John August

QandA

Formatting an interview montage

Formatting, QandA, Words on the page

questionmarkI’m writing a scene where my character is going on a series of interviews, but instead of writing out each individual interview, I want to do a montage of sorts, where different questions come from different interviewers.

The problem is I don’t know how to format it. Do I clearly mark it as a montage and just give each interviewer a different name, or do I have to go through and put each interview question under a different slug line?

— Trent
Iowa

answer iconYour instinct is correct. This is a classic montage, and is simple to do on the page. If you’re staying in one location — or a series of similar locations — you don’t need individual sluglines.

INT. CONFERENCE ROOM / A IS A INDUSTRIES – DAY [EARLIER]

MONTAGE: Randy meets with a series of INTERVIEWERS, beginning with WALTHAM GROEPNIK (50).

GROEPNIK

Consider an anthill.

RANDY

Okay.

GROEPNIK

Is it rational for the ants to work only for the benefit of the collective? Can an ant even be considered rational?

A beat. Randy blinks. Concentrates.

RANDY

What color are the ants?

CUT TO:

VIVIAN LAKELAND (25) is darkly seductive, but icy.

LAKELAND

What is your greatest weakness?

RANDY

I guess I’m late sometimes. I oversleep.

LAKELAND

Why would you admit to weakness?

CUT TO:

TREVOR KNIGHT (30) was probably a high school football star until he left the field mid-game, never to return.

KNIGHT

Would you say you’re a team player?

RANDY

Sure.

Knight makes a note on his form.

RANDY

Wait, no. No.

But Knight keeps writing.

RANDY

Yes?

QUICK CUTS:

GROEPNIK

If knowledge is the awareness of reality, how could you be aware of something unreal?

LAKELAND

(lighting cigarette)

Why do you bore me?

KNIGHT

What is the largest criminal organization in the world?

Randy thinks for a long moment.

RANDY

The Girl Scouts?

Knight smiles. Nods.

For production, the AD would likely break these out as a series of scenes (e.g. A24, B24, C24) on the board, but it can stay the same on the page.

If your character is going out for a series of interviews in different locations — Company A, Company B and Company C — you’re generally better off using sluglines the first time each of these is introduced. Once you’ve set up all of them, use INTERCUT (just once) to signal the reader that you’ll be cutting back and forth.

Everything is a remix, but you can still get sued

Rights and Copyright

Kirby Ferguson’s latest installment of [Everything is a Remix](http://www.everythingisaremix.info/) arrived this week. So did Andy Baio’s announcement that he’d [settled out of court](http://waxy.org/2011/06/kind_of_screwed/) on a copyright infringement for his Miles Davis tribute album Kind of Bloop — not for the music, which Baio licensed, but the cover art, which photographer Jay Maisel argued was too much like his original.

Baio:

> At the heart of this settlement is a debate that’s been going on for decades, playing out between artists and copyright holders in and out of the courts. In particular, I think this settlement raises some interesting issues about the state of copyright for anyone involved in digital reinterpretations of copyrighted works.

The conclusion of Baio’s post shows the same artwork with greater and greater pixelation, very effectively showing the murky boundary between homage and infringement.

It’s a great and unanswerable question for screenwriters: *When does something in your screenplay stop being a reference to another movie, and start being theft?*

Outlines, treatments and numbered pages

Formatting, QandA, Treatments

questionmarkI was looking through your library section at the TV shows you’d written and noticed a few things that caught my eye. I’m trying to write a treatment/pitch for a TV series and, well, first of all:

In writing it out, is it called a “pitch” or a “treatment” or a “write-up”?

I noticed that all three of your “write-ups” were different in terms of style, as in there didn’t seem to be any sort of template or format to follow specifically, like you would with a screenplay. How do you know what to do technically? Even down to the fonts used, and what is in bold. Sometimes there are bullets.

I also noticed your page numbers: 1 of 5, 2 of 5…. and so on. How did you do that? Did you do that manually or is there some setting I am not seeing in Word that allows for that, because I couldn’t find it.

— Jeff Fradley
Anchorage

answer iconTo me, an outline tends to be less prose-y and feature more bullet points, but there is no common consensus in Hollywood about what’s what. In features, we use “treatment” and “outline” and “beat sheet” interchangeably.

A “write-up” is generally a written version of something you’ve pitched. It could be long or short. A “leave-behind” is a written summary of a pitch that you literally leave behind after the meeting. ((Leave-behinds are often a terrible idea, because this written version becomes the basis of all future conversations. And you’ve essentially just delivered free work.))

As far as page numbers, I’m a big fan of X of Y headers — I even do it on handwritten documents. They were probably more important back when we were faxing documents around, but they’re a good idea overall.

ops sample

Pretty much every word processor can do this kind of page numbering.

In Pages, Insert > Page Number. Then type “of.” Then Insert > Page Count.

In Word, use the header bar/ribbon thing to Insert Page Number, then “of,” then Insert Number of Pages.

In Google Docs, well. It’s hard to do in Google Docs.

Outlines aren’t essential

QandA, Writing Process

questionmarkI looked at your outline for Big Fish and noticed you had it broken up into acts and what happens in each act. How exactly did you know what was suppose to happen? How do you start to figure it out?

For me, I might know some of the events pretty clearly but I might not know what happens in-between. Or I might know the middle and end, but not the beginning. I find it hard to break down my story the way you do.

Sometimes when I have a scene in my head, I’ll just start writing particular scenes and then go back to figure out more of an outline. Is that wrong?

— Ian Topple
Syosset, NY

answer iconIt’s not wrong. The correct way to write your screenplay is whatever gets it written.

My [original one-page outline](http://johnaugust.com/library) for Big Fish is really an anomaly. I rarely go into that level of detail.

Most scripts begin more the way you describe, with a few key moments and characters that gradually chain themselves together. I’ll always have a sense of where the story is going — I can write a third-act scene before I’ve written the end of the first act — but I won’t necessarily know how I’m going to get there.

The [sequence outline](http://johnaugust.com/library) in the Library came after the first draft, and charted what was actually happening in the script I wrote. It was a way of seeing how the movie was dividing its time between the real world and Edward Bloom’s stories.

Don’t beat yourself up over outlines. Save the self-flagellation for the scenework.