John August

QandA

On film schools, and the business of education

Education

College president Dick Merriman thinks talking about “the business of education” [sets the wrong expectations](http://chronicle.com/article/The-College-as-a-Philanthropy/125176/):

> This college exists as a philanthropy because thousands of people, many of whom you and I will never know, have built it over the past 125 years. They built it for your benefit, knowing they would never meet you.

> The college’s facilities, our endowment for scholarships, our mission—all of these have been built, and protected and sustained, for your benefit. They were built so you can gain a college education, find and pursue your passion, and commit yourselves to living a valuable life. In short, this college exists so you can become a better person and, in turn, help make the world a better place.

I serve on advisory boards for two universities, and find the demarcation between philanthropy and enterprise to be a constant (if sometimes silent) issue.

An athletic program is both a huge expense and a profit center — but to what degree does it contribute to the educational mission? Better marketing can [boost applications](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/education/edlife/07HOOVER-t.html), but will it result in a better outcome for students?

I went to film school at USC, a traditional non-profit university. I had access to experts and equipment and highly-motivated peers. But as a graduate student, I can’t honestly say that I needed the rest of the university. I didn’t need a quad and a student government and dormitories. The full, four-year experience was invaluable as an undergrad at Drake. It’s where I figured out a lot about my interests. But by the time I arrived in Los Angeles, I knew enough about what I wanted that I didn’t need historic buildings and school mascots.

Many film programs are unabashedly for-profit ventures, unaffiliated with a traditional university. They truly are businesses, not philanthropies. And maybe that’s okay. If a class promises to teach you advanced Avid editing for $900, that can be a business-customer transaction. I took a Final Cut Pro class through UCLA Extension and certainly never thought about a grade or diploma.

The danger is conflating this kind of specialized training with the mission of traditional colleges and universities, which I’d argue is to turn out well-educated citizens, regardless of their major. In both cases, you’re paying to learn, but a traditional university has different and higher expectations of its students. Merriman:

> [Y]ou are permitted to change your mind and change your plans here. What you are not permitted to do here is waste our time. Because we have made an investment in you. Because we chose you to receive a fabulous gift. All we ask of you is that you honestly make your best effort to capitalize on this opportunity.

Oh, Jessica

Film Industry, Random Advice

I have to believe she was misquoted, or excerpted in some unflattering way, because Jessica Alba couldn’t have actually [said this](http://www.elle.com/Pop-Culture/Cover-Shoots/Jessica-Alba-The-Girl-Can-t-Help-It/(imageIndex)/3/(play)/false):

> Good actors, never use the script unless it’s amazing writing. All the good actors I’ve worked with, they all say whatever they want to say.

Oh, Jessica. Where to start?

**Scripts aren’t just the dialogue.** Screenplays reflect the entire movie in written form, *including those moments when you don’t speak.* Do you know the real reason we hold table readings in pre-production? So the actors will read the entire script at least once.

**Following your logic, you’ve never been in a movie with both good actors and amazing writing.** That may be true, but it might hurt the feelings of David Wain, Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller.

**You’re saying your co-stars who delivered their lines as written are not “good actors.”** Awkward.

**You’re setting dangerous expectations.** So if an aspiring actor wishes to be “good,” she should say whatever she wants to say? That’s pretty terrible advice.

**Screenwriters can be your best friends.** We are pushovers for attractive people who pay attention to us. I wrote that bathtub scene in Big Fish because Jessica Lange made brief eye contact with me. So if you’re not getting great writing — and honestly, you’re not — ask to have lunch with the screenwriter. I’ve seen you on interviews. You’re charming. That charm could work wonders.

Again: I know that quotes often come out in ways we never intended. It’s lacking context — though the photos are lovely. (Hi, Carter Smith!) I’m calling this out just so we can all hopefully learn something.

(h/t David Dean Bottrell for the link.)

Cut a character, save a scene

Words on the page

Last night, I struggled with a scene that went on too long without really accomplishing its aims. The solution ended up being pretty simple: get rid of a character.

Rachel, I love you, but you don’t need to be in this scene.

I say “pretty simple” because getting her out of the bad scene meant revising the scene just before it to explain her absence. But an extra beat before the cut was worth it. The new scene is a page shorter and a lot sharper.

Why wasn’t this solution obvious from the start?

Well, Rachel is a pretty enjoyable character, and we like seeing her interact with the other characters in the scene. But she’s by nature a peacekeeper. When she’s around, the squabbling heroes tend to put their knives away. In real life, that’s a good thing. In drama, it’s non-dramatic.

As a general (and often excepted) rule, you’re better off with as few significant characters as possible in a scene. Each additional body you add is another set of relationships to keep track of, which helps explain this apparent paradox: the better we establish our characters, the fewer we can support in a scene.

It’s easy to write a scene with two principals and eight background players. As an audience, we don’t care about those eight. But if you put five principals in a scene, you’ve made your life difficult. The audience expects all five to contribute.

On the page, here’s an easy to way to distinguish important characters from unimportant ones: only name the characters who matter. Let SECURITY GUARD be just that. The minute you call him JOHNSON or DEBOERS, the reader promotes him from functionary to full-fledged character, with all the accompanying expectations.

When is it okay to write for free?

Film Industry, QandA, Rights and Copyright

questionmarkI’m a relatively new screenwriter, also working as a PA and doing script coverage. I’m loving it but it’s not helping me on actually getting my writing out there at all. While the coverage is helping me grow as a writer it’s not helping me get a foot in the door, so to speak.

This has left me looking around for any writing gig I can land to help get my name out there, but I’m quite unsure as to if I should even approach an unpaid writing position. Not that I’m not willing to put the work in but I just don’t want to get screwed over.

Am I right to be wary of these types of positions? I just don’t know how to get my work out there.

— Tim
Toronto

Any work you’re not getting paid for should be yours and yours alone. That’s why aspiring screenwriters write spec scripts. That’s what you should focus on writing.

Still, there may be situations in which it makes sense to write a script for someone else without getting paid. You become friends with a promising-but-broke young director who asks you to write her screenplay. You might say yes. And while it would be smart to have some kind of contract at the outset delimiting rights and responsibilities, it will ultimately come down to trust.

As the writer, you own copyright until you don’t — either by signing a contract transferring copyright, or by entering an agreement to make it a work-for-hire. Yet in many of these situations, someone is coming to you with a property, an idea, or some pre-existing material that makes ownership much less clear-cut.

So again, you’re ultimately going to decide based on how much you trust your collaborators.

You may find writing gigs that are more work than simple coverage but less than a whole screenplay. Say a scrappy young producer asks you to write three webisodes for him, unpaid. Run the cost-benefit analysis in your head. Would you get enough out of the experience to make it worth the hours you spent? If so, do it.

But my first advice remains my final advice: most of what you write should be for yourself or people who can pay you in money, not experience.