John August

QandA

Writing characters you would hate in real life

QandA, Writing Process

How do you go about writing characters that you don’t identify with, or even find abhorrent, as good as the ones you like?

— Dan
Redditch, England

The same way many actors find playing villains liberating, I often enjoy writing characters who, in real life, I would actively avoid.

For instance, in [Go](http://imdb.com/title/tt0139239/combined), the four guys who go to Vegas in the middle chapter are sort of my bete noire. Simon is id-driven, wantonly impulsive, and only gets away with it because of his accent. Marcus is too righteous by half, the self-appointed leader who only got the title by picking the least-capable of travelling companions. Tiny is a faux-Black chihuahua, and Singh is sort of a perma-stoner. They’re all little [lizard brains](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilian_brain), and I kinda love them, though I wouldn’t want to be within 20 feet of any of them.

[For the record, the character in Go who I best relate to is Claire. Like her, I’m the one who’s always trying to be the voice of reason. But eventually I give up, and hook up with the hot, scary guy.]

In many ways, it can be easier to write characters with whom you don’t have a lot in common. Unlike a novel, where you’re digging inside a character’s head, screenwriting is about what you see and hear. Even the most rigorous self-examination probably won’t reveal the dialogue and behavior you would notice just watching actual people going about their lives. Sometimes, the most fascinating people are the most annoying, or the most abhorrent.

So don’t strive for likeability. It’s a fool’s errand. Rather, aim for believability. Make sure your characters are consistent, and real within the universe you’ve built for them. The audience will happily watch loathsome characters doing terrible things, as long as you keep them engaging.

Deciding which parents get to visit the factory

Charlie, Projects, QandA

[Charlie Tour Group](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/charlieriver.jpg)I have a question about your upcoming film, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. What made you decide to have each child bring only one guardian to Wonka’s factory, and how did you choose which one would go?

–Michael
Daphne, Alabama

In Roald Dahl’s [book](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0375834605/), each of the four rotten kids (Veruca, Violet, Augustus and Mike) brings both of their parents on the tour of the factory. Charlie only bring Grandpa Joe, for reasons that are never entirely clear. According to the rules on the Golden Ticket, he’s allowed to bring two parents, but he doesn’t.

When Tim Burton and I first sat down to talk about how we were going to adapt Dahl’s book for the screen, the two-parent issue was one of my first questions. In addition to being a little unfair to Charlie, having each of the rotten kids bring both parents presented a lot of problems.

With a book, the reader can conveniently forget that Mrs. Teavee hasn’t said anything for a long time. In a movie, however, that character is always going to be on-screen. Which means she needs to be doing something, saying something. She has to interact with all the other characters in the scene, who in turn have to interact with each other, which steals focus from Charlie, Willy Wonka, and the rotten kids.

Basically, twice the parents means everyone gets half as much to say and do.

So we quickly decided that the rule on the Golden Ticket would be that every kid gets to bring one parent or guardian. No fuss, no muss.

Then the question becomes, which parent goes with which kid?

In my mind, piggy Augustus got that way because he had a mother who equated food with love. So Mrs. Gloop would be the first parent. We don’t learn much about her except that she and her husband own a sausage shop in Germany.

Violet Beauregarde claimed to be the world record-holder in chewing gum, so we decided to make her hyper-competitive, her ego stoked by sports mom Ms. Beauregarde, herself a former baton champion. We never say anything about Violet’s father.

Veruca Salt is a daddy’s girl gone wicked, manipulative and bossy. So it only made sense for her to bring her father, a British nut baron.

Finally, there’s Mike Teavee. In Dahl’s book, he’s obsessed with TV westerns and shoot-em-up cop shows. Updating it a bit, we gave him violent videogames and a well-meaning but completely over-his-head father, who is literally bullied by his son.

Even with just these four characters, it took work to find enough for everyone to do and say. In the Chocolate Room, for instance, we have to keep track of Willy Wonka, Charlie, Grandpa Joe, Augustus, Mrs. Gloop, Violet, Ms. Beauregarde, Veruca, Mr. Salt, Mike and Mr. Teavee. That’s eleven characters, not counting the Oompa-Loompas. If we’d added four more parents to the scene, we’d probably still be shooting it.

Organizing reality

Television

Yesterday, the WGA [announced plans](http://www.wga.org/subpage_newsevents.aspx?id=493) to begin organizing writers working on reality television shows. Unlike writers working on traditional dramas or sitcoms, these writers haven’t been covered by the guild, which means they receive no health insurance, no residuals, and no set pay minimums.

As WGAw president Daniel Petrie put it in the press release:

The secret about reality TV isn’t that it’s scripted, which it is; the secret is that reality TV is a 21st-century telecommunications industry sweatshop.

Most readers of this site are familiar with one kind of writing when it comes to film and television. It happens on three-holed paper, with uppercase scene headers and neatly indented blocks for dialogue and parentheticals. But the truth is that much of the work a professional writer does in Hollywood takes on other formats: treatments and beat sheets, outlines and season patterns. Even in non-reality shows, a lot of the writing takes place before you type “FADE IN:”. So it’s a mistake to confuse “unscripted” with “unwritten.”

Many of the people who the WGA would like to organize are currently called producers — which is the norm in television. Be it [The Simpsons](http://imdb.com/title/tt0096697/combined) or [The Sopranos](http://imdb.com/title/tt0141842/combined), many of the writers in television are called producers of some stripe: Executive Producer, Co-EP, Supervising Producer. Despite the title, there’s no doubt they’re writing. Every episode says “written by” or “teleplay by.”

In reality TV, there’s usually no “written by” credit. But it would be a mistake to think there’s no writing.

In addition to the obviously-scripted moments (someone has to tell Jeff Probst what to say), every episode needs writers to figure out what the hell the story is. Yes, video crews will capture the action, and a team of editors at Avids will ultimately cut the footage together, but the decisions about what actually happens in a given episode fall upon the writers, who have to tease plot, character development, comedy and tension out of hundreds of hours of “real life” taking place.

These people are, in fact, organizing reality. Which is why they deserve to be able to organize under the WGA umbrella. You can read more about the situation [here](http://www.wga.org/organizesub.aspx?id=1088).

UPDATE: After reading a note left in the comments section, I don’t want to understate the role editors often have shaping the “what happens” in reality TV. They’re often performing functions that would normally be the purview of writers; the question is, why aren’t they being compensated for it?

[Formatting a reality show proposal](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2004/formatting-a-reality-show-proposal)

Writing loglines for a comedy

Pitches, QandA

questionmarkSo now I have 120 pages of the funniest damn stuff you’ve never seen and I have to describe it in three or four sentences. How do you convey the witty dialogue, the clever visual gags, the essence of the humor in a logline?

Whenever I write one it ends up sounding like it’s describing an action movie or drama. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

— Jeff in Maplewood

You aren’t going to be able to summarize the visual gags, puns and one-liners in a logline, so don’t try. Rather, you want to distill what’s funny about the idea of your movie. The best practice is to take existing movies and figure out how you’d boil them down if you had to write a logline.

None of these would classify as John’s Best Effort, but they get the point across:

* [Groundhog Day](http://imdb.com/title/tt0107048/combined) — Bill Murray gets stuck repeating the same day, again and again. Every day, he tries to do something different, but the next morning everything resets to the way it was.

* [Shrek](http://imdb.com/title/tt0126029/combined) — A grumpy ogre and his hyperactive donkey have to save a princess. The world is made up of all the different fairy tale characters, like the Three Little Pigs and the Gingerbread Man.

* [Clueless](http://imdb.com/title/tt0112697/maindetails) — An airheaded but ultimately well-meaning Beverly Hills teenager tries to “makeover her soul” in a riff on Jane Austen’s Emma.

Accept the fact that some movies aren’t so easily summarized. For instance, we never did come up with a logline for Go which sounded actually funny.

Note: Looking up the IMDb summaries for these examples proves that anonymous posters can do better than the pros. For Shrek:

A reclusive ogre and a chatterbox donkey go on a quest to rescue a princess for a tyrannical midget lord.

Damn. It’s the “tyrannical midget lord” that makes it funny.