After a month of [baby duty](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2005/two-big-debuts), it’s back to work. This seems the perfect time to take stock of all the projects I have out there, and figure out exactly what their status is. __Prince of Persia__ I get more [comments and suggestions](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2004/prince-of-persia-announced) about this project than any other. So let me clarify what I know, and what I don’t know. First, the movie is much more like The Sands of Time than Warrior Within. Second, we have no idea who will star in it, nor where we will shoot it. Third, that’s all I know. Or at least, all I can say. __Ops__ __The Eye__ __Father Knows Less__ __Untitled Broadway Musical__ __How to Eat Fried Worms__ [Bob Dolman](http://imdb.com/name/nm0231190/), who was brought in to rewrite the script after me, is directing. Producer [Mark Johnson](http://imdb.com/name/nm0425741/) called to tell me filming was going well. I haven’t read the shooting script — or any script at all — so I don’t know how much resemblance it bears to the movie I wrote so many years ago. __Charlie and the Chocolate Factory__ When I did Q&A’s for the film, many people asked if we were going to make a sequel, such as Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator. As far as I know, no. That was never in the plans. Tim and I have never talked about it. __Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride__ __Charlie’s Angels__ __Tarzan__ It’s frustrating, because Tarzan is one of the best things I’ve ever written. It’s certainly one of the most difficult. You have a hero who grows from an infant to a man, and doesn’t learn how to speak until page 40. A lot of it plays like a silent movie, yet it has big [Joseph Campbell-y hero themes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces) that I generally avoid, but which work great for a film like this. I really wanted this to be a trilogy. Now, I’d settle for a mono-gy. __Untitled Zombie Western__ __Fury__ __Alice__ Back in 2000, the project was set up at Dimension, with [Wes Craven](http://imdb.com/name/nm0000127/?fr=c2l0ZT1kZnx0dD0xfGZiPXV8cG49MHxrdz0xfHE9d2VzIGNyYXZlbnxmdD0xfG14PTIwfGxtPTUwMHxjbz0xfGh0bWw9MXxubT0x;fc=1;ft=20;fm=1) attached to direct. I wrote a long treatment — not a full script, as the Hollywood Reporter article states — and left the project under less-than-felicitous circumstances. But I’ve kept up with American McGee, who’s a friggin’ rock star. I have no idea whether the movie will incorporate any of the material from my treatment, or if the current incarnation even has the applicable rights. If you’re interested in tracking the progress on the project, [American’s site](http://americanmcgee.com) is your best bet. __Barbarella__ There were [rumors](http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/622/622650p1.html) recently that [Lindsay Lohan](http://imdb.com/name/nm0517820/) was going to play the part. I think that was just fanboy fantasy. Although, honestly, last-year’s Lindsay (the nice girl who was in [Mean Girls](http://imdb.com/title/tt0377092/)) would have been great. My agent got a call a few months ago from a producer who claimed to have the rights to Barbarella. I doubt he had all the right he thought he had, and he certainly didn’t have the right to my script, which is co-owned by Fox and Warner Bros. So I don’t see this getting made any time soon. (Although I would have said the same about How to Eat Fried Worms.) __Thief of Always__ __Untitled John August Thriller__ __Demonology__ __Fantasy Island__ __Fenwick’s Suit__ __Bad Hospital__ In my story, the protagonist is the main character; it’s his story. But everything is affected by this supporting character’s possession of “character far greater than that of a typical person.” Is it wheels off to have a main character and protagonist not be the hero — Trey We’re venturing into Dramatic Theory 101, so if you’re the type who begins squirming in your seat when professor-types talk about [Joseph Campbell](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Campbell) and character arcs, you can save yourself a lot of frustration by stopping after the following sentence: In most cases, “Hero,” “Main Character,” and “Protagonist” are the same character. Seriously, you can stop reading now. Here’s a nice article about [raising orphaned squirrels](https://www.squirrelsandmore.com/pages/basic-steps-to-taking-care-of-a-baby-squirrel). Now, for readers who are still with me, let’s try to come up with more specific definitions for these three terms, and explore why they may apply to different characters in certain stories. Hero Main Character Protagonist Now, remember, most times, one character is all three of these things. For example, Ripley in Aliens is clearly the Hero (fighting the monster), the Main Character (the story is mostly about her), and the Protagonist (she reluctantly joins the trip, but ends up descending to the depths to fight for her “daughter”). The same triple-aspect applies to Cher in Clueless, and John McClane in Die Hard. And it’s fine for movies to have “teams” of characters fulfiling these roles; in Charlie’s Angels, Dylan, Natalie and Alex are each Hero, Main Character and Protagonist. However, in some stories, the Hero, the Protagonist and the Main Character are not all the same person. One very current example is Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There’s no question that Charlie’s the Hero. You want to see him win that Golden Ticket, and for only good things to happen to him. Likewise, he’s also the Main Character — though Wonka’s a close second. While Charlie recedes into the background a bit during the factory tour, he’s still the main focus of the movie’s storytelling energies. When the Narrator talks, it’s mostly to fill in details about Charlie. However, Charlie is not a classic Protagonist. Charlie doesn’t grow or change over the course of the story. He doesn’t need to. He starts out a really nice kid, and ends up a really nice kid. In terms of Classical Dramatic Structure, that leaves us one Protagonist short, which leads to the biggest change in the screenplay versus the book (or the 1971 film). In our movie, Willy Wonka is the protagonist. He grows and changes. We see his rise and fall, along with his nervous breakdown during the tour. Charlie’s the one who’s always asking — ever so politely, in the Freddie Highmore Whisper(TM) — the questions that lead to Wonka’s flashbacks upon his rotten childhood. (In Classic Dramatic terms, that makes Charlie an Antagonist. Not to be confused with a Villain. Are you sure you don’t want to read about some [squirrels](http://www.squirrels.org/raising.html)?) As I pitched it to Tim: Charlie gets a factory, and Willy Wonka gets a family. It’s the whole want-versus-need thing. Charlie doesn’t need a factory. Wonka really needs a family. Otherwise, he’s going to die a giggling misanthropic weirdo. Assigning labels Playing “spot the protagonist” can be a good intellectual exercise — up to a point. As I started writing Charlie, asking “Who’s the protagonist?” led to some important decisions about the storytelling. But trying to pin firm labels on the characters in Go or Pirates of the Caribbean would only prove frustrating. If a story works, it works — regardless of whether characters are fulfilling their archetypal roles. So be wary of trying to wedge characters into defined classes, simply because that’s how they “should” fit. [ –Michael In Roald Dahl’s [book](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0375834605/), each of the four rotten kids (Veruca, Violet, Augustus and Mike) brings both of their parents on the tour of the factory. Charlie only bring Grandpa Joe, for reasons that are never entirely clear. According to the rules on the Golden Ticket, he’s allowed to bring two parents, but he doesn’t. When Tim Burton and I first sat down to talk about how we were going to adapt Dahl’s book for the screen, the two-parent issue was one of my first questions. In addition to being a little unfair to Charlie, having each of the rotten kids bring both parents presented a lot of problems. With a book, the reader can conveniently forget that Mrs. Teavee hasn’t said anything for a long time. In a movie, however, that character is always going to be on-screen. Which means she needs to be doing something, saying something. She has to interact with all the other characters in the scene, who in turn have to interact with each other, which steals focus from Charlie, Willy Wonka, and the rotten kids. Basically, twice the parents means everyone gets half as much to say and do. So we quickly decided that the rule on the Golden Ticket would be that every kid gets to bring one parent or guardian. No fuss, no muss. Then the question becomes, which parent goes with which kid? In my mind, piggy Augustus got that way because he had a mother who equated food with love. So Mrs. Gloop would be the first parent. We don’t learn much about her except that she and her husband own a sausage shop in Germany. Violet Beauregarde claimed to be the world record-holder in chewing gum, so we decided to make her hyper-competitive, her ego stoked by sports mom Ms. Beauregarde, herself a former baton champion. We never say anything about Violet’s father. Veruca Salt is a daddy’s girl gone wicked, manipulative and bossy. So it only made sense for her to bring her father, a British nut baron. Finally, there’s Mike Teavee. In Dahl’s book, he’s obsessed with TV westerns and shoot-em-up cop shows. Updating it a bit, we gave him violent videogames and a well-meaning but completely over-his-head father, who is literally bullied by his son. Even with just these four characters, it took work to find enough for everyone to do and say. In the Chocolate Room, for instance, we have to keep track of Willy Wonka, Charlie, Grandpa Joe, Augustus, Mrs. Gloop, Violet, Ms. Beauregarde, Veruca, Mr. Salt, Mike and Mr. Teavee. That’s eleven characters, not counting the Oompa-Loompas. If we’d added four more parents to the scene, we’d probably still be shooting it. has a long-ish article about [Corpse Bride](http://imdb.com/title/tt0121164/maindetails), interviewing both [Pamela Pettler](http://imdb.com/name/nm1017135/maindetails) and yours truly about the story and process. Pamela, [Caroline Thompson](http://imdb.com/name/nm0003031/) and I share writing credit on the movie, but I was never really clear who wrote what and when. From the article, it appears that Caroline wrote a detailed outline, while Pamela wrote the first real script. I was the in-production guy, who did tweaks and fixes, smoothing out rough spots and writing lyrics for a few new songs.</p>
<p>Since it wasn’t a WGA-covered movie — animation often isn’t, [much to the WGA’s chagrin](http://wga.org.master.com/texis/master/redir/?u=http%3A//www.wga.org/negotiations/juris04_1.html) — there wasn’t a normal arbitration process to figure out who got what writing credit for the movie. Fortunately, the final credits as determined by the studio seem right to me. Again, since it’s not WGA, none of us will get residuals. Which blows. But we knew that going in. </p>
<p>The movie, incidentally, is great. </p>
<p>One of the cool/weird things about working on an animated movie (this is my second, after [Titan A.E.](http://imdb.com/title/tt0120913/maindetails)), is that you get to see the entire movie a lot while it’s in production. Every couple of weeks, I’d get a new tape via FedEx from London, showing the newly animated scenes and the pencil storyboards for what was about to shoot, with a mixture of real and temp voices for all the characters. In all, I’ve probably seen the entire film 20 times in various incarnations.</p>
<p>About a month ago, I finally got to see the finished product at a test screening in the Valley. The movie is flat-out gorgeous on the big screen, with the stop-motion animation having a realer-than-real quality. It’s so sharp that it looks 3D.</p>
<p>But what really surprised me is that all the story tweaking we did along the way feels so seamless. You wouldn’t know that characters got added and dropped along the way, or that significant points of backstory were still in discussion midway through shooting. Or that it wasn’t always so musical.</p>
<p>All films, including live-action, go through major changes during editing, but with this kind of animation, there really is no distinction between production and post-production. Once you shoot a frame, it’s finished, forever. So it’s heartening to see that the nail-biting decisions paid off. It feels like it was shot from a locked, finished script. It wasn’t.</p>
<p>The other great lesson you learn from writing animation is surrendering your monopolistic control over every little word, the cinematic [“Not Invented Here”](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_Invented_Here) syndrome. Moving from the page to the (miniature) soundstage means going through the storyboard artists, who often find new ways of playing a beat that you never considered. During production, a lot of my job was tweaking dialogue to match new bits of business that the artists had invented. While actors in a live-action movie will improvise, that kind of multiple-voices collaboration doesn’t happen as often. In the case of Corpse Bride, it really helped.</a> </p>
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Project update
★ ACTIVE ★
[Jordan Mechner](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Mechner), who created the videogame, wrote the movie adaptation, which he and I are executive producing with Jerry Bruckheimer Films at Disney. The script is great. Next step is to get a director. That discussion is just beginning.
This is the Fox TV show that Jordan and I set up last year about two guys who work as private military contractors. For various reasons, we didn’t end up shooting the pilot during the usual production schedule. Instead, Jordan and I ended up writing an almost entirely new pilot script which we (and Fox) are a lot happier with. Now there’s talk about shooting the pilot outside of the normal schedule, which would be fine with us. Or it could go away completely. That’s show business.
I did a few weeks’ of work on [this thriller](http://imdb.com/title/tt0406759) at Paramount, an American remake of [the Pang brothers movie](http://imdb.com/title/tt0325655/). I’m happy with the work I did, but it’s not my movie in any creative-ownership sense.
I rewrote Father Knows Less ((May 3, 2011 Update: IMDb listing now inactive)), set to star Dustin Hoffman as a second-time dad, for New Line. Director [Shawn Levy](http://imdb.com/name/nm0506613) left the project, so I suspect they’re looking for a replacement. (Actually, I know they are, because I’ve talked to two friends who were sent it.)
I’m writing the book for a Broadway musical currently in very, very early stages of development. It’s been interesting adapting to the challenges of storytelling on the stage. No, I can’t say what the project is, or whether it will ever happen. Based on the very busy schedules of everyone involved, it could take years.
This project, an adaptation of Thomas Rockwell’s book, was the very first script I was ever hired to write, way back in 1995. Originally, the project was set up at Imagine, then it migrated to Nickelodeon. I assumed the project was dead and gone, when suddenly I [read that it was filming](http://www.hdforindies.com/2005/08/ok-now-they-are-shooting-movie-in-my) in Austin. ★ FINISHED ★
[The movie](http://imdb.com/title/tt0367594/) is now out in almost every market, and looks to be closing in on $200 million domestic box office. I’ve seen the special features for the DVD, which are quite cool, although I don’t know the exact release date for the disc. But something tells me it would be a great stocking stuffer. Hint.
[The film](http://imdb.com/title/tt0121164/) is now finished, and ready for its debut at the Toronto Film Festival. I’m really happy with how the film turned out. I didn’t originate the project — I came on board after they had started filming — but I enjoyed working with the team to figure out how to get it in its best shape. In addition to shared screenwriting credit (along with Caroline Thompson and Pamela Pettler), I share lyric credit on several of the songs.
I keep getting questions about whether there will be a third one. I doubt it. I love the characters, and I love the people involved, but we’re all off doing other things now. I don’t foresee getting back together to make another one.★ LIMBO ★
My modern-day, pan-African adaptation of Tarzan is in a (permanent?) holding pattern at Warner Bros. Last year, we started to go out to directors, but now it’s not clear what the next step is. There’s disagreement about many things, including my basic take on the entire movie.
Largely due to readers’ terrific [suggestions for a new title](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2005/a-movie-by-any-other-name), I’m seriously considering dusting off this long-buried spec. Not that I think anybody’s itching to make a zombie movie after the disappointing returns for [Land of the Dead](http://imdb.com/title/tt0418819/maindetails). But I’ll at least add it to the [Library](http://johnaugust.com/library) section once I get it cleaned up.
There’s been some discussion about turning this unsold spec — the most violent thing I’ve ever written — into a graphic novel or a videogame. Both ideas make sense; the story is sort of a cross between [Grand Theft Auto](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_%28series%29) and [The Terminator](http://imdb.com/title/tt0088247/maindetails). But there are other projects that require my immediate attention, so I may just let this back-burner for a while.★ QUESTION MARKS ★
This adaptation((May 3, 2011 Update: IMDb listing now inactive)) of [American McGee](http://americanmcgee.com)’s videogame was looking pretty dead, when it suddenly sprang back to life with the announcement that [Marcus Nispel](http://imdb.com/name/nm1197971/) would be directing, with [Sarah Michelle Gellar](http://imdb.com/name/nm0001264/) in the title role. The Hollywood Reporter article lists [Erich and Jon Hoeber](http://imdb.com/name/nm0388377/) as the screenwriters.
Oh, sweet Barbarella. This adaptation of the French comic book series about a sexually-liberated space explorer was set to star [Drew Barrymore](http://imdb.com/name/nm0000106/), but a tangle of rights issues got in the way. It was tremendous fun to write. Of all my unproduced projects, it’s probably my favorite.★ PRESUMABLY DEAD ★
An adaption of Clive Barker’s novel. The first project I was ever fired off of.
[This Sony project](http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/036/036258p1.html) was intended to be a big summer event movie, but a competing project suddenly roared to life. I never ended up writing the script. In many ways, that’s good, because I don’t think our movie would have gotten made anyway.
This Paramount thriller is about two prep school girls who have to save Manhattan from the Apocalypse. Sort of a cross between [Clueless](http://imdb.com/title/tt0112697/) and [Aliens](http://imdb.com/title/tt0090605/), which is why it will never get made.
A big-budget feature adaptation of the classic TV show. My version was a lot like [Lost](http://imdb.com/title/tt0411008/), except that Lost is a lot better than my movie would have been.
Based on the book by David Small, a family comedy about a guy whose suit develops a life of its own. The studio gave up on it, but I think it could have worked.
An HBO dramedy about a terrible hospital. Not haunted, not evil, just really crappy. It was created by Julie Siege; I was executive-producing. Ultimately, we never made it out of development, but Julie landed a spot on [Invasion](http://imdb.com/title/tt0460651/).What’s the difference between Hero, Main Character and Protagonist?
I have a supporting character that seems to fill a far greater purpose
than I originally anticipated. The supporting character fits
Wikipedia’s definition of [Hero](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero). However, [your definition](http://johnaugust.com/site/glossary) says hero and main character are synonymous.
in the end? Do you think the audience will feel cheated by a decision
like this?
Dallas, TX
My incredibly-simplified definition: this is the character who you hope to see “win.” While it’s fine to think of Superman, or Aladdin, the hero doesn’t have to be noble, or courageous, or especially talented. As long as you’re rooting for him, that’s what matters.
Just what it sounds like: this is the character who the story is mostly about. Confused? Often his or her name is in the title: Shrek, King Arthur, Tootsie, Citizen Kane.
The character who changes over the course of the story, travelling from Point A to Point B, either literally or figuratively. She learns and grows as the story progresses. Generally, Protagonists want something at the start of the tale, and discover they need something else.Deciding which parents get to visit the factory
](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/charlieriver.jpg)I have a question about your upcoming film, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. What made you decide to have each child bring only one guardian to Wonka’s factory, and how did you choose which one would go?
Daphne, Alabama