John August

John

Smug ignorance

Rant

I haven’t said much about SOPA/PIPA, largely because the whole thing makes me so depressed about the industry I work in and the lawmakers who are too stupid or too lazy to understand what they’re voting on.

As [Mike Davidson puts it](http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2012/01/sopa-and-the-new-gatekeepers):

> If you want to pass any sort of bill that affects the internet, you better vet it with the people who control the internet. […]

> It would be like the EPA trying to sneak through a law that automobiles get 100mpg by year’s end without even talking to the car companies first.

But that’s just what Congress did, and was shocked when freedom-loving citizens and giant corporations — never best buds — rose up together in protest.

When you stir stupid and lazy together, they form a toxic compound called Smug Ignorance. It’s non-partisan and always fatal. The symptoms are phrases like, “I don’t know much about computers, but…” or “Look, no one knows if climate change is real.”

Senator, someone knows. It’s your job to ask.

How long is Rope?

Geek Alert, Story and Plot

In an [old article](http://www.antonellapavese.com/papers/damasio_remembwhen.pdf) that Scientific American recently reprinted, Antonio Damasio looks at how Hitchcock’s “no cuts” feature Rope squeezes 105 minutes into 80:

> Where do the missing 25 minutes go? Do we experience the film as shorter than 105 minutes? Not really. […]

> First, most of the action takes place in the living room of a penthouse in summer, and the skyline of New York City is visible through a panoramic window. At the beginning of the film, the light suggests late afernoon; by the end night has set in. Our daily experience of fading daylight makes us perceive the real-time action as taking long enough to cover the several hours of the coming night, when in fact, those changes in light are artificially accelerated by Hitchcock.

His analysis of Rope’s timeline is a sidebar to a longer article about how the brain time-stamps information to make the past seem orderly and the present feel “present.”

But in terms of Hitchcock’s film, I think Damasio overstates his case.

All movies exist in unreal time, not because of cuts and gimmickry, but because the experience of watching a movie involves surrendering to that film’s reality. We go into dream mode, especially when watching something on a giant screen in a dark theater.

Psychologists could — and I suspect have — shown test subjects a hour-long continuous shot of humdrum video. When asked to report its duration, guesses would vary considerably.

That’s not cinematic mastery. That’s our brains being only so-so at gauging time, particularly when denied outside clues.

In movies, unless something seems wildly impossible — driving from LA to New York in an hour — audiences are extremely forgiving about time, particularly if overall story logic seems to be consistent. In many of my favorite movies, I couldn’t tell you how many hours or days or months have elapsed in story time.

When movies work, you don’t care.

The rest of Scientific American’s special [A Matter of Time](http://www.scientificamerican.com/special/toc.cfm?issueid=40&sc=singletopic) issue (on newstands) is fascinating, by the way, touching on quantum matters, ancient clocks and other geekery. My very first screenplay was about Boulder’s atomic clock, so I’m a sucker for these things.

Ownership in a digital age

Follow Up

Jeremy Dylan doesn’t share my zeal for [renting movies](http://mrjeremydylan.blogspot.com/2012/01/collapse-of-ownership-society.html):

> In a recent episode, August and Mazin presaged a dystopian future in which entertainment exists only in an ethereal online space and nobody owns anything. Apparently, we are marching inexorably towards this brave new world and any attempts to halt the approach would be futile.

> I like owning things. I own The Philadelphia Story. I own all seven seasons of The West Wing. I own The Last Waltz. I paid a one-off charge at a store at some point, and in exchange, I own these things. I can watch them as often as I feel like, whenever I feel like, in perpetuity, and it costs me nothing further. I don’t need to be connected to the internet to do so. And no one can take away my ability to watch it. If I come across someone who’s never seen The West Wing (seriously?), then I can lend them my copy. While they have it, I can’t watch it, which is only fair. If they get bitten by the Sorkin bug, they can trot off and buy their own copies, and enjoy the associated privileges I listed above.

Valid points, every one of them.

I think one reason DVDs (and Blu-rays) have been so successful is that they hit a sweet spot of being cheap enough and small enough that you can afford to keep an extensive collection in a normal-sized apartment. If, at two in the morning, you suddenly have a jones for the second season of 24, you can pull out the discs and start watching.

That is, as long as you’re *at your apartment.* If you’re in a hotel room in New York with your iPad, the ability to get that through streaming is much more appealing.

Maybe it’s because I’ve been travelling so much — or because I’m going through a general [discardia](http://www.discardia.com/) phase — but I’m much happier to not own things. If a book is the same price in hardback or on Kindle, I’ll always take the Kindle edition.

With movies, yes, there’s the risk that I won’t be able to watch what I want when I want it. But that’s my argument for more pervasive licensing and rights-packaging. With HBO Go, I can watch that episode where David gets carjacked and confirm that *oh shit, yeah, that was insane.* It’s like having all the DVDs to all the seasons of all the HBO shows, and I’m happy to pay for access to it.

But that’s me. I rarely re-watch movies. I rarely re-read books. For folks wired the other way — which I suspect is a sizable majority — ownership of atoms makes a lot of sense. I think we’ll continue to have ways to buy physical books and movies. It’s not either/or.

How credit arbitration works

Episode - 20

Go to Archive

Scriptnotes, WGA

John and Craig take an in-depth look at how screenwriting credits are determined. In some ways, credit arbitration is a luxury problem — the movie you wrote got made! — but it’s one of the most controversial, contentious and misunderstood parts of a screenwriter’s career.

Ideally, you’re the first, last and only writer employed on a movie. For Go and The Nines, that was the case. In situations where more than one writer works on a movie, figuring out who deserves credit can become an ordeal.

Most non-animated Hollywood features are written under a WGA contract. Part of that contract specifies that the WGA ultimately determines who receives screenplay and story credit (which collapses into “written by” credit if the same writer receives both). This week, we take a look at the rules, principles and guidelines, and offer advice for writers who find themselves facing a credit arbitration.

Plus, a quick visit to CES.

LINKS:

* [Mat Honan’s sad-and-accurate portral of CES](http://gizmodo.com/5875243/)
* [WGA’s screen credits manual](http://www.wga.org/subpage_writersresources.aspx?id=167)
* [Craig’s guide to writing an effective arbitration statement](https://web.archive.org/web/20080828070525/http://artfulwriter.com/?p=57)
* INTRO: [CHiPs opening titles](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYKdayl7BHM)
* OUTRO: [Stereophonics: You Sexy Thing](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpVgigAB1l8)

You can download the episode here: [AAC](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_20.m4a).

UPDATE 1-18-12: The transcript of this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/scriptnotes-ep-20-how-credit-arbitration-works-transcript).