John August

Genres

The perils of coincidence

Genres, How-To, Treatments

Like several million people worldwide, I saw [Spider-Man 3](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0413300/) this past weekend. And like a substantial percentage of these viewers, I got frustrated by the number of unlikely coincidences in the movie.

There’s nothing wrong with coincidence, per se. Almost every movie is going to have some incidents where one character just happens to be in the right place at the right time. In fact, many movies are built around a “premise coincidence.” In [Die Hard](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095016/), John McClane just happens to be in the building when the villains attack. That’s okay. McClane’s being there is part of the premise. Likewise, in the original [Spider-Man](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0145487/), Peter Parker just happens to get bitten by the radioactive spider. No problem: it wouldn’t be Spider-Man otherwise.

The premise coincidence is one flavor of what I’ll call a Fundamental Coincidence: an accidental confluence of time, place and motivation which greatly impacts the story.

In a romantic comedy, when The Guy would have proposed to The Girl except that he just happened to overhear a conversation he interpreted the wrong way, that’s a Fundamental Coincidence. In the first Spider-Man, Norman Osborn just happens to be transformed into The Goblin just as Peter is becoming Spider-Man. That’s a Fundamental Coincidence, but we accept it because it feels true to the genre.

WARNING: MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW. (Mostly things you’d glean the trailers or ads, but still.)

Let’s look at the Fundamental Coincidences in Spider-Man 3:

  • The asteroid carrying the symbiote (utlimately, Venom) happens to land near Peter Parker. Peter doesn’t hear it, doesn’t investigate.
  • The symbiote happens to attach itself to Peter’s scooter.
  • Flint Marko happens to fall into the sand pit at exactly the moment the scientists test their billion-dollar Dyson vacuum.It’s never clear what they’re supposedly doing, or why they wouldn’t have, say, a lid on the pit. Or a videocamera to monitor the experiment.
  • Flint Marko happens to have been the man who killed Uncle Ben. (A retcon.)
  • Eddie Brock happens to be the only person in the church at the moment Peter tries to get rid of the black suit.

Any one (or two) of these Fundamental Coincidences would probably go unnoticed, particularly in a superhero movie, where credibility takes a back seat to spectacle. But put together, they make the plot feel rickety, particularly when you factor in the large number of what I’ll call Minor Coincidences — things that don’t fundamentally change the story, but feel convenient all the same.

  1. The police chief decides to tell Peter about Marko now, even though he’s known the details for some time, apparently.
  2. Sandman’s first attack just happens to coincide with Spider-Man getting the key to the city.
  3. Eddie Brock is newly arrived at the Daily Bugle, and wants Peter’s job.
  4. Gwen Stacy happens to be Peter’s lab partner.
  5. Gwen Stacy happens to be in the skyscraper during the crane accident.
  6. And she’s the police chief’s daughter.
  7. And she’s Eddie Brock’s love interest.Revealing both of these points of information in one piece of dialogue was a particularly bold choice.
  8. And Gwen happens to be at the fancy restaurant on the night Peter wants to propose.

Again, you could have several of these coincidences in any movie and no one would mind. It’s largely expected that familiar faces will become imperiled in a summer action movie, so #5 feels right. Likewise, the eventual discovery of Venom’s weakness is accidental, but that plays into the genre. No foul there.

My point is not to rip on Spider-Man 3, but to urge readers to look at their own scripts with an eye towards coincidence. If you’ve written a treatment, search for the following phrases: “at the same time,” “accidentally,” “luckily,” “unfortunately,” and “meanwhile.” They’re often a tip-off that you have events happening by coincidence. There’s almost always a better alternative.

Causality trumps everything
=====
Given a choice, try to find cause and effect. One event happens because of something else we’ve seen — ideally, something the hero himself has done.

Instead of having the hero accidentally overhear a key conversation, get him actively trying to listen. Or have an interested third party steer him in that direction — perhaps for his own reasons. At every juncture where a reader could ask “Why did that happen?”, try to have an answer that isn’t, “just because.”

Although there are some convenient twists in the Harry Osborn plot (amnesia, for starters), the causality is clear: the New Goblin wants revenge on Spider-Man for killing his daddy in the first movie.I kept waiting for Peter to point out that Harry’s dad was a psychopath, but oh well. It doesn’t feel like coincidence that Harry is flying around on his hoverboard. With two other villains desperate for scenes, the timing might not be opportune, but it’s clear why it’s happening.

Look for correlation
====
Rather than ask an audience to swallow a bunch of little implausibilities, try bundling them together.

In [Heroes](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0813715/), imagine if each character had a completely unique origin story: Claire got her powers from a shaman; Sylar is an alien; Peter has a magic ring. You’d get frustrated pretty quickly, because a lot of screen time would go towards explaining why and how. Instead, the creators wisely decided the characters all had some mysterious gene mutation activated by an environmental change. The audience is willing to make that one big leap,And a familiar leap, frankly, because of X-Men. because they’re not asked to make similar leaps each time a new character is introduced.Note that both the D.C. and Marvel universes do have multiple, often conflicting means of empowering their heroes and villains. This is good and fascinating, but I suspect it’s one reason it can be harder for a casual reader to pick up these titles. The time investment needed to get up to speed is significant. Quick: Is Scarlet Witch a witch? Ummm…[Sort of](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarlet_Witch).

For Spider-Man 3, I don’t have any magic answers on how to correlate these disparate threads — other than trimming one out, which wouldn’t be a bad place to start. But had the script dropped on my desk a month before shooting, here are a few thoughts I would have put out there in terms of the many coincidences:

* Both Venom and Sandman are forms of disembodied consciousness that control their host subjects — people and sand, respectively. That seems thematically promising.
* One asteroid feels random, while a meteor shower feels like an event that needs a superhero.
* Could this meteor shower overlap with Marko’s transformation or escape? Even if it’s just in the background, it makes them feel more united.
* Could Spider-Man be pursuing Marko at the start?
* Could we see the symbiote choosing Peter, because he’s the strongest creature around?

Chop it out
====
Often, the best answer when faced with a nagging coincidence is just to remove it.

* Do we really need the Uncle Ben retcon? It doesn’t have a lot to do with Marko’s sick-daughter motivation.
* Couldn’t Eddie Brock already be a stringer for the Daily Bugle? If he and Peter already have history, great.
* Does Gwen Stacy need to be Peter’s lab partner?
* Do we even need the police chief?

Again, my point isn’t to rag on Spidey, but to urge reader-writers take a hard look at the role of coincidence in their own scripts.

Some coincidence feels genuine. In real life, we do accidentally bump into old friends at the mall. And surprise in general is a good thing — catching your reader off-balance is a worthy goal. But if a significant portion of your plot depends on chance, that’s a good indicator something’s not fully baked. The best time to tackle these problems is in the outline, asking yourself not only what happens next, but why.

The great big list of fictional diseases

Genres, Resources

Now available [on Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_diseases), as pointed to by [kottke](http://kottke.org).

The Motaba virus sounds bad, but the cure — heavy doses of Dustin Hoffman — is arguably worse. Count Choculitis is a recent favorite. See the whole list [here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_diseases).

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.

Chicago: The Musical. No, not that one.

Formatting, Genres, News, Projects

I spent a few days in ChicagoTechnically, Evanston, which is north of Chicago. Apparently, confusing the two is annoying to actual Chicagoans, on par with saying “Los Angeles” when one means “Orange County.” My apologies to anyone offended. to see the premiere of my friends’ new musical [Asphalt Beach](http://www.northwestern.edu/observer/issues/2006/10/20/amtp.html), which is workshopping at Northwestern University. The show was terrific, and vindication for my decade of belief in my friends’ talent.

I took advantage of being away from L.A. to start writing something brand new. That’s my modus operandi; I generally barricade myself in a hotel room for a few days to crank through pages when starting a new project. I write longhand and quickly — first a scribble draft of a scene, then a more legible (but still handwritten) version. I fax pages back to Los Angeles and don’t let myself edit.

Since a writer can only stare at the same four walls for so long, I try to pick someplace interesting for my sequestration. Vegas is a good choice. When one doesn’t drink or gamble, it’s basically a giant, noisy food court. That’s where I started both Charlie’s Angels scripts and The Movie. I wrote Fury in San Diego, and Tarzan on a 23-hour [train ride](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2004/writing-on-the-coast-starlight-from-los-angeles-to-seattle) from Los Angeles to Seattle. I wrote Fantasy Island and Jurassic Park III in Hawaii, though the latter was more “forced labor” than a writing vacation.

It’s been six months since I’ve written something new, which is my longest hiatus by far. So I was happy to find that I could still string words together in a non-blog environment. After months of dealing with actors and vehicles and visual effects, it’s liberating to deal with only words.

This time, I wrote a play. An honest-to-[Baal](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baal), curtain-comes-up stage play. The story sort of demanded it: it’s necessarily talky, less about What Happens as much as What It’s About. The lack of easy CUT TO:’s is more than made up for by the luxury of scene length. In a stage play, you can do things that are unwieldy in films:

TOM: Let me make Point One.
MARY: Sure, we’ll talk about Point One.
TOM: Now let me tie that in to Point Two.
MARY: Really? Well, here’s Point Three.
(Steve ENTERS)
STEVE: What are we talking about?
MARY: Point Three.
STEVE: That sounds a lot like Point Four, which Tom and I were talking about in the previous scene, only from the opposite perspective.
TOM: Unlike a movie, we don’t have to simplify arguments down to postage-stamp sized thought nuggets. Ambiguity and uncertainty are a-okay.
MARY: We can also assume a much higher level of audience sophistication, since only rich, educated people bother seeing plays.
STEVE: And no unnecessary car chases!

On the downside, [stage play formatting](http://www.vcu.edu/arts/playwriting/formatnumbers.html) seriously blows. Dialogue stretches from margin to margin, and stage directions are surrounded by completely unnecessary parentheses. But one can’t have everything.