Tickets for the special screening of GO at Arclight in Hollywood on November 25th are now available for sale. The movie starts at 7:00 p.m., followed by a Q&A with John, hosted by MENACE II SOCIETY screenwriter Tyger Williams.
A couple of nice coincidences: the Arclight is just down the street from the supermarket that served as the inspiration for the movie, and GO’s premiere was held in Arclight’s Cineramadome.
On Tuesday, November 25th, GO is being screened as part of the “Story to Glory” series at the ArcLight Cinema in Hollywood, followed by a Q&A with me. Will I say something profound and brilliant? No. But I’ll hopefully be coherent.
I haven’t seen GO on a big screen since 1999, so I’ll probably just watch it beforehand so I remember the plot. Plus, the ArcLight is by far my favorite movie theater in Los Angeles, since they let you reserve your individual seat. Along with my TiVo and my Prius, the ArcLight is one of my favorite modern conveniences.
The ArcLight theaters are big, so I’m not expecting it to sell out. But as soon as there is ticket information, I’ll put it up.
This film series began in September 2002, and is held every second Tuesday, screening a different movie and interviewing its screenwriter afterwards. It’s run by the Scriptwriters Network.
How long did it take to write GO? How long does it take to
write a finished script? Do you work at an office day in, day out, or is it
different?
–Floris
GO took about two years to write, but it was an unusual case in that I wrote
it as a short film, then let it sit around for a long time before I did the
full version. My active work time on the script was probably about four months,
which is not a bad estimate for most of the things I’ve worked on.
Some things have had to go faster out of necessity. I wrote the first draft
of CHARLIE’S ANGELS in three weeks, because that was all the time I had available
between commitments. (I later went back and did another two months of work
on it, right before production.)
Currently, I work out of an office in my home. I have an assistant who works
from 9 to 6, which is what I consider my "working" hours, but truthfully
my life is more like college. Sometimes you can screw around during the day,
and sometimes you have to pull all-nighters to get work done.
As a writer, do you worry about everyone in your life thinking characters
are based on them?
–Dari
Surprisingly, the issue almost never comes up. I guess that means either,
(a) everyone in my life has already accepted that something they say or do
might someday end up on screen, or (b) they’re angry and repressing their rage.
A writer is inevitably going to borrow ideas from real life, both consciously
and unconsciously. With me, it’s dialogue. I’ll hear somebody say something
perfect and immediately jot it down on one of a hundred tiny slips of paper.
(Probably half of the time, I’ve actually misheard what they said, the same
way song lyrics seem much more poetic when you can’t quite make them out.)
But I’m pretty careful to never completely base a character on somebody I
know, especially not a close friend or family member. It’s just not worth the
potential grief.
Of the scripts I’ve written, GO was closest to using actual true people and
events. Tiny (played by Breckin Meyer) was inspired by Anthony Satariano, the
sports editor of my high school paper, who was a white kid talking black way
back in 1988. The food poisoning from shrimp at a Las Vegas buffet happened
to my friend Wende in 1993, while the hotel room fire is a possibly apocryphal
story related to me by my friend Tom
Smith. (No, it didn’t happen to him.)
It’s worth noting that of all these incidents, the only one I asked permission
to use was Tom’s, probably because he’s a writer himself, and might have been
saving it for one of his own projects. He was gracious enough to let me have
it.
Another factor which reduces the "Is-That-Based-On-Me?" tension
is that a lot of the projects I work on already have some form of source material,
be it a book, a TV show or whatnot. For example, my screenplay for BIG FISH
involves a lot of my experience watching my father die, and my frustration
at trying to get to know him. But the fact that it’s ultimately based on Daniel
Wallace’s book makes it easier for my family and everyone else to get some
emotional distance, and differentiate the movie-dad from my actual dad.