John August

QandA

Simple is better than accurate

Charlie, Projects, Words on the page

A story in today’s LA Times about [chocolate-making](http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fo-chocolate16-2008jul16,0,1682095.story?track=rss) got me thinking about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and an error I deliberately introduced. Early in the tour of the factory, Wonka says…

  • WONKA
  • The cocoa bean happens to be the thing from which chocolate is made.

    • Wrong. The right word is cacao — it’s not cocoa [until it’s partially processed](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoa), and as a globe-trotting master chocolatier, Wonka would certainly use the right word. And in the book, Roald Dahl does:

    > The cacao bean, which grows on the cacao tree, happens to be the thing from which chocolate is made. You cannot make chocolate without the cacao bean. The cacao bean is chocolate. I myself use billions of cacao beans every week in this factory.

    So why change it? Why be wrong?

    Because cacao is a weird word. It’s sounds like it’s supposed to be funny, but it’s not actually funny in context. Then Wonka uses the word six times in the scene. You generally repeat funny things, so when you repeat something that wasn’t funny to begin with, the stench of failed joke begins to waft in.

    Worse, cacao is confusing. It demands explanation, but the explanation isn’t particularly rewarding. As the audience, we don’t really want to learn about chocolate. We want to see bad things happen to terrible children.

    Cocoa is a synonym for hot chocolate, so it seems reasonable that you’d make chocolate from cocoa beans. For the movie version, changing “cacao” to “cocoa” made it easier to focus on the point of the scene (a flashback to Wonka meeting the Oompa-Loompas), and concentrate on finding things that were actually funny. It’s wrong, but it’s right.

    And that’s true in this general rule:

    __In screenwriting, simplicity should almost always trump accuracy.__

    I’m going to break that statement down into parts so that it doesn’t get misconstrued.

    In screenwriting — I’m only talking about writing for film and television, stories that race ahead at 24 frames per second, give or take. In novels and playwriting, the writer has the time and opportunity to be far more precise and thorough. And in journalism, accuracy is a fundamental responsibility. The journalist’s challenge is to make that accuracy comprehensible to the readership.

    simplicity — Simplicity is not the same as idiocy, or pandering. If you’re making a thriller set in the world of international espionage, you can’t have the computer expert “dial in” to something. We need to believe that the expert is an expert, that security is difficult, and yet be able to understand roughly what he’s doing. Consider the crew in the first two Alien movies. We don’t know how their spaceships work, but it’s easy to follow what they’re working on.

    should almost always trump — Sometimes, the complicated-but-accurate version is more rewarding than the simple version, so be wary of smoothing out all the wrinkles. And screenwriters aren’t absolved of societal responsibility, either. For example, the pilot episode of Eli Stone had a plotline about childhood vaccines that was [widely](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/arts/television/23ston.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) [criticized](http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-01-28-eli-stone-side_N.htm) for its inaccuracies. If there wasn’t time in the episode for a more thorough exploration of the issue, another case should have been substituted, because what remained was inflammatory and (debatably) dangerous.

    accuracy — In archery and life, accuracy is measured by how close you come to the target. For movies and television, the target is pretty wide. Looking back at the [derivative challenge](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2008/derivativ), it was more important to give a sense of why derivatives exist than explain exactly what they were. For a medical drama, we’ve come to accept a certain amount of time compression, allowing characters to recover from surgery in much less time than they actually would. But if a character became pregnant and gave birth in the same day, we’d protest. That’s not just inaccurate, it’s implausible, and plausibility is a much higher standard.

    Granted, even plausibility takes a back seat in Charlie. (c.f. Great Glass Elevator)

    Making unnecessary and possibly horrible changes

    Film Industry, Producers, Psych 101, QandA, Writing Process

    questionmarkI’m a struggling screenwriter in Brazil. About one and a half years ago, I had my first screenplay produced, a drama/thriller that had mixed reviews. The large part of the negative reviews pointed to aspects of the screenplay that I was forced to modify in the course of the production. In all, I like the result, but I think it would be better if my fourth draft (not my fifth) would had been the basis for the movie.

    Now, I am having similar problems with my new screenplay in pre-production. This time, it is a child adventure that is very close to my heart, a story about ghosts and divided families. I have a very tight screenplay that is focused in the protagonists. It’s a story about a family of ghosts that is trapped in a house, each member enclosed in a separate room. Three young heroes tries to broke the curse that binds them there. Because of this, the plot is mainly focused inside the house, with a little touch of claustrophobia. Now I have the studio which is banking the project demanding the adding of new subplots. But I fear that the added subplots will loosen the narrative.

    My question is: What you do when you truly think that your story don’t need to have new plots, but you have to add them anyway? How can I cut to external situations without weakening my main story?

    — Sylvio Gonçalves
    Brazil

    You’re facing exactly the situation Hollywood writers find themselves in on almost every job. You have the draft you think is ready to shoot, but other powerful forces are pushing for more changes. Sometimes the changes come out of necessity — they simply can’t afford to shoot that sequence. But more often, the changes feel arbitrary. “We need more monkey jokes. Everyone loves monkeys.” ((This is true, up to a certain threshold. More than three monkeys, and I start to get nervous. You’re getting into monkey gang territory, and working together, they could probably take down a grown man.))

    So what should you do?

    Lick you finger and see which way the wind is blowing. If there seems to be a consensus that more monkey jokes are needed, then add them. And don’t add half-assed monkey jokes in the hopes that they’ll fail and get cut later, because screenwriter karma dictates that the worst things you write will always get prominently featured in the trailer. So make them good monkey jokes.

    Am I seriously advocating selling out?

    Yes, for you Sylvio, because with one produced credit you don’t have a lot of hand to be saying, “Absolutamente não.” If making the changes will completely undermine the movie, your job is to get the other decision-makers (director, producers) to realize this. The best way to do it is to write the changes as well as you can, and present them with your reservations, explaining in advance how hard you tried, what works and what doesn’t.

    There is a small but real danger that they will disagree and shoot your revisions. But your version is no doubt better than what the director or another writer would have come up with.

    Coincidentally, I’m going through the same thing right now on a project I’m writing. I’ll be spending three days doing revisions I’m pretty sure won’t work, but that’s the best way to demonstrate to everyone why they won’t work. The silver lining is that the process of doing these failed revisions may inadvertently create some good material that will be helpful in other parts of the script.

    In your specific case, I’d make sure that whenever you’re cutting to external situations, you’re using the cuts to increase the overall energy. Make sure you’re leaving the house with a question unanswered, and returning to the house with something changed. ((Consider how Lost uses its flashbacks/flashforwards. They’re interrupting the flow, but they’re goosing the overall energy.)) You’re probably using claustrophobia to create tension, but there are many other tools in a writer’s arsenal. (Also, we’ll notice the enclosed spaces more if we’ve had some contrast.)

    Good luck.

    Writers need actors

    Film Industry, Strike, Television

    A few readers have asked whether I’ll weigh in on the SAG situation. I won’t, except to relate an interesting conversation I had with a TV showrunner a month or two ago.

    He said his casting people were having a hard time finding actors of a certain age, especially minorities, for episodic parts. These are the “day players” — roles in which an actor might have a scene or two in a given episode, never to return. Shows like Law & Order or C.S.I. require a bunch of these: witnesses, specialists, etc. The nanny who discovers her employer impaled on an icicle — that’s a day player.

    Day players aren’t extras. There is actual acting required. Casting directors will bring in a few candidates to read for the part, and the producers/director will pick. A good day player can really elevate a scene. A bad day player is a disaster. ((One anecdote: We shot my first show mostly at stages in Toronto. We quickly learned to check any dialogue to be spoken by a Canadian day player to avoid the ooo problem, and beyond that, we found most of our day players to be terrific. Except for one. She had two lines of dialogue with Mark-Paul Gosselaar, and no force on heaven or Earth could get her to say them properly. It turned out she was drunk. Because she was nervous. Because she had a crush on Mark-Paul Gosselaar. The truth was charming, but she was recast on the spot.))

    In Los Angeles or New York, if you’re trying to cast a day player in their 20s (say, a car wash attendant), it’s easy. You’ve got thousands of people to choose from. Even if you need a specific characteristic — say, Russian-speaking — you’re going to have great candidates.

    But what if you need an intimidating Chinese woman in her 60’s? Or a really, really old man you can believe is from Nigeria?

    Well, you hope they’re out there. And increasingly, they’re not. (At least, according to this showrunner, and two others who concurred.)

    So what’s going on?

    At the risk of getting [Freakonomics](http://freakonomics.com), it appears there’s a point at which it’s not economically viable to remain a day player.

    Consider the career arc of an actor. In one’s 20s, almost anyone can afford to be an actor, by waiting tables or doing other piecemeal work in order to buy ramen and pay for headshots. At some point in one’s 30s, that lifestyle becomes less possible. Actors get married, have kids, or have other responsibilities that require a more steady paycheck. Which means getting a traditional job. At a certain point, you find many actors have become plumbers or teachers or dog trainers just to keep their kids in school and family in health insurance. ((Obviously, you could substitute “screenwriter” for actor in this thought experiment. But it’s not a perfect analogy. For instance, an actor can’t work on spec.))

    Luckily, there are some actors who are able to remain actors because they book just enough jobs each year. They’re not making much — probably scale — but it’s enough to keep them working in their craft. These actors have a sense of how many days of work they need to book in order to stay solvent.

    So consider our Chinese woman in her 60’s. If she works a certain number of days each year, it makes sense to continue acting and living in Los Angeles. If not, she might as well move to Tucson, where it’s cheaper and closer to her grandkids.

    The showrunner told me that the studios are increasingly insisting that producers shoot out day player roles in fewer days, in order to save money. Episode-by-episode, this makes sense; why spend more than you have to? But in pinching pennies, the system may be squeezing out the actors it needs. And you really notice it in groups in which you didn’t have a lot of actors to choose from in the first place, such as minorities. If you write a role for a woman in her 60’s, and race doesn’t matter, you can cast anyone, including the Chinese woman. But if you write a role for a bossy Chinese grandmother, you really need that actress in town and available.

    If you look at any one actor getting economically forced out of the craft, oh well. Sad story, but Hollywood’s full of ’em. But when you apply that loss across a swath of your talent pool, suddenly it’s impossible to find that African man in his 80’s you need for your episode. So you’re stuck rewriting it for a white guy, or a younger guy. The product suffers, and TV gets a little more white and boring.

    I bring up this anecdote because it’s the kind of issue you really wish the industry was addressing in their ongoing negotiations with the actors’ unions, but they’re not. Instead, we get a three-way shoving match.

    Anticipating the first dozen comments on this thread:

    * Please don’t send your Chinese grandmother’s headshot. I’m sure she’s a terrific actress, but the example above was purely illustrative.
    * I’m not claiming this situation is causing a lack of diversity in television, but it makes it harder to combat. As writers, we can create rich, multi-ethnic worlds. But if we can’t find actors for those roles, it’s all for naught.
    * Obviously, the same economic pressures apply to plain old white actors as well. But there are more of them to begin with, so you don’t notice their absence as quickly or as acutely.
    * You don’t notice the problem as much in features because there’s so much more time to do casting, and (generally) more money.
    * I don’t have a solution to the situation, but it’s almost certainly not DVD residuals. Bumping up scale minimums will help, but only to a degree.
    * We can’t conflate raw numbers with talent. When a showrunner and her casting directors are pulling out their hair because they can’t find a Pacific Islander for a part, it’s not because there are no actors in that category. There may simply be none with the chops to pull it off. Doubt me if you want, but 95% of Americans could not convincingly say four lines of dialogue on Law & Order. It’s tougher than it looks.

    Short questions, short answers

    Big Fish, Projects, Psych 101, QandA

    questionmarkIn the [Big Fish Sequence Outline](http://johnaugust.com/downloads_ripley/bf-outline.pdf) posted in the [Library](http://johnaugust.com/library), you have boxes around certain sequences (i.e. sequences 3,5,8 etc.), but not around others. What do these boxes reference?

    — Gerald
    Mississippi

    The boxes indicate which sections of the movie are Edward’s stories. I wanted to show the balance between real-world stuff and fable.

    —

    Why did Edward Bloom leave Ashland?

    — Anonymous

    Because it’s too small for a man of his ambition. That’s what Edward says to Karl the Giant before they head off on their adventure.

    —

    Beginner’s luck? Is that supposed to happen?

    — Mark

    It’s a fallacy. We expect someone trying something for the first time to fail, so when they succeed, we call it “beginner’s luck” to discount it. But depending on the nature of the task, it’s actually just skill or garden-variety luck.

    A person who succeeds early and later fails may likewise try to diminish the first success by declaring it “beginner’s luck.” But it’s almost worth looking at the situation in which they were first successful, and what’s changed. Likely the “beginning” was an arbitrary point decided after the fact, and the subsequent efforts are being scored by different and perhaps unrealistic criteria.