John August

Projects

New Fox show announced

News, Projects, Television

Both [The Hollywood Reporter](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/television/brief_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000652435) and [Variety](http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117911329?categoryid=13&cs=1) had stories today about the new one-hour drama that I’m developing for Fox with Jordan Mechner, the writer of [Prince of Persia](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2004/prince-of-persia-announced).

The show is about two guys, business partners, who work as private military contractors. They run their own startup firm. Week-to-week, they find themselves in the most dangerous parts of the world — Iraq, Africa, South America — trying to complete short-term contract jobs such as rescuing hostages, guarding facilities, or protecting diplomats. Of course, being a drama, things never go as smoothly as planned.

The idea sprang from research Jordan was doing about military corporations, the mercenaries of the 21st century. It could have been a feature, but the more we talked about it, the more excited we got about developing it for television. The show is sort of a procedural (the term for all the CSI’s and such), but instead of trying to find a killer, our heroes are trying to complete a mission.

Television moves fast, but as I have updates, I’ll try to keep them posted.

Good book vs. movie comparison for ‘Big Fish’

Big Fish, Projects

[Boxofficeprophets](http://boxofficeprophets.com) has a well-considered article by Kim Hollis that looks at the differences between Daniel Wallace’s book and the movie version of Big Fish:

John August’s screenplay does take great liberties with the story detailed in the novel. Much is added or embellished, which is almost necessary given the brevity of the book. None of the expansion feels forced or off, though. It’s perfectly in keeping with the story of a man whose life was truly monumental.

You can read the rest [here](http://www.boxofficeprophets.com/column/index.cfm?columnID=8537).

Thanks to [Daniel](http://danielwallace.org) for the forward.

More D.C. stuff available in the Downloads section

Dead Projects, Projects

DC logoChris Landa of Salt Lake City, Utah, wrote in to say:

I just finished reading your scripts of D.C. Do you have a series
bible that you could put on your site? I’m trying to find examples of series
bibles and would love to find out what happens to the characters of D.C.

A series “bible” is a document that’s usually created at the start of a television series, which contains all the vital information about the characters, their history, and relationships. The idea is that you update it as you go along, so that in season four, you don’t have a character saying something that conflicts with something in season two.

Apparently, some showrunners go much further, and really do map out years ahead. [J. Michael Straczynski](http://imdb.com/name/nm0833089/) is said to have plotted out all of the seasons of Babylon 5 before even starting to shoot the pilot.

All this said, I’ve never even seen a real series bible. Perhaps that’s because I’ve never worked on a show that lasted more than three episodes.

But Chris’s question brought up a point I keep trying to make: a writer’s job doesn’t start and end at the script. Particularly in television, a writer needs to be able to write a lot of different kinds of documents, many of which are designed to get others to share his or her vision for the show.

I’ve added five examples of this from D.C. in the [Downloads](http://johnaugust.com/downloads) section. Included you’ll find:

  1. the initial pitch I made to the WB
  2. the outline for the pilot
  3. a template for a “normal” episode
  4. and an exercise in which I look at God from each character’s perspective.

Also included is the pilot presentation script. In order to save money, the WB asked all its drama pilots to shoot a 30-minute version of the show (called a “pilot presentation”), rather than the whole hour. To do this, I had to omit a bunch of scenes, and rewrite some others so that it would all make sense. If it sounds like a difficult task, it was. When we got ordered for series, the first thing we had to do was go back and shoot the missing scenes from the pilot.

A very, very big fish

Big Fish, Projects

very big fishThis from Daniel Wallace, a photo of two guys who have apparently caught Edward from BIG FISH.

Like Mulder from X-Files, I Want to Believe, but in the age of Photoshop, pretty much anything can be faked. But I welcome your opinions. Maybe this really is the biggest catfish in the Ashton river.