Skip ahead to 12:00, and it’s great. His advice about getting started is golden, and the easiest-to-forget advice that there is no magic.
**Update March 2011**
Player is offline, but you can visit [Maximum Fun](http://www.maximumfun.org) to find a range of interviews, including this one with Merlin Mann.
The NY Times has an article today about [The Variant](http://johnaugust.com/variant), the Kindle
> Mr. August, who wrote it for possible inclusion in an anthology of work by well-known screenwriters, tested the story with about two dozen of the 6,000 or so people who follow him on Twitter. They persuaded him to change the first sentence, trim some paragraphs and shorten the title from “The Egyptian Variant.”
You can read the whole article [here](http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/01/business/media/01august.html).
One correction: In the interview, I said that I’d earned enough to buy “about four Kindles.” But I misremembered how much they cost: $359.
As of Friday, I’d made enough to buy 2.73 Kindles.
VIDEO: A look at Final Draft 8 from John August on Vimeo.
Final Draft 8 is largely identical to FD7, with some better chrome. If you’re happy with FD7, the addition of a fairly useful navigator and a new XML file format may or may not be enough reason to upgrade.
I’ve been using it for a week, and so far, no crashes. There are a few quirks — awkward colorization during drag-and-drop, click-lag when editing summaries — but nothing approaching the bugginess of early FD7. It feels stable and looks like a 2009 application.
I’m not endorsing Final Draft or any of its competitors; each has its strengths and weaknesses. I’ve ping-ponged between Final Draft and Screenwriter over the years, but given its interface improvements, I’ll probably stick with Final Draft for a bit. Some of that is familiarity, frankly, particularly with how it handles production drafts.
There’s a demo version available at [the company site](http://finaldraft.com), which is worth checking out.
If you’re upgrading ($79), the mechanism for checking your current license is a bit slow. If you’re buying it new, note that it’s $50 cheaper on Amazon
Synthian Sharp, one of the nicest folks I met during the strike, took it upon himself to tape my [Q&A in Rancho Mirage](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/speaking-in-rancho-mirage). He now has it online at Vimeo, where you can also download a much beefier 934MB version.
This talk was very much geared towards a general audience. While there were some film students, most of the crowd was over fifty. We spoke more about the career than the craft of screenwriting.
I showed five clips. Weirdly, I didn’t pick one from The Nines, but I did show one scene from Scott Frank’s Minority Report that had my fingerprints on it.
At 112 minutes, it’s quite a time commitment. If you’re skipping around in the video, here’s the rough order of what I talk about:
* How I got started
* Go
* DC
* Charlie’s Angels
* Minority Report
* Big Fish
* Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
* God (the short film on The Nines DVD)
* The Nines
* Audience questions
Thanks to The Friends of the Rancho Mirage Public Library, Palm Springs International Film Society, and moderator Deborah Dearth. And of course Synthian for putting this up.