John August

Search Results for: characters

Time jumps and oil drilling

Dead Projects, Projects, QandA, Television, Words on the page, Writing Process

questionmarkI’m writing a movie that makes a time jump about 90 pages in, meaning at the beginning I’ve got a couple of 10-year olds who’ll be about 18 at the end. That’s not my problem though, since the jump is unavoidable and casting different actors actually makes sense in this case.

My question is: What’s the best way to label the new characters/actors? I checked your Big Fish shooting script in which you used terms like “YOUNG EDWARD” — but do I have to do this, if the older (or younger) characters never turn up again? Because “ADULT CHRIS” or “ADULT GINA” sounds a bit stupid in German. Could I just keep the original name after pointing out the leap in time or would that cause confusion?

Might sound like an insignificant detail to you, but it’s been bothering me for some time now.

— Fabian
Germany

Yes, you need to label them differently, because people will actually get confused. They might not when they’re reading through it from page one, but when they’re going back through the script looking for a specific scene, they will need to know immediately whether they’re looking at an 18-year old or a 10-year old. And if you do make it to the production stage, that chance of confusion increases exponentially, because scenes will be scheduled and shot out of order.

Given where your time jump occurs, I’d label the adult characters as such, or give them slightly altered names. (The young version of CHRIS becomes CHRISTOPHER as an adult, etc.)

. . .

questionmarkA two part question: I’m currently writing a spec script, a legal thriller set in Washington D.C. While I started it over a year ago — outlining, making notes, character sketches — I shelved it due to other work demands. Now I find that the subject matter (domestic oil drilling) is gaining topical currency in a way that I didn’t anticipate when I started out. Which is both good and bad.

A) Should I continue to write it, knowing that there is a strong possibility that it may be old hat by the time I finish (6 months to a year for a passable first draft. I have a day job!)? Or should I forge ahead in the hope that it may still hold some topical currency by the time I’m finished? And…

B) Since much of the story has to do with the law, and the subversion of a particular piece of legislation, how do I go about acquiring some fluency with legal protocol without enrolling in Law School? I’m a naturalized American citizen, so there is still lots I don’t know about the American justice system. If you were to approach material like this, where would you begin in order to make it at least plausible? Would you line up a couple of friendly D.C. lawyers and try to get some interviews? Try for an internship at the Dept of Justice? This material needs to be very well-executed for it not to be laughable (I’m after The Firm, not Pearl Harbor), and I’m anxious that the plot details at least make sound legal sense.

— Mark
New York

Yes, write it. No, don’t take an internship at the DoJ. But you’re going to need to hang out in D.C. to get the answers you want.

The kind of research you need to do will be an ongoing part of the process. You research; you find something that helps your story; you hit a roadblock; you do more research. You’re looking for believable dialogue, but more importantly, a believable approach to the situation you’re presenting in your story. That’s why you need to find someone (better yet, a couple of someones) who approximates the kind of characters you have in your story.

When I was writing the pilot for [D.C.](http://johnaugust.com/library), I wandered around Capitol Hill introducing myself to young staffers, and got them talking about their jobs. A few were interesting enough that I kept up with them via email, and could easily ask them a question about their lives on or off the clock. The show wasn’t staggeringly realistic — it had roughly as much verisimilitude as Felicity — but the characters were doing and saying the kinds of things they would in real life. (Just faster, and with better hair.)

From what you’re describing, it sounds like you need attorneys and staffers who handle energy legislation. You can find them. If you know anybody working in Washington, you’re probably two degrees of separation from someone in that job. And if you don’t know anyone there, hop on the train and head to the Hawk n’ Dove bar at happy hour. Two beers in, you’re likely to meet someone who knows someone.

Why it’s called “Go,” and not “Call”

Go, Projects

IMDb has message boards for every film and every filmmaker. I would strongly advise you to __never read them__, and in particular, don’t read them for any film you’ve worked on. You will walk away feeling a little worse about yourself and humanity.

But today, while looking up the name of an actor in Go, I ignored my own advice and clicked on one of the message board threads, which brought up an [interesting point](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139239/board/flat/99293237):

> Did anyone else notice that even though the film was shot in 1999 and focused on young people that no mobile phones appeared in the film? Unless I missed something it seems like this was a deliberate decision by makers of the film. I like the choice.

The stripclub guy who Simon shot may have used a mobile phone to call the Riviera to find out which room Simon and his friends were staying in. I don’t recall, it may have been a carphone. It still doesn’t explain why no other characters in the movie use a mobile when they had the opportunity.

The answer, of course: the film came out in early 1999, and cellphones weren’t yet ubiquitous in Los Angeles. They existed, to be sure, but they were relatively expensive and rare. We hadn’t even settled on the lingo yet. Here’s how I describe one early in the script:

  • Adam’s friend ZACK is behind him in line, YABBERING into a cellular phone.

    • Even my mother wouldn’t call it a “cellular phone” today. Later, Simon uses the current term to refer to the Ferrari’s built-in phone:

  • SIMON
  • It’s a cell phone. They can trace where we are even if we don’t answer.

    • (There’s still little consistency between cell phone, cell-phone and cellphone.)

    Whatever you call them, there are two such phones in the movie: Zack’s and Vic Jr.’s. Ronna uses a pager, which is as much as she could believably afford as a grocery store cashier with rent trouble. ((I can’t find the link, but I recently read an article about how bad we are at remembering when technologies started. How long have fax machines been around? How about DVDs? When did television go color? If it happened during our lifetime, we can often match it up to a specific purchase; the first DVD I owned was Go. But my three-year old daughter will have no idea whether the fax came before the telephone. In fact, she may never really understand a fax. It’s been six months since we’ve sent one.))

    Nearly ten years later, it seems natural to expect that every character in Go would have a cellphone. Their modern-day equivalents would. And the story would have had to change. Some examples:

    – Todd would have called Simon to check on Ronna before selling her anything.

    – Claire would have called Ronna, rather than paging her, while stuck at Todd’s apartment. Todd would have insisted on knowing why there was such a delay.

    – The conversation between Todd and Simon wouldn’t have necessarily happened in the hotel room.

    – Todd would have called Simon the moment he realized the pills were swapped.

    – As originally scripted, Ronna was conscious after being hit by the Miata. She could have called Claire, Manny, or 911 to get help.

    – After the shooting at the strip club, Simon and Marcus would have called Tiny and Singh, warning them to pack up.

    – Simon could have (but might not have) called Todd to warn him about the Vics.

    – Claire would have called Ronna after being ditched at the rave.

    – Ronna and Claire would have tried calling Mannie when looking for him.

    Looking at this list, I’m really glad there weren’t a lot of cellphones when making Go. None of these changes are horrible, but they demand extra work to explain why characters aren’t just picking up the phone. Getting people face-to-face in movies is crucial, and cellphones work against that.

    But cellphones are better than texting, which is what these characters would have been doing if the movie were made in 2008. Texting is not just uncinematic, it’s anti-cinematic: characters sitting still while twiddling their thumbs. I’ve yet to see it done effectively in movies or TV.

    Simple is better than accurate

    Charlie, Projects, Words on the page

    A story in today’s LA Times about [chocolate-making](http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fo-chocolate16-2008jul16,0,1682095.story?track=rss) got me thinking about Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and an error I deliberately introduced. Early in the tour of the factory, Wonka says…

  • WONKA
  • The cocoa bean happens to be the thing from which chocolate is made.

    • Wrong. The right word is cacao — it’s not cocoa [until it’s partially processed](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocoa), and as a globe-trotting master chocolatier, Wonka would certainly use the right word. And in the book, Roald Dahl does:

    > The cacao bean, which grows on the cacao tree, happens to be the thing from which chocolate is made. You cannot make chocolate without the cacao bean. The cacao bean is chocolate. I myself use billions of cacao beans every week in this factory.

    So why change it? Why be wrong?

    Because cacao is a weird word. It’s sounds like it’s supposed to be funny, but it’s not actually funny in context. Then Wonka uses the word six times in the scene. You generally repeat funny things, so when you repeat something that wasn’t funny to begin with, the stench of failed joke begins to waft in.

    Worse, cacao is confusing. It demands explanation, but the explanation isn’t particularly rewarding. As the audience, we don’t really want to learn about chocolate. We want to see bad things happen to terrible children.

    Cocoa is a synonym for hot chocolate, so it seems reasonable that you’d make chocolate from cocoa beans. For the movie version, changing “cacao” to “cocoa” made it easier to focus on the point of the scene (a flashback to Wonka meeting the Oompa-Loompas), and concentrate on finding things that were actually funny. It’s wrong, but it’s right.

    And that’s true in this general rule:

    __In screenwriting, simplicity should almost always trump accuracy.__

    I’m going to break that statement down into parts so that it doesn’t get misconstrued.

    In screenwriting — I’m only talking about writing for film and television, stories that race ahead at 24 frames per second, give or take. In novels and playwriting, the writer has the time and opportunity to be far more precise and thorough. And in journalism, accuracy is a fundamental responsibility. The journalist’s challenge is to make that accuracy comprehensible to the readership.

    simplicity — Simplicity is not the same as idiocy, or pandering. If you’re making a thriller set in the world of international espionage, you can’t have the computer expert “dial in” to something. We need to believe that the expert is an expert, that security is difficult, and yet be able to understand roughly what he’s doing. Consider the crew in the first two Alien movies. We don’t know how their spaceships work, but it’s easy to follow what they’re working on.

    should almost always trump — Sometimes, the complicated-but-accurate version is more rewarding than the simple version, so be wary of smoothing out all the wrinkles. And screenwriters aren’t absolved of societal responsibility, either. For example, the pilot episode of Eli Stone had a plotline about childhood vaccines that was [widely](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/arts/television/23ston.html?_r=1&oref=slogin) [criticized](http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-01-28-eli-stone-side_N.htm) for its inaccuracies. If there wasn’t time in the episode for a more thorough exploration of the issue, another case should have been substituted, because what remained was inflammatory and (debatably) dangerous.

    accuracy — In archery and life, accuracy is measured by how close you come to the target. For movies and television, the target is pretty wide. Looking back at the [derivative challenge](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2008/derivativ), it was more important to give a sense of why derivatives exist than explain exactly what they were. For a medical drama, we’ve come to accept a certain amount of time compression, allowing characters to recover from surgery in much less time than they actually would. But if a character became pregnant and gave birth in the same day, we’d protest. That’s not just inaccurate, it’s implausible, and plausibility is a much higher standard.

    Granted, even plausibility takes a back seat in Charlie. (c.f. Great Glass Elevator)

    How to cut pages

    Big Fish, Charlie's Angels, Dead Projects, Formatting, Go, How-To, Words on the page

    One page of screenplay translates to one minute of movie. Since most movies are a little under two hours long, most screenplays should be a little less than 120 pages.

    That’s an absurd oversimplification, of course.

    One page of a battle sequence might run four minutes of screen time, while a page of dialogue banter might zip by in 30 seconds. No matter. The rule of thumb might as well be the rule of law: any script over 120 pages is automatically suspect. If you hand someone a 121-page script, the first note they will give you is, “It’s a little long.” In fact, some studios will refuse to take delivery of a script over 120 pages (and thus refuse to pay).

    So you need to be under 120. ((But! But! you say. In the Library)), both Big Fish and Go are more than 120 pages. I’m not claiming that longer scripts aren’t shot. I’m saying that if you go over the 120 page line, you have to be doubly sure there’s no moment that feels padded, because the reader is going in with the subconscious goal of cutting something. ((Go is 126 pages, but it’s packed solid. Big Fish meanders, but those detours end up paying off in the conclusion.))

    Which usually means you need to cut.

    Before we look at how to do that, let’s address a few things you should __never__ do when trying to cut pages, no matter how tempting.

    * **Don’t adjust line spacing.** Final Draft lets you tighten the line spacing, squeezing an extra line or two per page. Don’t. Not only is it obvious, but it makes your script that much harder to read.

    * **Don’t tweak margins.** With the exception of Widow Control (see below), you should never touch the default margins: an inch top, bottom and right, an inch-and-a-half on the left. ((Page numbers, scene numbers, “more” and “continued” are exceptions.))

    * **Don’t mess with the font.** Screenplays are 12-pt Courier. If you try a different size, or a different face, your reader will notice and become suspicious.

    All of these don’ts could be summarized thusly: Don’t cheat. Because we really will notice, and we’ll begin reading your script with a bias against it.

    There are two kinds of trims we’ll be making: actual cuts and perceived cuts. Actual cuts mean you’re taking stuff out, be it a few lines, scenes or sequences. Perceived cuts are craftier. You’re editing with specific intention of making the pages break differently, thus pulling the end of the script up. Perceived cuts don’t *really* make the script shorter. They just make it seem shorter, like a fat man wearing stripes.

    Fair warning: Many of these suggestions will seem borderline-OCD. But if you’ve spent months writing a script, why not spend one hour making it look and read better?

    Cutting a page or two
    —-
    At this length, perceived cuts will probably get you where you need to be. (That said, always look for bigger, actual cuts. Remember, 117 pages is even better than 120.)

    **Practice Widow Control.** Widows are those little fragments, generally a word or two, which hog a line to themselves. You find them both in action and dialogue.

    HOFFMAN

    Oh, I agree. He’s quite the catch, for a fisherman. Caught myself trolling more than once.

    If you pull the right-hand margin of that dialogue block very, very slightly to the right, you can often make that last word jump up to the previous line. Done right, it’s invisible, and reads better.

    I generally don’t try to kill widows in action lines unless I have to. The ragged whitespace helps break up the page. But it’s always worth checking whether two very short paragraphs could be joined together. ((I try to keep paragraphs of action and scene description between two and six lines.))

    **Watch out for invisible orphans.** Orphans are short lines that dangle by themselves at the top of page. You rarely see them these days, because by default, most screenwriting programs will force an extra line or two across the page break to avoid them. ((While I rag on the program, Final Draft is smart enough to break lines at the period, so sentences always stay intact. It’s a small thing, but it really helps the read. Other programs may do it now, too.))

    Here’s the downside: every time the program does this, your script just got a line or two longer. So anytime you see a short bit of action at the top of the page, see if there’s an alternate way to write it that can make it jump back to the previous page.

    **Nix the CUT TO:’s.** Screenwriters have different philosophies when it comes to CUT TO. Some use it at the end of every scene. Some never use it at all. I split the difference, using it when I need to signal to the reader that we’re either moving to something completely new story-wise, or jumping ahead in time.

    But when I’m looking to trim a page or two, I often find I can sacrifice a few CUT TO’s and TRANSITION TO’s. So weigh each one.

    Cutting five to ten pages
    —-
    At this level, you’re beyond the reach of perceived cuts. You’re going to have to take things out. Here are the places to look.

    **Remove unnecessary set-ups.** When writing a first act, your instinct is to make sure that everything is really well set up. You have a scene to introduce your hero, another to introduce his mom, a third to establish that he’s nice to kittens. Start cutting. We need to know much less about your characters than you think. The faster we can get to story, the better.

    **Get out of scenes earlier.** Look at every scene, and ask what the earliest point is you could cut to the next scene. You’ll likely find a lot of tails to trim.

    **Don’t let characters recap.** Characters should never need to explain something that we as the audience already know. It’s a complete waste of time and space. So if it’s really important that Bob know what Sarah saw in the old mill — a scene we just watched — try to make that explanation happen off-screen.

    For example, if a scene starts…

    BOB

    Are you sure it was blood?

    …we can safely surmise he’s gotten the necessary details.

    **Trim third-act bloat.** As we cross page 100 in our scripts, that finish line become so appealing that we often race to be done. The writing suffers. Because it’s easier to explain something in three exchanges of dialogue than one, we don’t try to be efficient. So you need to look at that last section with the same critical eyes that read those first 20 pages 100 times, and bring it up to the same level. The end result will almost always be tighter, and shorter.

    Cutting ten or more pages
    —-
    Entire sequences are going to need to go away. This happens more than you’d think. For the first Charlie’s Angels, we had a meeting at 5 p.m. on a Friday afternoon in which the president of the studio yanked ten pages out of the middle of the script. There was nothing wrong with those scenes, but we couldn’t afford to shoot them. So I was given until Monday morning to make the movie work without them.

    Be your own studio boss. Be savage. Always err on taking out too much, because you’ll likely have to write new material to address some of what’s been removed.

    The most brutal example I can think of from my own experience was my never-sold ([but often retitled](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2005/a-movie-by-any-other-name)) zombie western. I cut 75 pages out of the first draft — basically, everything that didn’t support the two key ideas of Zombie Western. By clear-cutting, I could make room for new set pieces that fit much better with the movie I was trying to make.

    Once you start thinking big-picture, you realize it’s often easier to cut fifteen pages than five. You ask questions like, “What if there was no Incan pyramid, and we went straight to Morocco?” or “What if instead of seeing the argument, reconciliation and breakup, it was just a time cut?”

    Smart restructuring of events can often do the work for you. A project I’m just finishing has several occasions in which the action needs to slide forward several weeks, with characters’ relationships significantly changed. That’s hard to do with straight cutting — you expect to see all the pieces in the middle. But by focussing on something else for a scene or two — a different character in a different situation — I’m able to come back with time jumped and characters altered.

    Look: It’s hard to cut a big chunk of your script, something that may have taken weeks to write. So don’t just hit “delete.” Cut and paste it into a new document, save it, and allow yourself the fiction of believing that in some future script, you’ll be able to use some of it. You won’t, but it will make it less painful.