelation so that the characters exit profoundly changed.

Like most screenwriting hackery, this want-vs-need concept works just often enough to seem useful. You can trot out the familiar examples. Every character in The Wizard of Oz can be addressed this way (the Scarecrow wants a brain, but needs to realize just how smart he is). Ditto for The Sound of Music, though it gets a bit vague amid the younger Von Trapps.

Of my films, Big Fish and Charlie and Chocolate Factory come closest to fitting this template, though it requires a bit of hammering to get there. In Big Fish, Will Bloom begins the movie wanting to find the truth in his father’s tales, but he ultimately needs to accept that his father is contained within these tales. In Charlie, Willy Wonka wants an heir, but needs a family.²

Bolstered by these two examples, I spent a few hours this week looking at the characters in my project through the want-vs-need lens, before finally concluding it is complete and utter bullshit. Trying to distinguish between characters’ wants and needs is generally frustrating and almost universally pointless. The fact that I can answer the question for Big Fish and Charlie after the fact doesn’t make it a meaningful planning tool.

I’ve written about character motivation a few times, but hadn’t thought it necessary to define my objectives. But I think it can be simplified down to a single question:

Why is the character doing what he’s doing?

Here’s what I like about this definition:

• It scales well. You can ask this question about a character in a specific scene (“Why is he trying to get in the bank vault?”) or the entire movie (“Why is he racing in the Iditarod?”)

• It implies visible action. Characters in movies need to do something. That sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how many scripts slather motivation on like spackle to fill the holes. ( “He has OCD because his father abandoned him.” Umm, okay, so why is he robbing a bank?)

• It can be both concrete and psychological. In Go, why is Ronna trying to make the drug deal with Todd Gaines? (A) Because she’s about to be evicted. (B) To prove to her friends (and herself) that she can. Both are true.

When I started asking this question, many of my concerns with the project I’m writing slipped away. The problem wasn’t character motivation, but how I was looking for it.

That said, you need to be careful not to stop at the first easy answer: Why is he racing in the Iditarod? “To win the prize money.” The better answer will likely lead to a better story. Why is he racing in the Iditarod? “To beat his ex-wife, the five-time champion.” “To catch the man who killed his brother.” “Because the ghost of his childhood dog is haunting him.”

For the record, I’m not writing Snow Dogs 4.

1. My recollection is that these ideas are featured in Syd Field, but I’m not inclined to look it up, for fear of sparking of an enraged tangent about how damaging I think most screenwriting books are.
2. Charlie Bucket *wants* a Golden Ticket, but *needs*…well, Charlie doesn’t really need anything, which is another argument for why [Wonka is the protagonist, and Charlie the antagonist](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2005/whats-the-difference-between-hero-main-character-and-protagonist).

For example, according to a Variety editor, it’s perfectly okay for a screenwriter to pick up the phone and call a writer at the trades when you’ve sold a project.¹. It has to be legit, of course. Optioning a script to your roommate, who is an aspiring producer-slash-drummer, doesn’t count. It’s strange: in this blog, I’m constantly telling aspiring screenwriters to stop asking for permission and just do what they want to do. But I honestly wouldn’t be ballsy enough to call an unknown writer at the trades to do this.

Chris Day, who runs publicity for my agency (UTA) brought with him a memo I’d written in the Big Fish era. At his suggestion, I was meeting with publicists, and had listed my goals and messages.² I promised attendees at the panel that I would find the original memo and post a .pdf of it. So here it is: Big Fish publicity goals.

One of the questions that came from the audience–but probably should have started out the evening–was, What is the point of publicity, exactly? Most of us aren’t looking to be famous per se, and unlike a novelist, our names alone aren’t going to be selling books.

The Writers Guild Foundation stresses that any time a screenwriter gets press, that helps all screenwriters. And to some degree, that’s true. There are no famous screenwriters, but 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.

But I’d say the main reason to think about publicity is to help the movies and TV shows you’re involved with. The screenwriter tends to know more about the story than anyone else on the project, so you can be a crucial resource as journalists figure out how to write about the plot. I’ve attended a half-dozen junkets, and have rarely seen myself directly quoted. But I recognize a lot of what I’ve said in the stories that are written. If I can help create a consistent, positive message, then I’ve done my job.

The other reason to think about publicity is in terms of your overall career. I have no doubt that I’ve gotten meetings with certain directors and actors because of repeated exposure to my name. It’s nice if someone likes Big Fish. It’s even better if they remember I wrote it. Every time a news story includes the phrase, “…August, whose credits include Big Fish, Corpse Bride and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory…” that’s like refreshing the cache on someone’s internal IMDb.

1. Announcements like this run all the time (c.f. [Shazam!](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/news/e3i119db77792cbaa01e58b9c970709fb13
2. I was an advertising major, so this kind of publicity-speak comes naturally.

• Josh Oppenheimer and Thomas Dean Donnelly are classmates of mine,
• James V. Hart often works at the same Sundance labs,
• and the estimable Josh Friedman’s anal canal gets a shout-out. (At this point, 47% of my readers click over to the story.)

For those who don’t have time to read the article, I’ll summarize the moral: be very careful when adapting the work of living authors. Particularly when they go on about how much they hate Hollywood.

Cussler had unprecedented and frankly unconscionable control over the adaptation. He bitched and bullied and couldn’t be placated. And if the resulting movie was less-than-stellar, well Mr. Cussler, three fingers are pointing back at you.

But on another level, I get it. Screenwriters are used to seeing their material altered, mangled and reinterpreted. Screenwriting is part of a process, and the craft can only support medium-sized egos.

The novelist, on the other hand, is God. And God doesn’t like to be told he’s a crotchety old jerk who’s been coasting on a mediocre franchise for years. I sympathize with Cussler’s dilemma: he wanted a big movie to bring new readers to his books, without any risk of the cinematic version replacing his literary one. Dirk Pitt has black hair, damnit! It says so here on page two! He wanted Hollywood on his terms.

Have fun with that lawsuit, Mr. Cussler.

My own experiences with adaptations have been more positive. (How couldn’t they be?)

For A WRINKLE IN TIME, Madeleine L’Engel functioned through a trusted producer, and while I had some significant disagreements over what plot points really needed to stay or go, at least I wasn’t arguing with the author. BIG FISH was a love fest from the start, with author Daniel Wallace so intrigued by the screenplay form that he became a screenwriter himself. And CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY was made with the blessing of — and little interference from — the Roald Dahl estate.

What lessons should an aspiring screenwriter take from the SAHARA debacle? For starters, remember that the unhappy stories get press simply because of the train-wreck factor. Most times, the author and screenwriter have a decent relationship — if they have one at all. A smart novelist remembers that the existence of a movie doesn’t change anything about the book sold at Barnes and Noble. And the smart screenwriter remembers to praise the author at the press junket.

For example:

• The room bursts out in laughter, which quickly turns into applause. A few EXECS standing at the back of the room smile to each other, and nod their heads in amusement. The publishing wunderkind, #29 on Forbes’ Top 30 under 30, has done it again! The pleased crowd begins to disperse.

Since this information isn’t actually going to be shown to the audience in the scene, is it bad form to add it in? Or is it helpful in giving the reader a quick sense of the character and making the action lines a little less dry?

– Isaac Aptaker

Your specific example probably wouldn’t be to my taste. Once you have the people in the room smile, laugh, applaud and nod, it’s hard to justify another line to underscore the point again.

But in general, yes. Used judiciously, these for-the-reader-only snippets are fine. I often find myself using them when introducing an important character for the first time.

From Charlie and the Chocolate Factory:

• Mother Bucket is an ever-exhausted woman in her late 30’s, run ragged from taking care of Charlie and the four invalid grandparents. Many nights, she’s too tired to worry, and too worried to sleep.

From Barbarella:

• FINNEA (29) comes up to Barbarella at the podium, and hugs her in a sisterly but somewhat obvious manner, as if trying to share her spotlight.
• While Barbarella could be compared to the wildflowers she paints — joyful, open and a bit scattered — Finnea is like a cultivated rose. She’s very beautiful but very focused. And one suspects there are thorns to protect her.

Nothing in these descriptions is directly cinematic, but it gives the reader (and the director, and the actor) a much better idea of the intention. Just make sure that you’re never confusing these blips of exposition with real character work. Movies are about what characters do and say, not who they were before the story started.

ONE PAGE OF A PROPERLY FORMATED SCRIPT = APPROX. A MINUTE OF SCREEN TIME.

I know one page of say a battle can last five minutes whereas one page of quick dialogue my last ten seconds if the actors talk fast… So my question is, is this rule true?

Has your 120 page script been a 2 hour movie or was it more like 90 minutes?

My main reason for asking this is I want to make my own low-budget movie. And the best tips I get say keep the script 90 pages or shorter. And to make it a play (dialogue heavy, one location).

However, from my short film experience and being an editor, I saw a 90 page script of a friend be only 55 minutes when edited. And I know Kevin Smith’s CLERKS was 164 page script, but is only a 90 min movie because of the dialogue.

So, how can I find an accurate length of the movie before I shoot it. Or should I have a 130-page script if I want to make my own feature? How do the big boys figure out if there’s enough actual screen time on the pages?

– Matthew Kaplan
New York City

Your instinct is right: the one-page-per-minute rule of thumb doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny. True, most screenplays are about 120 pages, and true, most movies are around two hours. But the conversion rate between paper and celluloid is rarely one-to-one .

That’s why when a movie is in pre-production, one of the script supervisor’s first jobs is to time the script. She or he reads through the screenplay with a stopwatch, estimating how long each scene will play, then adds up the total running time. Generally, they go through the whole script twice, averaging the times.

How accurate is the script timing? Well, that depends on how well the script supervisor has factored in the director’s style. Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain featured long, contemplative shots of the heroes herding sheep, which another director might have dropped altogether. But generally, the script timing is in the right ballpark.

Although a script supervisor has more experience, you can time a script yourself. My advice would be to read the dialogue aloud, while trying to pad for non-spoken moments. It’s easier with some scripts than others.

As far as my own films:

Go was 126 pages, but came out at 103 minutes — without any major scenes left out. It wasn’t play-like, but the pacing was quick.

Big Fish was 124 pages, and 125 minutes long. To my recollection, only one significant scene was omitted, so the page-per-minute rule came close.

Both Charlie’s Angels movies went through so many drafts during production that an accurate page-count is impossible. But the first drafts were around 120 pages. The original film was 98 minutes; the sequel was 106. The pacing was obviously quick.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: 128 pages, 115 minutes.

Corpse Bride: 73 pages, 76 minutes.

Obviously, don’t get the full screen version.

It’s frustrating that they even sell one, much less call it “full screen.” In order to make the film fit on a conventional television set, they lop off a little on the right and left, or pan-and-scan. That means you’ll lose any Oompa-Loompas at the edge of the frame.

You wouldn’t kill an Oompa-Loompa, would you? So get the widescreen version.

Or better yet, get the two-disc set. The bonus disc has a lot of featurettes about the making of the film, including how they did the squirrels and Oompa-Loompas. On Amazon, it only costs $19.98, compared to $15.98 for the single-disc version.

I show up in several of the bonus features. My advice for any screenwriter lucky enough to have their movie come out on DVD: be really nice to the crew that films the bonus features. Think about what they’ll need when they’re editing. Specifically:

1. Tell the story. They need someone to help fill in pieces of the plot so that it makes sense.
2. Speak clearly.
3. If you screw up, or start rambling incoherently, just stop. Take a breath, and start over. They’ll use your clean take.
4. They won’t use the interviewer’s voice, so when they ask you a question, you have to answer as if unprompted. For example:

• INTERVIEWER
• Was is intimidating working with a book you loved so much?
• YOU
• It was intimidating working on this book I loved so much as as kid. I felt this responsibility to make sure that not just Roald Dahl’s words, but his spirit…etc.

As I’ve mentioned before, the screenwriter doesn’t get a particularly big cut of the DVD profits. But it’s something. For Charlie, I’ll also get royalties for “Wonka’s Welcome Song,” for which I co-wrote lyrics.

If you feel like shooting an extra few pennies my way, you can order through Amazon here.