John August

Go

Why it’s called “Go,” and not “Call”

Go, Projects

IMDb has message boards for every film and every filmmaker. I would strongly advise you to __never read them__, and in particular, don’t read them for any film you’ve worked on. You will walk away feeling a little worse about yourself and humanity.

But today, while looking up the name of an actor in Go, I ignored my own advice and clicked on one of the message board threads, which brought up an [interesting point](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139239/board/flat/99293237):

> Did anyone else notice that even though the film was shot in 1999 and focused on young people that no mobile phones appeared in the film? Unless I missed something it seems like this was a deliberate decision by makers of the film. I like the choice.

The stripclub guy who Simon shot may have used a mobile phone to call the Riviera to find out which room Simon and his friends were staying in. I don’t recall, it may have been a carphone. It still doesn’t explain why no other characters in the movie use a mobile when they had the opportunity.

The answer, of course: the film came out in early 1999, and cellphones weren’t yet ubiquitous in Los Angeles. They existed, to be sure, but they were relatively expensive and rare. We hadn’t even settled on the lingo yet. Here’s how I describe one early in the script:

  • Adam’s friend ZACK is behind him in line, YABBERING into a cellular phone.

    • Even my mother wouldn’t call it a “cellular phone” today. Later, Simon uses the current term to refer to the Ferrari’s built-in phone:

  • SIMON
  • It’s a cell phone. They can trace where we are even if we don’t answer.

    • (There’s still little consistency between cell phone, cell-phone and cellphone.)

    Whatever you call them, there are two such phones in the movie: Zack’s and Vic Jr.’s. Ronna uses a pager, which is as much as she could believably afford as a grocery store cashier with rent trouble. ((I can’t find the link, but I recently read an article about how bad we are at remembering when technologies started. How long have fax machines been around? How about DVDs? When did television go color? If it happened during our lifetime, we can often match it up to a specific purchase; the first DVD I owned was Go. But my three-year old daughter will have no idea whether the fax came before the telephone. In fact, she may never really understand a fax. It’s been six months since we’ve sent one.))

    Nearly ten years later, it seems natural to expect that every character in Go would have a cellphone. Their modern-day equivalents would. And the story would have had to change. Some examples:

    – Todd would have called Simon to check on Ronna before selling her anything.

    – Claire would have called Ronna, rather than paging her, while stuck at Todd’s apartment. Todd would have insisted on knowing why there was such a delay.

    – The conversation between Todd and Simon wouldn’t have necessarily happened in the hotel room.

    – Todd would have called Simon the moment he realized the pills were swapped.

    – As originally scripted, Ronna was conscious after being hit by the Miata. She could have called Claire, Manny, or 911 to get help.

    – After the shooting at the strip club, Simon and Marcus would have called Tiny and Singh, warning them to pack up.

    – Simon could have (but might not have) called Todd to warn him about the Vics.

    – Claire would have called Ronna after being ditched at the rave.

    – Ronna and Claire would have tried calling Mannie when looking for him.

    Looking at this list, I’m really glad there weren’t a lot of cellphones when making Go. None of these changes are horrible, but they demand extra work to explain why characters aren’t just picking up the phone. Getting people face-to-face in movies is crucial, and cellphones work against that.

    But cellphones are better than texting, which is what these characters would have been doing if the movie were made in 2008. Texting is not just uncinematic, it’s anti-cinematic: characters sitting still while twiddling their thumbs. I’ve yet to see it done effectively in movies or TV.

    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. ((But! But! you say. In the Library)), 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. ((Go is 126 pages, but it’s packed solid. Big Fish meanders, but those detours end up paying off in the conclusion.))

    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. ((Page numbers, scene numbers, “more” and “continued” are exceptions.))

    * **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. ((I try to keep paragraphs of action and scene description between two and six lines.))

    **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. ((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.))

    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](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2005/a-movie-by-any-other-name)) 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.

    Quitting, and the age question

    Film Industry, Go, Psych 101, QandA

    questionmarkI know the ultimate answer to every quitting question tends to veer towards, “If you can quit it then it wasn’t meant to be.” But I think there are many people out there who have yet to find some singular passion. The best I’ve been able to muster is finding things I really enjoy doing and I’m 40.

    Which brings me back to your opinion on quitting writing. Or should I say, quitting trying to become a paid writer. In my case I’ve been writing screenplays for about four years. None great. One almost optioned (the first, since then manager pretty much lamed out on me).

    So it’s years later and I’m pretty much still at square one in terms of contacts. Age being an issue aren’t the chances seriously evaporating à la a woman over 35 trying to get pregnant? Isn’t it more a 20-something game? Am I asking too many questions?

    Anyway, would love any thoughts you might have on the matter.

    — marc

    You should quit.

    I know that’s pretty controversial advice, and I feel uncomfortable typing it. After all, this is a blog about the wonders and challenges of screenwriting, full of hope and sunshine except for off days when I rip on Parade magazine.

    But there’s hope, and there’s false hope. And the latter is harmful. It keeps people locked in a cycle of unmet expectation, passing up other opportunities in pursuit of an elusive, often impossible dream. So I want to be honest with you, and explain how I came up with my answer.

    Let’s start with the positives, and address your age concern. Apparently, the median age of a new WGA member is about 35, which means there are plenty of screenwriters just getting started in their late-30’s and early 40’s. You’re not too late by any means.

    Also, you’ve only been doing this for four years — it took me longer than that to get Go made. Granted, they were a very different four years of my life. They were Ramen years, when I slept on the floor of a studio apartment and abused my student ID for discount movie tickets. Striving and struggling is exciting — romantic, even — in your 20’s. You hit 30, then 40, and the appeal fades. Particularly if what you’re striving and struggling for isn’t your singular passion.

    That’s the heart of the age question: It’s not harder for an older writer to start. It’s just easier to quit.

    I often fall back on my basketball analogy, but forgive me if I dust it off again. It’s relevant.

    Let’s say you’re good at basketball. In fact, of all the people you play with, you’re the best. Should you pursue a career in it? Let’s assume you’re willing to do the hard work — you’ll train every day, work with coaches on specific skills, and do everything in your power to make it. What are the odds you’ll end up in the NBA?

    The answer has a lot to do with where you’re at in your life. If you’re 18, maybe. If you’re 38, no. That’s not ageism. That’s just reflecting the fact that most basketball careers are established in their 20’s (or earlier). That’s when your natural talents are developed enough that it’s obvious whether you’re cut out for it. You may become a better basketball player in your 30’s, but you won’t suddenly become one when you weren’t before.

    While there are limits to the analogy,Most notably, basketball has many purely quantitative measurements to let you compare yourself to your peers, while screenwriting is fundamentally qualitative. “Number of produced credits” reflects a combination of consensus opinion and good fortune. a good writer is like a good basketball player in that there’s some inherent and unobtainable aptitude required. Either you’re good at it, or you’re not, and no workshop is going to change that. Until my senior year of high school, I didn’t know screenwriting existed, but I always knew I would be a writer. It was the one thing I could consistently do better than my peers, and once I recognized that, I ran with it.

    The weird thing with screenwriting is that many people try their hand at it without any prior background (or demonstrable skill) in writing. They see writing movies as being akin to watching movies. Here the basketball analogy holds up: being a fan of the Pistons doesn’t mean you can play for the Pistons.I chose that team at random. I don’t follow the game at all, which makes it awkward to use basketball in this analogy. But I’m sticking with it.

    Coming back to you, Marc, if you’ve been trying for a couple of years, and have started to seriously question whether you’re cut out for it (“none great”), maybe it’s time to look for another field. I think you wrote in asking permission to quit considering yourself an aspiring screenwriter. You have my blessing.

    But keep in mind: I may be completely wrong, and you may be deluded. Here are some signs that you should ignore my advice and keep at it:

    1. Smart people genuinely love your scripts, and want to keep talking about them after the obligatory period has passed.
    2. You can pull one of your older scripts off the shelf, reading it for the first time in years, and be more impressed than embarrassed.
    3. At least once a week, you write something that sends you to bed happy.

    None of these are guarantees that you’re going to make it as a screenwriter. But they’re indications that writing (of some form) is probably a net positive in your life, so don’t stop doing just because I told you to quit.