John August

QandA

Formatting the one-sided phone conversation

Formatting, General, QandA

questionmarkI’m curious about your format for writing a one-sided phone conversation.

I’ve seen it done in so many different ways now, that I have no idea if there is a more uniform way of doing it, or a preferred way.

I’ve seen…

KEVIN

(on phone)

I know it’s your birthday…I can’t make it…Look, that’s not my problem.

or…

KEVIN

(on phone)

I know it’s your birthday…

(listens)

I can’t make it.

(listens)

Look, that’s not my problem.

Then, I’ve seen some similar to above, but filled with (beat) instead.

Is there one correct way to do it?

— Kris
New York City

There’s no one “right” way, but I tend to choose the first option, since space is always at a premium. The only time to break out the parentheticals is if something really is changing on Kevin’s side of the conversation: the tone, the intent or the direction of the conversation.

You’ll also need a parenthetical (or a separate action line) if Kevin is speaking to someone on-screen and on the phone at the same time.

For instance, here’s an exchange from Go:

GAINES

(on phone)

It’s called Mary Xmas. Mary like a chick…Like her name is Mary, not like you marry her. You fucking moron…I dunno, some warehouse shit.

(to Claire)

Is this gonna be cool?

CLAIRE

Yeah, I guess.

GAINES

(on phone)

My friend Claire here says it’s going to be a kick-ass-fucking-time…What, you know her?

(to Claire)

It’s your buddy Simon. He’s in Vegas.

CLAIRE

I know.

GAINES

She knows…Hell, I dunno…

(looks at Claire)

Maybe…Yeah, well save a load for me big boy…Whatever.

Read lots of bad scripts

Film Industry, Psych 101

Screenwriter/blogger Bryan ‘Locke’ Naegele speaks the truth: it’s just as important to read bad writing as good.

The first reason to read bad scripts is to constantly expose yourself to what doesn’t work. Don’t learn from your own mistakes, learn from others. That’s my motto. That way yours are much more manageable because they’re fewer. You become hyper-aware of flat characters, shotty dialogue, predictability, clichés, etc.

I assume “shotty” is a cross between “shoddy” and “shitty.” I like it.

I worked as an intern-slash-reader at a little Paramount production company during my first semester of graduate school, and the contrast between the crappy scripts I read there and the great scripts I read for class was really illuminating. And encouraging on some level. I knew I could never write as well as Lawrence Kasdan, but I could easily write better than the schmucks I had to write coverage on.

So, take Bryan at his word.

Theory #1

QandA, Recycled, Story and Plot

Why does it seem that there are maybe 6 templates for Hollywood movies? As
a writer you pick one of those, fill in the check boxes, and poof the next
movie of the week. Is it because of the money to be made, or a lack of talented
writers getting their scripts to the right people, or is it due to producers
and directors not getting the ‘picture’, or is it because those mentioned above
don’t really give a rats butt about the people going out to see a movie?

–Niall

While I can’t offer an apologia for everything that is wrong with the state
of film, I can suggest a few theories for this nagging sense of sameness you
feel about movies. As I started writing this column, it got so long that I
needed to break it into two pieces.

Before I start, I should stress that this isn’t a Hollywood-specific problem;
if you look at the combined film output of France or Germany or India you’re
going to find the same percentage of mindless retreads. Nor is this a recent
problem. To me, the only thing more torturous than the slow pace of most movies
in the 1940’s and 50’s is their utter predictability.

Theory 1: There really are only a few basic plots.

While I don’t support the kind of reductionism you see in a lot of film books,
which boil down the entire canon of Western literature into three or seven
or thirteen plots (Revenge, Fatal Love, etc.), the truth is that for any scenario
you create, there’s only a few ways it’s going to resolve. While there might
be many detours and diversions along the way, the course of your story is going
to end up at one of several possible outcomes.

For instance, let’s say you’re writing a movie about a young woman who is
looking for her father. All the details of the story – why she’s looking for
him, how long he’s been gone, the nature of their relationship, the setting,
the obstacles, the other characters involved – these details make the story
unique, and hopefully interesting. But from the minute the movie begins, we
know there’s only two possible outcomes: either she finds him, or she doesn’t.
"Aha!" you say. The only reason we know the two possible outcomes
is because we’ve been told she’s looking for her father. If we didn’t say that
at the start of the movie, it wouldn’t be so predictable. And you’re absolutely
right. But the movie would also be incredibly, annoyingly frustrating. The
next time you’re in a movie theater squirming around and checking your watch,
ask yourself, "Do I know what the main character is trying to do?" More
likely than not, you’ll answer no. That’s why the movie seems to be wandering
around aimlessly, because it hasn’t given you any sense of where you’re going,
or how to know when you get there.

Are there exceptions? Sort of. Last year’s BEING JOHN MALKOVICH and AMERICAN
BEAUTY both seemed to get by without the usual goal-driven plotting. But AMERICAN
BEAUTY actually went through a lot of changes in the editing room to give it
more set-up than it originally had: the opening was scrapped completely and
a voice-over was added from Kevin Spacey talking about his death, letting the
audience know from the start the movie was going to be about Lester’s transformation
and murder.

As far as BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, the movie was incredibly inventive, with good
characters and interesting themes. But I know I wasn’t the only one getting
restless by hour two, simply because I had no idea where it was going. I didn’t
need to know how the story would end, just that it would end. It became so arbitrary, it felt like you could cut it off at any point.
Of course, all this is only talking about the rough structure of movies, not
the details that make them unique and vibrant or hackneyed and cliché.
In the next column, I’ll talk about Theory 2: Audiences want hamburger.

(Originally posted in 2003.)

Fixing double-spaces after periods

Formatting

Before I was a screenwriter, I worked in graphic design, with a font collection that was the envy of my dorm floor. So it’s life’s cruel joke that I now make my living in 12-pt. Courier.

Modern typefaces are designed to look best with a single space after the period which ends a sentence. (Or the [full stop](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_stop), for the British in the room.) Courier, however, is not such a typeface. As a monospace font, it looks best with two spaces after the period.

When writing a script, it’s pretty easy to type two spaces sometimes, one space other times. Before printing the “final” draft, you could scroll through the whole document, looking for periods with only one space. But it’s much easier to use Find and Replace.

This trick works in pretty much any word processor, including both Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter.

**Converting to two spaces**

1. Choose “Find…”
2. In the Find field, type . followed by two spaces.
3. In the Replace field, type . followed one space.
4. Click Replace All. You should get a dialog box that shows a large number of changes. Yes, you’ve just made every sentence wrong. What’s important is that they’re all wrong in exactly the same way.
5. Back in the Find field, type . followed one space.
6. In the Replace field, type . followed by two spaces.
7. Click Replace All.
8. Look through the script. You should have two spaces after every period. However, you may find that you also have two spaces in case where you shouldn’t (like after “Mr.” or “Dr.”).
9. If so, Find “Mr.” followed by two spaces, and Replace with “Mr.” followed by one space.
10. Repeat as needed with “Dr.” or “Mrs.”

In my opinion, Courier looks best with two spaces after the colon as well. The same technique works.

In programs that allow it, a technically-savvy wordsmith could use [regular expressions](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expressions) to do all of this in one step, matching the period only in cases where it is followed by exactly one space. But considering this whole process generally takes less than 20 seconds, I’m not sure it’s worth it.

If you find yourself writing a letter or some other document in a non-Courier font, you may want to do just the opposite, converting two spaces to one. That’s a lot easier.

**Converting to one space**

1. Choose “Find…”
2. In the Find field, type . followed by two spaces.
3. In the Replace field, type . followed by one space.
4. Click Replace All.
5. Keep clicking Replace All until there are no more replacements. (It may take a few times through.)
6. Look through the script. You should have one space after every period.