John August

Search Results for: characters

Pardon the interruption

QandA, Words on the page

questionmarkHow do you write dialogue of one character interrupting another mid-sentence? I’ve seen it as (interrupting) next to the characters name, I’ve seen it below the name and I’ve seen it in the dialogue itself.

— Craig
Los Angeles

You have several choices. Use whichever one works best for the situation.

Truncating the first speaker’s line with double dashes (or an ellipsis) is common:

MATT

I simply can’t tell you how honored we are --

SUSAN

Swellingly!

MATT

Yes. We’re swollen with honor.

A parenthetical (interrupting) may be needed if it’s otherwise unclear that the second speaker is changing topics:

BAIN

No ship has ever navigated a subatomic fissure that size.

LUBOV

Then we’ll be the first. Ensign, bring us about, engines at fifty...

PINCHOT

(interrupting)

Plasma fragment! Dead ahead!

It’s also common for action to interrupt dialogue:

GIDEON

The Great Pigeon Army will never be defeated! Our dirty wings shall fill the sky, and our excrement stain the land!

A red laser light -- a sniper’s aim -- glows on Gideon’s feathered chest. His compatriots COO in alarm.

GIDEON (CONT’D)

Never more will we beg for the baker’s scraps, those piteous crumbs of...

Gideon’s LIEUTENANT WHISPERS into his ear. Gideon looks down at the dot on his chest. He releases a squirt of white from his tailfeathers.

No one stole your idea

Rights and Copyright

I have very little patience for accusations that someone “stole my idea for a movie.” Or a TV show. Or an [episode of Grey’s Anatomy](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2007/she-was-mistaken).

Such complaints are common. Sometimes, it becomes a copyright lawsuit. More often, it’s a campaign of whispers. As noted in the aforelinked post:

> A while back, a screenwriting colleague was dealing with a guy who was claiming on message boards that a certain blockbuster was stolen from his script. The “proof?” One of the characters had the same name. Basically, the guy was arguing that the screenwriter had changed the plot, the setting, the character’s motivations — pretty much everything but this one character’s name. It’s hard to claim that a conspiracy is both thorough and lazy.

In almost all these cases, the question fails once you consider the [silent evidence](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2007/silent-evidence): if the script in question is just as similar to a dozen other unproduced scripts, it’s hard to claim infringement, legally or spiritually.

When these cases make it to court, studios will often do the back-of-envelope calculations and decide it’s more cost effective to settle than fight. Any case you put before a jury is a case you can lose. The plaintiff’s attorneys know this, so they will forego upfront fees in exchange for a piece of the settlement.

So I was heartened to see that last week, a studio decided to fight and won. The case involved a lawsuit over the Jane Fonda/Jennifer Lopez comedy Monster-in-Law. Recaps Eriq Gardner for THR’s [law blog](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/blogs/thr-esq/woman-owes-900k-failing-convince-74454):

> Not only did Gilbert [the plaintiff] lose, with the judge finding “vast differences in characters, plot, mood and theme” from her script and the film’s script, but her claims were deemed so unworthy and motivated by “bad faith” that the judge last month ordered Gilbert to pay the defendant’s legal tab.

That legal tab? $894,983.

Ouch.

I don’t know that the result will have much of a chilling effect on future litigants, but I hope it will embolden some studio lawyers to fight back.

These bogus claims of idea theft feed pernicious myths about Hollywood:

1. That movie ideas have much worth independent of execution.
2. That writers and writing are secondary to the idea.
3. That big ideas emerge unique and fully-formed without antecedent.

Additionally, these lawsuits obscure the very real ways working screenwriters find their ideas used without compensation. When developing a feature based on some existing material, it’s become common for producers to meet with six or eight writers to hear their takes. These bake-offs almost inevitably lead to cross-pollination, which raises the real question of whether writers are being used as unpaid R&D.

It’s this kind of intellectual appropriation — not “what the movie is” but “how to do it” — that is a much bigger issue in modern Hollywood. But because it’s subtle and hard to document, it doesn’t lend itself to headlines.

How much screen time does the hero get?

QandA, Story and Plot

questionmarkMy question deals with the amount of screen time the main character(s) receives in a script. In other words, how much screen time can be devoted to the main character(s)? Is there a unspecified limit as to how much face time a main character gets on screen?

The reason I ask is because I feel as if the viewer needs breaks from constantly seeing the main character(s) on screen.

For instance, the script that I am currently writing has two main characters that receive relatively the same amount of screen time. The two characters lead separate lives and do not meet until about page 60-65, of a planned 110 page script, where their lives intertwine.

So, is it feasible that these two characters are seen in every scene of the movie (be it that they share or do not share the scene together)? Or is it better to develop minor characters that serve as breaks in the film which would serve the purpose of moving the story forward as well as give the viewer a break from seeing the two main characters on screen?

— Nick
Long Island, New York

Your hero can be on-screen 100% of the time, as Ryan Reynolds is in Buried. There’s no rule that you need scenes centered around other characters.

In fact, many high-concept comedies focus almost exclusively on their heroes. Consider Groundhog Day or Liar, Liar. There’s hardly a scene in which the hero isn’t front-and-center.

But it’s true that in most stories, you’re going to want something else to cut away to: a villain, a supporting character, an asteroid headed this way. Cutting to something is a crucial part of pacing, and you generally gain more energy by cutting to something new than following a single character through a series of actions.

Part of planning your story is deciding which characters are allowed to take the wheel and drive scenes. In your case, it sounds like you’re ping-ponging between your two main characters, which is a well-accepted structure. As long as the story feels like it’s moving forward, your audience probably won’t object to the distribution of screen time.

Premise pilots

Ops, Television

If you’re writing the pilot episode of a TV series, you have a choice to make: will this episode be more-or-less typical for the series, or will it be The Beginning?

The latter are called premise pilots, because they establish the underlying premise of the series — how it all came to be. In screenplay-speak, premise pilots contain the inciting incident of the entire series. Without this event, the series would be fundamentally different.

Many of the pilots you remember were premise pilots:

* Lost: The plane crashes on the island.
* Moonlighting: Dave meets Maddie.
* Remington Steele: Con-man assumes role of fictional detective.
* Buffy: Buffy moves to Sunnydale, meets friends.
* Angel: Angel moves to Los Angeles.
* Six Feet Under: Father dies, leaving funeral business to his sons.
* Frasier: Dad moves in.
* Heroes: An eclipse reveals people with superpowers.
* Arrested Development: Father arrested.
* 30 Rock: Liz meets Jack and hires Tracy.
* Futurama: Fry awakens in the future.
* Desperate Housewives: The narrator kills herself.
* Star Trek (TNG): Characters meet for first time.
* Star Trek (DS9): Sisko takes over as commander.
* Star Trek (Voyager): Ship stranded in the Delta Quadrant.

Other shows start with non-premise pilots that could have just as easily been episode four:

* Star Trek (TOS) (Both the Kirk and Pike versions).
* South Park
* The Office (British and U.S.)
* Mad About You
* The Simpsons
* Gilmore Girls
* Seinfeld
* Law & Order

Remember: a premise pilot doesn’t mean introducing the setup to the audience. A premise pilot is about what’s new *inside* the world of the show. It’s the big thing that’s changed which marks this The Beginning.

For shows that last several seasons, it may become easier to argue that the events of the pilot weren’t fundamental to the premise. For example, if you only watch the first season of Cheers, it seems like a premise pilot, since it is the first time Sam and Diane meet. But several seasons in, it’s clear that Sam and Diane’s relationship isn’t fundamental to the show. ((In fact, Cheers is a One New Guy pilot.))

By the same logic, True Blood feels like a premise pilot now — Bill and Sookie meet — but as the show has evolved, it’s easy to see other moments that could have been the starting point.

Why this matters
—-

Networks hate premise pilots. Studios, too. They will flatly tell you that they don’t want to make premise pilots. They may offer a few reasons why, but one stands above rest:

**Premise pilots don’t feel like the show.** It’s often hard to get a sense how a “normal” episode of the show will function based on a premise pilot. Watching fifteen pilots, the network wants to pick the shows it feels it understands. They want to know what episode eight will be like. That’s hard to do with a premise pilot.

So studios and networks will insist that they don’t want premise pilots. But secretly, they do: roughly half the new shows every fall begin with a premise pilot. The Good Wife is a premise pilot. Same with Glee, Mike and Molly, Undercovers, The Event, Vampire Diaries, Outsourced, Hawaii 5-0 and $#*! My Dad Says.

In fact, outside of true procedurals (body-of-the-week like CSI) and family shows, it’s rare to find a series that doesn’t start with something of a premise pilot. The trick may be to do it less overtly, introducing one small-but-important change in the world rather declaring this day one.

In the pilot episode of Friends, Rachel arrives at Central Perk in a wedding dress, having bailed on her nuptials. If this was called The Jennifer Aniston Show, it would clearly be a premise pilot. But because the six primary characters already had relationships — Ross and Monica already knew Rachel — I’d argue that it falls in a middle ground I’ll call **One New Guy.** You’re introducing a new member to an existing group.

The pilot for Modern Family includes Mitchell and Cameron presenting their daughter Lily to the rest of the extended family, but if she had been introduced in episode four or ten or twenty, the basic dynamics of the show would have been the same. Everyone already knew each other. The arrival of Lily made a good starting point for the audience, but it wasn’t the start of the family.

Similarly, Adam Scott joins the catering company in the pilot of Party Down. Structurally, the episode works like any other, just that characters are introducing themselves to him.

Both of these are examples of One New Guy. In Party Down, the newbie is more central to the action, but it’s not his show. You could do an episode without him, but you probably wouldn’t do an episode that focused on him but not the rest of the cast.

I’ve written one pilot of each type. D.C. is clearly a premise pilot: the gang meets and moves into the house. Alaska is a One New Guy, with a new prosecutor joining the team. Ops is very deliberately an ordinary episode, with the company already up and running.

You can find all three in the [Library](http://johnaugust.com/library).

If you take away nothing else from this, let me stress again that a premise pilot isn’t about setting up the characters or world — every pilot has to let the audience figure out who’s who and what’s what. A premise pilot is about Something Happening that marks the pilot as the beginning.