Screenwriter and author John August

Five things

April 22, 2007 Meta

I got tagged with the [Five Things Meme](http://www.google.com/search?q=five%20things%20meme&), in which I’m supposed to share five pieces of information most readers probably don’t know about me. Fair enough.

1. __I’m an Eagle scout.__ I can tie all my knots, splint a broken bone, and build a fire without matches. Growing up in Colorado, I also learned to dig snowcaves, gut fish and cook a delicious snipe. My troop had the Frost Point Award, which worked thusly: for every campout during the winter months, they’d bring a thermometer. For every degree below freezing it fell, you’d get a frost point. The goal was to collect 100 frost points during the winter camping season. I got the award three years straight. Yes, in retrospect, it was crazy.

2. __Raspberries are my kryptonite.__ One raspberry and I’m curled in the fetal position, waiting out the abdominal pain and feeling like I’ve been poisoned. This has only been going on for a few months. I think it may related to some undercooked ostrich I ate.

3. __I was all-state orchestra.__ I wasn’t a prodigy, but I was very good at clarinet through high school. Then one day I realized I was never going to be great. I was never going to do it for a living. What’s more, I didn’t really enjoy it: I kept playing because I was good. So I gave it up completely. No regrets.

4. __I’m not the smart one in the relationship.__ By any metric, Mike is demonstrably smarter when it comes to math, history and languages. At a certain point, most couples divvy up responsibility for life’s chores: cooking, pet care, dealing with solicitors at the door. I have ceded all responsibility for calculation, navigation and scheduling. I have claimed baking, swimming instruction, and ripping the meat off rotisserie chicken.

5. __I was a vegetarian for seven years.__ I gave up meat during a summer film program at Stanford, largely for economic reasons — pasta was cheaper. Mostly through inertia, I stayed a milk-and-egg-eating vegetarian without complaint or incident, until I started working out and found myself ravenously, deliriously craving protein. Tuna was my gateway meat, and within a year I was eating KFC. But I still don’t eat mammals.

Chad sold a spec

April 17, 2007 News

Yesterday’s post was the first mention of New Assistant Matt, which naturally ~~begs~~ provokes the question: What happened to Chad?

Well, by the headline, you can probably guess he [sold a spec](http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117963194.html?categoryid=13). Written by Chad and his wife Dara Resnik Creasey, B.F.F. is a high school romantic comedy, roughly Hughesian in nature. Rogue bought it, with assurances of a R-rating. Many congratulations to them on the sale, and for not messing up my master plan of ruling Hollywood with my pack of former assistants.

While the spec sale is great, that’s not why he left.

Eight weeks ago, Chad and Dara got a call to meet with Aaron Sorkin, and four hours later, they were staffed on Studio 60. That’s how Hollywood works. New Assistant Matt came to me through the Stark program at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts, which cranks out 25 vastly overqualified people each year.

I’d [previously mentioned](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2007/chad-sydney-white) that Chad and Dara had a movie in production. That’s still going, plus another movie they’ve signed on to write. It’s going to be a busy year.

Feeds and subscriptions

April 10, 2007 Geek Alert, Meta, News

geek alert In a bit of misguided tweaking, I completely screwed up the RSS feeds for the site. It was a few weeks before I realized the damage I’d done. (I was redirecting through FeedBurner, but only certain formats, leaving other feeds lying dormant. Bad.)

I think everything is fixed now. I’m back to the (new-ish?) default URL’s for WordPress:

__http://johnaugust.com/feed__ (for all articles)

__http://johnaugust.com/comments/feed__ (for all comments)

While older URL’s should redirect, it’s probably worth checking your browser to make sure that it’s looking for the right thing. The feed now serves up full articles as RSS 2.0.

Each article’s comments can also be tracked as a feed. There’s a link (and icon) below the comment box.

I’ve also added an option to receive comments to an article by email. I use this feature occasionally on other sites, when I’m curious what follow-up comments will come days, weeks or months later. Let me know if you like it; it’s a plug-in that can be turned on or off.

Also, big news coming tomorrow morning.

On the topic of old things sucking

April 9, 2007 Projects, Rant, Shazam

My post on Captain Marvel/Shazam! generated a lot of comments, both on this site and AICN, primarily because of a single observation…

If I were writing a dissertation on the evolution of the Captain Marvel character, [hardcover anthologies] would be invaluable. But I’m not. So every time I read one of these, I’m struck with the same realization I encounter trying to watch The Honeymooners or a black-and-white movie: Wow. Old things suck.

Was I deliberately exaggerating to make a point? Yes.

Was I baiting readers to write in? Sure.

Was I serious? Sort of.

There’s obviously an abundance of old things which not only do not suck, but are in fact spectacular: great works of literature, music, art, and movies which deserve to be called classics — and not just because they’re in black and white. We study them, we emulate them, because they are just so damn good.And yet, when we emulate them too closely, the results are invariably disappointing. That’s a good topic for someone’s dissertation, so I won’t try to address it in a footnote.

[kane] That said, for every great old masterpiece, there are a lot of non-masterpieces. And what frustrates me is when society insists on elevating and fawning over these non-masterpieces simply because they were part of some mythical Golden Age. To me, that includes The Honeymooners. Sorry. I can understand why it was groundbreaking, and the enormous challenge of creating a live show, and why it was seminal. But I don’t care. It doesn’t connect for me whatsoever, and I’m too honest to fake any interest in it.

Thus, to me, it sucks. Everyone is free to have his own opinion, at least until the corporate sponsors find out.Read the fine print on the parking garage stub. It’s a contract.

I could have softened the blow by saying, “Many old things suck” or “Some old things suck.” But that wouldn’t be true to my experience. When I watch a classic film and have that holy shit, this is just as good as everyone says experience, that’s the glorious exception. That’s when I’m happy I’ve deliberately set my expectation meter low for anything older than I am.

Setting aside the implicit ontological paradoxes, most people I know would be curious to travel back in time. They’d love to meet historical figures, marvel at extinct animals, and experience daily life in an earlier age. But I’ve yet to meet someone who wants to travel back in time to watch TV. Imagine, you could watch The Honeymooners in its proper context, live, as it was made. Wouldn’t that be the best thing ever? No?

Of course it wouldn’t, because you live in 2007. The world has changed a lot since the days of Ralph Kramden threatening domestic violence against his wife, and you can’t pretend it hasn’t.Yes, I know he was kidding. There’s a fascinating apologia on the topic, but you wouldn’t see Kevin James getting away with it today.

And yet, time travel is exactly what some fans want out of an adaptation — to create a movie as it would have existed in an earlier era. To me, that’s foolish. You can watch The Honeymooners on DVD, safe in its nostalgic bubble, but to slavishly recreate the experience is cultural masturbation.

And yes, I said “masturbation” just to bait comments.

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