John August

The Nines

Monovision

First Person, Projects, The Nines

About halfway through shooting [The Movie](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2006/so-i-made-a-movie), the propmaster asked, “Hey, where are your glasses?” I had taken them off to check my email, and left them sitting on the dining room table. It’s part of his job to recognize continuity issues, so it’s natural he noticed something was off.

But it was only his comment that made me realize: *Holy shit. I wear glasses.*

The truth is, I’ve had glasses since high school, but I’ve never considered myself a glasses-wearer. I’m near-sighted, with mild astigmatism. Originally, the glasses were only for driving at night and watching movies on the big screen. After college, I found myself wearing them for watching TV. Then, several years ago, I started wearing them for all driving, day and night. But I work at home, so I don’t drive much. And TV hours are limited, particularly with the baby. Most days, you’d only find me in glasses for ninety minutes, tops.

Then came The Movie.

Whereas a writer only has to look at the words on the screen, a director has to look at actual things: people, props, stupid bamboo plants that keep getting moved into the shot to conceal light stands. In having to look at all of these things at various distances, I found myself wearing my glasses 12 hours a day.

The crew naturally assumed I was a person who wore glasses full-time, so any moment where I had them off was an anomaly. Thus Greg Props’s question. Thus my dismay: Without realizing it, I’ve become a (nearly) full-time four-eyes.

I’ve got nothing against glasses, really. They work. But they kind of suck for a director. When we were filming out in Malibu, they kept getting streaked with sweat and sunscreen. When looking through the camera lens, one has to take them off, adjusting the diopter to find focus, which screws it up for the operator. Mostly, they just get in the way. I have magnetic clip-on sunglasses which work okay, but honestly look stupid. The alternative — carrying around prescription sunglasses — just isn’t going to happen.

Contact lenses aren’t a terrific solution for me, partly because my eyes freak out at the mildest irritation, and partly because my reading vision is better without them.

All of which serves as introduction to the real topic at hand: laser eye surgery.

My uncorrected vision is good enough that I’ve put off LASIK for years, assuming (correctly, as it turns out) that it would get better and cheaper. But in putting it off, I’ve also gotten older, which means that correcting my distance vision will put me in reading glasses sooner. Maybe immediately. (This isn’t particularly a laser thing; it’s a time thing. As you hit your 40’s, your eyes lose the ability to focus clearly at short distances. Fixing one’s nearsightedness often hastens the need for reading glasses.)

Is losing my distance glasses worth adding reading glasses? Maybe. And considering I’ll eventually need reading glasses anyway, it might be time.

One possible alternative to the either-or scenario is [monovision](http://www.stlukeseye.com/eyeq/Monovision.asp). That’s a terrible word for it, because it conjures up images of Colonel Klink, patch-wearing pirates and the foreign policy of George W. Bush. A better term would probably be “split vision” or “asymmetrical vision.” Basically, they correct one eye for distance, and the other for reading.

The literature touts it as the “best of both worlds,” but clearly it’s a compromise — your distance vision isn’t as good as it could be, nor is your reading vision. But good enough is often the best solution.

I’m test-driving it now, wearing one contact in my right eye (my dominant eye). So far, it’s pretty good. My distance vision is much sharper. The challenge is reading. I can focus with either eye separately, but together, things tend to be a bit blurry, as if the right and left are fighting about who should be in charge. From what I’ve read, your brain eventually figures out how to make sense of it.

For now, I’m enjoying my monovision experiment. But it’s brought up another issue: sunglasses. I didn’t have any non-prescription sunglasses, so I had to borrow a pair.

I guess you never really get away from glasses.

Because really, he should drive a Chrysler LeBaron

QandA, Rights and Copyright, The Nines

questionmark*My question concerns referencing branded objects in a screenplay. I’ve read that including name-brand references should be avoided in screenplays because you would need legal clearance in order to feature them.*

*That being said, what if my character drives a Chrysler LeBaron? Can’t I say he drives a beat-up Chrysler LeBaron? And not just as a description, but if it was mentioned in the dialogue as well.*

*Understandably, name brand references wouldn’t make or break my script, but I feel it adds a nice level of depth and detail to my characters if you know they like Gucci shoes and not fancy Italian boots.*

*I guess my question is, what are the do’s and don’ts of brand name references?*

*– Aaron Murphy*

In a screenplay, you can do anything. You can have Ronald McDonald shank Elmo with a sharpened Barbie over a pack of Marlboros.

The trouble comes when you’re moving from the printed word to the projected image. The corporations who hold these trademarks and copyrights don’t look kindly on other people profiting off them, even if the usage is not necessarily disparaging.

So, when you set out to make a movie, someone is generally assigned the chore of getting permission to use other people’s copyrights and trademarks. These “permission slips” are called clearances. During the summer of 1993, while I was interning at Universal, this was my job. I helped do clearances for [The War](http://imdb.com/title/tt0111667/) and [Reality Bites](http://imdb.com/title/tt0110950/), mostly working on props and set decoration.

How do you get permission? You ask.

A large part of the job is figuring out who to ask. In 1993, the Internet didn’t exist in anything approximating its current form, so my fingers got very fast at dialing New York information (212-555-1212) to track down corporate offices.

Once you get the right person on the phone (or email), you explain what the movie is, why you’re asking, and if they could sign and fax back the attached clearance form. As I mentioned in an [earlier article](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2004/getting-permission), Nolo Press’s book *Getting Permission* has templates for clearance forms, and a lot of information about how to handle everything from artwork to music. You can also see a generic version of what we used for The Movie here: [.pdf](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/clearance.pdf) or [.doc](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/clearance.doc).

My assistant Chad handled the majority of the clearances for The Movie, mostly artwork and books featured as props. It’s tedious work, but not particularly brain-draining. (In fact, I wrote my first screenplay while doing clearances.)

How do you know what needs to be cleared, and what you can just get away with using/saying?

I fall back on my standard advice: as a writer, just do what’s best for the script. If that’s Gucci shoes and Chrysler LeBarons, knock yourself out. Don’t worry about phantom problems. Rather, focus on writing the best screenplay you can.

Down the road, when your great script gets ready to become a great movie, there will be producers and other clever people to help you stress out over clearances.

Update on the promiscuous player problem

Big Fish, Geek Alert, The Nines

My plea for a DVD player with [loose morals and low standards](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2006/i-want-a-cheap-slutty-dvd-player) was answered by many thoughtful readers. I ended up picking the Philips DVP-642 ($49 at Amazon), which not only zips through questionably-recorded dailies, but even Peixe Grande e Suas Historias Maravilhosas, the Portuguese version of Big Fish.

Thanks again.

Location scouting

The Nines

One of the first tasks in getting [The Movie](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2006/so-i-made-a-movie) on its feet was picking locations. We spent about three weeks scouting — almost as long as we shot.

I didn’t think I’d written a very location-driven movie, but it ended up being a bit of a monster. Part of that was budget — if we’d had serious money, we could have spent our way out of some problems. But the bigger issue was the schedule. The movie is broken into three parts, and for reasons I won’t divulge, we had to shoot the parts in a very specific order. We couldn’t swap Day 4 for Day 9. Which meant we had to have a given location available on exactly the right day.

Complicating matters, we needed dense forest close enough to Los Angeles that we wouldn’t have to put up crew overnight. In Vancouver, you’ve got forest everywhere. In Los Angeles, we have Angeles Crest, but the parts that looked right were way too far from the main roads. Logistically, it would have been impossible.

Fortunately, we found great stuff in Topanga and Malibu. The rest of our locations had to fit in around them.

The movie was shot almost entirely on practical locations (that is, real places rather than sets). The exception was one day shot at the Hearst Building in Downtown LA, an old newspaper plant that’s been converted into standing sets for film and television. It’s a super-creepy building made even stranger by the sets. Walk around a corner and you’re in a hospital. Open a door, and it’s the filthiest motel room you’ve ever seen. It’s hard to tell where movie-squalor ends and actual squalor begins.

I’ve put together a two-minute reel of the locations we ended up using. When the movie’s done, you’ll be able to see how we used them. The last clip is the hotel we shot in New York City.

(Because you’ll ask: The music is by [Alex Wurman](http://imdb.com/name/nm0943391/), our composer.)