John August

Search Results for: courier

About

photo of john august
Need a photo of John for something? It’s here.

This site belongs to John August. I wrote everything here, unless it’s specifically credited to someone else.

The site has been around since 2003, and now has more than 1,500 posts.
(If you’re curious, you can see snapshots of what it’s looked like over the years.)

I’m mostly known as a screenwriter. My credits include Go, Big Fish, Charlie’s Angels, Titan A.E., Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride and Frankenweenie.

I’m writing the Arlo Finch series of middle-grade fiction books. If you like Harry Potter or Percy Jackson, there’s a good chance you’ll dig them. You might want to leave a review on GoodReads. I’ve also written short fiction, including The Variant and Snake People.

I wrote the book for the Broadway musical version of Big Fish. It gets produced quite often around the world, with licenses through Theatrical Rights Worldwide.

I wrote and directed the 2007 movie The Nines, starring Ryan Reynolds and Melissa McCarthy. It’s generally available through Netflix and iTunes.

For television, I created the show D.C. for the WB Network. It was a terrible experience. I’ve also written pilots for ABC and Fox, both of which went fine.

Through my company, Quote-Unquote Apps, I’ve released several popular apps and doodads, including Highland Pro, Weekend Read 2, and Bronson Watermarker.

I also created Writer Emergency Pack and the games One Hit Kill and AlphaBirds.

I commissioned the typeface Courier Prime, designed by Alan Dague-Greene.

I collaborated with Stu Maschwitz, Nima Yousefi and others to develop the Fountain markup syntax for screenwriting, which allows users to write screenplays in any text editor.

I married Mike August in 2008. We have a daughter, born in 2005.

The site was originally designed by Ryan Nelson, and is currently maintained by Dustin Bocks. Editorial supervision by Drew Marquardt.

You can find me on Bluesky, Instagram or reach out via email.

Sensible sluglines

Formatting, QandA

questionmarkThank you for keeping your site up to date and offering so many great resources, not the least of which: your scripts. I have read your scripts, Rawson Thurber’s Dodgeball, and many others.

I have a question on the usage of slug lines and pacing.

A quick example:

TOM

carefully turns the dial a tad.

THE MACHINE

Hums, LIGHTS UP!

TOM

grins and turns the

REMOTE to the maximum level.

I am afraid I am overusing this technique, but would like your
professional opinion.

–Brandon Walowitz
Los Angeles

Yes, you’re overdoing it, at least to my taste. I suspect you could find successful screenwriters who write very much the way you describe, but to me it feels like padding.

Just as you wouldn’t want to read a solid page of 12-pt Courier, you don’t want to read a series of short sluglines. There’s no flow. Think of these short sluglines as punctuation, little guides to help you make your way down the page.

Some suggestions:

* Use a slug only if we’re going to be looking at something new to the scene, or if we’re cross-cutting between simultaneous action. In your example, “TOM” is the same guy both times, and “THE MACHINE” is probably already established in the scene.

* After a slug, I usually start the next line lower-case, particularly if it’s the continuation of a sentence.

* Try to have at least three “normal” lines between slugs.

* Avoid mixing slugs and dialogue. It gets messy on the page.

Cover page artwork

Formatting, QandA

Is artwork that only appears on the title page of a screenplay frowned upon?

— Darryl McD

Yeah, that’s kind of cheesy. If I had to choose between two scripts in front of me, I’d probably pick the one without the artwork.

That said, if you look in the Downloads section, you’ll see that I used a circle around ‘Go’, largely because the word itself is so small. And the cover page for Prince of Persia has the title in the logo font, but since it’s based on a hugely popular videogame, there’s a good reason for it.

For the other 20 or so scripts I’ve worked on, there hasn’t been any artwork on the cover. I’ll occasionally use a font other than 12pt Courier for title itself, but always something simple.

Discover the basics of title page formatting here!

How many lines per page?

Formatting, QandA

Today’s question isn’t really a question at all, but rather an investigation into how many lines of type should fit on a standard screenwriting page. While this may seem frivolous — a little like “How Many Angels Can Dance on the Head of a Pin” — almost every screenwriter has tweaked and shuffled, nipped and tucked to get a draft a few pages shorter.

Lines-per-page translates into lines-per-script, which is arguably a better metric than page count for how long a script “really” is. So I applaud Jeff trying to figure it out.

questionmarkI have a seemingly simple formatting question that I cannot find the answer to anywhere: How many lines should fit on a page?

I don’t ask for help with out trying to help myself first, but believe me, this one has got me stumped. My research yields vastly different results and even an interesting (disturbing?) modern trend. (I know it’s a long read for an e-mail, but I’ve done the research and I would really like your thoughts.)

I know all about setting margins and screenwriting software, but even following those suggestions, there appears to be a large discrepancy in the actual number of lines per page from script to script. Here’s how I have counted lines per page for purposes of this research:

Open a screenplay up to any page, start at the first line of screenplay on that page (a scene heading, character name, dialogue, action; not white space or a page number) and count that as ONE. Then, count every line after that (including white space) all the way to the last line of screenplay on that page (not including bottom CONTINUEDs if the script has them). The number you end up with is what I call Screenplay Lines per Page.
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