John August

Genres

Bechdel and Batman

Episode - 91

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Genres, Scriptnotes, Story and Plot, Transcribed

It’s a week of pondering other people’s opinions. First, Craig and John take a look at the Bechdel Test: is it a useful metric for screenwriters, or just meaningless checkbox-ticking?

From there, we dive into David Wong’s analysis of troubling superhero lessons. Are these just updated versions of the classic myths, or do they say something specific about modern times?

Finally, we heap praise on screenwriter Justin Marks’s article on what it’s like to be a working writer who is mostly unproduced.

LINKS:

* [The Hangover Part III](http://www.hangoverpart3.com/) is in theaters now!
* [CinemaScore](http://www.cinemascore.com/)’s official site, and [on Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CinemaScore)
* The [Bechdel Test](http://bechdeltest.com/)
* John’s 2010 blog post on [Women in film](http://johnaugust.com/2010/women-in-film)
* [The 5 Ugly Lessons Hiding in Every Superhero Movie](http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-5-ugly-lessons-hiding-in-every-superhero-movie/) by David Wong
* [My Life as a Screenwriter You’ve Never Heard Of](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/my-life-as-a-screenwriter-520979) by Justin Marks
* Wikipedia’s [list of common misconceptions](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions)
* Esha Khare’s [twenty-second phone charger](http://in.news.yahoo.com/indian-girl-invents-device-charge-phone-20-seconds-153130999.html) (via [Ryan Conroy](https://twitter.com/RyConTiki/status/337409509569994752))
* OUTRO: The Clique’s [Superman](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjASX8ugl_E) covered by Rob Lamber

You can download the episode here: [AAC](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_91.m4a).

**UPDATE** 5-31-13: The transcript of this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-ep-91-bechdel-and-batman-transcript).

The pressure of PG-13

Film Industry, Genres

Rich Juzwiak looks at how PG-13 has become the [rating you want](http://gawker.com/5896566/the-reign-of-the-pg+13-rating-sanitized-safe-and-worth-shitloads-of-money):

> It’s simple math, really: Movies rated PG-13 make more money on average ($42 million per picture versus G’s $38.5 million, PG’s $37 million and R’s $15 million). Getting blessed with PG-13 ensures that the odds are ever in your favor. In this economy, who wants to gamble?

To some degree it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: as studios make most of their blockbusters PG-13, most blockbusters will be PG-13.

While there are always notable exceptions (Safe House is a recent one), in most cases it doesn’t seem worth arguing anymore: if you’re making an expensive movie that could conceivably be less than an R, it probably *should* be PG-13 — and that comes at the scripting stage.

From personal experience, one of the worst things that can happen to your movie is to cut it down to a safer rating after you’ve shot it. It’s not just losing the F-words. It’s losing the moments that called for the F-words. If when writing the script you knew you could only say it once and in a non-sexual context, you would write scenes in a way that didn’t demand it.

Similarly, an R-rated action scene cut down to PG-13 feels neutered, while an action scene designed for PG-13 can plan for the absence of gore at the outset. People criticize the shaky-cam in The Hunger Games, but it was clearly a choice made from the beginning in order to show the feeling of violence without the bloodshed.

That worked out well for them.

How to write Groundhog Day

Books, Film Industry, Genres

I’ve only just started reading Danny Rubin’s [How to Write Groundhog Day](http://www.howtowritegroundhogday.com/), but it’s promising enough that I think many screenwriters will want to take a look at it this weekend.

It’s [available on Kindle](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0072PEV6U/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=johnaugustcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0072PEV6U) and Nook, on sale for $9.99 today.

Rubin walks the reader through the genesis of the idea — and all the other ideas competing for his attention. The ebook includes a lot of marked-up pages from his initial notes and drafts. Most of these are readable on a traditional Kindle, but it’s one of the rare titles that actually works better on an iPad.

Groundhog Day is nearly 20 years old, but still feels very contemporary in terms of high-concept comedies, with its simple-but-clever premise and curmudgeonly fish-out-of-water protagonist. My only caution to readers is that even though we keep making variations of this movie (c.f. Click, Liar Liar, A Thousand Words), the film industry itself has changed, so descriptions of the business and process might not reflect current reality.

Wishing Pixar were braver

Genres

Watching the [trailer](http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/disney/brave/) for Pixar’s new film Brave, Theresa Couchman [sighs](http://theresacouchman.com/post/12924506307/keeping-up-with-my-self-imposed-duty-to-blather-on):

> [It] would’ve been nice if a studio that’s known for creative and original storytelling had decided to do something more interesting with their first female protagonist (in SIXTEEN YEARS) than make her…a princess. Who’s cool because she’s good at “boy” stuff. How fresh and exciting! Ugh. Granted, Tangled was one of my favorite movies from last year, but it was also an adaptation of a classic fairytale. Pixar had the opportunity to do *anything* with this, and they’re just rehashing the same old, same old.

> Sadly, “girl struggles against restrictive society” is still a very relevant theme, but it would be awfully nice to see a story about a regular person who has adventures and, oh yeah, also happens to be female. And who maybe likes to read or do needlepoint instead of or in addition to kicking ass, because *there is nothing wrong with those kinds of things.* I’ve always found the tomboy ideal so prevalent in fantasy fiction and film particularly irritating, sometimes more so than the passive damsel ideal, because it’s still presenting traditionally masculine pursuits as superior.

I had the same reaction as Couchman. I love most of the Pixar movies (well, *all* of the Pixar movies that don’t feature anthropomorphic vehicles) and found myself shrugging at this trailer, hoping it doesn’t represent the actual movie. While the Highland setting looks compelling, the heroine’s setup feels disappointingly stock.

Sure, gender roles can be restrictive — but so can these rebellious-princess tropes. “A lady pursues elegant pursuits,” her mother chastens. “Show a little decorum!” her father grouses. We don’t see her getting squeezed into a corset, but we get all of the other requisite beats: bored by ceremony, shooting a bow, escaping on horseback.

Studios grumble that boys won’t go to see movies featuring female protagonists, and I think this is why: the trailer shows a frustrated daughter rather than an adventurer.

Link via [Faruk Ateş](https://twitter.com/#!/kurafire/status/149417988624367616).