Screenwriter and author John August

Readers speak, part one

May 5, 2005 News

survey In the recent [survey](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2005/answer-you-are-an-american-male-in-his-twenties), I got a lot of hard numbers to back up and/or refute my assumptions about who reads johnaugust.com. I also got a lot of good suggestions from Question 10, which read: “If I could do one thing to improve johnaugust.com, I would…”

Here’s a sampling of what people wrote, and how I might implement their advice. Today, we’ll look at suggestions about content. Tomorrow we’ll cover everything else.

> Update the site daily.

> Increase the frequency of updates (no matter how breezy or trivial).

I do my best to post a couple of times per week. Realistically, that’s the best I can do while holding down a full-time screenwriting career. Unlike [Jason Kottke](http://kottke.org), I don’t think any number of [micro-patrons](http://www.kottke.org/about/patron/) is going to enable me to quit my day job. Though at times, it’s tempting.

> Increase the Q&A sections, or at least make the IMDb columns less of a
rehash from what’s already been posted on the website.

The [IMDb columns](http://indie.imdb.com/Indie/Ask/) are the same questions I answer on the site. I could divvy them up differently, but I’d still be answering the same number of questions.

> Be funnier. It’s a little dry.

Alas, dry is what you get. The truth is, I’m not crazy yuk-yuk funny, as you might guess by the movies I write: entertaining, sure. Hysterical, not so much. This site isn’t really meant to be a hoot-and-a-half. At its best, it’s probably edu-tainment.

English isn’t Latin

May 5, 2005 Rant

In an email a few weeks ago, my former assistant (and alarmingly successful writer/director) [Rawson Thurber](http://imdb.com/name/nm1098493/maindetails) apologized for ending a sentence with a preposition. I insisted that he was well within his rights to dangle a preposition, split an infinitive, or break pretty much any rule he’d been taught about English — especially the seemingly-arbitrary ones.

Grammarians come in two flavors. A [descriptivist](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descriptive_linguistics) studies the way people use a language, while a [prescriptivist](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription) tries to lay down the rules of a language.

Prescriptivists are assholes. Ignore them.

Or better yet, try to make them explain why you’re not supposed to dangle a preposition. After all, there’s not a Bible of the English language, in which a certified deity listed his or her commandments. Backed into a corner, the prescriptivist will probably say, “because English comes from Latin, and that’s not allowed in Latin.”

Well, I studied Latin. It’s cool in a geeky way, sort of like computer programming. Many English words come from Latin, so it can be fascinating to play linguistic C.S.I. to figure out how “abscission” came from “away” and “to cut.” But here’s the most interesting and challenging thing about Latin:

It’s nothing like English.

Most notably, it has [cases](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grammatical_cases) and [declensions](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension), which have pretty much disappeared in our happy language, replaced by word order and, you guessed it, prepositions.

But don’t just take my word for it. Here’s [another article](http://www.alphadictionary.com/articles/drgw001.html) that does a good job explaining why the grammar Nazis are wrong.

Teenage girls and gay men

May 5, 2005 Formatting, QandA

I have a quick question in regard to my current screenplay. I have a scene set at a concert and it contains the line:

The enthusiastic AUDIENCE is made up mostly of teenage girls and gay men.

Should I just capitalize “audience” (as I have at the moment) or should I also capitalize “teenage girls” and “gay men”? Or should I keep audience in lowercase and just capitalize teenage girls and gay men?

— Mason Fox
Long Island, NY

While it’s certainly not a make-or-break decision, I vote for your third option:

The enthusiastic audience is made up mostly of TEENAGE GIRLS and GAY MEN.

The reason screenplays capitalize groups of extras is to help the assistant director and casting coordinators figure out what types of people they’ll need for a given scene. In this case, you need TEENAGE GIRLS and GAY MEN.

In general, if I break a bigger group down into specific categories, I only capitalize the categories. But I’m sure that if you read through other scripts I’ve written, you’ll see counter-examples.

Good interviews about Father Knows Less

May 3, 2005 Film Industry, Projects

UPDATE: 4/28/2011 — Links to “Father Knows Less” IMDb listing no longer active.

UPDATE: 4/28/2011 — All podcast links have been updated.

podcast Okay. It’s not actually podcasting, but behold the site’s the first-ever audio links.

I’m currently rewriting a script called Father Knows Less, originally written by [Aline Brosh McKenna](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0112459/maindetails). It’s the story of “a loving but aloof guy (Dustin Hoffman) abandoned by his trophy wife, [who] finds himself in charge of raising his young kids. In order to connect with them as their father, he turns to his children from his first marriage for help.” (synopsis by [IMDb](http://imdb.com))

Tonally, it’s a dramedy in the James L. Brooks mode. More [Jerry Maguire](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0116695/combined), less [The Pacifier](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0395699/combined). New Line is the studio.

As it happens, Claude Brodesser of Variety has been tracking this project on his KCRW radio show [The Business](http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/tb), and has had various members of the production on to talk about the process. It’s a refreshingly candid discussion of how a movie wends its way through development.

You can start with the [initial conversation](http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/tb/tb040621looking_deep_inside) with McKenna, agent Devra Lieb, and producer [Laura Hopper](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1348882/maindetails) about the pitch, and how the project was set up. The discussion starts at 11:08.

Next, there’s a [follow-up conversation](http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/tb/tb040719cashin_in_on_the_pas) with McKenna and Hopper as they start looking for a director. Starts at 2:51.

Finally, Brodesser [talks with the movie’s director](http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/tb/tb050411battlestar_galactica), who explains his decision to take the project, and the discussion about bringing on a different writer (which ended up being me). The talk starts at 9:20.

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