John August

QandA

That’ll teach her

Genres

Tad Friend examines female characters in comedies and finds an [unsettling pattern](http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/11/110411fa_fact_friend):

> Funny women in movies must not only be gorgeous; they must fall down and then sob, knowing it’s all their fault.

Nerve has a super-cut to demonstrate:

Friend’s article — a lengthy piece on Anna Faris — looks at a lot of the issues surrounding female roles in comedy. It’s easy to point fingers at screenwriters (“Write better parts!”) or studios (“Make better movies!”), but the real obstacle is of course the audience, voting with dollars.

The more money female-driven comedies make, the more female-driven comedies will get made. In the short term, the success of Bridesmaids should make studios less gun-shy about spending money to produce and market these movies.

But will they be any good? I worry we’ll learn the wrong lessons and just make more comedies about women in wedding dresses.

Okay to use bold for scene headers?

Formatting, QandA

questionmarkSounds trivial, but I’ve been seeing a lot of scripts recently with sluglines (or scene headers) in bold formatting. Is this a trend? I kind of like it, but is it appropriate to use bold sluglines in a spec as a first-time writer?

— Shane

It’s simply a matter of personal preference. As long as you’re consistent through the script, either bold or normal weight is fine.

KYLE’S DAD

Half-done is half-assed, Kyle.

KYLE

So you want full ass, you’re saying.

KYLE’S DAD

I want less lip and more hustle. Now.

CUT TO:

EXT. HOUSE – DAY

Kyle drags the giant spider’s carcass from the garage to the curb. It’s too big to fit in the garbage can -- he couldn’t lift it anyway -- so he tucks the legs underneath the body.

or…

INT. BENNIGAN’S – NIGHT

Aspiring mixologist JIMMY WAKE (24) strains his latest creation into a chilled martini glass. The liquid has an unsettling yellow-green hue with streaks of blood. He garnishes it with a pickled crow’s foot.

Either is fine.

Born on the Fourth of The Nines

QandA, The Nines

questionmarkIn The Nines, was there a particular reason you chose to make Dahlia and Gavin’s birthday the same, November 21st?

— Guarionex
Florida

answer iconIf you look through the screenplay of The Nines in the [Library](http://johnaugust.com/library), you’ll see that many scenes in the second section of the movie are basically unscripted.

Here’s that scene as written (italics in original):

INT. SUSINA COFFEESHOP – DAY

Gavin meets with Dahlia Salem. She’s pretty, funny, and very cool.

They talk about the other pilot (Gatin’s), the role, and how fucked up it is to be having these double-top-secret conversations. It goes well. They seem to genuinely like each other.

When filming these scenes, I was beside the camera as it was rolling, telling the actors what to talk about. I told Dahlia that she and Gavin had the same birthday, and she went with it. (In fact, she misunderstood at first, and assumed that she and Ryan Reynolds had the same birthday.) Ultimately, it didn’t really matter what they were talking about, just that they were talking and seemed to click.

All of Part Two was shot essentially this way. Even in scenes with traditional dialogue, I would “wind the clock back” a minute and have the actors talking about something else, eventually getting to the text of the scene.

The conceit of this section is that it’s a half hour episode of a reality TV show, so I needed lots of little pieces to suggest the conversations have been stitched together in editing. Non-scene conversation got the right rhythms goings.

Part Two was the last section we shot, and by far the most fun. It was like real-time writing. A lot of things that came up in the moment could easily be incorporated; I’d say something, then have Ryan say it. Melissa McCarthy talks about buying a house because just that day she bought a house.

The Nines was a very special case, and the only time I’ve done it. I wouldn’t suggest trying such non-writing in your own scripts unless there’s a particularly good reason for it.

Write the way you speak

Psych 101, Words on the page

As he loses his voice to cancer, Christopher Hitchens writes about the idea of [literary voice](http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2011/06/christopher-hitchens-unspoken-truths-201106?currentPage=1):

> To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a a huge and loathsome snake: “How many people in this class can talk? I mean, really talk?” That had its duly woeful effect.

> I told them to read every composition aloud, preferably to a trusted friend. The rules are much the same: Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don’t say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really *was* a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. If something is worth hearing or listening to, it’s very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own *voice.*

College was the first time I started writing how I speak.

Or, more accurately, college was when I stopped trying to write the way I thought I *should* write. Whether through explicit instruction (topic sentences, Roman outlines) or imitative insecurity (we all had a Hemingway phase), any unique quality in my prose had been flattened. The occasional quirks were mostly borrowed from Spy magazine, whose pithy precision I worshipped without really understanding.

A freshman year newswriting class probably changed me more than anything. J54 taught us how to align fact-bearing sentences in a deliberate pyramid structure so that the story could be truncated at any point without losing its meaning.

We learned the rules. We wrote the articles. The process was almost automated; given the same facts, any two news writers should generate very much the same story.

I hated it. I revolted. Why should I waste my time writing something anyone else could have churned out?

Writing isn’t harder than speaking, but it’s lonelier. It’s a conversation with someone who isn’t there.

When you’re writing, you end up hearing your own voice a lot. I think that’s why so many people struggle with it. We don’t like to be alone with our thoughts. They scare us. But in the same way people don’t stutter when talking to a dog, it helps to envision a friendly reader at the far side. Let writing be talking with someone you like.