John August

QandA

Understanding house styles

Television, Words on the page

Joanna Cohen spent five years as a writer on the daytime soap *All My Children.* She’ll miss the show, and its [unique vocabulary](http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/16/losing-all-my-children/?pagewanted=all):

> I collected a list of “soapisms,” the peculiar and hilarious terms we use in stage direction. No one is ever shocked at the end of a scene. They are “klonged,” “gut-punched” or “pole-axed.” No one has an epiphany. They are “hit by a Mazda.” There is lots of “eyelock” and “liplock.” It would not be unusual to get an e-mail from the editor saying something like, “Josh will no longer be buried alive in trunk. We are going with a wooden coffin. Please track accordingly.”

Unlike feature screenplays, scripts for an ongoing TV show can afford to indulge in some in-jokes and esoterica. After all, the writers know exactly who will be reading them and what they’ll find funny.

Over time, many shows develop a house style. The scripts for Lost, for example, rely heavily on the f-word. “Two for the Road,” an episode written by Elizabeth Sarnoff & Christina Kim, uses “fuck” 96 times.

INT. HATCH – ARMORY – DAY 11

TOTAL DARKNESS as THE DOOR SLIDES OPEN, casting a SHAFT OF LIGHT on Henry, sitting on the COT.

Henry is not only bound by his wrists, but he is also TETHERED to the bed. And fucking TIGHTLY, too.

ON LOCKE. Backlit. Very fucking NOIR. Just looking at Henry. Trying to... make sense of him. The silent moment PLAYS. Then --

HENRY

If you’ve come to apologize, I forgive you for hitting me with your crutch.

(beat)

I’m glad my head didn’t break it.

Boy, is he fucking smug. And Locke ain’t one bit amused --

LOCKE

Why?

HENRY

Now there’s a broad question.

Would you write this way in your spec pilot? Almost certainly not.

But it became the house style of the show, to the degree that “fucking” became the principal adverb: fucking huge, fucking dark, fucking terrifying. Omit the word and you’d lose something, even though the audience never heard it.

Why you can’t get HBO Go by itself

Television

Tim Carmody offers a mild [defense of cable](http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/03/opinion-carmody-nimble-empire/all/1):

> Anytime anyone says, “I wish that company X would offer pay service Y without complication Z,” I ask them, “what would you pay for that?” Typically, the other person hasn’t actually thought it through all the way from “what-if?” service to actually-existing, would-you-actually-spend-so-much-money-on-that? product.

I spent the past month in a rented apartment in New York City, with only basic cable and internet. Thanks to HBO Go, I could watch Game Change and Game of Thrones on my iPad. It worked flawlessly. This is a glorious era of technology.

Of course, the only reason I could use HBO Go at all is because I get HBO via DirecTV at my home in Los Angeles. HBO doesn’t offer the option of buying it as a stand-alone product.

Carmody explains the pricing issues:

> There are actually really good reasons why HBO is that cheap when bundled with cable, and why it would have to be a lot more expensive if sold stand-alone to individual subscribers.

> First, to say Comcast buys HBO in bulk is an understatement. Other cable companies, too, (and satellite and AT&T/Verizon/other telecoms doing video) have profound purchasing power. They also heavily promote HBO to their hundreds of millions of customers. So HBO gets a lot more from Comcast for its $7.27 (or whatever it is Comcast might pay) than it would get from me or you for our $10.

> HBO costs $10 per month because it’s bundled. It’s not the fair market price. Untie that knot, and you have to untie everything.

Will that knot get untied? Probably, eventually.

But pricing will be tricky. Remember the uproar when Netflix tried to raise its rates? Consumers have an artificially low expectation of how much digital things should cost.

Right now, HBO Go feels like a free bonus. It’s hard to know how much customers would be willing to pay if they had the chance.

All Apologies

Episode - 31

Go to Archive

QandA, Scriptnotes, Transcribed

Craig and John take a look at Toph Eggers’s apology, which segues to a discussion of apologies in general and laugh tracks.

The bulk of the episode is spent on listener questions:

* After making a spec sale, what should a writing team do next?

* When handing in a rewrite, should you preface your changes in an email?

* How do you handle file-keeping with multiple projects and drafts?

* What is a “spec script auction?”

* What do you do when your manager keeps pushing you to write things you’re not interested in?

* How do you format verse (like Shakespeare) when it’s used as dialogue?

* What do you do when your scene has 23 characters in it?

All this and more in this week’s Scriptnotes.

LINKS:

* [Big Bang Theory without Laughter](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmLQaTcViOA)
* [Once, the Broadway musical](http://oncemusical.com/)
* Martin Scorsese’s Casino
* Intro: [Bewitched opening](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o73ka8pbbE)
* Outro: [South Australia](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFrXUDWBIpU&feature=related) performed by Fisherman’s Friends

You can download the episode here: [AAC](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_31.m4a).

**UPDATE** 4-5-12: The transcript of this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2012/scriptnotes-ep-31-all-apologies-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.