John August

Archives for 2012

Amazon’s new deal for writers

Episode - 32

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Film Industry, QandA, Scriptnotes

Craig and John answer questions about specificity, television and what to do when your great idea sounds too much like a movie that’s already been made.

The big news this week is potentially very big news: Amazon Studios has completely revamped their business model, ditching the terrible parts and transforming into something potentially very good for writers. Notably, Amazon is now a WGA signatory, which offers the promise of residuals and credit protection for screenwriters.

Will it work? It’s too early to say. But when a new player with deep pockets enters the film industry, it often helps loosen the purse strings. More importantly, the Amazon deal sets a precedent for other tech companies considering taking the plunge.

Along the way, Craig talks about directing and John takes his daughter to work. All this and more in this episode of Scriptnotes.

LINKS:

You can download the episode here: [AAC]http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_32.m4a).

UPDATE 4-12-12: The transcript of this episode can be found here.

Understanding house styles

Television, Words on the page

Joanna Cohen spent five years as a writer on the daytime soap All My Children. She’ll miss the show, and its unique vocabulary:

I collected a list of “soapisms,” the peculiar and hilarious terms we use in stage direction. No one is ever shocked at the end of a scene. They are “klonged,” “gut-punched” or “pole-axed.” No one has an epiphany. They are “hit by a Mazda.” There is lots of “eyelock” and “liplock.” It would not be unusual to get an e-mail from the editor saying something like, “Josh will no longer be buried alive in trunk. We are going with a wooden coffin. Please track accordingly.”

Unlike feature screenplays, scripts for an ongoing TV show can afford to indulge in some in-jokes and esoterica. After all, the writers know exactly who will be reading them and what they’ll find funny.

Over time, many shows develop a house style. The scripts for Lost, for example, rely heavily on the f-word. “Two for the Road,” an episode written by Elizabeth Sarnoff & Christina Kim, uses “fuck” 96 times.

INT. HATCH – ARMORY – DAY 11

TOTAL DARKNESS as THE DOOR SLIDES OPEN, casting a SHAFT OF LIGHT on Henry, sitting on the COT.

Henry is not only bound by his wrists, but he is also TETHERED to the bed. And fucking TIGHTLY, too.

ON LOCKE. Backlit. Very fucking NOIR. Just looking at Henry. Trying to... make sense of him. The silent moment PLAYS. Then --

HENRY

If you’ve come to apologize, I forgive you for hitting me with your crutch.

(beat)

I’m glad my head didn’t break it.

Boy, is he fucking smug. And Locke ain’t one bit amused --

LOCKE

Why?

HENRY

Now there’s a broad question.

Would you write this way in your spec pilot? Almost certainly not.

But it became the house style of the show, to the degree that “fucking” became the principal adverb: fucking huge, fucking dark, fucking terrifying. Omit the word and you’d lose something, even though the audience never heard it.

Why you can’t get HBO Go by itself

Television

Tim Carmody offers a mild defense of cable:

Anytime anyone says, “I wish that company X would offer pay service Y without complication Z,” I ask them, “what would you pay for that?” Typically, the other person hasn’t actually thought it through all the way from “what-if?” service to actually-existing, would-you-actually-spend-so-much-money-on-that? product.

I spent the past month in a rented apartment in New York City, with only basic cable and internet. Thanks to HBO Go, I could watch Game Change and Game of Thrones on my iPad. It worked flawlessly. This is a glorious era of technology.

Of course, the only reason I could use HBO Go at all is because I get HBO via DirecTV at my home in Los Angeles. HBO doesn’t offer the option of buying it as a stand-alone product.

Carmody explains the pricing issues:

There are actually really good reasons why HBO is that cheap when bundled with cable, and why it would have to be a lot more expensive if sold stand-alone to individual subscribers.

First, to say Comcast buys HBO in bulk is an understatement. Other cable companies, too, (and satellite and AT&T/Verizon/other telecoms doing video) have profound purchasing power. They also heavily promote HBO to their hundreds of millions of customers. So HBO gets a lot more from Comcast for its $7.27 (or whatever it is Comcast might pay) than it would get from me or you for our $10.

HBO costs $10 per month because it’s bundled. It’s not the fair market price. Untie that knot, and you have to untie everything.

Will that knot get untied? Probably, eventually.

But pricing will be tricky. Remember the uproar when Netflix tried to raise its rates? Consumers have an artificially low expectation of how much digital things should cost.

Right now, HBO Go feels like a free bonus. It’s hard to know how much customers would be willing to pay if they had the chance.

The scorpion and the frog

Rant

Most versions of this parable run something like this:

Unable to swim, a scorpion asks a frog to carry him across a rising river.

The frog worries that the scorpion could sting him. The scorpion argues that if he stung the frog, the frog would sink and the scorpion would drown as well.

Convinced, the frog agrees and lets the scorpion climb on his back. Halfway across the river, the scorpion does in fact sting the frog, dooming them both.

“But why?” asks the frog.

“It’s just my nature,” says the scorpion.

It’s a useful parable that illustrates several principles:

  • Creatures can’t change their basic instincts, even for self-interest.

  • It’s folly to think you’ll be the exception to the rule. (He’ll keep his word just this once.)

  • Scorpions are dicks.

As parables go, it feels more inherently dramatic than most: trust! betrayal! poison! Compare that to another favorite: The tortoise may win the race, but his life was never in danger.

There’s nothing wrong with the scorpion and the frog. But as screenwriters, let’s stop having characters actually recite it. It’s been done before. A lot. So now it feels like a hacky and desperate way to make villains seem cool by rationalizing their actions.

A friend writes:

Really was digging the MAGIC CITY pilot until the mob boss dude asks Jeffery Dean Morgan, “Do you know the story of the scorpion and the frog?” to which, of course, JDM replies, “No, I don’t.” — and then the fucking mob boss proceeds to tell the entire fucking parable.

Can a brother get a moratorium on that bitch or what?

Perhaps a brother can.