John August

Projects

Packing light

Projects, The Nines, Travel

I’m headed to Seattle tonight for a quick screening of The Nines. I’m packing almost nothing: my iPhone, my Kindle, toiletries and a change of undies. Over the past year, I’ve found I am packing less and less, to the point that it’s become a sport to see how little I can get by with. It’s like urban survivalism.

It even has its own subcultures: I’ve become an adherent of bundle wrapping.

Part of my packing-light buzz is probably a reaction to having a child, because particularly with infants, there’s just so much crap you have to carry with you. When you leave them at home, you’re eager to ditch the luggage as well.

Five quick questions

Big Fish, Formatting, Projects, QandA, Words on the page

I have lots of questions, but by all means choose two you’d like to answer.

— Ric
New Zealand

questionmark1) What’s the commercial potential of movies without happy endings? I’m tired of every movie having to end in a good way, even if that’s a main character surviving a slasher flick. Does a movie automatically fail if it ends with the world blowing up? Forrest Gump wouldn’t quite be the same movie if Forrest suddenly went mad and killed everyone, but surely not every single movie has to end on a good note.

Movies can certainly end with everyone dead, ((Consider The Blair Witch Project, or Cloverfield. If either of these are spoilers, you’re officially behind on popular culture.)) and it’s not at all uncommon to kill off key protagonists (e.g. Romeo and Juliet, Titanic). Even a comedy can end on mixed notes — The Graduate being a good example. But your basic assumption is correct: the commercial potential of most movies is going to be stronger if it ends happily, simply because people will walk out of the theater happy. So you need to decide how important a happy ending is to your story, knowing the extra challenges you face with a downbeat ending.

I’d also challenge you to remember that a happy ending doesn’t necessarily mean everyone skipping off into the sunset. From The Godfather to Aliens, many great movies end on a note of uncertainty. The immediate threat may have passed, but the road ahead is dangerous.

questionmark2) What’s the best way to handle an “early life” part of a film, where you need to show the character growing up? How much is too much? How many “stages” are too many? Will it break the movie if my screenplay uses the whole first act to show incidents: at birth, 5 years old, 7 years old, 10 years old, 14 years old (and that’s condensing things, stage-wise) and then further flashbacks later on? And how do I show the character’s “want” or “why” through all of this? Or is it okay if the want or why doesn’t start until later in the film?

Every movie works differently, but trying to include that many stages will almost certainly fail. Here’s why.

In a book, aging a child from five to seven to ten to fourteen costs you nothing. You can skip from age to age, incident to incident, without trouble. Readers don’t have a strong expectation about “when the story is supposed to get started,” so as long as you are holding their interest, you’re okay.

In a movie, aging a child from five to seven to ten to fourteen means casting at least three actors. ((I’m assuming the same child actor is playing 5 and 7, or 7 and 10.)) Each time, you’re forcing the audience to identify with a new kid, with a new face, and new quirks. The replacement cost is very high, so it has to be really worthwhile to consider doing it.

More importantly, movie audiences have strong expectations about when the story is supposed to get started, and we know the story won’t really begin until we reach the grown-up version. Any scenes involving the young versions are going to feel like stalling.

Big Fish follows Edward Bloom’s life from the day he was born until the day he dies, but deliberately structures those moments to tell the bigger story of Edward and Will’s reconciliation. That’s the A-plot, and everything else is in service of that. In fantasy flashbacks, we see Edward very briefly as an infant, then jump ahead to him as ten-year old. After that, he’s either adult (Ewan MacGregor) or elderly (Albert Finney).

Get to the grown-up. We need to know much less of a character’s history than you think.

questionmark3) What is, in your opinion, the best way to write a synopsis?

A good synopsis doesn’t follow the plot beat-by-beat, but gathers together related story threads to explain What It’s About rather than exactly What Happens. Depending on its purpose, a synopsis can be two sentences or two pages, but I find almost any movie can be well described in a paragraph.

questionmark4) How would I show someone “studying really hard all year.” Would that be a montage?

Yes, but it sounds incredibly dull. Please avoid it.

questionmark5) Say the character starts singing a song and then all these different scenes start showing. How would I write that, considering each scene coincides with certain lyrics?

The character begins singing, then as you move through other scenes, you include the next part of the song as voice-over.

BOY’S CHORUS

Oh beautiful, for spacious skies / For amber waves of grain...

SONG CONTINUES as we...

CUT TO:

INT. PRINCIPAL’S OFFICE – DAY

Mrs. Wiggin’s ginormous bare butt bounces up and down. She’s evidently straddling Mr. Garcia.

BOY’S CHORUS (V.O., CONT’D)

For purple mountains majesty, / Above the fruited plain.

Mrs. Wiggins opens her mouth in wide-eyed ecstasy:

BOY’S CHORUS (V.O., CONT’D)

America! America! / God shed his grace on thee.

CUT TO:

FIVE MINUTES LATER

Sweaty and slaked, Mrs. Wiggins lights a cigarette. Mr. Garcia is trying to work a kink out of his back.

BOY’S CHORUS (V.O., CONT’D)

And crown thy good / With brotherhood

BACK TO:

INT. AUDITORIUM – NIGHT

BOY’S CHORUS

From sea to shining sea!

The parents APPLAUD.

Simple is better than accurate

Charlie, Projects, Words on the page

A story in today’s LA Times about [chocolate-making](http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fo-chocolate16-2008jul16,0,1682095.story?track=rss) got me thinking about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and an error I deliberately introduced. Early in the tour of the factory, Wonka says…

  • WONKA
  • The cocoa bean happens to be the thing from which chocolate is made.

    • Wrong. The right word is cacao — it’s not cocoa [until it’s partially processed](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoa), and as a globe-trotting master chocolatier, Wonka would certainly use the right word. And in the book, Roald Dahl does:

    > The cacao bean, which grows on the cacao tree, happens to be the thing from which chocolate is made. You cannot make chocolate without the cacao bean. The cacao bean is chocolate. I myself use billions of cacao beans every week in this factory.

    So why change it? Why be wrong?

    Because cacao is a weird word. It’s sounds like it’s supposed to be funny, but it’s not actually funny in context. Then Wonka uses the word six times in the scene. You generally repeat funny things, so when you repeat something that wasn’t funny to begin with, the stench of failed joke begins to waft in.

    Worse, cacao is confusing. It demands explanation, but the explanation isn’t particularly rewarding. As the audience, we don’t really want to learn about chocolate. We want to see bad things happen to terrible children.

    Cocoa is a synonym for hot chocolate, so it seems reasonable that you’d make chocolate from cocoa beans. For the movie version, changing “cacao” to “cocoa” made it easier to focus on the point of the scene (a flashback to Wonka meeting the Oompa-Loompas), and concentrate on finding things that were actually funny. It’s wrong, but it’s right.

    And that’s true in this general rule:

    __In screenwriting, simplicity should almost always trump accuracy.__

    I’m going to break that statement down into parts so that it doesn’t get misconstrued.

    In screenwriting — I’m only talking about writing for film and television, stories that race ahead at 24 frames per second, give or take. In novels and playwriting, the writer has the time and opportunity to be far more precise and thorough. And in journalism, accuracy is a fundamental responsibility. The journalist’s challenge is to make that accuracy comprehensible to the readership.

    simplicity — Simplicity is not the same as idiocy, or pandering. If you’re making a thriller set in the world of international espionage, you can’t have the computer expert “dial in” to something. We need to believe that the expert is an expert, that security is difficult, and yet be able to understand roughly what he’s doing. Consider the crew in the first two Alien movies. We don’t know how their spaceships work, but it’s easy to follow what they’re working on.

    should almost always trump — Sometimes, the complicated-but-accurate version is more rewarding than the simple version, so be wary of smoothing out all the wrinkles. And screenwriters aren’t absolved of societal responsibility, either. For example, the pilot episode of Eli Stone had a plotline about childhood vaccines that was [widely](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/arts/television/23ston.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) [criticized](http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-01-28-eli-stone-side_N.htm) for its inaccuracies. If there wasn’t time in the episode for a more thorough exploration of the issue, another case should have been substituted, because what remained was inflammatory and (debatably) dangerous.

    accuracy — In archery and life, accuracy is measured by how close you come to the target. For movies and television, the target is pretty wide. Looking back at the [derivative challenge](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2008/derivativ), it was more important to give a sense of why derivatives exist than explain exactly what they were. For a medical drama, we’ve come to accept a certain amount of time compression, allowing characters to recover from surgery in much less time than they actually would. But if a character became pregnant and gave birth in the same day, we’d protest. That’s not just inaccurate, it’s implausible, and plausibility is a much higher standard.

    Granted, even plausibility takes a back seat in Charlie. (c.f. Great Glass Elevator)