John August

QandA

Writing a biography

Film Industry, QandA

I’m submitting a script to a screenplay competition and to
an agent that accepts unsolicited material. Both ask for a biography. Common
sense says to keep it short and sweet–and spell everything correctly. But
I’m finding it very hard to write anything other than a two or three sentence
summation of my education and career (none of which is entertainment related
and all of which is surely boring). I suppose I could add something about my
interests or goals as a writer, but does anyone care? Any advice or guidance
would be greatly appreciated.

–MA

Here’s my all-purpose screenwriter bio. Change the relevant details
to match.

Mark
Anonymous hails from Osh Kosh, Pennsylvania, the zipper capital of
the world.

The son of average suburbanites, he found escape
from the crushing sameness of early-90’s America through the films of Pedro Almodovar
and Lars Van Trier. Inspired to become a rule-breaking filmmaker, he
dedicated himself to learning the rules so that he might break them more
fully and artistically. To this end, he earned a bachelor’s degree
in communications from Oberlin, where he made stylish and inscrutable
films. Forced to take a slave-job at The Gap in order to repay monumental
student loans, he turned his attention to screenwriting, hand-scribing
his first feature-length screenplay during
slow periods in Men’s
Wear.

That script wasn’t very good. However, his second screenplay, A SWIFTLY
TILTING DOUGHNUT, turned out great. A light-hearted riff on Joseph Conrad’s
HEART OF DARKNESS, DOUGHNUT tells the story of a Krispy Kreme manager
sent to close an unprofitable store in the Florida panhandle.

Mark is 25 and lives in Pittsburg.

Finding time to write

QandA, Writing Process

I enjoy writing just as much as another person, but my time
is limited. I work 9-5 everyday and when I get home I am dead tired. I have
some good ideas for
a story/screenplay but have trouble finding the time. Do you have any advice
on how I can stretch my time out in order to start writing again?

–Kevin B Smith

Writing is now my full-time job, but I wrote my first few scripts while working
full-time. Outside of some wacky high-concept family movie (likely starring
either Eddie Murphy or Tim Allen), there’s simply no way to squeeze more time
into the day. So something has to give.

Some how-to-be-a-writer books will recommend you get up an hour earlier, or
stay up an hour later in order to write. If that works for you, God bless,
because I need every bit of sleep I can get.

You might be able to give up weekends. I ended up staying in a lot of Friday
and Saturday nights in order to write, which was a little pathetic and lonely
at the time, but hey. It worked.

One relatively safe bet is to give up television. It’s a giant time-suck,
and now that it’s summer, who needs it anyway? I’ve been known to make a sign
that says "NO," which I tape directly onto the TV screen. Other times,
I’ve rationed my TV viewing: one hour for every four pages written, or somesuch.

Delete all the games on your computer. That’s a no-brainer. And unplug your
internet connection.

When I was writing my first script, I was fortunate to be working a completely
brainless summer job at Universal, answering phones and making copies. I ended
up getting a lot of writing done. After work, I’d come home, eat some spaghetti
and start writing longhand, siting on the floor of my apartment. (Note: I had
almost no furniture, thus the floor.) I would take my PowerBook 180 into work,
then type up those pages on my lunch break. Repeat this process for four weeks,
and I’d written a script. As a bonus, I’d avoided banal office lunch conversation.

Everyone’s situation is different, so what worked for me may not work for
you, but my general point is that you need to actively clear time in your day
to write, which means giving up something.

Portraying "endurance"

QandA

I am working on a screenplay where I am trying to portray extreme endurance
on the part of the main character. The problem is I am afraid that my method
of illustrating this leads to a sort of monotony in my script. What creative
approaches could I use to portray redundancy while maintaining the momentum
of the story?

–Jonathan

If "endurance" is shown by having the character run for pages and
pages, then yes, I think you’re right to worry that your script will be monotonous.
But one of the amazing things about both movies and screenplays is that they
can compress space and time to great effect.

For example, let’s say you had your character run from New York City to Miami
without stopping. That’s pretty extreme endurance. If this action were supposed
to take five days, you’d probably want to show the passage of time in some
form: sunrises, sunsets, and shadows sweeping past in time-lapse. Maybe there
would be rain storms that come and go. If your runner were a man, maybe you’d
notice his beard growing.

Next, you’d need to show how far he’s running. You could cheese out and show
a map of the Eastern seaboard, with an animated line charting his progress.
Or, perhaps more cinematically, you could show his journey in relation to major
geographic icons: running across the Brooklyn Bridge, through the Washington
Mall, down the Georgia coast and into the heart of Miami’s hotel district.

Regardless of exactly how you show the journey, I suspect you could do it
all in less than a minute of screen time, which means less than a page of script.
That’s a pretty economical way to establish this information.

Got the story, but I can’t write

QandA, Treatments

Is it possible to sell a "story," "treatment," or "outline" instead
of the full script? I see separate story & screenplay credits on films
all the time. I’ve got some great ideas, but have no screenwriting skills and
I believe they would make great films. What can I do?

–Edward Brock

The "story" and "screenplay" credits you see on movies
are actually determined by the Writers Guild after the movie is finished, and
don’t necessarily mean that one person wrote a treatment and someone else wrote
the script. Often a person getting story credit did write a script, but a later
writer changed so much that only the essence of the story remained, thus reducing
the credit. (For the record, "Written by" means the writer receives
both "story" and "screenplay" credit. The rules are so
complicated and contentious I recommend you don’t even think about it unless
you’re lucky enough to get a studio movie produced.)

In Hollywood, a person with a great idea and no writing talent is called a
producer. Or a studio executive. Or a bag boy at Ralphs.

I’m being glib, but it’s true. Treatments or pitches from non-writers rarely
go anywhere. What can and does happen is that a person with a great idea pairs
up with a real writer and either (a) decides to work on it together, or (b)
somehow convinces a third party to pay the writer to write it. This is how
studios develop movies "in-house," and how a lot of producers function.

My advice? Find a writer. If there’s a known writer who’s perfect for it,
hunt her down through her agent. Or find someone who’s written a really good
script, maybe out of a screenwriting program, and convince them to do it. It
won’t be easy, but that’s how to do it.