John August

The Nines

Is the Slamdance script competition a bad idea?

Film Industry, Genres, QandA, The Nines

questionmarkI am a writer who has multiple scripts entered in the Slamdance Horror Script Competition.

Recently, Slamdance announced the new Grand Prize: $10,000 and acquisition of all rights and title by an independent production company. In said acquisition, the production company plans to produce a feature motion picture from the grand-prize winning script.

The winner will be paid five percent of the film’s minimum budget, which is $200,000.

So here’s my first question: Shouldn’t the writer be paid 10% of the film’s budget according to WGA standards?

As a writer who has primarily entered the competition with the hope of placing in the competition so I can attract queries from agents, I am a bit puzzled by this new Grand Prize. If a script is good enough to rise to the top of a competition like this, and if the writer is lucky enough to land a good agent, wouldn’t it be within the writer’s interest to look for a better deal?

Not to mention that upon accepting the Grand Prize and putting pen to paper, the writer is signing all rights of the script to the powers that be.

Would it be foolish for someone to decline the Grand Prize and take his or her chances with attracting an agent who might be able to find a better deal?

— Terrell
Newnan, Georgia

Yes, it would be foolish. If you win, you should take the prize money and the additional $10,000. (I’m assuming that the 10% of the budget comes on top of the prize money, but either way, take the deal.)

Why am I suggesting you blindly take whatever’s offered, when just two days ago I advised another reader to [quickly get another lawyer](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2006/help-im-getting-screwed-on-my-own-series)? Because you live in Georgia. You’re treating the Slamdance competition as a sort of become-a-screenwriter lottery. The first, unspoken rule of lotteries is “always take the money.”

Could winning the competition help get you started as an honest-to-goodness screenwriter? Sure. But getting a movie made would be a much, much bigger help. Lots of writers win competitions but never get beyond that point. However, if you get a movie made — if you get a movie set up — you suddenly become an actual, working screenwriter. And the process of finding agents, managers and future work becomes much easier.

Now that your main question is resolved, let’s correct one fundamental misunderstanding:

Shouldn’t the writer be paid 10% of the film’s budget according
to WGA standards?

Yes, in Fantasyland. There’s no WGA rule or standard. All there is is WGA scale, which indicates the minimum a writer can be paid for movies of a certain budget. These are flat figures, not percentages. (You can download a .pdf of the rates [here](http://wga.org/uploadedFiles/writers_resources/contracts/min2004.pdf).)

I’ve never been paid anything close to 10% of a film’s budget. My first feature, Go, cost roughly $6 million. I was paid $70,000. That’s half a million dollars less than I “should” have gotten.

For The Movie, I was paid low-budget scale — $35,782, plus a $5,000 script publication fee. (If we’d qualified for the [WGA Indie](http://wga.org/subpage_writersresources.aspx?id=924) rates, we could have brought that down to zero.)

And as a writer who’s written several very expensive movies, let me tell you, I’d love to be cashing $20 million checks. But it doesn’t happen.

Don’t get me wrong, a screenwriter can make plenty of money. But dollar signs shouldn’t be a driving force in choosing it as a career, no matter what level you’re talking about.

Movies look nothing like reality

Directors, Projects, Rave, The Nines

While at [Austin](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2006/back-from-austin-2), I caught a screening of Susannah Grant’s new movie [CATCH AND RELEASE](http://imdb.com/title/tt0395495/). Since I sorta-know and definitely admire half the people in it (Jennifer Garner, Tim Olyphant, Kevin Smith), not to mention producer Jenno Topping, I’m hardly an unbiased viewer. So I’ll leave the reviews to more neutral eyes.

But what I do feel justified discussing is the movie’s setting: Boulder, Colorado. My home town.

My very first script was set in Boulder, so I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how it would look on film. Watching CATCH AND RELEASE, I saw many of my chosen locations (The Hill, the Pearl Street Mall, various Flatirons) yet felt almost no recognition that this was actually Boulder.

It’s not the film’s fault. It’s just that movies look nothing like reality.

For instance, a scene set at the Pearl Street Mall is shot in mostly mediums and close-ups. Without a big wide establishing shot, you don’t get a sense of a street that’s been converted to a pedestrian mall. Of course, the movie doesn’t need the wide shot. The scene would probably be worse for its inclusion. It’s only Boulderites who miss the sense of geography.

If it sounds like I’m complaining, I’m not. The movie is a postcard and valentine for Boulder, and its brand of earnest happiness and liberal optimism. Characters attend the opening of a “peace garden” without a trace of snarkiness to be found — and this in a movie featuring Kevin Smith.

Yes, much of the movie was shot on soundstages and locations far from Boulder. But it wasn’t the geographic differences that hurt the verisimilitude; it was the movie magic. In real life, the sun doesn’t dapple, clutter isn’t charming, and a wall painted “Tampax blue” wouldn’t merit discussion.

I have first-hand experience with the disorienting effects of movie magic, since a portion of The Movie I just directed was shot at my own house. For the last four months, I’ve been staring at footage of my kitchen, yet I barely connect it as being the same place I eat breakfast every morning.

Light, film and lenses change the colors and geometry of the room. The camera watches from places a human wouldn’t, constant and undistracted.

After a friends-and-family of The Movie, I got word back from a friend who lamented that her own house seemed less grown-up after seeing mine on film. She’s overlooking the fact we packed up all the baby toys, the dog beds, the stacks of unread mail, and the dishes in the sink. My house looks grown-up the same way houses in magazine shoots look: perfect, because no one has to live there.

In every scene, in every shot, there are lights and flags and twenty crew members just off the edge of frame, all working really hard to make it look nothing like reality.

As it turns out, I could care less

Directors, First Person, The Nines

I fired an eight-year old girl.

It was the third day of production on The Movie, which had already endured freak rains, poison oak, rattlesnakes, bee swarms and a mountain lion. None of which could compare to this little girl.

The soon-to-be-fired pre-teen was a stand-in for our eight-year old actress. As a stand-in, her entire job was simply to reflect light and not be annoying. She failed.

She was über-annoying: a cross between Pippi Longstocking and Nellie Olsen. Whichever way I looked, she was there. While I was discussing wardrobe with an actress during lunch, Demon Girl pushed her way into the actress’s trailer, just for a look.

I promptly told the first A.D. that I wanted the brat gone. When she somehow showed up on the set after lunch, I clarified my earlier statement: I never wanted to see that little girl again, beginning immediately. A white production van arrived to whisk her off to whatever circle of Hell or Reseda had spawned her.

Was it really this little girl’s fault? Perhaps not. She was, after all, eight. Her parent-slash-guardian was alarmingly lax, considering the aforementioned rattlesnakes. And there’s a compelling argument that children should not be stand-ins at all. I had asked about using an adult little person for a stand-in. Apparently, it’s not uncommon, but we couldn’t swing it in time.

But that’s not the point.

I offer this story of juvenile termination to illustrate the single most important skill I developed while making The Movie: I learned to care less.

It seems anti-social — anti-human — to argue for less compassion. But in order to direct the film, I consciously decided to harden my heart a little. And by ZeusIn appreciation of Richard Dawkin’s [The God Delusion](http://www.amazon.com/God-Delusion-Richard-Dawkins/dp/0618680004/sr=8-1/qid=1160776464/ref=pd_bbs_1/002-6262160-3232047?ie=UTF8), I’ve decided to stop referring to the Abrahamic God and start spreading the wealth to other mythical deities., it helped.

In ordinary life, I’m nice, to the point of obliging. I tend to treat people in my life like guests at a never-ending dinner party I got roped into hosting. I want everyone to be comfortable, yet at the same time, I secretly want them to leave.

I find myself apologizing for things completely out of my control, like the weather, or the incompetent baggage clerk at Newark.

A friend of mine, who is one of the more emotionally-intelligent people I’ve met, labels this behavior “over-functioning.” I take responsibility for things that I should better leave alone, and reverse-delegate tasks out of a skewed sense of fairness.

This is a questionable strategy for life. But it’s a flat-out awful strategy for directing a movie. A director’s first and only concern needs to be getting the story into the camera — damn the cost, fatigue, frustration and hurt feelings.

So I changed.

I decided that while I was on set, my only responsibility was to the movie, and my ability to direct it. With this philosophy in hand, many decisions became easier.

It didn’t matter why the little girl was annoying. It wasn’t my job to figure out what her malfunction was, or why her parent-slash-guardian wasn’t keeping tabs on her. The little girl was getting in the way, and thus, she had to go.

When the the focus puller tripped during a complicated Steadicam shot, Ordinary John would have insisted that he get checked by the medic. Director John didn’t. Mr. Focus said he was okay, so we kept shooting. I could see he was hurt, but that wasn’t my responsibility. He was a grown-up, and it was his decision. He could take care of himself.

The real test of this new philosophy came while we were shooting at my house. Normally, the presence of any stranger in my home sends me into full host mode. If I haven’t offered you something to drink within the first minute of your arrival, either I’m off my game, or I’d rather you leave. But when it came to The Movie, I let it go. The house was just a location; the crew was just the crew; it wasn’t my responsibility to find more toilet paper.

The real surprise of my Month of Caring Less was that I found myself caring much more deeply about the things that actually mattered.

Without the background noise of a thousand little niceties, I could focus much more clearly on what I wanted to happen in front of and behind the camera. I could talk to actors about motivation in very precise terms, because all I cared about was their moment, not the long-simmering feud between the gaffers and the camera department.

To be clear, I didn’t become an asshole. I think.I guess technically, I shouldn’t care if I did become an asshole. I only yelled three times, which is three more times than I would normally yell in a year, but well within guild standards. After the little girl, I fired three other crew members, not because they were bad people, but because they weren’t doing what I needed them to do for the movie. Which was all that mattered.

And now that we’ve wrapped? I’m probably a little less obliging, a little less eager-to-please. I expect more out of people, and am quicker to express my displeasure when someone isn’t performing.

Still, there’s no doubt I’ve gotten softer. As I recently wrote to that better-adjusted friend:

I’m worried that the theoretical actors and crew of my theoretical movie might feel exploited by a decision I don’t need to make for months if ever. This keeps me awake at night. Not North Korea. This. Bah.

Which, in a way, is fine.

I think part of being a writer, or an actor, is letting yourself feel things without judgment. A director leads an army into battle; a screenwriter leads characters into danger. They’re vastly different jobs, which require different temperaments.

But I’ll definitely keep part of the experience with me. After you’ve cared less, you recognize a certain dishonesty in a lot of what passes for sociability, and the opportunity cost of too much pleasantry.

For example, the first day of shooting, there was one crew member I was certain wouldn’t work out. He was uncomfortably weird and grumpy. Yet as I watched him work, I realized he was just really into his job. Essentially, he was doing what I was doing, putting the movie first and everything else later. He was too focused to be friendly. But he ended up being a lifesaver, solving problems in seconds that could have taken minutes.

So what did I learn in making The Movie? It turned out, I could care less. And both the film and I were better for it.

———

Previewing score with GarageBand

Geek Alert, The Nines

[Alex Wurman](http://imdb.com/name/nm0943391/) is busy writing the music for The Movie, which in this digital age means a lot of files shuttling back and forth. Rather than tapes, we have QuickTimes for each reel, with timecode burned in for reference. When Alex wants us to listen to a cue, he sends an mp3 with instructions for where it lines up.

This hand-off works great when we’re in the editorial office, with the Avid churning away. But since Alex is working on weekends and after hours, I wanted to be able to preview new tracks on my home computer (a MacBook Pro).

My first instinct was to fire up Final Cut Pro. It worked, but it was kind of grizzly. Neither the QuickTimes nor the mp3’s are native formats for FCP, which meant a lot of rendering or a lot of dropped frames. Plus, it felt like overkill to build a project with just two assets. Apple’s Soundtrack would be a more natural choice, but I hadn’t installed it.

Then I vaguely remembered that the most recent version of GarageBand — which came installed on the computer — had some sort of basic Soundtrack-like features designed to work with iMovie. It turned out to be exactly what I needed. The program happily churns through both QuickTime and mp3, making it easy to sync music to picture. The video preview window is a fixed size, but it’s fine for these purposes. Plus, it’s more or less free. In a market of $999 super-apps, it’s easy to overlook the gems that came with the computer.