John August

Search Results for: shazam

Monsterpocalypse, and why some projects get announced (and others don’t)

Big Fish, Charlie's Angels, Monsterpocalypse, Projects

monsterpocalypseAs [announced today](http://www.heatvisionblog.com/2010/06/john-august-reteaming-with-tim-burton-exclusive.html), I’m going to be writing a big movie version of Monsterpocalypse for DreamWorks, based on Matt Wilson’s kaiju-themed giant-monsters-smashing things extravaganza.

Wilson’s creation — published by Privateer Press — imagines the modern world under siege by super-sized creatures of every stripe. Giant apes, terrasaurs, planet-eating extraterrestrials? Check, check and check.

Plus robots. C’mon. You need robots.

Many of the elements are still being locked down, so there’s obviously a lot I can’t say about the movie yet: the plot, the players, what the humans are doing in all of this. Will every possible monster be in it? Logic would say no, but I can’t give you a list.

What I can talk about is why the project is getting announced today, while so many others are kept under wraps.

Shouts and whispers
—-

Most of the projects I work on stay under the radar until very close to production. That’s intentional. There are huge advantages to being out of the spotlight.

Particularly with properties that invite media and/or fanboy speculation, there is a real risk of putting the cart before the horse, and having to manage public perception before even finishing the first draft.

That was certainly the case with Charlie’s Angels. From the moment Drew Barrymore signed on, we were constantly battling expectations and fabrications about what a disaster the movie was going to be. Gossips were convinced the actresses would fight, because everyone knows you can’t have [more than one female character](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2010/women-in-film) in a movie. It was an exhausting part of an already difficult project.

Compare that with Big Fish, which over the course of its long gestation had much bigger directors (Spielberg, Burton) but a lot more breathing room. No one said a thing about Big Fish until the trailer. That let us focus on making the movie.

As an extreme example, consider Cloverfield. Secrecy served that movie well.

Another great advantage to keeping a project out of the public eye is the fact that most movies never happen. I’ve got a sizable list of those never-weres, including Tarzan, Shazam, Barbarella, Fantasy Island and Thief of Always. All were announced in the trades. All went through multiple drafts. None of them got made. But they still linger on as “what’s going on with…” questions whenever I do interviews.

So why not play it low and quiet with Monsterpocalypse?

Because there was simply no way to keep a lid on it. As detailed in the article, Monsterpocalypse potentially affects many other tentpole movies at other studios in a way that’s certainly newsworthy. And while I’m hardly the biggest element in this, Monsterpocalypse will take me off the market for a year or so, and make it pretty much impossible for me to direct a movie in the near future.

So an article was going to be written regardless. Announcing the project allowed DreamWorks the chance to have some control over how the story got out. That’s the main and best reason to announce something.

Monsterpocalypse has been the fastest a movie has come together in my career, and I’m ridiculously excited to start writing it. But I’m also ridiculously excited to be writing the other things I’m working on, most of which have been kept very quiet.

More Remnants

Projects, Remnants, The Remnants, Web series, WGA

I was happy to get such a strong reaction since [posting](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/the-remnants-in-full) the pilot for The Remnants. Every few days, we get a surge of hits as new sites link to it. A fan even set up [Draft The Remnants](http://drafttheremnants.com) to get people to pledge their love.

For something that’s been sitting on a shelf for a year, it’s really gratifying.

Viewers had a lot of questions, so I’ll do my best to answer them here.

It’s actually not about zombies.
===

When I pitched the show, I described it as a cross between The Office and The Stand. Something Very Bad has happened, but we’re focusing on the survivors and their dysfunctional attempts to reestablish normalcy. Like Stephen King’s book, there are good people and some very bad people — but they’re not the living dead.

I completely understand why viewers might expect some shambling corpses. Mia claims that she’s “not one of them,” and former group member Stan apparently “went Jurassic Park.” The bad people, “them,” are truly scary — but also incredibly organized and sneaky. Think fascist.

Think V, not Z.

In the final scene, Mia and Josh both admit they don’t really understand what happened. That’s important.

MIA

I don’t know if the world got invaded, or if this is something we created ourselves...

JOSH

It’s nano-technology from the future.

MIA

Really.

JOSH

I have no idea.

The correct answer is an amalgam of all three.

How did you get that cast?
===

I knew Ben Falcone and Justine Bateman, so I wrote those parts with them in mind. Ze Frank is a friend of producer Matt Byrne, and I had a hunch he could act. So I wrote the part hoping he’d do it.

Robert Ulrich, who’s been my casting director on several projects, graciously agreed to help me find actors for Chas, Mia and Wallace. You’d think that given my credits, it would be easy to get people in to meet and/or audition, but several agencies simply refused to send their actors out for a web series. ((Props to William Morris and ICM for taking us seriously.)) I deliberately hired people with a writing or improv background, because I knew from shooting Part Two of The Nines that I’d need to let people veer far off the script in order to get the feel I wanted.

Because Justine is very active in SAG, she got us to test out their new web series agreement, which basically allows guild actors to work on experimental projects like this for less than scale. From cast to crew, everyone got about $120/day.

How long did you shoot? How much did it cost?
===

We shot three pretty easy days, with most departments getting a day to prep and a day to wrap. With six actors and a fair amount of improv, I didn’t want to feel rushed. We shot two cameras (the HVX-200) most of the time, generally gunning the same direction for a wide and a close-up.

remnants crewAll in, the show cost $25,003. Depending on your perspective, that’s either expensive for a web show or mind-blowingly cheap for television show. We paid for locations, permits and other details a scrappier web show would just ignore. And we had more crew. Some web shows are literally just the actors and a guy holding the camera. We had 15 people. We were more like an indie feature, but without trucks or trailers.

We could have done it cheaper. Of the $25,000, more than $17,000 went to pay people, and a lot of those folks probably would have worked for free. But I didn’t want to do anything I couldn’t replicate for a series of 10 episodes. You can’t ask someone to work for 25 days for the love of their craft.

I saw the pilot as an experiment not just in storytelling, but production. I wanted to it to be sustainable.

Why isn’t this a web series?
====

There are at least five answers, all of which are obstacles.

* **The lack of a major advertiser who wanted to sponsor it.** That was the original goal: to find a company that would promote the show as hard as we would promote their product. Pringles is sort of a placeholder. We could swap that out for almost anything: Coke, Ace Hardware, Duracell.

* **Actor availability.** Every actor in The Remnants works a lot. The writers’ strike was a major reason why so many great people were available. And no, I’m not wishing for an actors’ strike.

* **My schedule.** I don’t know when I could do it. I haven’t announced the post-Shazam projects I’m working on, but trust me, I’m really busy with features. Doing ten episodes of The Remnants would be three solid months of work.

* **The lack of a viable business model.** A series of ten similar webisodes wouldn’t cost that much (maybe $300K), but there’s still no model for how investors could get their money back. If I thought there was, I’d pay for it myself.

* **My ambitions.** I need to write another movie to direct. The more things I put in front of it, the longer it pushes off that goal.

All this said, I’ve been thinking a lot about The Remnants, and have mentally moved it from the “Impossible” to “Unlikely” box.

What happened at the Grand Canyon?
===

Something so awful it still gives me nightmares.

(That’s the answer I gave actresses when they asked that question in auditions.)


The Remnants from John August on Vimeo.

How long should it take to write a script?

Big Fish, Charlie, Film Industry, Projects, QandA, Television

Answering a [recent question](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2008/bail-idea), I made the following unqualified assertion:

> Six weeks is a long time. I say this not to panic you, but to make sure you understand that employable screenwriters need to be able to produce on demand.

In the comment thread that followed — and subsequent emails — many readers wondered exactly how long was too long, and what was a reasonable timeframe in which a screenwriter should be expected to deliver a script. So let’s try to answer those questions.

When a screenwriter is hired to write a project (like Shazam!, or Big Fish), the contract generally allows for a 12-week writing period for the first draft. Subsequent rewrites and polishes are given shorter time period, anywhere from eight weeks to two weeks.

In practice, I’ve never seen these contractual writing periods enforced. ((In a few cases where a movie was rushing to production, my contracts have had special language like “Time is of the essence” or similar, which I suspect is a giant flashing arrow to indicate that the studio really would consider withholding payment if delivery were late.)) Rather, a few weeks into the process, a producer or studio executive calls the screenwriter and the following conversation takes place:

PRODUCER

So, how’s the writing going?

WRITER

Good. Good.

PRODUCER

I know it’s early, but do you gotta sense of when you’re going to be finished?

WRITER

Umm....

PRODUCER

Just ballpark, like, end of January? Start of February?

WRITER

Yeah. Absolutely.

PRODUCER

Great. Great. Because I know the studio’s really excited to see it, and it would be great to get it in around then.

WRITER

Shouldn’t be a problem.

PRODUCER

I’ll just check in with you in a coupla weeks, make sure everything’s going okay.

I’ve encountered some version of this conversation on every project I’ve written. Follow-up phone calls try to narrow the time frame down even more, with the goal of getting you to deliver the script on a Thursday or Friday so everyone can read it over the weekend.

I’m hesitant to give a firm number for how many weeks it should take to write a script. Every project is different. Big Fish took me the better part of four months, while Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was three weeks. But part of the reason Charlie was only three weeks was because that’s all the time there was. There was already a release date, and sets were being built.

And that points to the better question to ask: How quickly should a professional screenwriter be able to turn around a script, given some urgency? In my experience, the most successful screenwriters are the ones who are able to accurately estimate how much time they’ll need. That’s part of the craft, just like a cabinetmaker promising a delivery date. For my work on Iron Man, I told them exactly how many days it would take to address certain issues, and delivered pages every night.

For feature films, I’d be reluctant to hire a writer who couldn’t deliver a script in eight weeks. For television, writers sometimes have less than a week to get a one-hour episode written. You’d like to give every writer as much time as she needs, but in my experience, the deadline is often the main force getting the script finished.

Trifecta

News, Projects, Shazam, Videogames

The combination of family travel, lingering illness and Fallout 3 has kept me away from the blog this week, but I should be back to a normal schedule beginning Sunday.

There’s actual news, including my next writing project and an update (post-mortem?) on Shazam!. Plus, I really want to write something about [this misguided memo from Thomas Kinkade](http://www.vanityfair.com/online/culture/2008/11/14/thomas-kincades-16-guidelines-for-making-stuff-suck.html) reprinted in Vanity Fair. It’s a good cautionary tale.

(Update: Fixed spelling of Kinkade’s name. Thanks Matt Redd.)