John August

Charlie's Angels

Habits, heavy lifting, and the possibility of suck

Charlie's Angels, Video, Writing Process

MakingOf has part two of my interview up on the site. (You can see part one here.)

Some notes on certain sections:

0:07 Writing process

In How to Write a Scene, I go into a lot more detail on “looping” and “scribble versions” of scenes.

0:49 How scripts have evolved

My hunch is that the modern era of writing action begins with James Cameron. Every screenwriter I know read and devoured his scripts for Terminator, Aliens and Point Break. We’re all probably channeling him a bit.

1:30 When I write

I really do try to do most of my work during “office hours.” But during crunch times — which has been a lot more, recently — I find myself going back to work after dinner, or setting the alarm for 5 a.m. to get stuff written before breakfast.

Writing is an inherently selfish act: you’re shutting the world out to live in a fantasy. You don’t really appreciate that until you have a family.

2:18 This could possibly suck

One of the main reasons we procrastinate is to give ourselves an excuse for why things might be terrible: “I know it’s not great, but I wrote it in three days.” Suck early and fix it.

3:30 Writer’s block

You know who gets writer’s block? Non-writers. They think it’s cool and romantic to struggle to make Art. They make sure everyone knows how torturous the process is, so when they finally squeeze something out, it won’t be judged on its merits but rather the emotional anguish involved in its creation.

Writers write. Hacks Posers whine about how hard it is.1

4:09 Heavy lifting

The twenty minute timer actually works. Do twenty minutes of solid work, then give yourself ten minutes of freedom.

Ideally, you want finesse: a combination of strength and dexterity that uses a scene’s natural momentum to make everything look effortless. But sometimes, that’s not possible: there isn’t time, or there’s some major impediment. With enough craft, an experienced screenwriter can often muscle a scene that shouldn’t otherwise work.

4:35 You can always cut something

I’m obliquely referencing a meeting for Charlie’s Angels, during which the studio president ripped ten pages out of the script and told me to write around what was missing.

5:10 Most people aren’t screenwriters

If you want to work in film or television, you need to work on films and television shows. Screenwriting is mostly writing, but without experience in how stuff is actually made, you’ll never be very good at it.

  1. “Hacks” was really the wrong term, because there are some very prolific hacks. There are also some genuinely talented writers who go through spells of low productivity. I find stories glamorizing their travails really tedious, however. ↩

Rewriting the rewriter

Charlie's Angels, Directors, Film Industry, Projects, Psych 101, QandA

questionmarkHow often do original screenwriters, who’ve been rewritten by other fellows, get hired back onto their original scripts? Does it matter if the script is revving up to go into production? I’ve heard of a few other guys like Josh Friedman (Chain Reaction) and Michael Arndt (Little Miss Sunshine) hopping back on, but are they the exception or the rule?

— Lewis

It’s not uncommon. I was on and off both Charlie’s Angels movies several times, and I can think of at least half a dozen other cases where the original writers came back in before (or during) production.

In order to understand why the original writers are sometimes rehired, you have to understand why they leave projects. Sometimes, it’s simple availability: at a crucial moment during development of the first Charlie’s Angels, I was shooting a series in Toronto, so someone else got the gig (a long string of someone elses, as it turned out). In other cases, a new element (director, producer, star) wants to take the script in a new direction, which generally means a new writer — often someone they’ve worked with before.

You’re not always fired, and it’s not always acrimonious. That’s important to understand. The screenwriter wants the movie made, and wants to maintain relationships with the filmmakers and the studio. So it behooves everyone to make sure the original writer is at least peripherally involved, even if he’s no longer the active writer on the project.

The original writer might get asked back for several reasons. The simplest is cost: she may be willing to do a lot of piece work essentially for free because it’s her movie. But more often there is something about the original writer’s voice or vision that remains important despite subsequent revisions, and the producers (or director, or stars) recognize this. So she comes back in to make the new stuff feel like her stuff, and let it read like one movie rather than a patchwork.

How to cut pages

Big Fish, Charlie's Angels, Dead Projects, Formatting, Go, How-To, Words on the page

One page of screenplay translates to one minute of movie. Since most movies are a little under two hours long, most screenplays should be a little less than 120 pages.

That’s an absurd oversimplification, of course.

One page of a battle sequence might run four minutes of screen time, while a page of dialogue banter might zip by in 30 seconds. No matter. The rule of thumb might as well be the rule of law: any script over 120 pages is automatically suspect. If you hand someone a 121-page script, the first note they will give you is, “It’s a little long.” In fact, some studios will refuse to take delivery of a script over 120 pages (and thus refuse to pay).

So you need to be under 120.1, both Big Fish and Go are more than 120 pages. I’m not claiming that longer scripts aren’t shot. I’m saying that if you go over the 120 page line, you have to be doubly sure there’s no moment that feels padded, because the reader is going in with the subconscious goal of cutting something.2

Which usually means you need to cut.

Before we look at how to do that, let’s address a few things you should never do when trying to cut pages, no matter how tempting.

  • Don’t adjust line spacing. Final Draft lets you tighten the line spacing, squeezing an extra line or two per page. Don’t. Not only is it obvious, but it makes your script that much harder to read.

  • Don’t tweak margins. With the exception of Widow Control (see below), you should never touch the default margins: an inch top, bottom and right, an inch-and-a-half on the left. 3

  • Don’t mess with the font. Screenplays are 12-pt Courier. If you try a different size, or a different face, your reader will notice and become suspicious.

All of these don’ts could be summarized thusly: Don’t cheat. Because we really will notice, and we’ll begin reading your script with a bias against it.

There are two kinds of trims we’ll be making: actual cuts and perceived cuts. Actual cuts mean you’re taking stuff out, be it a few lines, scenes or sequences. Perceived cuts are craftier. You’re editing with specific intention of making the pages break differently, thus pulling the end of the script up. Perceived cuts don’t really make the script shorter. They just make it seem shorter, like a fat man wearing stripes.

Fair warning: Many of these suggestions will seem borderline-OCD. But if you’ve spent months writing a script, why not spend one hour making it look and read better?

Cutting a page or two

At this length, perceived cuts will probably get you where you need to be. (That said, always look for bigger, actual cuts. Remember, 117 pages is even better than 120.)

Practice Widow Control. Widows are those little fragments, generally a word or two, which hog a line to themselves. You find them both in action and dialogue.

HOFFMAN

Oh, I agree. He’s quite the catch, for a fisherman. Caught myself trolling more than once.

If you pull the right-hand margin of that dialogue block very, very slightly to the right, you can often make that last word jump up to the previous line. Done right, it’s invisible, and reads better.

I generally don’t try to kill widows in action lines unless I have to. The ragged whitespace helps break up the page. But it’s always worth checking whether two very short paragraphs could be joined together.4

Watch out for invisible orphans. Orphans are short lines that dangle by themselves at the top of page. You rarely see them these days, because by default, most screenwriting programs will force an extra line or two across the page break to avoid them.5

Here’s the downside: every time the program does this, your script just got a line or two longer. So anytime you see a short bit of action at the top of the page, see if there’s an alternate way to write it that can make it jump back to the previous page.

Nix the CUT TO:’s. Screenwriters have different philosophies when it comes to CUT TO. Some use it at the end of every scene. Some never use it at all. I split the difference, using it when I need to signal to the reader that we’re either moving to something completely new story-wise, or jumping ahead in time.

But when I’m looking to trim a page or two, I often find I can sacrifice a few CUT TO’s and TRANSITION TO’s. So weigh each one.

Cutting five to ten pages

At this level, you’re beyond the reach of perceived cuts. You’re going to have to take things out. Here are the places to look.

Remove unnecessary set-ups. When writing a first act, your instinct is to make sure that everything is really well set up. You have a scene to introduce your hero, another to introduce his mom, a third to establish that he’s nice to kittens. Start cutting. We need to know much less about your characters than you think. The faster we can get to story, the better.

Get out of scenes earlier. Look at every scene, and ask what the earliest point is you could cut to the next scene. You’ll likely find a lot of tails to trim.

Don’t let characters recap. Characters should never need to explain something that we as the audience already know. It’s a complete waste of time and space. So if it’s really important that Bob know what Sarah saw in the old mill — a scene we just watched — try to make that explanation happen off-screen.

For example, if a scene starts…

BOB

Are you sure it was blood?

…we can safely surmise he’s gotten the necessary details.

Trim third-act bloat. As we cross page 100 in our scripts, that finish line become so appealing that we often race to be done. The writing suffers. Because it’s easier to explain something in three exchanges of dialogue than one, we don’t try to be efficient. So you need to look at that last section with the same critical eyes that read those first 20 pages 100 times, and bring it up to the same level. The end result will almost always be tighter, and shorter.

Cutting ten or more pages

Entire sequences are going to need to go away. This happens more than you’d think. For the first Charlie’s Angels, we had a meeting at 5 p.m. on a Friday afternoon in which the president of the studio yanked ten pages out of the middle of the script. There was nothing wrong with those scenes, but we couldn’t afford to shoot them. So I was given until Monday morning to make the movie work without them.

Be your own studio boss. Be savage. Always err on taking out too much, because you’ll likely have to write new material to address some of what’s been removed.

The most brutal example I can think of from my own experience was my never-sold (but often retitled) zombie western. I cut 75 pages out of the first draft — basically, everything that didn’t support the two key ideas of Zombie Western. By clear-cutting, I could make room for new set pieces that fit much better with the movie I was trying to make.

Once you start thinking big-picture, you realize it’s often easier to cut fifteen pages than five. You ask questions like, “What if there was no Incan pyramid, and we went straight to Morocco?” or “What if instead of seeing the argument, reconciliation and breakup, it was just a time cut?”

Smart restructuring of events can often do the work for you. A project I’m just finishing has several occasions in which the action needs to slide forward several weeks, with characters’ relationships significantly changed. That’s hard to do with straight cutting — you expect to see all the pieces in the middle. But by focussing on something else for a scene or two — a different character in a different situation — I’m able to come back with time jumped and characters altered.

Look: It’s hard to cut a big chunk of your script, something that may have taken weeks to write. So don’t just hit “delete.” Cut and paste it into a new document, save it, and allow yourself the fiction of believing that in some future script, you’ll be able to use some of it. You won’t, but it will make it less painful.

  1. But! But! you say. In the Library ↩
  2. Go is 126 pages, but it’s packed solid. Big Fish meanders, but those detours end up paying off in the conclusion. ↩
  3. Page numbers, scene numbers, “more” and “continued” are exceptions. ↩
  4. I try to keep paragraphs of action and scene description between two and six lines. ↩
  5. While I rag on the program, Final Draft is smart enough to break lines at the period, so sentences always stay intact. It’s a small thing, but it really helps the read. Other programs may do it now, too. ↩

Secret history of the Kleinhardt Gambit

Charlie's Angels, Projects, QandA, Words on the page

questionmarkIn the second Charlie’s Angels, where did the phrase “Kleinhardt gambit” come from?

— Duane
Mount Pleasant

Duane is referring to this scene, near the end of the movie:

EXT. HIGH ROOF – NIGHT

Madison finds herself alone on a high, empty roof. Reeling, confused. A giant, blinking “LOS ANGELES” SIGN flashes.

A single telescope has been set up near the edge. Madison walks to it. Leans down to the eyepiece.

HER P.O.V.

On a distant rooftop, all of her gangster clients are being arrested by the F.B.I.

CLOSE ON MADISON

as she looks up from the eyepiece. Furious, but smiling. She speaks to the only ones who could be behind this:

MADISON

The Kleinhardt Gambit. Classic. Well done.

WIDEN TO REVEAL the Angels, approaching behind her.

NATALIE

Thanks.

SMASHCUT to a series of FAST FLASHBACKS:

MUSSO AND FRANK’S. SNAP ZOOM TO THE COAT CHECK ROOM. THE COAT CHECKER IS NATALIE, WITH BLACK HAIR AND SLINKY BLACK DRESS.

ROOSEVELT HOTEL, BATHROOM. THE HISPANIC DOORMAN QUICKLY RIPS OFF HIS LATEX FACE, REVEALING DYLAN.

(Those last three are separate scene numbers, by the way.)

Here, the “Kleinhardt Gambit” refers to the way the angels sent Madison’s buyers to the wrong rooftop through elaborate misdirection. The telescope is apparently not a key part of the gambit, but rather just to piss off Madison.

The action is pretty standard for Charlie’s Angels (or Mission: Impossible), so it makes sense that a fallen angel would recognize how she was duped, and would have a term for it. The term itself is completely invented, a ridiculous neologism. And believe me, there wasn’t a lot of deep thought going into it. The first combination of syllables that seemed reasonable got typed.

Science fiction does this constantly. What’s a flux capacitor? How did Kirk prevail in the un-winnable Kobayashi Maru? What are midi-chlorians, and how can we pretend we never heard of them?

Don’t be afraid to invent terms you think would exist in your fictional world. Done just right, jargon helps ground characters in their setting, much the way medical-ese makes you think those pretty people on TV could actually be doctors.