John August

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Pitching Prince of Persia

Pitches, Prince of Persia, Projects

[Jordan Mechner](http://jordanmechner.com/blog/2009/10/prince-of-persia-movie-pitch-trailer/) has posted the game-footage trailer we used when we pitched the feature film version of Prince of Persia to the studios six years ago.

Most movie pitches don’t involve video, but with PoP, most of the studio executives weren’t familiar with the game at all, so it became an important way to introduce them to both the franchise and the world. As Jordan notes in his post, this trailer doesn’t really tell the story of the movie, but it does give a sense of the characters and style: the dashing prince’s acrobatics, the devoted priestess/princess, the dagger with its time-reversing slickness.

Jordan and I pitched seven studios over two days. Each time, the presentation was pretty much identical.

1. Introductions. Apologies for keeping us waiting. (1 minute)
2. John hyping Jordan’s prestigious videogame background. (1:00)
3. Play the video. (2:10)
4. Jordan describes the world of the Persian empire, using artwork. (:30)
5. John pitches Prince Dastan, using artwork of him. (:30)
6. John and Jordan alternate pitching story, introducing character/prop artwork as new things come up. (6:00)
7. Questions about story, tone and scale. “Somewhere between Pirates and Raiders. It’s not Lawrence of Arabia.”(3:00)
8. Promises that they’ll follow up. (1:00)

Altogether, we could get through the pitch in less than 20 minutes. Disney liked it, and sent us to Jerry Bruckheimer’s company, who bought it from Jordan. The film comes out next May.

Here’s the trailer we used for the pitch. The actual trailer for the movie is ridiculously good, and should be out before too long.

Prince of Persia movie pitch trailer (2003) from jordan mechner on Vimeo.

Habits, heavy lifting, and the possibility of suck

Charlie's Angels, Video, Writing Process

[MakingOf](http://makingof.com/insiders/media/john/august/john-august-on-personal-writing-habits-and-process/99/283) has part two of my interview up on the site. (You can see part one [here](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/interview-with-about-adaptions-and-picking-projects).)

Some notes on certain sections:

0:07 Writing process
—-

In [How to Write a Scene](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2007/write-scene), I go into a lot more detail on “looping” and “scribble versions” of scenes.

0:49 How scripts have evolved
—-

My hunch is that the modern era of writing action begins with James Cameron. Every screenwriter I know read and devoured his scripts for Terminator, Aliens and Point Break. We’re all probably channeling him a bit.

1:30 When I write
—-

I really do try to do most of my work during “office hours.” But during crunch times — which has been a lot more, recently — I find myself going back to work after dinner, or setting the alarm for 5 a.m. to get stuff written before breakfast.

Writing is an inherently selfish act: you’re shutting the world out to live in a fantasy. You don’t really appreciate that until you have a family.

2:18 This could possibly suck
—–

One of the main reasons we procrastinate is to give ourselves an excuse for why things might be terrible: “I know it’s not great, but I wrote it in three days.” Suck early and fix it.

3:30 Writer’s block
—–

You know who gets writer’s block? Non-writers. They think it’s cool and romantic to struggle to make Art. They make sure everyone knows how torturous the process is, so when they finally squeeze something out, it won’t be judged on its merits but rather the emotional anguish involved in its creation.

Writers write. Hacks Posers whine about how hard it is. ((“Hacks” was really the wrong term, because there are some very prolific hacks. There are also some genuinely talented writers who go through spells of low productivity. I find stories glamorizing their travails really tedious, however.))

4:09 Heavy lifting
—-

The twenty minute timer actually works. Do twenty minutes of solid work, then give yourself ten minutes of freedom.

Ideally, you want finesse: a combination of strength and dexterity that uses a scene’s natural momentum to make everything look effortless. But sometimes, that’s not possible: there isn’t time, or there’s some major impediment. With enough craft, an experienced screenwriter can often muscle a scene that shouldn’t otherwise work.

4:35 You can always cut something
—-

I’m obliquely referencing a meeting for Charlie’s Angels, during which the studio president ripped ten pages out of the script and told me to write around what was missing.

5:10 Most people aren’t screenwriters
—-

If you want to work in film or television, you need to work on films and television shows. Screenwriting is mostly writing, but without experience in how stuff is actually made, you’ll never be very good at it.

Quoting books in a script

QandA, Rights and Copyright, Words on the page

questionmarkIn my script, characters quote from several articles and textbooks to reinforce the validity of their discourse.

My question is: Besides in-text quotation marks, how should I go about crediting the books referenced? Are bibliographies fairly common or allowable in the screenplay format? Or is this only necessary in academic-type publications?

I’ve searched myriad style guides but I find little regarding endnotes/references/bibliographies for screenplays. And I’d like to get it right.

— Dave
New York City

Do you hear that? That BEEP BEEP BEEP sound? That’s a metaphorical truck carefully backing out of the wrong alley you’ve driven it into.

Screenplays don’t need to cite references because they don’t quote things. Or at least, they shouldn’t. Remember: a script is really a transitional document on the way towards creating a movie. Is your film going to have footnotes? Will a bibliography be printed on the popcorn bag?

Sure, you could have a character reading aloud from a textbook:

MARY

Maybe the enthalpy was increasing?

Todd grabs a chemistry textbook off the shelf. Flips through to find a dog-eared page.

TODD

No, see, it says here on page 56 that “exothermic reactions result in higher randomness -- or entropy -- of the system as a whole. They are characterized by a decrease in enthalpy.”

But this would be terrible. *Terrible.*

In fact, I believe this can be generalized into a rule:

**Any scene in which a character quotes from a real or imaginary text will be awful.**

I will quickly add the Whedon corollary:

**”…unless the unlikely existence of the text is part of the joke.”**

Dave, the reason you’re tempted to quote articles or textbooks is that you’re desperately looking for some authority to support your ideas. But the authority needs to come from within your script, not outside. Some examples:

* In The Matrix, anything Laurence Fishburne says has authority.

* In Iron Man, Tony Stark’s suit works because the movie says it does.

* In Up, a bunch of helium balloons can lift a house because it’s charming, damnit.

Cut those quotes. Let characters say what they need to say in their own voices.

A hard time to be an indie

Indie, Projects, Sundance, The Nines

As a counterpoint to the utopian bliss of the Sundance Filmmakers Lab, I’ll direct your attention a [speech given by James D. Stern](http://www.indiewire.com/article/2009/06/20/james_d._stern_making_smarter_movies_or_i_need_the_eggs_-_now_what/) last week on the present and future of independent film.

In my [post-mortem on The Nines](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2008/nines-post-mortem), I wrote that the business model of selling your indie at Sundance for theatrical release was largely mythology. The numbers are stacked against you, and have only gotten worse.

According to Stern:

> An astonishing 9,293 films were submitted to Sundance last year. Of those nearly 10,000, only 218 were screened. Of the lucky handful to get bought, so far only three have been released theatrically.

> From January through May 2008 … the number of indies that grossed over $1 million dollars went from 16 to six. Less than half.

Fewer indies are making it to the big screen, and fewer of those movies are earning money. And video isn’t the savior it once was. DVD and TV deals are smaller, when you can even get them.

Stern acknowledges that changes in the distribution system — particularly the rise of streaming video — may help out in the next few years. Right now, Netflix is like an infinite video store, but once it becomes possible to monetize each viewing of a movie, there’s suddenly value to being one of its 10,000 movies.

> Provided they actually pay us for our content in appropriate ways, these are the once and future friends of independent film.

But to his credit, Stern won’t let filmmakers themselves off the hook. In mythologizing the struggling writer/director auteur, we’ve created a genre of movies that are built to fail. Quoting Patrick Goldstein from the LA Times, Stern notes:

> “The real problem with the indie business isn’t quality, but discipline. We have a generation of filmmakers who feel entitled to make personal films… and a generation of executives who’ve been willing to essentially use specialty films as a loss-leader to launch their division or win awards. If people in the indie world want to start making money again, they have to start treating their investment like a truly precious natural resource, not like Monopoly money. Discipline is not antithetical to art.”

That’s an idea I’ve been trying to reconcile while up here at the labs.

My friend Howard Rodman often says, “The point of studio development is to take a script only you could have written and turn it into something anyone could have written.” I’m keenly aware that our goal as writers and advisors is to make projects more unique and specific.

Yet the fact that we can say a script “feels like a Sundance movie” belies this intent. It’s shorthand for challenging, quirky, maddening and (if we’re being honest) non-commercial. We want these movies to exist. But we need to be honest about their prospects.

Stern argues that filmmakers need to keep their audience in mind from a project’s initial conception — even if that audience isn’t a typical mainstream audience.

> I was blown away when I found out that the #32 film on the all-time documentary box-office list is a little 2005 film I’d never heard of, called “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill.” (It’s about wild parrots living on Telegraph Hill, by the way.) Can you imagine how tiny the market sliver is of people willing to take a night out to go see this peculiar-sounding film?

> Well, the filmmaker did imagine them. Rather thoughtfully, in fact. And then proceeded to use viral marketing to rally those people into the theater, by making the film an event for every bird-lover on God’s green Earth.

> Audubon Society members. Bird-watching clubs. Breeders. Veterinarians. Humane Societies. Feather-fancier magazine subscribers. There are a lot of people out there who really love birds. And I think every last one of them went to this movie.

Every filmmaker would like her movie to break out of its niche and gain wider exposure and acceptance. But Stern’s point is apt: figure out your base, and develop a marketing plan that succeeds even if it never goes beyond that. If this sounds more like planning a small business than planning a movie, that’s sort of the point.

I wouldn’t make another indie the way I did The Nines. I’d figure out how I was going to make money before figuring out how to get money.

There is more to Stern’s speech, which is certainly [worth a read](http://www.indiewire.com/article/2009/06/20/james_d._stern_making_smarter_movies_or_i_need_the_eggs_-_now_what/P1/).