John August

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A visit from the ghost of coverage past

Education

Reader Jason writes:

> [My boss] was giving our poor assistant the grueling duty of digitizing boxes and boxes of her old scripts. In the mire, he came across something we all found amusing -– coverage you did back in 1992.

He attaches coverage I wrote for both Quentin Tarantino’s NATURAL BORN KILLERS and Sam Hamm’s PULITZER PRIZE.

I don’t publish reviews of unproduced screenplays (ahem), but I’ll happy share what I wrote about [Tarantino’s NBK](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/nbk.pdf).

natural born killers script

I read it (and wrote this coverage) during my first semester of film school at USC. I probably read 200 scripts that year, but I remember this one distinctly, because upon reaching the last word I promptly flipped back to page one and read it again.

(This was Fall 1992. Little did I know that the following year I’d be working for the movie’s producers during post-production, and would co-write the novelization.)

Next to James Cameron’s ALIENS scriptment, NBK was probably the single screenplay that most made me want to become a screenwriter.

So why the hell did I give it “good” across the board rather than “excellent?”

An acute case of chickenshititis, I suspect. We were strongly discouraged from ever using the “excellent” boxes. Just writing “consider” was a bold move. I’ll cut my younger self a break just this once.

Some extra details about this document, just because I remember:

* I’m pretty sure I wrote this for a class assignment, rather than my reader internship. Laura Ziskin taught our first development class. Each week, we checked out two scripts from her extensive script library. ((The idea of “checking out” something seems quaint, but photocopying was fairly expensive.))

* I wrote this on the Mac, most likely in [ClarisWorks](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleWorks). For the cover page, we had a pre-printed template to use. Most readers used a typewriter to do the cover sheets, but with enough finessing, I got the fields in ClarisWorks to line up properly.

* This coverage was probably printed on a StyleWriter. Sometime later that year I bought a LaserWriter — an expensive indulgence at the time, but much cheaper through the USC Bookstore. The LaserWriter had a thin and terrible version of Courier, so I used Fontographer to make a chunkier one I called Dorphic, which I continued to use for many years. (Go is printed in Dorphic.)

In my essay on [Professional Writing and the Rise of the Amateur](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2006/professional-writing-and-the-rise-of-the-amateur), I make a pointed challenge:

> So you have to ask yourself: a year from now, five years from now, how am I going to feel when someone asks me about that thing I wrote?

This coverage is eighteen years old, from the pre-internet era. Further proof you don’t get to choose when to be professional.

You can read the full coverage [here](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/nbk.pdf).

One dash, two dashes

Formatting, QandA, Words on the page

questionmarkI’m thinking this might boil down to “personal preference”, but I can’t seem to find any direct answers as to whether it’s best perception-wise to use one hyphen, two hyphens (as I see more and more) or no hyphen at all? The trend seems to be going towards two, but I can’t see or find what the relevance is. Can you elaborate?

— Chris
The OC

There are at least three distinct names for those little horizontal lines used in English.

A **hyphen** is the shortest of these, and is used to break a word into syllables (i.e. hyphenation). You also use hyphens to make compound words like inside-out. On your keyboard, it’s probably next to the plus sign, so it’s fair to conflate it with “minus.”

A **dash** is a punctuation mark. An **en-dash** is commonly used for ranges, such as “6–10 years.” An **em-dash** is longer, and used to set off a phrase—often a parenthetical thought, like this—from the rest of the sentence.

With most typefaces, you can and should use en-dashes and em-dashes instead of just automatically hitting the hyphen. You can use a special key combination, ((On a Mac, you make an en-dash with option-hyphen and the em-dash with shift-option-hyphen.)) but many applications will automatically choose the right one based on context, such as converting two hyphens into an em-dash.

Em-dashes in particular just look better. And you don’t need to put spaces around the dash.

Screenplays are set in monospace fonts like Courier. Because every letter takes up the same amount of space, a lot of what looks good in normal typefaces looks wrong in Courier. ((Notably, we still double-space after the period in Courier.)) Traditional typewriters never had “real” dashes, so the convention was to use two hyphens instead, generally set off with a space on either side.

TODD BLANDERSNOT (14) is the homeliest kid at Miskatonic Academy -- and two of Cthulu’s kids go here.

That’s what I use: two floating hyphens. Other writers jam two hyphens right at the end of a word, ((The Wibberleys do this. We rewrote once each other on a project, and it involved a lot of dash-redeployment.)) or leave a single hyphen dangling at the end of a line when cutting before the end of a sentence.

You can also simply stop a line early, with no punctuation. I often do this when the next thing will be an intermediate slugline:

Dazed, Todd scrambles to feet just as

THREE GRIFFONS

swoop down from above, snatching random classmates in their talons.

It’s all to your taste. The important thing is to pick a style and stay consistent throughout the script.

Last looks

Formatting, Words on the page

I handed in a script today, and thought it might be helpful to talk through my best practices when finishing up a draft. I don’t always do all of these — but I get nervous if I’ve skipped one.

1. Print it out.
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There are mistakes you’re only going to catch on paper. So print it. I like to do two-up (side-by-side) printing to save paper, but your eyes might prefer full size.

Circle mistakes with a colored pen so you’ll see them. In addition to typos, look for any bit of redundant description or needless fluff. You can almost always squeeze a page out of a 120-page script.

2. Make changes all at once.
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It’s tempting to fix mistakes as you catch them, but you’re likely to miss things if you’re constantly switching between error detection and error correction. Sit at the computer and go through page by page, fixing each problem you’ve found. As you go, you may spot ways to improve page breaks and other formatting niceties.

3. Fix the title page.
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This is the step I often forget, resulting in mis-dated drafts and re-exported .pdfs. If I’m doing multiple versions of a draft — for example, one with starred changes, one without, I’ll make sure the title page indicates this.

4. Save this draft and email it to yourself.
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Yes, you should have multiple backup strategies. But the self-addressed email will always work, and can be accessed from wherever you find yourself.

5. Export a .pdf — then check it.
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These days, you almost always “hand in” a draft as a .pdf by email. But make sure it actually looks right, complete with title page. If you’re friendly with the assistant on the other end, ask her to check if there’s anything you’re at all worried might print strangely, such as a title page font ((Yes, you can use a font other than Courier for the title page. But I rarely do anymore.)) or starred changes in the right margins.

Show your work

Awards, Directors, Rant

For math and science exams, we were often required to “show our work” — not merely to prove we weren’t cheating, but to demonstrate we understood the underlying principles involved.

I’ve been thinking about this in relation to screenwriting. When it comes to making a film, the screenwriter’s craft is probably the most direct and transparent. What did you do? You wrote the script, the 120-or-so pages of Courier around which everything else revolves. Your work is front-and-center.

Cinematographers, production designers and editors can’t point to a product which is “theirs.” In the finished film, the light is lovely; the world is stunning; the pacing is tight. All wonderful accomplishments, but inextricably bound to the work of others. That wonderful light would go unnoticed if it didn’t highlight the sets, and the sets would be meaningless if the editor favored close-ups. And the contribution of directors, who marshall all these forces in addition to actors’ performances, is probably the most difficult to judge.

As a concise, pre-existing document, the screenplay is probably the only thing that can be judged independently of the finished film. Put another way, the screenwriter shows his work.

But the irony is, after the film is made, no one asks to see his work.

Indeed, we award “best screenplay” based on a viewing of the finished film. If the movie was good, we figure the screenplay was probably pretty good. We guess. Even though we don’t need to guess, because the screenplays for “award contender” movies are commonly available. But frankly, it would be a lot of work to read all those screenplays, so we don’t make that a requirement, even for the WGA Awards. The more honest award would be titled, “Best Film based on a Screenplay which was Probably Good, and Presumably Didn’t Get Messed Up by the Director or Others.”

Worse, we also presume that a bad movie came from a bad screenplay. At some point, I’ll fund a comprehensive study of film reviews from the past 10 years, tracking exactly how many times the film’s screenwriter’s name is mentioned. My gut tells me that the writer’s name is three-to-four times more likely to be mentioned in a negative review than a positive one. But I’d love to see data.

In the meantime, screenwriting will continue to be the most transparent and opaque part of moviemaking.