John August

Projects

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 long should it take to write a script?

Big Fish, Charlie, Film Industry, Projects, QandA, Television

Answering a [recent question](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2008/bail-idea), I made the following unqualified assertion:

> Six weeks is a long time. I say this not to panic you, but to make sure you understand that employable screenwriters need to be able to produce on demand.

In the comment thread that followed — and subsequent emails — many readers wondered exactly how long was too long, and what was a reasonable timeframe in which a screenwriter should be expected to deliver a script. So let’s try to answer those questions.

When a screenwriter is hired to write a project (like Shazam!, or Big Fish), the contract generally allows for a 12-week writing period for the first draft. Subsequent rewrites and polishes are given shorter time period, anywhere from eight weeks to two weeks.

In practice, I’ve never seen these contractual writing periods enforced. ((In a few cases where a movie was rushing to production, my contracts have had special language like “Time is of the essence” or similar, which I suspect is a giant flashing arrow to indicate that the studio really would consider withholding payment if delivery were late.)) Rather, a few weeks into the process, a producer or studio executive calls the screenwriter and the following conversation takes place:

PRODUCER

So, how’s the writing going?

WRITER

Good. Good.

PRODUCER

I know it’s early, but do you gotta sense of when you’re going to be finished?

WRITER

Umm....

PRODUCER

Just ballpark, like, end of January? Start of February?

WRITER

Yeah. Absolutely.

PRODUCER

Great. Great. Because I know the studio’s really excited to see it, and it would be great to get it in around then.

WRITER

Shouldn’t be a problem.

PRODUCER

I’ll just check in with you in a coupla weeks, make sure everything’s going okay.

I’ve encountered some version of this conversation on every project I’ve written. Follow-up phone calls try to narrow the time frame down even more, with the goal of getting you to deliver the script on a Thursday or Friday so everyone can read it over the weekend.

I’m hesitant to give a firm number for how many weeks it should take to write a script. Every project is different. Big Fish took me the better part of four months, while Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was three weeks. But part of the reason Charlie was only three weeks was because that’s all the time there was. There was already a release date, and sets were being built.

And that points to the better question to ask: How quickly should a professional screenwriter be able to turn around a script, given some urgency? In my experience, the most successful screenwriters are the ones who are able to accurately estimate how much time they’ll need. That’s part of the craft, just like a cabinetmaker promising a delivery date. For my work on Iron Man, I told them exactly how many days it would take to address certain issues, and delivered pages every night.

For feature films, I’d be reluctant to hire a writer who couldn’t deliver a script in eight weeks. For television, writers sometimes have less than a week to get a one-hour episode written. You’d like to give every writer as much time as she needs, but in my experience, the deadline is often the main force getting the script finished.

Trifecta

News, Projects, Shazam, Videogames

The combination of family travel, lingering illness and Fallout 3 has kept me away from the blog this week, but I should be back to a normal schedule beginning Sunday.

There’s actual news, including my next writing project and an update (post-mortem?) on Shazam!. Plus, I really want to write something about [this misguided memo from Thomas Kinkade](http://www.vanityfair.com/online/culture/2008/11/14/thomas-kincades-16-guidelines-for-making-stuff-suck.html) reprinted in Vanity Fair. It’s a good cautionary tale.

(Update: Fixed spelling of Kinkade’s name. Thanks Matt Redd.)

The Nines, recut

Education, Projects, The Nines

Since before its debut at Sundance, one of my goals for The Nines has been to let viewers recut it to their whims. It’s a film that lends itself to wild reimagination, so I suspect there are some fascinating versions out there waiting to be assembled.

We were able to do it to a small degree with the [trailer competition](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2007/trailer-winners), but I’d ultimately love for an editor to load in all of the assets and go crazy. ((Yes, an ambitious cutter could rip apart the footage from the DVD — that’s how most parody trailers are made — but it’s not the same as having the real footage. It’s like rewriting a sentence with only ten words and two pieces of punctuation.))

This spring, we’re going to do a test run. In USC’s Advanced Editing class, students will get every frame of dailies for The Nines on their Avids, so they can work through the process of making a real feature with the real footage. Editor Doug Crise and I will visit to help explain some of our choices, but it will be up to the student editors to figure out what movie they want to make and how.

Given its relationship with filmmakers, USC’s School of Cinematic Arts has done this with many features over the years. But my hope is to find a way to make it possible without the infrastructure of a film school, so that any aspiring editor could get her hands on the real footage. There are legal and technical obstacles, to be sure, but I’m looking forward to seeing how this dry run goes.