Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton is fantastic. Move it to the top of your must-see list.
The Challenge of Writing in a Digital Age
Last week, I blogged about [my upcoming speech](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2007/writing-the-future) at Drake University (my alma mater), which was entitled “The Challenge of Writing in a Digital Age.” I posted my basic thesis statements, and invited comments. As expected, the hive mind was very helpful in reshaping (and renaming) many of my thoughts, so I’m very grateful to those who wrote in.
The speech went well. It was a nearly-full house, with a lot of first-year students in the crowd, and they seemed to keep pretty engaged.
In terms of content, I don’t think the talk was the equal of the [speech on professionalism](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2006/professional-writing-and-the-rise-of-the-amateur) I gave at Trinity University last year, which covered some of the same ground and used one of the same anecdotes. This one wasn’t as organized or persuasive. I think there’s a much better speech to be written on a single one of these topics (such as Authority), but I’d already committed to the sampler platter.
I promised several professors I’d hold off posting the text of the speech until after extra-credit assignments were turned in. Those deadlines should have now passed.
If you’d prefer a .pdf version (it’s 19 pages), you can find it [here](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/writing_in_digital_age.pdf).
It’s an honor–a pleasure–to be back on campus, standing on this stage where just a couple of weeks ago, actual presidential candidates were trying to seem electable.
I feel I should stress: I have absolutely no political ambitions. But I do have a bit of a platform tonight, a list of observations about the things I see looming on the horizon, and what’s to be done about it. I’m not going to ask for your vote, but I am going to ask for your attention. And most importantly, I’m going to ask you to turn off that part of your brain that automatically goes, “Yeah, well, but that doesn’t apply to me.”
(Actually, you don’t have to turn that part of your brain off. Just put it on vibrate. Let your objections go to voicemail.)
What I’m going to try to convince you tonight is that writing matters. That seems like a pretty easy sell at a university. After all, most of you are students. You’re getting grades. Of course writing matters.
But I’m going to be a little more ambitious tonight. I’m not talking about just academic writing. I’m talking about all writing. I’m talking about email. Memos. Your blog. I’m talking about what you wrote on your friend’s Facebook wall. All that writing you don’t think you’re getting graded on–well, you are.
Whether you want to or not, you’re being judged on it. And you’re being judged differently because of the era you’re living in.
So if I do my job right tonight, I’m going to send you out of here a little bit rattled, a little bit paranoid, but hopefully better prepared. [Read more…] about The Challenge of Writing in a Digital Age
Summing up The Nines
We have a bunch of overseas dates coming up for The Nines (starting with the U.K. on November 30th), but in terms of North America, we’re basically done. There are some one-off screenings on the books, but nothing resembling a true expansion.
We ended up playing in Los Angeles, New York and Austin.
Am I bummed? Yes. Even though I knew 99% of viewers would end up seeing the movie on DVD, I wanted more people to have the chance to see it in a theater.
But I get the economics of it, too: every print, every newspaper ad, every local PR push costs a fortune.
And yet.
My frustration stems largely from seeing how it all played out. It feels like we were one of those movies that basically gets its hand stamped in theaters before coming out on video. And from the distributor’s side, that’s not far from the truth: we didn’t go wider because they didn’t need us to go wider. New York and Los Angeles got us the good reviews they were banking on, so spending more money on the theatrical release wasn’t a priority — either at launch or later on.
When a movie costs $40 million, or $100 million, you have to make a lot of money in theaters. When a movie costs a fraction of that, there’s no pressure, no incentive. So instead of spending millions of dollars on marketing, you spend thousands. I won’t know the final marketing budget on The Nines for many months, but it was probably less than one national TV commercial.
But there was still the chance that our limited release would become a platform release, and that we could use the momentum from the opening weeks to shake out money for more prints, more ads, more cities. That didn’t happen. But I’m **incredibly** grateful to the people who bought tickets for screenings they knew they could never attend. I promise I’ll return the favor, or at least pay it forward.
We’re hard at work on the DVD, which will be coming out in a timely and feature-rich fashion.
And to re-iterate, if you live somewhere other than the U.S. and Canada, there’s a strong chance The Nines will be playing theaters in your neck of the woods. The U.K. kicks it off in November, with other European dates to follow. (Along with the rest of the world.)
Mom and Dad are fighting
I like that you keep updating us on The Nines, but the big issue is the strike vote. At least to working workers. How about an in-depth post on that issue with your thoughts?
–Anonymous (from the previous post’s comment section)
Anon, I’m not on the WGA Board, nor on the Negotiating Committee, so I don’t have any special information or insight. All I could offer is conjecture, and that would be a mistake. I’m a fairly high-profile writer, so anything I blog would be given unwarranted authority. That’s why I’m not commenting publicly.
At the Screenwriters’ Dinner earlier this year, I taped something for a videopodcast that may show up one of these months. They asked about the (then upcoming) negotiations, and I described how my family was very quiet and Midwestern. When there were disagreements, they were handled in private, in hushed tones. But some of my friends’ families were always shouting at each other. I thought they hated each other, but that was just they way they communicated. They fought; they made up; everything went on as normal. Some families just have a lot of Big Drama, and once you accept that, it’s much less uncomfortable.
I try to remind myself of that when I see public spats between powerful entities who obviously have a lot of mutual interest. I don’t think Mom and Dad are going to get divorced. They just have stuff to work out, and it’s going to get loud for a while.