John August

Rant

Permitted filmmaking

Film Industry, Rant, Rights and Copyright, Sundance

Writer/director [James Ponsoldt](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1242054/), one of the fellows at this summer’s Sundance Filmmakers Lab, emailed me some information about new regulations on filming in New York City’s five boroughs. Under the proposed rules ([.pdf](http://www.nyclu.org/pdfs/nyc_photo_permits_proposed_rules_052507.pdf)), a city permit would be needed for:

* Two people with any camera, shooting in a public location (defined as any area within 100 feet of where filming begins) for a half hour or longer, even if the camera is hand-held, including set up and breakdown.

* Five people with one tripod, shooting in a public location for over 10 minutes, including set up and breakdown.

I have no doubt that the rules are well-intentioned. Anyone who’s lived in New York or Los Angeles has dealt with the inconvenience of film crews — that’s why there’s a permit process. But there’s a difference between a true film shoot, with its trucks and dollies and light stands, and two guys with a videocamera.

Would these rules really get enforced? It’s hard to say. But even rarely-used laws are a Bad Thing if they criminalize free expression. Videotaping a protest march could be deemed illegal under these rules.

Thanks to sites like YouTube, video has become the new generation’s media of choice. It’s their printing press, their pamphlet, their church-door-upon-which-to-nail-theses. Placing undue restrictions on video creation undermines the spirit of the First Amendment. The Mayor’s office needs to find a way to control the burden of filming (trucks, traffic, noise) without restricting expression.

[Picture New York](http://www.pictureny.org/) has more information about the proposed rules, including a petition.

As for Los Angeles (and other cities), I can’t say exactly what the current rules are. At USC, we had to get LA film permits for our student films. That was a university policy, and made sense given their concerns about liability and guild relations. (We were able to use SAG actors under a waiver.)

This was before the age of tiny, ubiquitous videocameras. You can now shoot a film without anyone realizing you’re shooting a film. If it’s you and a buddy with a tiny camera, should you really have to register with a governmental agency? I say no. And I hope that New York’s proposed rules wouldn’t make that mandatory.

Look out! He is a Spider-Pig

Film Industry, Projects, Rant, The Nines

I saw and quite enjoyed The Simpsons movie this weekend. But having just gotten the [MPAA rating](http://www.mpaa.org) for The Nines (“Rated R for language, some drug content and sexuality”), I was a little surprised-slash-envious to see the official rating for The Simpsons:

Rated PG-13 for irreverent humor throughout.

I’m fine with PG-13. There is yellow nudity, after all. But “irreverent humor throughout” feels like a marketing quote, not a rating. You could blow that up in 200-pt type on the newspaper ad: “The MPAA says… IRREVERENT HUMOR THROUGHOUT!”

On Parade

Parade, Rant

For a short time, I was running a bit where I would re-answer questions sent to Walter Scott’s Personality Parade™, one of the most odiously irrelevant and self-congratulatory bits of cultural fluff in the lint screen we call popular culture. While I was inspired to write it out of true anger at its existence, the column and my parody were mostly harmless wastes of time.

Then, one week, I decided to do an entire Q & A defending and exalting Britney Spears. Just because. Keep in mind, this was when Britney was a young mother of two, married to a sleazeball wannabe. (It’s hard to remember that once upon a time, a few months ago, we thought she was the stable one.) The piece was fairly toothless, but moderately funny, as I hoped most of those columns were.

But before I could post it, Britney went absolutely bonkers. And what I’d written suddenly felt like kicking a (recently-shaved-bald) puppy. So I junked it, along with the feature.

I’m reminded about this because of a story in today’s Variety: [“Parade of confusion after Lohan arrest”](http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117969283.html?categoryid=18&cs=1). As you’re no doubt sick of hearing, Lindsay Lohan was arrested early Tuesday on suspicion of drunken driving, but this coming Sunday’s issue of Parade tells a different story…

After extending her stay at luxury rehab facility Promises, Lindsay Lohan “seems committed to finally getting clean.”

So reports Parade magazine in this week’s edition of Walter Scott’s Personality Parade, the purveyor of feel-good celebrity news that, regrettably in this case, has a four-week lead time from when an item is written until it is published.

Excuse me if I mis-read — it takes __four weeks__ to come up with the bullshit you call Personality Parade? If Walter Scott were a real person, he’d be the laziest hack on the planet. Says a Parade spokesman:

“We’ll address this on the Parade.com website so we’ll have something that’s much more current,” the spokesman said. “This is an example of how difficult substance abuse can be, and we wish her the very best on her road to recovery.”

I wish nothing but plague and pestilence upon you, anonymous spokesman.

Lohan’s problems are her own. She’s seriously fucked up her career. But don’t blame her for messing up your faux-news column.

You work for a sham newspaper inserted inside actual newspapers. I can already predict your editorial memo going out on Monday: “From now on, we need to make sure anything the publicists feed us will still feel somewhat true four weeks from now. Concentrate on Disney stars and country singers.”

I’m urging the Los Angeles Times to drop Parade this week. You can, too. [Here’s the link.](http://www.latimes.com/services/site/la-comment-other-cf2,0,897028.customform?coll=la-navigation&sId=Other%20Questions)

Better yet, if your local paper includes Parade, let them know.

Is it too late to pull it out of the Sunday issue? They’ll say so. But it’s not too late to respond editorially, answering the question of why a newspaper would run a story they already know is inaccurate, and continue to support the inane ramblings of a publicist mouthpiece. I gave up on Parade. So should they.

And if you’re feeling so inclined, feel free to [Digg this](http://digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=http%3A%2F%2Fjohnaugust.com%2Farchives%2F2007%2Fon-parade&title=On+Parade).

Title page trouble with Final Draft .pdfs

How-To, Rant, Screenwriting Software, Software

Reader Josh C wrote in with one solution to a problem that’s been frustrating me for months. When you want to save a script as a .pdf, Final Draft won’t always include the title page. It’s frustratingly inconsistent. The obvious workaround is to save the title page as a separate file, which is what I’ve often done. But then you end up emailing two documents, increasing the confusion on the other end.

Josh was using Final Draft version 6.0.6.0. It turns out, the issue is whether the “Title Page…” window is open or closed.

1. Save your screenplay as normal (as a .fdr)

2. With your saved screenplay still open, go to Document > Title Page. A new, blank Title Page opens.

3. Fill in the blanks, then just CLOSE THE TITLE PAGE. This is the part that I got hung up on forever. If you leave the title page open, then try to save as a PDF, it won’t work. The Title page WON’T attach itself to the PDF if the Title Page is still open when you try to Save as. Just close the Title Page. It saves automatically to your screenplay.

4. With your screenplay still open, go to File > Save As — then select Adobe Acrobat Document (*pdf) – or whatever your computer says. Save the new PDF file somewhere and open it up. The Title Page should be attached at the top of the screenplay where it should be 🙂

In my tests with 7.1.3, the .pdf will also include the title page even if that window is still openHowever, if you haven’t closed or saved the title page, it won’t be updated until you do. — provided you have a [certain checkbox checked](http://oslo.instantservice.com/iskb/SearchAnswer.cfm?NodeID=181153) in “Preferences.”

checkboxYes, I’ll admit that I didn’t read the manual with version 7 of Final Draft. But this is a pretty questionable place to put this checkbox. After all, sometimes you’ll want to include the title page, sometimes you won’t. Does it really make sense to have this be an application-wide preference, housed in a panel that has nothing to do with printing, saving or the specific document you’re working on? It’s pretty much the last place I’d think to look for it.

What’s more, at least on the Mac, Final Draft is using the built-in .pdf facility of OS X. It’s basically just printing to a file.You can test this by choosing a two-page layout in the Print dialog box. The next time you choose to Save as PDF, you’ll get facing pages. Since it seems to be using the standard print architecture, you’d think that choosing the “Print Title Page” option in the Print dialog box would have some effect. It doesn’t. And that’s why it’s frustrating.On the Mac, you always have the option of using the “Save as PDF” function built into the Print dialog box. But I’ve never had any luck getting that to include a title page. My guess is that Final Draft treats the title page as a separate document. When you print to a traditional printer, you’ll notice a one-page progress dialog flash for a second. I think Final Draft is kicking out the title page as a distinct job. It never incorporates it into the “real” script.

Whenever I complain about Final Draft, I get a nice note from the developers asking me to help out with the next version, and a few emails from companies working on competing applications. So let me make it clear where I stand. Despite its annoyances, I end up using Final Draft because what it gets right generally outweighs what it gets wrong. There’s certainly some inertia on my part, but given a better alternative, I’d switch in a heartbeat. The shipping versions of Screenwriter, Montage and Celtx aren’t better, particularly when it comes to revisions.

I’m hoping the upcoming Screenwriter 6 gives Final Draft some real competition, because that’s what’s lacking. When we were cutting The Nines, I realized that editing software has benefitted tremendously from the battle between Avid and Apple, with new features, better interfaces, and dramatically lower prices. I started out a Final Cut Pro man, while my editor was firmly Avid. We had the luxury of both being right. Both systems are terrific, and I think that’s largely because of the competition.