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).

If a friend or co-worker tells you an anecdote, or describes a character eccentricity of one of her relatives, and you use it in a screenplay are there any legal ramifications? I have no intention of using the name of the friend’s relative (I don’t know it), but the story and the relative are so funny and eccentric, respectively, that a very amusing character could be made from them. Do I need to get my friend’s permission to use this information?

– Derek

Legally, no. Ethically, yes. Particularly if said friend is a writer who might be planning to use it herself. I borrowed an anecdote from a screenwriter friend in Go: the moment when Simon accidentally sets the hotel room on fire. I changed pretty much everything about it, but I checked with him first to make sure he wasn’t planning on using it.

I’m writing a scene between a Chinese immigrant woman and a man from Mexico. Both characters speak in broken English, and I’m wondering how to correctly write broken English with a Chinese accent and speaking pattern, as well as how to do it for other languages. Do you just write the dialogue in “good English” and then somehow note that the character has a thick Chinese accent? How would you tackle this challenge and could you an some example or two?

– Jules Hoffman

No time for examples in a Short Answer Sprint. But when writing non-standard English, you walk a fine line between “giving the flavor” and “annoying the reader.” So here’s the simple advice:

1. Use the speaker’s words
2. Use the speaker’s grammatical structure
3. Don’t try to duplicate the exact speech pattern on paper

If you have more than two apostrophes in a line of dialogue, you’re probably overdoing it.

I’ve been building a bit of a gut. Too many years of balancing a day job with writing time and squeezing in food when I could led to some really bad eating habits. One of the perks, though, was that I became a “Shit Camel.” I could go for a week without taking a dump. Sure, it was a massive, hour-long endeavor that afforded plenty of reading time whenever I did take a crap, but it left the flow of work or writing largely undisturbed.

Now that I’m eating better and trying to work this fat off, I find that I’m visiting the john much more often and depositing much less when I leave. I hate that. This has been especially annoying in the past few days since I blocked them off for writing time only.

All this is to ask, what do you eat as a writer? Are you hunched in front of your Mac for hours on end like a crazy Korean gamer, with Red Bulls and candy wrappers scattered everywhere? Or do you have some kind of healthy eating regimen that keeps you energized? Just curious, because distractions of any kind really destroy my momentum.

РRen̩ Garcia

Writing is sedentary, and sedentary people tend to get fat. But most screenwriters — even the fat ones — defecate more than once a week. Yikes.

In terms of health, I eat pretty sensibly. If you’re trying to lose weight, South Beach is actually very easy and sane. Excercise-wise, I lift three times a week. (A lot of writers go to my gym, for reasons unclear.) I do less cardio than I should, but I’m walking 4+ miles per day picketing, so that kind of makes up for it.

I am a beginning screenwriter and I am very intimidated by plot design. I love reading good screenplays because the plots seem like clever puzzles where each piece fits snugly but unexpectedly into a grand scheme. When I try to construct plots on my own, however, I feel they seem contrived and unrealistic. It seems like a very intellectual process to me, even though the ultimate goal is an emotional one. Do you have any advice for someone struggling with this? I’ve read about three books on screenwriting, and they make plot structure seem so basic, but it doesn’t feel that way when you’re creating from scratch. Any helpful words from you will probably do a lot for me.

– Jim

Screenwriting books make everything seem so tidy, when actual screenwriting is gory and difficult. Plot and structure are really just the answer to a single question: what happens when?

Look at your story from your main characters’ perspectives. What are they trying to do at each moment in the script? What do they know, and what do they learn?

Then look at it from the audience’s perspective. What do they know, and what do they expect will happen next?

A good plot keeps surprising both the main characters and your audience. Probably the reason your plots feel contrived is that you’re trying to drag your characters through some pre-determined series of structural benchmarks, rather than focusing on what’s interesting and surprising right now in this scene.

I read in your comments, some time ago, that you had a mix tape you listened when you wrote for “Go” to help you get in the right mood. Did any of that music find its way into the movie? If so, how did that happen? ex. did you suggest it to the music director? If not, why not? Wasn’t it a key factor in setting tone for you?

– Dan

None of those songs made it in the movie — and that’s fine. A playlist is a great way to help capture a certain tone while you’re writing, particularly when you need to get back into a mood. But it’s really just for your own preparation. Screenwriting is a lot like acting in that way, incidentally. Actors often have touchstones to help them get back into a role. Music is a great one.

Are you inspired to help new writers because you had the good fortune of a mentor when you were starting your career, or do you do it because you had to figure it out on your own?

– Annabel

I didn’t have a mentor, at least not for any significant period of time. I started this site because I remembered what it was like having 1,000 questions about screenwriting, and no good place to ask them.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but do you think the stop of “Ops” was related to the imminence of the somewhat similar secret-adventures-’round-the-world “The Unit”?

– Matt Waggoner

The Unit is a lot like Ops — but done as a CBS show. I don’t mean that as a slam. They figured out how to take a potentially risky premise and turn it into something embraceable by a mass audience. What’s funny is that we met with Scott Foley for Ops (at Susina, the coffee shop featured in The Nines). He read the script and really liked it. We liked him, and would have cast him in a second. He’s an undervalued actor, and a nice guy.

But no, I don’t think The Unit derailed Ops. Our project hung around longer than it should have largely based on my name and the quality of the writing. It really wasn’t a Fox-appropriate show, and it’s for the best we never shot the pilot. (The two Ops scripts are in Downloads section if you want to read them.)

I’m in early discussions with a producer about writing a biopic. One thing that has come up in these discussions is the producer’s insistence that the movie adhere to a traditional three act structure and not be ‘episodic’ – and I agree with him in principle (I’m frequently dissatisfied by biopics for this very reason), but I also feel that the complicating factor in this case is that lives simply don’t unfold in three acts – they are, by their very nature, episodic. I was curious as to how you might approach this kind of assignment in terms of finding a three-act story within an episodic sequence of ‘true’ events.

– M

History is history. Movies are stories, and good stories have forward momentum. Your challenge is finding the thread(s) that keep the main character working towards a goal, with obstacles, setbacks, and moments of success. And that may not be possible. There are many remarkable people whose lives are surprisingly resistant to dramatic staging. There hasn’t been a great biopic of Lincoln, Da Vinci, or Einstein. Amadeus succeeds because they elevated a fairly minor character in his life (Salieri) and told a largely fictionalized story through his eyes.

Don’t try to tell the story of a great person’s life. Tell a great story using the details of a person’s life.

This may be kind of a loaded question, but have you ever read Stephen King’s Dark Tower books? They’ve just been finished, thirty-some years after the first book was started, and are so old fashioned and evocative of Rod Serling — like some weird combination of The Lord of the Rings, Sergeo Leonne’s Spaghetti Westerns and The Twilight Zone — that a movie adaptation has to happen eventually. The fan base is much too huge. Could you ever see yourself considering adapting this?

– J.R. Flynn

This is an example of how long questions sit in the box sometimes. JJ Abrams is now adapting it.

But to answer your question: sure. I could see myself doing it. But JJ Abrams or not, I try not to dwell on the projects I’m not writing, because that can drive one mad with frustration. As busy as I am (when not on strike), barely a week goes by that I don’t see a project announced in Variety which causes that spike of envy. If that ever goes away, I’ll probably quit.

In the re-design of the site, I inadvertently got rid of the “Ask a Question” link. Until I find a good home for it, you can ask a question here.

I have read so many times that your character has to have a goal and an opposition and so on and so forth. In these books and classes, they really limit examples to scripts with relatively simple solutions. I have heard everything from Indiana Jones to Romancing The Stone to Ghost. Of course we can pick out the goals and oppositions here.

For instance, in your script for “Go�, who is the central character and what is their goal and opposition? I get so stuck on these rules and it really discourages me in my writing because I don’t feel I have the right answers. I don’t know, but I am so afraid of being one of these awful writers described on your site.

-Robert V Gallegos
Chicago, IL

You might be an awful writer, but it’s not because you have a hard time figuring out how to implement the so-called rules. Most of them were dreamed up by non-writing film enthusiasts, who decided there had to be an underlying template behind all great movies.

I think there’s a place for the guidebooks, but only to degree the help lessen the stress of “getting it right.” There’s one I recommend, with reservations. And it’s important to be able to talk about “second act breaks” even if you don’t really believe in them, since you’ll be hearing terms like that for the rest of your career.

In terms of the specific rule you cite, I think it’s always fair to ask, “What does this character want?” The answer to that question may or may not be the driving force of your story, but if you can’t answer the question at all, there’s probably something fundamentally wrong with your script.

Let’s look at Go. You have to approach it as three separate stories, each of which has a central character (or duo).

• In Part One, Ronna wants to make a very tiny drug deal in order to get enough money to pay her rent. Every decision she makes after that point stems from that desire.

• In Part Two, Simon wants to go wild in Vegas. That seems like a nebulous goal, but he’s weirdly aggressive about fulfilling his vision of a perfect night in Vegas.

• In Part Three, Adam and Zack want to finish the terms of their deal with the police. Individually, they each want to know who the other one is sleeping with, which becomes the primary goal once the business with Burke is finished.

None of these stories have a classic protagonist/antagonist setup. The central characters experience great obstacles, but the movie deliberately undercuts any sense that, “This was the night that everything changed.” A bunch of shit happens, then it’s over.

Asking what the characters want is something real screenwriters do. In two of the projects I’m writing at the moment, the biggest decisions are about exactly this issue, since that informs every action and the overall tone of the story. Often, the best answer is the simplest: something physical and achievable.

Script Cops, Ep 2: McKee Sting

One of three clips forwarded by David Dean Bottrell. You can see the other two here and here.

Screenwriting is an odd form: half stageplay and half technical document, somewhere between art and craft. And nowhere is its strangeness more apparent than the formatting. So it’s entirely reasonable that I’ve received many, many questions about margins and sluglines and whether a half-covered stadium is “INT.” or “EXT.”

But I’m done. Or at least, done for the time being. I’m going to cede all formating concerns to a printed book (yes, they still make them) which can answer newbie questions and let me focus on other points of word-pushing.

The book I’ve chosen to give up with is The Hollywood Standard by Christopher Riley. It’s not perfect, but it’s refreshingly straightforward and anticipates most of the situations screenwriters are likely to face.

The author used to work for the Warner Bros. script processing department, which the book’s blurbs highlight as why he’s an expert. Honestly, if I had seen this before I bought it, I would have put it back on the shelf with a shudder.¹ David has Goliath; Ahab has the whale; I have the Warner Bros. script processing department. In my head, the department consists of three women in their 50’s who smoke and gossip as they retype scripts on 1980’s computers with amber monitors. For CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, I had the displeasure of reading their “official” version of the script, and realizing that they don’t just spellcheck and change margins — they rewrite things. Just because. Fortunately, we were shooting in London, beyond the reach of their nicotine-stained fingers. We threw their script in the bin.

So I would say despite his background, rather than because of it, I’m still giving Riley’s book a thumbs-up. He admits (on page xvii) that “good writers with long Hollywood careers may find details here with which to quibble. That’s fine.” And I do have minor quibbles.² But I also have a website with which to note my second opinions, so here they are.

Courier and margins

The term “fixed pitch font” is quaint, but let’s just say 12-pt. Courier. If you have a couple of Couriers on your computer, pick the one that looks best on-screen and printed. It really doesn’t matter that much.

Riley’s margins are fine, but I had to really think back to remember what “position 17″ referred to (p. 4).³ Back in the old days, typewriters had mechanical stops to set the left and right margins, with painted (or engraved) markings to line them up. Tabs were set the same way. “Position 17″ would be seventeen spaces over from the left edge of the paper.

That’s kind of fascinating in a post-neo-Luddite, technology-as-history Make-magazine way, but without explanation, it’s apt to be confusing to 21st-century readers. So perhaps that will be omitted in the next edition.

Medium shot (p. 12)

I’ve never typed this, and never seen it. Don’t use it. Same with “two shot,” unless it’s crucial for a joke.

Back to scene (p. 17)

Awkward. Better to use the “BACK TO HUCK” format he shows later on the same page.

Flashback (p. 33)

He underlines FLASHBACK and puts it in front of the scene heading. That’s not wrong, but I generally put it in brackets after the time of day. This way, it’s more likely to make it onto the call sheet for production.

Capitalizing people (p. 47)

The book tells you to capitalize the first occurrence of only those characters who end up speaking, on the theory that AD’s need to treat these roles differently. I disagree. Capitalizing indicates which scene people are established in, which is a boon to other department heads, such as wardrobe and props. I capitalize the introduction of all roles, speaking or otherwise, including groups like FIVE SCHOOLCHILDREN or ANGRY VILLAGERS.

Parentheticals at the end of a speech (p. 70)

He’s right–a dialogue block shouldn’t end with a parenthetical. The exception is in animation, where this is common. You’ll often see dialogue end with (exasperated grunt) or (sigh).

Song lyrics in dialogue (p. 72)

He puts them in quotes. I suggest italics, in an 11-point sans-serif font. (I use Verdana, which pretty much every computer has.) It looks much, much better, and subtly signals that it’s not true dialogue.

Numbering “A” scenes (p. 95)

The A.D. on Big Fish and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Katterli Frauenfelder) taught me a different scheme which ends up being a lot less confusing for production and post-production. If you need to insert a scene between 121 and 122, you number it A122. That is, lettered scenes go before the normal scenes. The great advantage to this method comes during shooting, when each new setup for a scene is given a letter. If you shoot a master and two close-ups for scene 100, they’re labeled 100, 100A, 100B. For our inserted scene, Riley’s scheme would get confusing: he’d have 121A, 121AA, 121AB. Whereas Katterli’s method would give us A122, A122A, A122B.

If you’re doing A/B pages on a script, there’s very likely an A.D. involved, so consult with him or her about preferred numbering/lettering schemes.

Managing page numbers when a script is revised (p. 103)

Riley makes a heroic effort to explain a confusing topic, but trust me, you should never have a page A5B. If you, the writer, has a hard time understanding it, pity the poor wardrobe PA who has to figure out how to insert pages into her bosses’ scripts.

Once you get into the second revision on a series of pages, you’re almost always better off backing up and releasing a run of pages that uses true numbers. To use Riley’s example:

• Between 5 and 6 comes 5A. (Yes.)
• Between 5A and 6 comes 5B. (Okay.)
• Between 5A and 5B comes A5B. (Never do this. Instead, revise starting at page 5, replacing 5A, 5B and adding 5C and further if need be.)

In general, the writer’s goal with A/B pages should be to release as few sheets of paper as possible, while still making it abundantly clear how it all fits together. In fact, I often attach a memo to colored pages explaining it. (Here are the memos I attached for the blue and pink pages of Charlie.)

Multi-camera (sitcom) script formatting (p. 117)

Here’s where I’m of no use. While I’ve read half-hour scripts, I’ve never written one, so I can’t say how accurate his advice is. But I will point out that every show is likely to have a “house style,” so it’s doubly important to get a real sample script from the show and duplicate it, right down to the punctuation.

And that’s it for my addendum/errata. Riley’s book will be nothing new to most screenwriters, but it’s a helpful and practical guide for newcomers. Note that he deliberately doesn’t teach anything about writing–and his snippet examples aren’t particularly inspiring. This book is strictly about formatting, and on that level, it’s solid enough that I hereby abdicate all common formatting questions to it.

1. I got it on Amazon, and by the time I saw the blurb, I’d already broken down the box.
2. Yes, I’m claiming to be a good writer with a long career.
3. It’s not kama sutra.

The services provided by Scriptblaster sound pretty great and are offered at an affordable (to me) price. I realize there are loads and loads of “services” and companies out there that make their living off the aspiring writers of America (AWA) and this certainly seems to be one of them. But still. My question to you, who needs not a service such as this, is whether you know anything about it, have heard anything, or could just tell me your thoughts on using Scriptblaster to get my queries out there?

– Eric
Boston, MA

“Dear John — This seems like a scam, but it’s soooooo reasonably priced…”

I’d never heard of Scriptblaster, but a quick look at their website leads me to believe your money would be better spent elsewhere. Such as Vegas.

Let’s start with the testimonials. There are a lot of them, such as…

After beating my head against traditional Hollywood screenplay agents’ doors for almost a year, I tried your Blaster Package. Within three weeks, I optioned an original screenplay and have another producer looking at my novel, “Five in the Future”. You guys are simply super! — R. Malcolm Dickson

I’m happy for R. Malcolm Dickson, but who the hell is he? I’m not saying he’s made up; his testimonial could be completely genuine. But without details, how are we to know? For instance, which producer optioned his screenplay, and was it a free option? Has a single movie gotten made that was set up through this service?

Looking at the “blast” part of Scriptblaster, I go from dubious to a little bit outraged:

The Blaster Pack combines the Full Blast & the Agents Blast for just $89! When you choose the Blaster Pack, your query letter will be emailed to over 900 producers, agents and managers. A great saving – and a great way to get connected!

Allow me a quick rewrite…

When you choose the Blaster Pack, your query letter will be spammed to over 900 producers, agents and managers. What a great way to piss off hundreds of potential employers and representatives for less than $90!¹

What Scriptblaster is selling is a mailing list of producers and agents, and a web script that generates email from what you type in a form. Yes, it’s affordable, but it’s essentially a query letter mailbot. I don’t know any reputable agent or producer who would bother to read one of these emails.

If I’m wrong, I’ll happily be corrected. So write in if you’ve had a good experience with this service. But please provide some independently verifiable facts to back up your praise.

1. For the record, I don’t know that Scriptblaster’s emails are unsolicited — maybe they really do have legitimate opt-in process for agents and producers. But I see no link for it on their website, which leads me to believe their email addresses are culled from other sources. And are therefore spammy.

Part of the deal was that I had to announce the title of my speech months in advance. I picked, “Professional Writing and the Rise of the Amateur,” figuring that in the intervening months I would think of inspiring examples of how the World of Tomorrow was going to be a wonderland of possibility for the undergraduates in the audience.

But the more I thought about it, the less I wanted to talk about the future. Instead, I wanted to focus on one of the biggest challenges of today: in our celebration of the amateur, we kind of forget what it means to be professional.

As I spoke with various classes before the big presentation, I promised I’d post the whole speech on the site for those students who had night classes. And, of course, for anyone else who might be interested.

Let me warn you: this is long. My speech lasted 45 minutes, and that was without a lot of riffing. So if you’d rather read the whole thing as a .pdf, you can find it here.

. . .

It’s a pleasure to be here talking with you tonight. Over the last two days, I’ve been visiting a lot of classes, talking about screenwriting and movies, and well, basically talking about myself. Which I’m really good at. But when I agreed to give a formal public lecture, one of the requirements was that the presentation actually have a title. By which I mean a topic, a thesis. A point.

It all feels very academic, and I love that. I miss that. None of you will believe me now, but some day you’ll look back on your college careers and be wistful. Nostalgic. Because there’s something comforting about having to write a fifteen page paper on the use of floral imagery in “Pride and Prejudice.”

I think what it is, is that even if you’re completely wrong, it just doesn’t matter that much. For the rest of your life, you’re going to get called on bullshitting. In college, you’re graded on it.

Anyway.

I decided I wanted my lecture tonight to be not strictly about screenwriting, but about writing in general. Because everyone in this room is a writer. You might write screenplays; you might write research papers. You definitely write emails. Every one of you is, and will be, a professional writer in some field.

So I wanted to talk about what that means.

But first, I want to talk about myself.

On March 21, 2004, at about nine in the morning, I got an email from my friend James, saying, “Hey, congrats on the great review of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on Ain’t It Cool News!”

This was troubling for a couple of reasons.

First off, the movie hadn’t been shot yet. We weren’t even in production. So the review was really a review of the script. Studios and filmmakers really, really don’t like it when scripts leak out and get reviewed on the internet, because it starts this cycle of conjecture and fuss about things that may or may not ever be shot. So I knew that no matter what, I was going to get panicked phone calls from Warner Bros.

But first, I had to read what was on Ain’t It Cool News. I’m assuming everyone knows what Ain’t It Cool News is. It’s that web site run by the fat guy with red hair where they talk about upcoming movies and how everyone sucks. And at the end of every article, readers write in their comments, which are generally incomprehensible ramblings about Hulk Hogan. That’s Ain’t It Cool News.

So I clicked over there. And started reading. I’m going to sort of excerpt it here, because it’s really long. And it wasn’t written by one of the regular guys. It came from someone calling himself Michael Marker.

Dear All, I’m no inside source, just a lucky kid with a parent in the business. So with half-permission from Dad, a deep love for Roald Dahl, and a reinforced respect for John August, I’m writing my thoughts on his adaptation of Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.

So at this point, one paragraph in, I’m certainly nervous. But “reinforced respect” sure sounds good, so who knows?

First let me say that there will be spoilers: The script is made of them. Too many details are twisted in with the plot and themes like the red in a candy cane — enriching and vital.

Okay, a little flowery. But still.

As with P.J. Hogan’s adaptation of Peter Pan, August keeps a firm focus on Dahl’s text and subtexts, not only highlighting key pieces of the story and characters, but reiterating Dahl’s vision with a brash inventiveness.

Cool. I rock.

August made the choice early on in the re-construction of this story to reset the locale from a Britishy, Oliver Twistian, Sixties game-show world into an amalgam of Hershey, PA and Detroit/Pittsburgh/Chicago/Suburbia. With Walgreen’s-esquestores selling Wonka Bars, and Charlie’s mom working overtime at the tennis shoe factory, August may be in critical danger of arrogantly over-Americanizing for shock value. I’m sure Mr. Dahl would be proud.

And here’s where I get perplexed. “Perplexed” is probably the wrong word, because that implies an intellectual reaction, when what I actually feel is physical. It’s the kind of nausea you get when you’re falling. Because here’s the thing: I didn’t set it in Hershey, PA. Charlie’s mom doesn’t work at a tennis shoe factory. At all. But I keep reading.

Wonka’s Entrance: The classic cane fall of course. Until an old man in the crowd kills the fun. “Imposter” he screams. … The man produces a remote and freezes Wonka with a click. The man rips off his face and VIOLA!

It actually says, “Viola!” But I’m sure the writer meant “Voila!”

It was Wonka all along. He rolls the putty face into a ball and bites off a piece like jerky. He clicks the remote and robot-Wonka bows.

This is not even remotely what happens in my script. Our version has a parody-slash-homage to “It’s a Small World” in which the little puppets catch on fire and melt. So I have to stop and think, “What the hell am I reading?” Did this guy get a copy of some other, older Charlie script without a writer’s name on it and just assume that it was mine? Or is he completely bullshitting? Either way, that nausea is becoming actual shaking.

But I keep reading:

A small touch: The doors in the Bucket house and the Chocolate Factory never close entirely. In the house it is a human habit, in the factory it is a mechanical hiss halting all doors at 99% closure.

I have no idea what this is. I have no idea what it even means.

Though modest with most visual descriptions, August has every sentence read like candy: “Show your hands and arms child, I want no secrets in this house”, “A distant dog barks, a different dog, dark, seductive”.

Hey, if I can write a seductive dog, I am a damn good writer.

And then we get to the Oompa Loompas.

Wonka explains their history in a tone as eerie as Thomas Jefferson’s letter to Tom Hart, a fellow slave owner, in 1806, “The negro has been transplanted from the Deadly Jungle of Tribal Conflict and the demons of Disease and Famine, but has done so against his will. Some would say this is the white man’s benevolence. I say it is the way of things.”

Holy shit. Thomas Jefferson? White man’s benevolence? For the record, this is a movie about a Golden Ticket and magical chocolate factory. I think we’re trying to avoid the larger socio-political ramifications of Western imperialism. The article is signed, “A loving work of fiction by Michael Marker.”

This guy is basically saying that he made up the whole thing, but here it is online, presented as if it’s true. This “review” is overwhelmingly positive, but also overwhelmingly wrong.

So what do I do?

Fortunately, I know exactly one person at Ain’t It Cool News. His name is Jeremy, but he goes by the handle “Mr. Beaks.” I’d had lunch with him a couple of weeks earlier to talk about Big Fish and Tarzan. So I email him, and say, hey, that review of the Charlie script is bullshit.

Actually, I don’t say that. I say, “That guy is bullshitting you.” It’s not that I’m wronged, no. It’s that that guy, Michael Marker, is besmirching the good name of Ain’t It Cool News by trying to pass off his deluded ramblings as truth. How dare he!

And it works. Mr. Beaks talks to Harry, and Harry posts a new article saying that the review was bogus. They don’t pull the original article, but oh well. It’s basically resolved.

But I can’t help but think… This article was wrong, but it was really, really positive. What if it had been negative? Would Mr. Beaks or Harry Knowles have believed me? Probably not. They would have said, “Oh, sour grapes.” My complaining would have made the readers believe the bogus review even more.

See, the thing is, if you ever try to really go after Ain’t It Cool News, or one of the other film-related sites, criticizing them for say, running a review of a test screening or just outright making shit up, you get one standard response:

Hey, we’re not professional journalists. We’re just a bunch of guys who really love movies.

And that’s where we rejoin the thesis topic of the evening: professional versus amateur.

What do those words even mean anymore?

The classic, easy distinction is that the professional gets paid for it, while the amateur doesn’t. For a lot of things, that works. You have a professional boxer versus an amateur. You have a professional astronomer versus an amateur — some guy with a telescope in his back yard.

A friend tried to make the distinction that, “The amateur does something for the love of it.” Which is kind of defeatist if you think about it. Like, the minute someone pays you for doing what you love, you stop loving it.

Maybe that applies to prostitution, but I don’t think it’s a universal by any mean.

For instance, I feel exactly the same way about screenwriting now as when I first started, back when I was sleeping on the floor and eating Ramen Noodles. That is: I kind of hate writing, but I love having written. I would rather do almost anything than sit down and write a scene. But having written it, then reading it back? Pure gravy.

And really, the “getting paid for it” distinction doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny. An amateur photographer can take a picture that ends up in Newsweek. That doesn’t make him a professional. A blogger can sell Google ads on his site, a few pennies per click. That doesn’t make him a professional, at least not in the way I think we want to use the word.

And here’s my first thesis for the evening:

“Professional” has nothing to do with getting paid.

When we say “professional,” I think what we’re really talking about is “professionalism,” which is this whole bundle of expectations about how a person is supposed to act. I’m going to try to list what I think those characteristics are.

The first is “presentation.”

I used to call this, “giving a shit,” but I decided I was swearing too much for an academic setting.

Here’s what I mean by presentation. Let’s say you write a business letter, and it’s full of typos and grammatical mistakes. Not professional.

Or you’re a funeral home director, and you sit down with the grieving family while wearing a Ramones t-shirt. Not professional.

Obviously, what I’m getting at is that there’s an expectation about how a professional presents him or herself, either in person or in writing. You want to make sure that your audience sees you in your best light, which means spell-checking and putting on a clean shirt.

Being a professional means looking like a professional.

The second characteristic we’re talking about when we mean “professional” is “accuracy.”

If you’re an accountant, and you misplace a decimal point, that’s unprofessional. If you’re a surgeon who amputates the wrong arm, that’s inaccurate, and unprofessional. And really awful.

The third characteristic is “consistency.”

Let’s say you go to a restaurant, and they serve really good Mexican food. The next time, they serve all Hungarian food. Do you go back a third time? Part of professionalism is consistency. It’s delivering what people expect every time.

And of course, showing up on time. If the only thing you’re consistent in is “consistently late,” then that’s not professional.

Next, “accountability.”

That means, when asked the question, “Who did this?” You can raise your hand and say, I did. I was responsible. Accountability is sort of the opposite of anonymity. It’s why you see bylines on newspaper articles.

The last characteristic of professionalism, at least that I can think of, is “meeting peer standards.”

By that I mean that within the class of people doing what you’re doing, there’s consensus about what’s acceptable and what’s not. Sometimes, that’s codified, like Realtors with a capital-R, or lawyers and the bar association. A lot of times, it’s less formal, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there. Whether it’s waiters sharing tips with the busboys, or undergraduates sharing notes before a test, there’s pretty clear agreement about what’s okay. And probably more importantly, some consequence if you don’t meet the standards of your peers.

So to review, here’s what I’m including in my definition of “professional”:

• Presentation, a.k.a. “Giving a shit”

• Accuracy

• Consistency

• Accountability

• Peer standards

There’s no good acronym. I tried. But I think these five things are what you’re really talking about when you use the word “professional.” Which leads us to:

Thesis two:

A lot of the “professional” media is staggeringly unprofessional.

That seems pretty obvious, but it doesn’t make it any less depressing. Here are two magazines I bought at the airport on the way here.

The first is Us Weekly. The second is OK Weekly. You can see they both have articles about a certain celebrity couple.

Wow, you know, I spend sleepless nights worrying about Tom and Katie’s marriage. To bring this back to me, which is the topic I feel most comfortable with, I actually know Katie Holmes, from Go. I adored her. For a while, I would actually call her on her birthday. But then I realized that a 19-year old woman and a gay guy who’s quite a bit older having nothing in common.

But God bless’em. They’re making it work.

We hope. It’s hard to say. Because one magazine says they’re rock solid, the next says it’s falling apart. Let’s try to apply our standards of professionalism to these magazines to see where we’re at.

Presentation: You could object to the font choice, and I hate when they write on the photos, like it’s a yearbook or something. But everything is spelled right. You can’t say the presentation is unprofessional.

Accuracy: Well. Tougher to say. Are Tom and Katie really splitting apart? I’ve been in relationships where I had no idea whether we were staying together or falling apart.

Consistency: Not a strong suit. If you think back to Nick and Jessica (I know, heartbreaking), one week it was his fault, one week it was hers. And you got the impression the editors wrote it both ways and decided which version worked better with the photos that week.

Accountability: How do we know there’s trouble in paradise? “Sources say.” Really. Sources. Why do I have a hard time believing these sources? Maybe it’s because the sources they actually bother to mention by name have nothing to do with Tom or Katie, and are openly speculating.

That’s a dangerous trend, because you can find someone who will say just about anything for you. Some of the terms to watch out for are “media watchdog” or “celebrity observer.” Really, aren’t we all celebrity observers? I bought this magazine. That makes me a celebrity observer.

Peer standards: I’m picking on two magazines. Are all magazines the same? Honestly, no. I think Time Magazine or Newsweek generally have higher standards, particularly when covering “hard news” as opposed to entertainment journalism.

“Entertainment journalism” is one of those weird terms that gets more unsettling the more you think about it. To me, it’s like that optical illusion where it’s either a vase or two women looking at each other. Is it journalism about entertainment, or entertaining journalism?

That’s probably a whole other lecture. But I think we obviously don’t hold Entertainment Tonight or Access Hollywood up to the same standards as 60 Minutes. As an audience, we watch and we see, “This is a show about celebrities,” and just assume and accept that most of what we’re watching is manufactured. Where it gets awkward is where you have an actual news person like Diane Sawyer going with Brad Pitt to Africa to talk about the famine. It’s not really a news story; it’s not really news. And I think it makes it harder to take Diane Sawyer seriously when she’s reporting actual news.

Now, one of the things that’s not readily apparent to people who live and work outside of the film industry is that Hollywood is a really small town. Everyone calls each other by their first names, even if they don’t know each other. And we have two small-town newspapers: Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.

If you work in the industry, you subscribe to both of them, and they’re delivered every morning. Variety in particular is known for its own insider lingo that makes it almost unreadable. They call it Slanguage. Premieres are called preems; presidents are called prexys; and no one ever quits a job, they ankle. Their most famous headline was from 1935: “Sticks Nix Hicks Pix.” Which meant that people in the Midwest weren’t attending movies about farmers.

The Hollywood Reporter, on the other hand, is written in English.

Both newspapers have web sites, where you can get most of the same content you get in the physical paper. But the Hollywood Reporter also has a blog, written by its Deputy Editor, Anne Thompson. The blog doesn’t really have full stories, but rather little blips, paragraphs. Like, well, a blog.

About a week ago, I read something on the blog that sort of troubled me.

Thanks to Stax, IGN FilmForce’s resident Bond maven, for this link to a description of the new James Bond script. If you don’t want to read the spoilers, don’t go there!

And it included a link to a review of the script for the new James Bond movie.

Now, if you’ve been paying attention to when I started this lecture-type monologue, you’ll remember that I kind of have an issue with script reviews. I don’t think they’re a good thing. To me, it’s like calling someone’s baby ugly off of an ultrasound.

I was upset by the script review of Charlie on Ain’t It Cool News, and that was a bogus review. Here’s the Deputy Editor of The Hollywood Reporter linking to a script review. I didn’t think that was right. So I called her.

And her first question was, “Is the link broken? Did it not work?”

Yeah, Anne, it works. But I don’t think it should be there at all.

I asked her if she would have run the same piece in the printed version of The Hollywood Reporter. She said no, of course not. But this was a blog, and blogs are different.

And that’s when we got to the heart of the matter: she envied the blogs. On some level, she envied Ain’t It Cool News, because they were able to report on rumors and speculation without the same burdens as The Hollywood Reporter. The trade papers have an unspoken contract with the readers that they are only going to report the verifiable facts. The blogs of the world don’t, and because of that, they can get away with a lot more.

We had a good conversation about her decision to include the piece, and the challenging distinction between capital-J journalism and what happens on the internet. Ultimately, she revised the piece to remove the link.

But what I didn’t tell her, but I’m going to tell you now, is that I think it was incredibly unprofessional for her to have posted that piece in the first place. It was ridiculous that it took me calling her for her to agree to take it down.

Coming back to the issue of professionalism: There’s no question that she’s a professional journalist in the classic sense. She’s a paid editor at one of the most respected industry newspapers. She can’t turn around and say, oh, but in this context, I’m just a blogger. You can’t hold me to the same standards.

That’s really Thesis #3:

You don’t get to pick when you’re going to be professional, and when you’re going to be amateur.

Maybe the best way to prove this is to think back to when you were in high school geometry class. Which for some of you, was like, last year. Remember, there are two kinds of proofs? There are direct proofs, where you follow from your postulates and axioms to prove something, and then there’s the indirect proof. For the indirect proof, you assume the opposite, then follow it through until it reveals itself to be illogical.

This is an indirect proof.

So let’s say, okay, you do get to decide when you’re going to be an amateur, and when you’re going to be a professional. Let’s follow that logic through.

When would you choose to be a professional? Well, probably when you’re doing your best work. The work you feel confident about. Good about. It’s easy to be a professional when everyone says you rock.

What do you get out of identifying yourself as a professional? Well, sometimes you get access. If you’re a professional photographer, you might get access to a news event that an amateur wouldn’t. You might paid. As a professional screenwriter, I get paid pretty well for writing witty dialogue. A professional actor gets a paid a lot more for saying the witty dialogue I wrote (but that’s another issue).

As a professional, you also get respect of your peers. You get to sit at the grown-up table, rather than the kiddie table. In terms of life-satisfaction, that can be worth a lot.

Clearly, there are a lot of reasons why you want to be considered a professional.

When would you choose to be an amateur? Well, probably the moments in which you obviously suck, either because you don’t know what you’re doing, or you’re just not very good at it. Or at least in the moments when people are criticizing you. You’d say, “Hey, what do you expect? I’m only an amateur.”

That sounds like Ain’t It Cool News. You’re using amateur status as an excuse.

You’re basically saying, “Don’t judge me.”

And here’s where this indirect proof falls apart: People will always judge you. You can’t control that. You can’t control what scale they’re going to judge you on, or which criteria are most important.

The only thing you can control is your work. And that’s why your work, all of your work, has to be professional.

And what do I mean by professional?

Back to the five things that I don’t have a good acronym for:

Presentation: If your writing is rambling and incoherent and ungrammatical, people are going to judge you on that.

Accuracy: If you’re flat-out wrong, that matters. And that’s not just in the sense of journalism. If you’re drawing conclusions that aren’t backed by the data, that’s a problem. If you’re studying human cloning, you can go from being the hero of South Korea to its greatest villain in about a week. Trust me, that guy isn’t going, “No, you don’t understand, I’m an amateur cloner.”

Consistency: Can people count on you? I’m sure everyone in this room has had to do a group project. And there’s always that one guy who doesn’t pull his weight. Shows up late. Didn’t get that thing written quite yet. Don’t be that guy. You need to show up, on time, and be ready.

Accountability: Do you stand behind what you say, and what you do? It’s really easy to have strong opinions. It’s a lot harder to live by them.

Meeting Peer Standards: Going back to Thanksgiving, once you graduate to the adult table, you really can’t go back to the kiddie table. You can’t throw food any more, or they’re going to stop inviting you.

So my thesis was, “You don’t get to decide when you’re going to be professional, and when you’re going to be an amateur.” We can shorten that.

Thesis 3.01:

You don’t get to be an amateur at all.

Right now, a lot of you are thinking, crap, that’s a lot of pressure. When I graduate, when I’m in the real world, I’m going to have to be, like, professional.

And I’m saying, no. This IS the real world. You have to be professional right now. Because everything you’re writing, be it your English paper or your profile on Facebook, that all has your name on it. It all stands for you. And in the age of Google, everything you’ve ever written, even that snarky comment you left on the message board, is linked back to you.

So you have to ask yourself: a year from now, five years from now, how am I going to feel when someone asks me about that thing I wrote?

Truly, honestly, I don’t mean to be Mr. Doom and Gloom. If you feel like writing 1500 words about your cat in your blog, go for it. I’m just asking you, pleading with you, to spellcheck. Mr. Whiskers deserves it. Tuck in your virtual shirt and take even the frivolous stuff seriously.

Let me talk about two examples from my own experience:

The very first script I wrote was called Here and Now. It was a romantic tragedy set in Boulder, Colorado. It was your classically overwritten first script, where I tried to cram in everything I knew about everything, because there’s that sense of, maybe I’m never going to write another script, so I better put it all in this one.

The script turned out well, and was ultimately good enough to get me an agent, and eventually got me a paid job writing a script for somebody else.

Now when I go back and read the script, I wince. I’m a better writer now than I was then. But I’m not ashamed of that script, because it’s professional. Presentation-wise, there’s no egregious typos. It’s accurate, at least about the emotional details. It’s consistent; in screenwriting, there are a few acceptable ways of formatting things, and any of them are okay, as long as you pick one and stick with it. I still feel accountable for the script. I don’t send the script out any more as a sample, but if someone’s read it, I’ll still happily talk about my choices.

And finally, this is the important thing: the script met peer standards. Even though I was a newbie screenwriter, I wasn’t trying to write for other newbie screenwriters. I was writing as if I were a professional screenwriter, and I wanted people to read it that way.

Second example: Currently I maintain a website, basically a blog, about screenwriting. The little tagline on it is, “A ton of useful information about screenwriting,” which is hopefully true. I set up the website because when I was an aspiring screenwriter — notice, I said “aspiring” not “amateur” — it was really hard to find good information about screenwriting and how to do it. I started writing a weekly question-and-answer column for the Internet Movie Database, and ultimately used those columns to form the basis of the site.

I update things about twice a week, and I really take it quite seriously. It’s not my job; I don’t get paid anything; I don’t even have those little Google ads on the site. But I’m really professional on the site, in all five senses of what I mean by professional. I want it to look good. I check my spelling. I check that all the links work. I try to make sure that I’m giving consistent advice from week to week. And as peer standards, I’m not looking at other screenwriter sites, but the most helpful sites in any other discipline. I try to live up to those standards.

And I do that because it has my name on it. I think you need to look at your name as sort of your brand. Just like the Walt Disney Corporation doesn’t want Mickey Mouse portrayed with a bloody cleaver in his puffy white hand, I don’t want my name associated with bad, unprofessional writing.

All you have is your work. So do your best work. At all times.

In closing, I want to say that my criticisms of Ain’t It Cool News, or Us Weekly or crappy blogs aren’t meant to be disheartening. I think we’re actually living in one of the most exciting times in media history. The barriers to entry have never been lower. You can make a short film with a $500 camera, and post it on YouTube.com, and be a worldwide sensation the next day. With a blog, you can respond to media in ways you never could before, and your readers can respond back.

I think the closest parallel to where we’re at was the early 90’s, when you suddenly had laser printers. I was a graphic designer, so I was in heaven. But I think we all remember what happened, don’t we? Suddenly, there were a lot of crappy newsletters. And we learned a painful lesson: Just because you can make a newsletter with 50 fonts on the cover, doesn’t mean you should.

So I guess what I’m asking, what I’m pleading for, if you can read my subtext, is that we approach these new tools not like amateurs, but like professionals. Unlike that crappy newsletter, which got recycled, your blog post is going to be around forever. Forever. Historians will read it and wonder, “Jesus. Didn’t they have spell check?”

No matter what career you end up choosing, you will be a writer for the rest of your life. Make a promise to yourself tonight that you’ll always be a professional one.

Thank you.

• Go really didn’t change that much from the first draft.
• Charlie’s Angels was a positive experience, but not “a total love fest.” [clears throat]
• My dad died several years before I read Big Fish.
• For Thief of Always, I was fired for a very specific reason: the director and novelist hated my script.
• Drew Barrymore’s relative star power wasn’t the deciding factor on Barbarella; there were complicated studio politics at work.
• “I can beat myself with the best of them.” Well, I probably said that, but it sounds kind of naughty out of context.
• Although I write longhand (a scribble version, followed by a readable one), what my assistant types up is exactly the script, not notes. I’ll try to scan some of these scenes so people can see what I mean.
• “Get job as a writer on TV” — as if it’s that easy. But I really do think that every screenwriter should look at TV as just another screen, and pursue it if at all interested.

You can read the whole shebang here. Thanks again to Devon for putting it up.

– Brian
Galway, Ireland

When I was first starting out, I was paranoid about structure — but that’s because I didn’t know what it really was.

I had of course read Syd Field’s book, and I worried that if I wasn’t hitting my act breaks at exactly the right page number, I was a dismal failure. Then at USC I was introduced to a “clothesline” template, which was baffling. People smarter than me would talk about eight sequences, or eleven sequences, and I would nod as if I understood.

And now I do: It’s all bunk.

At the risk of introducing another screenwriting metaphor, I’ll say that structure is like your skeleton. It’s the framework on which you hang the meat of your story. If someone’s bones are in the wrong place, odds are he’ll have a hard time moving, and it won’t be comfortable. It’s the same with a screenplay. If the pieces aren’t put together right, the story won’t work as well as it could.

But here’s the thing: not every skeleton is the same.

Think about it in real-world terms.
Human skeletons are pretty consistent, but you also have gazelles and giraffes, cockroaches and hummingbirds, each with a different structure, but all equally valid designs. The standard dogma about screenplay structure focuses on hitting certain moments at certain page numbers. But in my experience, these measurements hold true for Chinatown and nothing I’ve actually written.

My advice? Stop thinking about structure as something you impose upon your story. It’s an inherent part of it, like the setup to a joke. As you’re figuring out the story you want to tell, ask yourself a few questions:

1. What’s the next thing this character would realistically do?
2. What’s the most interesting thing this character could do?
3. Where do I want the story to go next?
4. Where do I want the story to end up eventually?
5. Does this scene stand up on its own merit, or is it just setting stuff up for later?
6. What are the later repercussions of this scene? How could I maximize them?

If you answer these questions at every turn, I guarantee you’ll have a terrifically structured screenplay. It might not hit predefined act breaks, but it will be consistently engaging, something that can’t be said for many “properly structured” scripts.

– Eric
Indiana

Like flossing, stretching, and updating your will, backing up your work is one of those unquestioned Good Ideas that’s pretty easy to ignore. It’s the law of delayed consequences: people tend to put off work that doesn’t have immediate gratification.

Honestly, I don’t back up nearly as much as I should. Or, “should.” If you read any computer magazine, they’re constantly harping on you to back up every night to a redundant RAID, then weekly to a tape drive, with off-site storage and whatnot.

Bah. My philosophy can be summarized in six words: What’s the worst that could happen?

It’s a revelation that came to me the last time I switched to a new computer. I dutifully dragged my files onto an external hard drive, ready to migrate them to their new home, when I realized that pretty much everything I needed on the new computer was either…

• already installed, or
• would need to be redownloaded for the most recent version.

The only item that needed to make the move was my “Projects” folder, a mere 500 megabytes. So why was I bothering with everything else? It was time to apply my new philosophy.

What’s the worst that could happen if I didn’t back up my applications and system software? Well, it would take a little more time to re-install them. But, I’d be saving a lot of time by not bothering to back them up every day/week/month.

What’s the worst that could happen if I didn’t back up my old projects? Well, I’d hate to lose them; they’re like old friends frozen in 12pt Courier. Beyond the emotional cost, I do occasionally need to refer back to them. So it’s worth the effort to periodically grab the folder off the server and copy it to my local hard drive. Likewise, every few months I burn a copy of the whole thing onto a CD-ROM and mail it to my mother in Colorado, figuring that if an asteroid wipes out California, at least future generations will be able to read what SCOOBY-DOO was like before they cut it down to a PG rating. (Answer: much funnier.)

What’s the worst that could happen if I lost the current version of the project I’m working on? This is probably the worst-case scenario, because I’m generally on deadline and working for people with very little patience for technical difficulties. If I’m using my Powerbook, I’ll often email the file to myself as a backup, and also save it to my keychain drive. When I’m at home, I’ll often do the email trick, or copy items to my .Mac iDisk.

And then there’s the backups you don’t even plan. In Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond makes a convincing argument that the best place for a tribal chief to store his surplus food is in his neighbor’s stomach. The same is true for data. (Go with me here.) Most of the scripts I work on these days travel around as .pdfs. One side benefit of this digitalization is that for any given script, some friend or assistant will invariably have a copy sitting in her mail. I sleep a little more soundly knowing that I could simply ask her to send it back.

In conclusion: Backing up is a waste of time, except for the few items for which it’s crucial. So worry about those, and not the rest.

I wanted to find out if this Get A Mentor program is worthwhile. I’d like to be a director, but I’d like to obtain some practical experience beforehand. Any advice?

–Rayna
Denver

Rayna’s referring to the character Sarah Polley played in GO. In an early script, I had written that she was “eighteen, black and bleeding.” When we were casting the film, we met with black, white and Latina actresses for the part, and ultimately picked Sarah, who was sublime. Over the years, a few people have written to ask if I was forced to change Ronna’s ethnicity, or if I felt it changed the movie in any way. No, and no. Her race was never a story point, so all that mattered to me was finding the actress who could nail the part.

I’m assuming the program you’re writing about is this one, but I’m not familiar with it beyond what I’ve just read on its website. It seems legit, up until the point you’re paying a couple thousand dollars for privilege of being mentored. Call me old-fashioned, but I consider mentoring to be a pro-bono thing. And I don’t know what value you’d get talking to this mentor on the phone.

As an avid snoop, I’ve been trying to figure out more about this program. Based on its Better Business Bureau profile, it’s located at 7095 Hollywood Blvd. #325. That may be a rented mailbox. There’s a “Mail and More” at that address, and the guy who answered the phone said #325 was probably one of their mailboxes.

Now, a lot of legit businesses use rented mailboxes. But I always get a little nervous sending money to strangers, especially if I couldn’t track them down if I had to. None of this is meant to scare you off, or say that this organization is in any way shady. Its mission is certainly laudable, so I’d love to say that it’s as helpful as it claims. If any readers have experience with it, please write in.