John August

Archives for 2011

Timely vs. timeless

News

Television has the blessing and curse of short production schedules, so it’s possible to land a joke about something happening in popular culture, such as Lady Gaga, Twilight, or Twitter hash-tags.

But even if it’s a good joke, it’s not always a good idea.

[Looking back at Cheers](http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/09/cheers_parks_and_recreation_mi.html?mid=twitter_vulture), Parks and Rec co-creator Michael Schur argues that one of the keys to keeping a show from feeling dated is avoiding topicality — within limits:

> We have a couple rules on the show. If possible we never show the year; like, if there’s a banner for some event we never show “Harvest Festival 201” or something. Because we feel like visually that would be bad; we want people ideally to be watching these shows long into the future and you don’t want to date yourself.

> But on my show we are purporting that these are real people doing real things so you can’t help it. One of the essences of Tom Haverford is he loves hip-hop and pop culture and the Fast and the Furious movies and it would be limiting to not have him reference those things. […] A lot of comedy is about people getting references and recognizing and being able to relate to something.

I love Parks and Rec, but I’ve found myself wondering how well Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari) will hold up in reruns.

Perhaps in his favor: Even now I don’t get a lot of his references. It’s like Niles and Frasier arguing about sherry or Proust. The comedy comes from the intensity of expression, not what they’re actually saying.

Pitching a take, and the WGA elections

Episode - 1

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Scriptnotes, Transcribed, WGA

Today marks the inaugural episode of Scriptnotes, a podcast that Craig Mazin and I are trying out. It’s meant to be a weekly-or-so conversation about items of interest to screenwriters, from getting stuff written to dealing with insane producers.

Topics in episode one:

* Pitching a take. When screenwriters are asked to come in and meet with the studio (or producers) about a project, what do both sides expect? How much work do you do in advance? How different is it from pitching an original idea?

* The WGA elections. It’s time to pick new officers and new board members. We talk about issues and priorities, and what the WGA Board actually does.

You can listen to the episode here:

Down the road, we plan to have the podcast up in the usual places (like iTunes), so you can subscribe and get episodes automatically delivered. I’ll post details when they’re available.

UPDATE 9-4-11: The transcript of this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/scriptnotes-ep-1-pitching-a-take-and-the-wga-elections-transcript).

Stay away from this girl

Genres, Rant

Wait, how did I not know the [Manic Pixie Dream Girl](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManicPixieDreamGirl) existed as a trope? Nathan Rabin gets credit for first [calling her out](http://origin.avclub.com/articles/the-bataan-death-march-of-whimsy-case-file-1-eliza,15577/):

> [Elizabethtown’s Kirsten] Dunst embodies a character type I like to call The Manic Pixie Dream Girl (see Natalie Portman in Garden State for another prime example).

> The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition. Audiences either want to marry her instantly (despite The Manic Pixie Dream Girl being, you know, a fictional character) or they want to commit grievous bodily harm against them and their immediate family.

The OnionA.V. Club lists [sixteen examples](http://www.avclub.com/articles/wild-things-16-films-featuring-manic-pixie-dream-g,2407/) and further clarifies just what’s wrong with this archetype:

> Like the Magical Negro, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype is largely defined by secondary status and lack of an inner life. She’s on hand to lift a gloomy male protagonist out of the doldrums, not to pursue her own happiness. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, MPDGs often took the comely form of spacey hippie chicks burdened with getting grim establishment types to kick back and smell the flowers.

She’s simply awful. She’s the [navigable air duct](http://johnaugust.com/2006/air-vents-are-for-air) of female antagonists, something that exists only for cinematic convenience. Let’s stop using her.

Like villains, love interests need to have a plausible reason for why they’re there and what they want. Always ask yourself, “What would this character be doing if the hero never showed up?”

If you can’t answer — or if the answer is boring — you need to go back to the drawing board.

There’s nothing wrong with kooky females, by the way. Anna Faris has made a career of them. But in films like The House Bunny, it’s always clear what she’s after — and it’s never about getting a nice guy to loosen up.

Aline Brosh McKenna and the BlackBerry 3

Genres

NY Times has a nice piece on Aline Brosh McKenna, screenwriter of [“the BlackBerry 3”](http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/magazine/if-cinderella-had-a-blackberry.html?_r=1&ref=susandominus&pagewanted=all):

> McKenna’s solution to romantic-comedy fatigue is not to ironize the genre or make fun of its characters’ (and therefore its audience’s) quests for fulfillment, but to give them what they want: a great guy and a great job, a happy family and professional success. In “I Don’t Know How She Does It,” Pierce Brosnan may seem like a straightforward object of desire; in fact, as McKenna sees it, his character is especially seductive in that he alone recognizes the heroine’s talent. “He embodies the work recognition she hasn’t gotten until then,” McKenna said.

Because movie stars and directors are more visible, we rarely look at a screenwriter’s credits as being part of an overall package. It’s nice to see an article paying attention to more than just the movie headed to theaters next month.

McKenna’s produced films are thematically unified in much the way Kevin Smith’s or Woody Allen’s are — with the same type of protagonist answering the same category of question. Regardless of the director, her movies feel like her movies.

In failure, screenwriters are pigeon-holed. In success, they’re branded.