Search Results for: logline

Answer: You are an American male in his twenties

April 28, 2005 General

Thanks to the 470 of you who were gracious enough to fill out the not-especially-scientific [survey](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2005/who-are-you-where-do-you-come-from), I can now state with confidence that the typical reader of johnaugust.com is a North American college graduate in his 20’s who has a Y chromosome, but no WGA card.

Now, before anyone protests, I should point out that not all readers are typical. Some are women in their 30’s from South Africa with graduate degrees; others are older, younger, or more international. And one could easily fault the methodology: it relied completely on self-reporting, with no particular incentive for readers to click the link to take the survey.

Yet the trends in the data are so clear that there’s not a lot of point keeping the survey running any longer. If you don’t believe me, maybe some charts will prove the point:

chart: male/female

The vast majority of readers are men. That’s no surprise, but I wasn’t expecting almost 90%. I don’t know whether this reflects the reality of the male/female split among screenwriters or not. Regardless, I try to vary to my pronouns, so that I’m not always talking about “a screenwriter and his script.”

chart: age

Readers are a little older than I thought. Had I known that the under-20 categories would be so sparsely populated, I would have broken up the age groups differently. Given the average age, I may feel a little more liberty to swear.

Tracking a comment thread by RSS

April 19, 2005 Geek Alert

geek alert Unlike some sites, where the number of comments on a given article can reach triple-digits, most of the threads at johnaugust.com stay pretty short. Still, sometimes you want to keep on top of an interesting discussion without re-visiting the site every hour. That’s where RSS can be your friend.

On every article, down by the “Leave a comment” section, you’ll find a link for “RSS feed for comments on this post.”

If you click it, you’ll get gibberish. Rather, copy the link (which ends with ‘/feed/’) and paste it into your newsreader of choice (such as [Bloglines](http://bloglines.com/), [NetNewsWire](http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/), or the new [Safari RSS](http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/safari/)). You’ll then get every comment on the article as it appears, without ever having to go back to check the original page. And when you’re done following a conversation, just delete the link. No fuss, no muss.

Incidentally, this technique works for almost any blog you visit. So definitely try to make use of it.

My idea’s been stolen

September 10, 2003 QandA, Story and Plot

Help! Everytime I think of a cool screenplay idea, and start
developing a treatment, I find out later that practically the exact same idea
is already
in development somewhere in Hollywood! What should I do? Ditch the idea and
move on, or stick with it?

–Frustrated and slightly paranoid screenwriter

Every working screenwriter I know has been in this situation, where you flip
open Variety and find that Paramount has just bought a project that sounds
horribly similar to yours. Just remember that you’re only reading a one sentence
description, and the script itself could be completely different.

For instance, the logline might read, "The project concerns a team of
scientists who must stop an ancient evil." That storyline could be describing
THE RELIC, or just as easily be about GHOSTBUSTERS. And no one would say those
are the same idea.

In short, my advice is not to worry about it, unless (a) you find out more
details about the other project which prove it to be very similar to yours,
and (b) there’s evidence that the other movie is probably going to get made.
While occassionally two competing projects will get greenlit, such as ARMAGEDDON
and DEEP IMPACT, or VOLCANO and DANTE’S PEAK, far more often neither project
will, as happened with the multiple Janis Joplin biopics.

Just remember that a well-written script has value for a writer even if it
never gets made, in terms of its ability to showcase your talent. If you have
a great idea that can make a great script, don’t be afraid to write it.

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