John August

News

Introducing Screenwriting.io

News, QandA

Introducing Screenwriting.io

I’ve been answering online questions about screenwriting since June 2000, when IMDb asked me to be a columnist for their brand-new [Ask a Filmmaker](http://www.imdb.com/indie/ask-archive-toc) section. Those early questions and answers were short and basic — but evergreen, covering topics like copyright, film school and getting an agent.

Frustrated by IMDb’s weekly-column format, I set up this website (johnaugust.com) in 2003 with the goal of answering these questions more fully and forever. If you look through the posts from the [early years](http://johnaugust.com/2004), they’re almost entirely Q&As. Over time, I’ve added features like [Answer Finder](http://johnaugust.com/answers) to make sorting through the 1500+ posts more manageable.

While I still answer reader questions, it’s not this site’s primary focus anymore.

I’ve gotten bloggier, with more here’s-what-I-think posts and Kottke-style link-to articles. I’m also featuring more solicited series like First Person and Workspace. Plus the podcast.

It’s a long way from where I started, and that’s a good thing.

But I still think there’s a need for high-quality answers to basic screenwriting questions. That’s why I’ve asked Stuart and Ryan to build a new site we’re launching today: [Screenwriting.io](http://screenwriting.io).

Screenwriting.io is simply questions and answers about screenwriting:

* [What is a slugline?](http://screenwriting.io/what-is-a-slug/)
* [How do you format a montage in a screenplay?](http://screenwriting.io/how-do-you-format-a-montage-in-a-screenplay/)
* [Can scene headers be bold?](http://screenwriting.io/can-scene-headers-be-bold/)

These are questions so basic they would feel awkward on johnaugust.com.

My mandate to Ryan and Stuart was straightforward: each page should be The Answer. If answering one question raises new questions, new pages should answer those questions.

While we’re not quite going for [Simple English](http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_English_Wikipedia), the language on Screenwriting.io is deliberately unsophisticated. If a sixth-grader in Boston or Belgium or Barbados wants to write a report about screenwriting, she will find the site approachable.

I’ll be supervising the content at Screenwriting.io, but it’s really Ryan and Stuart’s domain.

The new site has been in beta for several weeks. A big thank you to the readers who’ve volunteered to check it out. We will stay in beta for the next month or two while we roll out to the wider world. In the meantime, check it out and leave some [feedback](http://screenwriting.io/feedback/).

I’ll continue to answer questions both on johnaugust.com and on the podcast, but will focus on more difficult topics that don’t have one clear answer — the “what should I do?” questions rather than the whats and whys and hows.

Dennis Ritchie, 1941-2011

Geek Alert, News

Dennis Ritchie, the father of the C programming language, has died. He was 70.

His book [The C Programming Language](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_C_Programming_Language) (often referred to as K&R, for his co-author Brian Kernighan) was my first introduction to “real” programming beyond Atari Basic. As a teenager, I spent weeks one summer studying its pages intently, trying to wrap my brain around the difference between pointers and traditional variables.

Eventually, I could explain it without really understanding it, the mark of sophisticated ignorance.

To this day, C confounds me. As I look through Nima’s coding for FDX Reader, I’m always perplexed why some things belong in .h files while others live in .c files. It doesn’t fit my brain right.

Like my father, Ritchie spent his career at Bell Labs. I don’t know if my dad knew him or not, but I suspect they crossed paths. My father’s work was developing systems for reporting errors; in the end, all programming comes down to dealing with errors.

Ritchie outlived my father by two decades. I think that’s what strikes me most: how strange and amazing it would be to see technology reach this point. Even the iPhone has its roots in UNIX, the operating system Ritchie helped create.

The times I miss my father most aren’t birthdays or holidays. It’s unboxing a new gadget. *He would have loved to see this.*

Steve Jobs, 1955-2011

News

Without Steve Jobs, we’d still have computers and mobile phones and other wonderful devices. But they’d be different.

In most cases, worse. But certainly different.

As I look around, most of the gizmos I use to do my work (and avoid my work) exist because of Steve Jobs. He didn’t design them or code them, but he willed them into being.

People talk about his reality distortion field, but I think they’re misapplying the term: his gravity bent the path of technology. He made his vision reality.

I never met him. But I’m deeply sad to lose him because we will collectively miss out on his next big ideas.

His death is like losing a great filmmaker. We celebrate the work he created, but regret what he didn’t get to finish. There will never be another One More Thing.

I think that’s what I’m feeling most: a sense that the future won’t be quite as amazing as it could have been.

Timely vs. timeless

News

Television has the blessing and curse of short production schedules, so it’s possible to land a joke about something happening in popular culture, such as Lady Gaga, Twilight, or Twitter hash-tags.

But even if it’s a good joke, it’s not always a good idea.

[Looking back at Cheers](http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2011/09/cheers_parks_and_recreation_mi.html?mid=twitter_vulture), Parks and Rec co-creator Michael Schur argues that one of the keys to keeping a show from feeling dated is avoiding topicality — within limits:

> We have a couple rules on the show. If possible we never show the year; like, if there’s a banner for some event we never show “Harvest Festival 201” or something. Because we feel like visually that would be bad; we want people ideally to be watching these shows long into the future and you don’t want to date yourself.

> But on my show we are purporting that these are real people doing real things so you can’t help it. One of the essences of Tom Haverford is he loves hip-hop and pop culture and the Fast and the Furious movies and it would be limiting to not have him reference those things. […] A lot of comedy is about people getting references and recognizing and being able to relate to something.

I love Parks and Rec, but I’ve found myself wondering how well Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari) will hold up in reruns.

Perhaps in his favor: Even now I don’t get a lot of his references. It’s like Niles and Frasier arguing about sherry or Proust. The comedy comes from the intensity of expression, not what they’re actually saying.