John August

QandA

Cams, rips and release dates

Film Industry, Follow Up, Video

Following up on [last week’s post](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/fansubbing) about international release dates and subtitles, I’ve been asking around to find more information about studios’ anti-piracy efforts. I didn’t get into any specific numbers — and I wouldn’t know how seriously to take the numbers anyway.

But based on these conversations, I came across a few broad bullet points worth sharing:

* Studios have gotten more sophisticated about putting tracking marks in individual prints, often localized by country, to help them determine the source of a leak. It’s not just the ugly brown dots anymore.

* For almost every movie, they can trace back bootlegs to one or two “cams” (in-theater camcorder recordings) and just a handful of subsequent DVD rips. They assign letter grades to these bootlegs based on quality. And quality matters: a cam which rates a “C” won’t be nearly as much a factor as a “B.”

* For certain countries, studios will delay theatrical release because of a history of cams originating there. They’ll then release the DVD as soon as possible thereafter.

* The subtitles issue becomes important because a cam or rip in the wrong language isn’t especially appealing.

* In Italy, where custom greatly favors dubbing over subtitles, you don’t see much piracy until the local language DVD rip leaks.

Obviously, this is only talking about feature films. American television is at least as important to many international viewers, and much harder to lock down.

And for independent film, it’s a whole other clustermuck. You’re dealing with local distributors, so trying to coordinate any worldwide effort is going to be extremely difficult.

Last night, I was talking with another friend about 3D. It hadn’t occurred to me that a 3D film is probably more difficult to cam. Possible, certainly — it’s a fun mental exercise — but not as easy to get something usable.

How to handle a body-switching protagonist

QandA, Writing Process

questionmarkIn my script the appearance of the protagonist physically changes at the end of the first act. As I envision it, the same actor would not play the part from that point on. This is not a Face/Off situation where characters change places; the protagonist becomes a separate and new character (we’ll call him Tom) in the latter acts while retaining the previous mental identity (Jim) from the first act. I hope this makes sense with as little as I’m telling you.

The protagonist will then be referred to as Jim by those who knew him in the first act and meet him subsequently, and Tom by all those he meets in the 2nd act and beyond. My current solution is to refer to him as Jim in the first act and Tom in the latter two to match their physical appearance. Is it okay for me to rely on the context of my story to lead the reader through the transition (identity is a theme throughout) or am I risking confusing the reader?

— Jed
Fort Worth, TX

I understand what you’re trying to do, and so will your readers, as long as they’re engaged enough by your story to care. In fact, readers will follow you down almost any rabbit hole provided you can convince them something rewarding awaits.

When you’re pulling a big switch like this in a script, it’s okay to stop the action for a few lines and directly address the reader:

He ejects the DVD from the player and holds it up to see his reflection, an improvised mirror. He touches his face, confused.

Jim Maxwell is now TOM BARNHARD.

Mid-40’s, he has a similar build but a completely different face: rougher, darker. He is physically a different person.

(NOTE: From this point forward, we’ll be referring to this character as Tom. It is designed to be a different actor.)

Tom catches movement in the reflection. Another MAN. Charging right at him.

When dealing with potentially-confusing moments like these, it’s okay to give the reader slightly more concrete information than the viewing public might receive. The reader doesn’t have benefit of seeing that Derek Luke has suddenly become Denzel Washington.

Are writing groups a good idea?

Psych 101, QandA, Writing Process

questionmarkI was wondering if you have ever had any experience with writing groups. I know it’s good to network and build more of a community of contacts, but in your experience, can they improve your writing? Do you think they can be advantageous? Or do you just end up getting ever more sets of conflicting notes?

— Jack
Burbank

I’ve never been in an official writing group, but I did rely on an informal circle of writer friends for my first few years after film school, getting feedback, suggestions and a healthy amount of peer pressure. Reading other people’s writing — even bad writing — makes you think more about the words you put on the page, so it can be a worthwhile exercise even if the notes you get back on your script are less than ideal.

I’d recommend finding people who are interested in doing the same general kinds of movies. If most of you want to write comedies, the woman writing the drama about a girl’s troubled relationship with her alcoholic father is going to be a drag on the group. Likewise, if most of the writers in the group have emotion-laden scripts, your hilarious spec about a farting monkey won’t get much love.

Another suggestion: Accept and embrace that the group won’t hold together long. People will flake out, drop out or move on. In fact, it might be a good idea to put an expiration date on the group at the start: “We’ll be meeting every Monday for the next six weeks. That’s it.”

Show your work

Awards, Directors, Rant

For math and science exams, we were often required to “show our work” — not merely to prove we weren’t cheating, but to demonstrate we understood the underlying principles involved.

I’ve been thinking about this in relation to screenwriting. When it comes to making a film, the screenwriter’s craft is probably the most direct and transparent. What did you do? You wrote the script, the 120-or-so pages of Courier around which everything else revolves. Your work is front-and-center.

Cinematographers, production designers and editors can’t point to a product which is “theirs.” In the finished film, the light is lovely; the world is stunning; the pacing is tight. All wonderful accomplishments, but inextricably bound to the work of others. That wonderful light would go unnoticed if it didn’t highlight the sets, and the sets would be meaningless if the editor favored close-ups. And the contribution of directors, who marshall all these forces in addition to actors’ performances, is probably the most difficult to judge.

As a concise, pre-existing document, the screenplay is probably the only thing that can be judged independently of the finished film. Put another way, the screenwriter shows his work.

But the irony is, after the film is made, no one asks to see his work.

Indeed, we award “best screenplay” based on a viewing of the finished film. If the movie was good, we figure the screenplay was probably pretty good. We guess. Even though we don’t need to guess, because the screenplays for “award contender” movies are commonly available. But frankly, it would be a lot of work to read all those screenplays, so we don’t make that a requirement, even for the WGA Awards. The more honest award would be titled, “Best Film based on a Screenplay which was Probably Good, and Presumably Didn’t Get Messed Up by the Director or Others.”

Worse, we also presume that a bad movie came from a bad screenplay. At some point, I’ll fund a comprehensive study of film reviews from the past 10 years, tracking exactly how many times the film’s screenwriter’s name is mentioned. My gut tells me that the writer’s name is three-to-four times more likely to be mentioned in a negative review than a positive one. But I’d love to see data.

In the meantime, screenwriting will continue to be the most transparent and opaque part of moviemaking.