John August

Recycled

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.)

Screenwriting wastes a lot of paper

QandA, Recycled, Writing Process

Do you print out your script pages as you go along, or do you wait until you have a completed draft before printing out the whole thing (assuming you’re using a word processor and not a typewriter.) There’s nothing more motivating to me than to see pages of script piling up, but then if I want to make a change to what I’ve written already there’s a potential for waste and I feel bad enough that we’re still using trees for paper instead of something more plentiful and efficient like cotton or hemp.

–Rob Workman
Saint Paul, MN

In the early days of ink-jet printers, there was a lot more incentive to economize: printing an entire script could take half an hour, and cost a few bucks’ worth of ink. Now, with fast-and-cheap laser printers, the temptation is to print a lot more. Fight it. The business of making movies already wastes a lot of paper — everything from call sheets, to budgets, to rainbow-colored script revisions. As a single screenwriter, you can at least make sure you’re not adding to the problem.

I tend to write first drafts longhand, scene by scene, and print out pages as they get typed up. Call it paranoid, but I like to have at least one hard copy in case my hard drive commits hara-kiri. So, for a normal first draft, that means about 240 pages — 120 hand-written, and 120 typed.

The real waste comes during countless drafts of the rewriting process. Here are some suggestions to keep it somewhat reasonable:

1. Only print what you need.
Before you hit Print, ask yourself if you really need the whole script, or whether you simply need a few pages. Often, your corrections are contained to just a few pages, and it’s easy to print only the range you need.

2. Double-up.
If you’re using Mac OS X, use the pull-down menu in the Print dialog box to select ‘Layout’. Set it for two pages, with a hairline border. (Confused? Here’s a screenshot.) You’ll end up with two pages side-by-side, and it’s perfectly readable. Your 120-page script is now sixty pages, and can be held together with a binder clip. (Never hand in a script printed this way; keep it for your own use.)

3. Use recycled paper.
HP makes a good paper that’s 30% post-consumer. Unfortunately, recycled paper rarely comes three-holed, but if you’re printing the two-page layout, that doesn’t matter.

4. Reuse the back sides.
I avoid printing scripts on the back sides of scripts — I get confused which pages are new. But script pages are perfectly good scratch paper for everything else you need to print.

5. Use .pdfs.
If you’re giving somebody your script to read, consider emailing them a .pdf rather than printing it out. These days, almost anyone can handle a .pdf file.

Even if you only implement a few of these suggestions, you can cut your paper use by 75%. Until they start making hemp copier paper, you’re doing your part to keep the trees in the forest where they belong.

(Originally posted January 20, 2005.)

Recycled articles

News, Recycled

One of the suggestions from the [survey](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2005/readers-speak-part-two) was to highlight previous articles from the archives. I agreed, because (a) the readership has grown quite a bit recently, and (b) the archives are kind of daunting right now.

So, every once in a while, I’ll be pulling old articles up to the front — generally entries that tie into the current discussion, and ones without a lot of comments attached to them. You’ll be able to spot these articles by the little green “recycled” logo on the right-hand side.

Does bad work spoil mine?

Psych 101, QandA, Recycled

questionmarkI work for a small production company.
While trying to break into the "next" (bigger)
level as a screenwriter, I work here as a reader. Basically, I spend a lot
of time writing coverages for awful scripts that never should have been written
in the first place. I often wonder what is going through some of these people’s
minds when they send this junk out.

I don’t really know when it happened, but at some point it
seems that everyone in the world decided they wanted to be screenwriters. My
question is this: does all that subpar work poison the water for the rest of
us truly
capable folks?

–Aaron Saylor

I hear you, brother.

I worked as a reader for about a year and a half, both at Tri-Star and at
a little production company based at Paramount. During that time, I read the
worst scripts of my life — horrible, horrible atrocities worse than a dozen
cable movies.

In writing coverage, half the time my plot summary was much clearer than the
script’s true narrative, and my comments section became an exercise in finding
creative ways to express the same underlying truth: this script is not a movie,
and this writer doesn’t know what he’s doing.

I got a taste of my own medicine later, when I slipped one of my scripts under
a pseudonym to an intern whose opinion I respected. His coverage lambasted
the screenplay and the untalented hack who created it. I actually got nauseous
reading his critique.

Since then, I’ve learned to temper my disgust for poorly written scripts,
and try to view them as the little lessons they are. Once you start looking
for the common problems, you can avoid these pitfalls in your own writing:

  • Bad scripts introduce ten characters in the first four pages,
    without giving you any real information about them, or making clear which ones
    are important.
  • In bad scripts, characters talk about events you just saw happen, which makes
    seeing them redundant.
  • In bad scripts, characters are always walking through doors, as if it’s a
    play where they need to make entrances and exits.
  • In bad scripts, characters do exactly what you expect they’re going to do.

What’s interesting is that many of these lessons can only be learned by reading
bad screenplays. In a good script, you’d never know what you were missing.
So rather than blaming these bum writers for doing terrible work, rejoice in
their suckiness, and remember that their low standards make your great script
all the more unusual.