John August

John

Screenwriting 101

General

Following a reader’s suggestion, I added a 101 section to the sidebar to highlight some of the introductory how-to articles on screenwriting.

This site houses about 950 posts, of which more than 500 are of the non-expiring educational variety. I’d love to find a way to guide new visitors (and aspiring screenwriters) through them without annoying longtime readers. So consider this a call for advice. I’d especially welcome links to sites that do a great job walking readers through a lot of related articles.

Currently, archives are broken down by category, a listing of which can be found at the bottom of each page. It’s not a great way to browse. Adding tags could help (maybe a ‘101’ track, or ‘character’ track), but my hunch is that it’s going to take more human work than semantic upgrading to really be worthwhile.

Don’t be shy with crazy suggestions. Even if it’s 100 hours worth of work, it’s no challenge to bring in a cadre of film students to implement it.

Uggh

Strike

On Friday afternoon, WGAw President Patric Verrone and WGAE President Michael Winship sent out an email to members that embarrassed themselves and both organizations. In it, they slammed the “puny few” who bailed on the WGA to take fi-core status, thus allowing them to write for pay during the strike. They provided a link to the list of names — seven in the East, 21 in the West.

The email felt like it had been stuck in the Out box for several months, and had suddenly and unexpectedly been sent to membership. Some readers have speculated that the timing was somehow related to the SAG negotiation, but I can’t fathom how it was supposed to help. It was badly conceived and badly executed.

There are two issues involved, and it’s best to look at them separately.

The first is the decision to list the names. It apparently came about by a vote of the board(s) during the strike. I’m not privy to what the discussion entailed, but I have to assume the memory of the [Hollywood blacklist](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_blacklist) came up as a significant argument against releasing the names. It’s a painful and dark mark in screenwriter history, and not easily forgotten.

The best rationale I can think of for naming names would be to end speculation and mythologizing about how many writers walked out on the WGA during the strike: it was in fact a very small number, consisting almost entirely of daytime serial writers. There was no great insurrection or profiteering by writers for film or traditional television.

I think there is a discussion worth having — whether making those names public helps or hurts the writers, the Guild and the industry. I can’t fault strong opinions on either side.

The second issue is the email itself, and that’s the real flashpoint of this debacle.

> [T]his handful of members who went financial core, resigning from the union yet continuing to receive the benefits of a union contract, must be held at arm’s length by the rest of us and judged accountable for what they are — strikebreakers whose actions placed everything for which we fought so hard at risk. […]

> Without concern for their colleagues, they turned their backs and tossed the burden of collective action onto the rest of us, taking jobs, reducing our leverage and damaging the guilds for their own advantage.

Clearly, de-mythologizing was not the goal here. If anything, it’s a call to unsheath swords once again, this time to fight enemies among us. As the [archives](http://johnaugust.com/archives/category/strike) will show, I supported the strike strongly, both in miles walked and moments blogged. But guys? It’s over. And trying to reignite the flames of guild fury over 28 names is ridiculous. It makes the guild look as crazy as the AMPTP tried to portray us.

Over the past two days, I’ve heard the term “tone-deaf” a few times in reference to the email. But I think that’s too soft a criticism. A tone-deaf singer at least has some idea what the melody is supposed to be — he can hear it in his head, even if it sounds like cat disembowelment to us.

This email, however, is the wrong song at the wrong time. It’s Sussudio at a funeral. It feels like it came from a parallel universe in which the strike was still happening and Spock had a beard.

If there’s any silver lining, it’s this: If you were ever going to blunder, now is the time. For the first moment in quite a while, nothing’s at stake. The WGA is not in war mode — at least, it shouldn’t be. A frank discussion of how the guild conducts itself, publicly and privately, should be embraced. And emails like this should be the first topic of discussion.

Were I to seek examples of the subjunctive…

Resources, Words on the page

…I might begin with the excellent [Wikipedia article](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive) on the issue, which provides a nice introduction to its usage in English and other Indo-European languages.

I’m a native English speaker, but the first language I studied was Spanish, which I think accounts for my fascination with the subjunctive mood. It’s much more commonly heard in Spanish, partly because its usage in English disappears amid polysemy:

→ I wish **you were** nicer to your brother. (past subjunctive)
→ **You were** lucky he didn’t hit you. (past indicative)

Different words, but you wouldn’t know it. The only time you notice the subjunctive in English is when the verb doesn’t seem to match the subject:

→ If **I were** rich, I’d have you killed. (contrafactual)
→ I request that **he be** given exile. (indirect command)
→ **Let us fight** our enemies, not each other. (hortatory)

When the subjunctive shows up, there’s almost always drama. Someone is expressing hope or doubt. It’s worth paying attention.

Cynics have been predicting the death of the subjunctive for years, arguing that it is mostly confined to archaic phrases. I disagree. While there are many shaky grammatical constructs I could easily see collapsing (who/whom, lay/lie), I think the subjunctive has several points in its favor:

* **Most native speakers don’t know they’re using it.** While we notice when it’s omitted (“If I was president…”), the majority of people get it right without knowing why. (“I demand my account be reactivated immediately.”)

* **While there are alternatives, they’re rarely better.** The previous example could be rewritten, “I demand you reactivate my account…” or “Reactivate my account, you idiot!” But neither achieves the same effect as the subjunctive. English thrives on having many ways of saying similar-but-different things.

* **It’s really common in religious material.** The U.S. is very church-y, so Americans get a weekly dosage of subjunctive in their sermons and prayers. (“The Lord bless thee and keep thee. The Lord make his face to shine upon thee. The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee and give thee peace.”)

Remember that the subjunctive is invoked by the semantics, not just the words leading up to it:

→ If I were correct with my answer, I would have won Jeopardy.
*but…*
→ If I was correct in my calculations, we should hear a boom in three seconds.

Now that I’ve expressed my deep affection for the subjunctive, let me urge discretion when using it in screenwriting. Many times, your characters will speak ungrammatically. Your knowledge of the subjunctive should never trump their ignorance.

PAPPY

If was a bettin’ man, I’d say he demanded Sonny kills that other fella lest he rats him out to Bubba.

That’s three missed opportunities to use the subjunctive, but it may be the right choice for Pappy. Always go by ear with dialogue.

James Cameron on 3-D

Directors, Geek Alert

Variety has a [terrific interview](http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117983864.html?categoryid=2868&cs=1) with James Cameron about current state (and possible futures of) 3-D filmmaking. A couple of things that stood out for me:

> Godard got it exactly backwards. Cinema is not truth 24 times a second, it is lies 24 times a second. Actors are pretending to be people they’re not, in situations and settings which are completely illusory. Day for night, dry for wet, Vancouver for New York, potato shavings for snow. The building is a thin-walled set, the sunlight is a xenon, and the traffic noise is supplied by the sound designers. It’s all illusion, but the prize goes to those who make the fantasy the most real, the most visceral, the most involving. This sensation of truthfulness is vastly enhanced by the stereoscopic illusion…

> When you see a scene in 3-D, that sense of reality is supercharged. The visual cortex is being cued, at a subliminal but pervasive level, that what is being seen is real.

Seeing U2:3D last month, I agree: the best thing about 3-D is not that it makes things look cool. It’s that it makes things look more real. My favorite shots in the movie are when the cameras look out over the crowd, because you really feel each individual person. Not only are you there, you have permission to stare.

> On “Avatar,” I have not consciously composed my shots differently for 3-D. I am just using the same style I always do. In fact, after the first couple of weeks, I stopped looking at the shots in 3-D while I was working, even though the digital cameras allow real-time stereo viewing.

Of course, most directors aren’t James Cameron, who helped invent the technology and can trust his instinct on all of this. But we should trust someone’s instincts, because the result is paralysis. One of pitfalls of adding new technology to film production is that the director moves further and further from the action (and the actors) to a Den of Experts, often in a dark tent, who make decisions around monitors. In most cases, you’re better served by having a d.p. you trust.

> We all see the world in 3-D. The difference between really being witness to an event vs. seeing it as a stereo image is that when you’re really there, your eye can adjust its convergence as it roves over subjects at different distances…In a filmed image, the convergence was baked in at the moment of photography, so you can’t adjust it.

> In order to cut naturally and rapidly from one subject to another, it’s necessary for the filmmaker (actually his/her camera team) to put the convergence at the place in the shot where the audience is most likely to look. This sounds complicated but in fact we do it all the time, in every shot, and have since the beginning of cinema. It’s called focus. We focus where we think people are most likely to look.

Cameron is slaving convergence to focus, even pulling it as necessary throughout a scene. This makes sense, but I’d never heard it explained so clearly.

> The new cameras allow complete control over the stereospace. You should think of interocular like volume. You can turn the 3-D up or down, and do it smoothly on the fly during a shot. So if you know you’re in a scene which will require very fast cuts, you turn the stereo down (reduce the interocular distance) and you can cut fast and smoothly. The point here is that just because you’re making a stereo movie doesn’t mean that stereo is the most important thing in every shot or sequence. If you choose to do rapid cutting, then the motion of the subject from shot to shot to shot is more important than the perception of stereospace at that moment in the film. So sacrifice the stereospace and enjoy the fast cutting.

In front of U2:3D, there was a 3-D trailer for [Journey to the Center of The Earth 3D](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0373051/), which I’m sad to say looked like ass. Actually, it kind of looked like nothing, because it was blurry in a way I can’t describe, like my eyes didn’t know how to process it.

I think this is exactly what Cameron is talking about. The 3-D shots in the Journey 3D trailer were probably composed for the movie, where they play much longer. But cut into a conventional trailer, it just didn’t work. ([link ](http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5033580116498129767&q=Journey+to+the+Center+of+the+Earth+3D+trailer&total=32&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0))

> You don’t need to be in 3-D at every step of the way. And as long as your work will be viewed in 2-D as well as 3-D, whether in a hybrid theatrical release or later on DVD, it is probably healthy to do a lot of the work in 2-D along the way. I cut on a normal Avid, and only when the scene is fine-cut do we output left and right eye video tracks to the server in the screening room and check the cut for stereo. Nine times out of 10 we don’t change anything for 3-D.

I spoke with a writer-director during the strike who had the opposite experience. To get the cutting to work right in 3-D, he and his editor were constantly checking the “deep version.” And that’s a not newbie predilection — for Zodiac, David Fincher cut in HD with a giant screen.

No matter how advanced the technology gets, while you’re in the editing room, you’re still working with a rough approximation of what the final film will look and sound like. Just as with color timing, music and FX, anticipating the depth effect is something you’ll need to remember and forget while cutting.

> For three-fourths of a century of 2-D cinema, we have grown accustomed to the strobing effect produced by the 24 frame per second display rate. When we see the same thing in 3-D, it stands out more, not because it is intrinsically worse, but because all other things have gotten better. Suddenly the image looks so real it’s like you’re standing there in the room with the characters, but when the camera pans, there is this strange motion artifact. It’s like you never saw it before, when in fact it’s been hiding in plain sight the whole time.

> [P]eople have been asking the wrong question for years. They have been so focused on resolution, and counting pixels and lines, that they have forgotten about frame rate. Perceived resolution = pixels x replacement rate. A 2K image at 48 frames per second looks as sharp as a 4K image at 24 frames per second … with one fundamental difference: the 4K/24 image will judder miserably during a panning shot, and the 2K/48 won’t. Higher pixel counts only preserve motion artifacts like strobing with greater fidelity. They don’t solve them at all.

An example of why James Cameron is the Steve Jobs of filmmakers: he understands that what matters is the user experience, not the hard numbers. He also sees how important it is to control the entire process, from shooting through exhibition. The best camera technology is worthless if you can’t get the results you want in a theater.

The good news is that the next generation of moviegoers seems ready to forget that 24fps is how movies are “supposed to” look. And changes within a digital delivery system should be much less painful than the switchover from our current, analog system.

I know it seems like I’ve quoted a lot here, but the interview is long, and there’s a lot more in it about other aspects of the technology which will be interesting to anyone geeky enough to [click through](http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117983864.html?categoryid=2868&cs=1).