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.
Today’s [scriptcast](http://johnaugust.com/archives/category/scriptcast) focuses on how you start scenes.
The standard advice is always to come into a scene as late as possible, and exit as soon as you can. That’s a lot of what I’m doing in this tutorial. By picking the right opening action (or opening line), you can jump past a lot of boilerplate and get to the meat of the scene. Along the way, you can provide more texture and detail to keep it from feeling so generic.
To save your eyes from the tiny type, you may want to go full-screen. That’s the second button from the right on the bottom of the video.
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.
A new screencast (scriptcast?), a little shorter than the [previous one](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/scene-description).
In the audio, I say “parallel action,” but a better term would be parallel structure: You’re lining up sentences to omit the subject. Action sequences tend to benefit from these staccato word bursts.