With the Macintosh now 25 years old, several sites have been discussing which was the best Mac ever. I made up my mind fully before clicking through, and was happy to see so many people [agreed with me](http://www.macworld.com/article/138328/2009/01/macat25_bestmac.html?lsrc=rss_weblogs_editors).
Presidential punctuation
Over the weekend, while my daughter slept in her stroller, I read the text of an Obama speech on my iPhone. I was struck by how clearly I could hear his voice in my head and predict where he would have put his stresses. Even after eight years of George W. Bush, I couldn’t anticipate his speaking rhythms, except to observe that he finished every sentence with either grim conviction or a wary half-smile, regardless of the content.
Obama’s inauguration speech this morning was deliberately sober, with none of the call-and-response cadence we heard on the campaign trail. It was the right choice both tonally and logistically — given the time delay to reach the back of the massive crowd, any audience chanting would have resulted in chaos.
Looking at the [full text](http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/inauguration_obama_text) of the speech, I’m struck by something else: the punctuation.
> To those leaders around the globe who seek to sow conflict, or blame their society’s ills on the West — know that your people will judge you on what you can build, not what you destroy. To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.
Yes, a semicolon.
Best known to most Americans as half of a winking emoticon, this elite and misunderstood conjoiner has a friend in Obama. Yes, he’s using it as more of an oratorial pause than a semantic adhesive. And yes, this sentence likely went through several writers before its debut. But the fact our new President feels confident using it is another small cause for celebration on this very happy day.
Slumdog Coincidentalist
A reader writes in requesting a reexamination of my post [“The Perils of Coincidence”](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2007/perils-of-coincidence) in light of an acclaimed movie which is already a screenwriting award contender:
This weekend, I saw Slumdog Millionaire, a story that is succinctly described by the equation: “I knew the answer to this obscure question because this farfetched event happened to me once. And repeat.”
Is coincidence good now?
— Andre Gayle
London
I would argue that Jamal’s knowing the right answers falls into my category of a Premise Coincidence, much the same way that in Die Hard, John McClane just happens to be in the building when the villains attack, or in the original Spider-Man, Peter Parker just happens to get bitten by the radioactive spider.
In each of these cases, the coincidence is the reason why the story is happening.
But I can see why Andre is bristling. In my original post, I single out luck and chance as being particularly flimsy pegs upon which to hang a story, and there are a couple of answers in Slumdog that seem arbitrary or tangential (the cricketeer comes to mind). ((A reader points out that the cricket question is actually an answer that’s handled mostly in the present-day story.)) However, the overall flashback structure sets a rule and sticks by it: every time we jump back, we’ll see how he got the answer.
I addressed this in my original post, calling it correlation:
> Rather than ask an audience to swallow a bunch of little implausibilities, try bundling them together.
> In Heroes, imagine if each character had a completely unique origin story: Claire got her powers from a shaman; Sylar is an alien; Peter has a magic ring. You’d get frustrated pretty quickly, because a lot of screen time would go towards explaining why and how. Instead, the creators wisely decided the characters all had some mysterious gene mutation activated by an environmental change. The audience is willing to make that one big leap, because they’re not asked to make similar leaps each time a new character is introduced.
In fact, the biggest coincidence in Slumdog would have to be that the answers Jamal needs just happen to be found chronologically in his life story. That’s something you buy or you don’t. It didn’t bother me.
Audition scenes
When you’re auditioning actors for a role, the scenes as scripted are sometimes not especially useful.
For example, if most of a character’s scenes are with groups of people talking, the auditioning actor probably won’t to have enough lines to really make an impression. And in television, you may need to cast a part that isn’t especially big in its first episode, but becomes more important later.
Knowing this, casting directors will often try to cobble something together. But a smart writer should also volunteer to write special scenes just for auditions. Sometimes they’re cut-down and rearranged versions of scenes from the script, but it’s also an opportunity to just come up with something new. On movies and shows in which I’m involved with casting, I’ll generally give the casting director specially-prepared sides a few days before auditions begin.
In the [Library](http://johnaugust.com/library), I have an additional audition scene from Go for [Mannie](http://johnaugust.com/downloads_ripley/mannie_audition.pdf), whose character didn’t talk much but was crucial to the first act.
And I just added three audition scenes from The Remnants:
[Chas, Mia and Wallace auditions](http://johnaugust.com/downloads_ripley/remnants_audition.pdf)
And all the casting sides for the [Alaska pilot](http://johnaugust.com/library#alaska).
One added bonus of writing new scenes for the audition is that you don’t get completely burned out on the real scenes. After you’ve heard fifty actors read the same ten lines, they become meaningless. You don’t want to be on set hearing them again.