John August

QandA

Today’s trends are tomorrow’s clichés

Film Industry

Eric D. Snider looks at [patterns in 2012 movies](http://www.pajiba.com/seriously_random_lists/the-films-of-2012-miscellaneous-important-statistical-data.php#GKZ6GjlA9YV1V6Oc.99). Some highlights:

> Movies in which a man puts his fingers in another’s man mouth: **21 Jump Street, American Reunion, The Three Stooges, Holy Motors**

> Movies in which archery is prominent: **The Avengers, Brave, The Hunger Games, Moonrise Kingdom**

> Movies in which someone vomits during a public performance, and then sees video of the incident go viral on YouTube: **Pitch Perfect, Here Comes the Boom**

> Movies in which John Goodman swept through the place, did a couple scenes, and instantly improved the film by at least 20%: **Argo, Trouble with the Curve, Flight**

The ideal 2012 movie would have featured John Goodman as a vomiting Friar Tuck in a modern-day retelling of Robin Hood.

Sprints, marathons and migrations

Broadway, Psych 101, Television

This week, I’ve been working on a feature, a TV pilot and the stage musical of Big Fish. It’s gotten me thinking about the nature of different forms of dramatic writing.

Writing a TV pilot is a **sprint**. It’s only about sixty pages. You can easily write an act a day. Sure, there are outlines and notes and rewrites, but everything happens incredibly quickly, and if you can’t write fast you shouldn’t write TV at all.

Writing a feature is a **marathon**. You might have a few sprints along the way — the first act, those last ten pages — but it’s ultimately a bit of a slog. Like a long-distance runner, you have to pace yourself and accept the page-after-page, scene-after-scene grind. When it come time to actually make the movie, it’s the same experience: seemingly endless, but the finish line finally comes. Just like many sprinters can’t run a marathon, many TV writers struggle when facing a feature.

Writing a stage musical is a **migration**. Race analogies fail. You’re covering distance, but there’s no real finish line. Like pioneers crossing the plains, you may have a destination in mind (Broadway), but you’ll be making many stops during the trip, setting up camps that may turn into towns, before eventually hitting the trail again. Along the way, people will come and go from your little community. And if you finally reach your original destination, that’s still not the end of the journey. You’ll go back on the road with other stagings of the show. As a writer, you have to make peace with the unfinishability of a musical.

As I mentioned on the podcast, one of the goals for this year is to accept that I’ll probably be writing some form of Big Fish for the rest of my life.

I suspect other art forms have a similar sprint/marathon/migration triad:

* You can sprint through a short story, while a novel is a marathon, and a franchise like Harry Potter is a migration.
* “Rapper’s Delight” is a sprint, *Paul’s Boutique* is a marathon, and hip hop is a migration.
* One painting is a sprint, a gallery exhibition is a marathon, and cubism is a migration.
* In coding, perhaps that Flash game is a sprint, Karateka is a marathon and building Gmail is a migration.

If you think of others, by all means [tweet ’em](https://twitter.com/johnaugust).

Unless they pay you, the answer is no

Episode - 71

Go to Archive

Los Angeles, QandA, Scriptnotes, Transcribed, WGA

John and Craig return from the holidays to look at the WGA nominations, the perennially high costs of movies, scene headers and acceptable fonts for treatments.

Two reader questions ask how to get career stuff started before an LA move. Are any of the contests worth the bother? Does a great review on the Black List open doors for a writer living in Jerusalem?

Also discussed: resolutions, accepting long time horizons, and not counting chickens.

If you’re listening on the site — or just track-by-track in iTunes — do us a favor and hit Subscribe on [our iTunes page](https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/scriptnotes-podcast/id462495496). It helps us figure out how many people are new listeners and how many are listening to back-catalog tracks. Thanks!

LINKS:

* 2013 Writers Guild Award [nominees](http://www.wga.org/awards/awardssub.aspx?id=1516)
* [Chaparral Pro](http://www.identifont.com/show?2E3)
* [Baskerville](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baskerville)
* The johnaugust.com [library](http://johnaugust.com/library)
* Austin Film Festival’s [screenplay and teleplay competitions](http://www.austinfilmfestival.com/submit/screenplayandteleplay/)
* The Academy [Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting](http://www.oscars.org/awards/nicholl/index.html)
* About the [Black List](https://www.blcklst.com/about/) screenwriting service
* [Quebec City](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_City) on Wikipedia
* [Poutine](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poutine) on Wikipedia
* [Cheese curds](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheese_curds) on Wikipedia
* [Coffeescript](http://coffeescript.org)
* [Maple, the computer algebra system](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maple_(software))
* OUTRO: [Sabado Merengue](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsmyoT2DhnY) by Cabaret Diosa

You can download the episode here: [AAC](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_71.m4a).

**UPDATE** 1-10-13: The transcript of this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-ep-71-unless-they-pay-you-the-answer-is-no-transcript).

Present tension

Words on the page

While most fiction is written in the past tense, screenwriting is all about the present tense — including the present progressive, a topic I’ve [blogged about](http://johnaugust.com/2009/present-tense).

But not all prose fiction is written in the past tense. Robert Jackson Bennett looks at the benefits and drawbacks of [writing in the present tense](http://robertjacksonbennett.wordpress.com/2013/01/02/on-the-present-tense):

> The past tense actually separates the audience from what’s happening in the work they’re reading by making it so that the story has already happened. While you might not think about it, the past tense actually sets works in the past – there is a division of time between the audience and the work, in the same manner that there is a division in time between me and World War II. If I read about World War II, I am not experiencing World War II, I am merely hearing about it. I will never experience World War II: I will only have someone tell me what it was like.

> The present tense, to a certain extent, bypasses this division, or it simulates the feeling of bypassing it: you are witnessing something happening right now. Everything is immediate.

> […] It bypasses the fixed, static feeling of an event that has already happened, being told from a fixed narrator’s voice, and instead feeds you an experience that is currently ongoing.

That’s exactly why screenplays are written in the present tense. It’s not about what *did* happen; it’s what’s right in front of the audience.

Still, for traditional fiction, the present tense often feels wrong — too insistent, to in-your-face.

Bennett compares it to shaky-cam, but to me closer analogies would include the 48 frames version of The Hobbit or the sniffily live-sung close-ups of Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables. The hyper-reality either works for you or it doesn’t.