Screenwriter and author John August

Missed opportunities and second chances

September 7, 2011 Awards, First Person

Melissa Rossi won a Student Academy Award for her university thesis film. That success prompted her to move to Los Angeles to begin a career as a writer/director. But she wasn’t ready.

She writes in to discuss what she wishes she had known, and what she’s doing differently to be ready the next time.

—

Back in 2005, I won a Student Academy Award for the thesis film I made at the Florida State University Film School. I had just moved to LA, just learned the real meaning of traffic, and had just added the word IKEA to my vocabulary. While I had the utmost confidence in actual technical filmmaking — I felt comfortable holding a boom pole, scheduling a film, and working with actors — I knew very little about the industry itself.

melissa rossi [Read more…] about Missed opportunities and second chances

FCP 7: Not quite dead yet

September 2, 2011 Follow Up, Software

Good news for Stuart and others who [despise Final Cut Pro X](http://johnaugust.com/2011/final-cut-pro-and-con): Apple has resumed selling version 7. But you better [really want it](http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/09/apple-relents-begins-selling-old-final-cut-studio-again.ars):

> Final Cut Studio can be purchased for $999 (or $899 for educational buyers). That’s the same price the suite was being sold for as of July 2009, but $700 more than its newer replacement, Final Cut Pro X.

To be fair, the older Studio edition includes Motion 4, Soundtrack Pro 3, DVD Studio Pro 4, Color 1.5 and Compressor 3.5, which are now priced separately (or not available at all). FCP Studio won’t be sold in stores at all. It is available only by calling Apple directly.

This is certainly good news for editors who need to stick with FCP 7 for a project.

I maintain my belief that newish editors are much better off starting with FCP X or one of its competitors (Premiere or Avid). Don’t invest time and money in a program Apple wants dead.

Timely vs. timeless

September 1, 2011 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.

Stay away from this girl

August 29, 2011 Genres, Rant

Wait, how did I not know the [Manic Pixie Dream Girl](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ManicPixieDreamGirl) existed as a trope? Nathan Rabin gets credit for first [calling her out](http://origin.avclub.com/articles/the-bataan-death-march-of-whimsy-case-file-1-eliza,15577/):

> [Elizabethtown’s Kirsten] Dunst embodies a character type I like to call The Manic Pixie Dream Girl (see Natalie Portman in Garden State for another prime example).

> The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures. The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is an all-or-nothing-proposition. Audiences either want to marry her instantly (despite The Manic Pixie Dream Girl being, you know, a fictional character) or they want to commit grievous bodily harm against them and their immediate family.

~~The Onion~~A.V. Club lists [sixteen examples](http://www.avclub.com/articles/wild-things-16-films-featuring-manic-pixie-dream-g,2407/) and further clarifies just what’s wrong with this archetype:

> Like the Magical Negro, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype is largely defined by secondary status and lack of an inner life. She’s on hand to lift a gloomy male protagonist out of the doldrums, not to pursue her own happiness. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, MPDGs often took the comely form of spacey hippie chicks burdened with getting grim establishment types to kick back and smell the flowers.

She’s simply awful. She’s the [navigable air duct](http://johnaugust.com/2006/air-vents-are-for-air) of female antagonists, something that exists only for cinematic convenience. Let’s stop using her.

Like villains, love interests need to have a plausible reason for why they’re there and what they want. Always ask yourself, “What would this character be doing if the hero never showed up?”

If you can’t answer — or if the answer is boring — you need to go back to the drawing board.

There’s nothing wrong with kooky females, by the way. Anna Faris has made a career of them. But in films like The House Bunny, it’s always clear what she’s after — and it’s never about getting a nice guy to loosen up.

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