John August

Projects

10 Sundance shorts on iTunes

Indie, Sundance, The Nines, Video

Ten of the 80 short films featured this week at the Sundance Film Festival are available free on iTunes until January 25th. It’s a great way to see some work you’d almost certainly never catch.

Visit [itunes.com/Sundance](http://itunes.com/sundance) to check out trailers and download. (Link opens in iTunes store.)

I’m happy to see shorts featured this way, and hope it expands to features in coming years. I would have absolutely done it for The Nines. By offering movies for a limited window, Sundance and Apple can give exposure to films and filmmakers far beyond Park City, Utah.

It’s a smart implementation of the festival’s mission.

Audition scenes

Go, Ops, Projects, The Remnants

When you’re auditioning actors for a role, the scenes as scripted are sometimes not especially useful.

For example, if most of a character’s scenes are with groups of people talking, the auditioning actor probably won’t to have enough lines to really make an impression. And in television, you may need to cast a part that isn’t especially big in its first episode, but becomes more important later.

Knowing this, casting directors will often try to cobble something together. But a smart writer should also volunteer to write special scenes just for auditions. Sometimes they’re cut-down and rearranged versions of scenes from the script, but it’s also an opportunity to just come up with something new. On movies and shows in which I’m involved with casting, I’ll generally give the casting director specially-prepared sides a few days before auditions begin.

In the [Library](http://johnaugust.com/library), I have an additional audition scene from Go for [Mannie](http://johnaugust.com/downloads_ripley/mannie_audition.pdf), whose character didn’t talk much but was crucial to the first act.

And I just added three audition scenes from The Remnants:

[Chas, Mia and Wallace auditions](http://johnaugust.com/downloads_ripley/remnants_audition.pdf)

And all the casting sides for the [Alaska pilot](http://johnaugust.com/library#alaska).

One added bonus of writing new scenes for the audition is that you don’t get completely burned out on the real scenes. After you’ve heard fifty actors read the same ten lines, they become meaningless. You don’t want to be on set hearing them again.

The Visitor

Los Angeles, Meta, Projects, The Nines, Video

On Wednesday morning, we came into the kitchen to find an orange slice on the stove and a tomato that seemed to have exploded. This was obviously troubling.

My initial thought was that one of us had sleepwalked, and acted out some rage issue against fruit. I realize this is a strange explanation to reach for first — maybe I’m the culprit! — but it may explain why I’m a screenwriter.

The much more reasonable instinct would be to assume we had some sort of visitor. A mouse, a rat, a squirrel. Or possibly a raccoon — our housesitter had mentioned seeing one over the holiday. We set a peanut butter-baited mousetrap on the counter, and sure enough, at 4:50 a.m. Thursday I heard it snap. There was no critter under the bar, however.

I know through friends that a raccoon has to be handled differently than a mere mouse or rat, so I was determined to figure out which kind of varmint we had. I set my MacBook’s built-in camera to shoot one frame of video per second, and left the lights dimmed in the kitchen. I also re-baited the trap, this time with hummus.

This morning, I came downstairs and saw with disappointment that the trap hadn’t popped. But scrubbing through the video, I got my answer.
rat

Fans of The Nines may recognize the kitchen, and the accuracy of Margaret’s “they live in the palm trees” line.

**UPDATE:** Conventional rat trap worked. It snapped four minutes after leaving the room. Cleanup was bloodless, but still more unsettling than I anticipated. Rat Guy comes Monday to figure out how it got in.

**FURTHER UPDATE:** [Here](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/the-rat-is-dead).

The Remnants, in full

Projects, Remnants, Video, Web series

I showed a snippet [back in October](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2008/the-remnants), but here is the full web pilot I shot during the strike. If you [click through to Vimeo](http://www.vimeo.com/2755105), you can see it in full-screen HD. ((Click the zoom-out arrows in the bottom right corner. It’s only HD if you’re watching it on Vimeo, not the embedded version.))

For the past few months, the pilot has been shopped around to advertisers and other possible sponsors, but given the economy and my schedule, it’s looking unlikely that a confluence of money and time will lead us to shoot more. So I wanted to let people see it, particularly because it features some actors who should be on more lists. Including [Ze Frank](http://zefrank.com), who is now an Angeleno.

The web series business model has proved tough for everyone to figure out. Yes, Joss Whedon’s Dr. Horrible was fantastic, but even that couldn’t get the ad sponsors it should have. Selling through iTunes is an option for someone with Whedon’s name brand, but I don’t see it working for The Remnants, even given the recognizability of some of the cast members.

I retained rights to do other things with The Remnants, so I certainly may come back to it at some point in some other form.

The proposed Seth Rogan/Jay Baruchel comedy [Jay and Seth vs. The Apocalypse](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehNFPShWTsg) seems kind of similar, but the What Actually Happened is a lot different. Had Chas and Norman successfully gotten their Wii hooked up and powered, they would have realized many of their assumptions about the end of civilization were wrong.