John August

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A bunch of marriage news

News

It’s been weirdly under-reported, but Proposition 8, the November ballot initiative that seeks to amend the California constitution to ban same-sex marriage, had its official language changed earlier this month. It used to read as follows:

LIMIT ON MARRIAGE. CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT.

Amends the California Constitution to provide that only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California. Summary of estimate by Legislative Analyst and Director of Finance of fiscal impact on state and local government: The measure would have no fiscal effect on state or local governments. This is because there would be no change to the manner in which marriages are currently recognized by the state.

What’s going to appear on the ballots in November is much more accurate, and makes it clear that voting for it means actively taking away existing rights:

ELIMINATES RIGHT OF SAME-SEX COUPLES TO MARRY.

INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT.

Changes California Constitution to eliminate right of same-sex couples to marry. Provides that only a marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.

Fiscal Impact: Over the next few years, potential revenue loss, mainly sales taxes, totaling in the several tens of millions of dollars, to state and local governments. In the long run, likely little fiscal impact to state and local governments.

I would have added, “Voting for this means you’re a dick.” But the new language is certainly an improvement.

As I [noted earlier](http://johnaugust.tumblr.com/post/35835686/the-numbers-on-californias-gay-marriage), the polling indicates that the initiative is struggling: [just 42% are in favor](http://www.field.com/fieldpollonline/subscribers/Rls2278.pdf), a huge drop from 2000’s similar initiative. So its backers are already falling back on FUD tactics, the most recent being [kindergartners](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/24/BA5511V2DO.DTL&type=politics). They warn —

lovejoy
> If the gay marriage ruling is not overturned, teachers will be required to teach young children there is no difference between gay marriage and traditional marriage.

In the words of Mrs. Lovejoy: “Think about the children!”

Nevermind that the statement is factually wrong. Also, when do public school teachers give lessons on marriage, period? And are there popsicle sticks and yarn involved?

It’s easy to be glib, but dangerous. The proponents of Prop. 8 — many of them out-of-state — have deep pockets and a long history of stirring shit up in their favor. That’s why in lieu of a traditional wedding registry, we signed up with [Equality California](http://eqca.org), which is spearheading the opposition campaign. Frankly, we’d rather have justice than a toaster. ((If you’re itching for some righteous equality but don’t have another couple to gift, the registry is still there. John and Michael August, under “J,” strangely enough.))

But worst case scenario — what happens if it passes? That’s still up for debate.

The consensus is that existing marriages couldn’t be voided, since they were legal at the time they were enacted. And to paraphrase the late Charlton Heston: you can pry my ring off my cold, dead hand. But there are reasons to believe the amendment might still get considerable court scrutiny even if it passes. The legal lingo about “suspect classes” is a bit head-swirling, but can be summarized thusly: imagine an amendment that said African-Americans couldn’t marry. You’d have a guaranteed court battle.

. . .

In much happier news, my friend Andrew Lippa just wed his longtime squeeze David Bloch, and the New York Times has a [great piece on it](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/20/fashion/weddings/20lippa.html?_r=1&ref=weddings&oref=slogin). I hadn’t realized that the Times now does video interviews, but wow, it’s great. You get a much better sense of the couple when you hear them tell their own story. You’d have to be pretty hard-hearted not to want them married.

Andrew is a genius composer and lyricist, and I’ve been fortunate to be working on a project with him for the past two years. Mazel Tov to them both.

How to cut pages

Big Fish, Charlie's Angels, Dead Projects, Formatting, Go, How-To, Words on the page

One page of screenplay translates to one minute of movie. Since most movies are a little under two hours long, most screenplays should be a little less than 120 pages.

That’s an absurd oversimplification, of course.

One page of a battle sequence might run four minutes of screen time, while a page of dialogue banter might zip by in 30 seconds. No matter. The rule of thumb might as well be the rule of law: any script over 120 pages is automatically suspect. If you hand someone a 121-page script, the first note they will give you is, “It’s a little long.” In fact, some studios will refuse to take delivery of a script over 120 pages (and thus refuse to pay).

So you need to be under 120. ((But! But! you say. In the Library)), both Big Fish and Go are more than 120 pages. I’m not claiming that longer scripts aren’t shot. I’m saying that if you go over the 120 page line, you have to be doubly sure there’s no moment that feels padded, because the reader is going in with the subconscious goal of cutting something. ((Go is 126 pages, but it’s packed solid. Big Fish meanders, but those detours end up paying off in the conclusion.))

Which usually means you need to cut.

Before we look at how to do that, let’s address a few things you should __never__ do when trying to cut pages, no matter how tempting.

* **Don’t adjust line spacing.** Final Draft lets you tighten the line spacing, squeezing an extra line or two per page. Don’t. Not only is it obvious, but it makes your script that much harder to read.

* **Don’t tweak margins.** With the exception of Widow Control (see below), you should never touch the default margins: an inch top, bottom and right, an inch-and-a-half on the left. ((Page numbers, scene numbers, “more” and “continued” are exceptions.))

* **Don’t mess with the font.** Screenplays are 12-pt Courier. If you try a different size, or a different face, your reader will notice and become suspicious.

All of these don’ts could be summarized thusly: Don’t cheat. Because we really will notice, and we’ll begin reading your script with a bias against it.

There are two kinds of trims we’ll be making: actual cuts and perceived cuts. Actual cuts mean you’re taking stuff out, be it a few lines, scenes or sequences. Perceived cuts are craftier. You’re editing with specific intention of making the pages break differently, thus pulling the end of the script up. Perceived cuts don’t *really* make the script shorter. They just make it seem shorter, like a fat man wearing stripes.

Fair warning: Many of these suggestions will seem borderline-OCD. But if you’ve spent months writing a script, why not spend one hour making it look and read better?

Cutting a page or two
—-
At this length, perceived cuts will probably get you where you need to be. (That said, always look for bigger, actual cuts. Remember, 117 pages is even better than 120.)

**Practice Widow Control.** Widows are those little fragments, generally a word or two, which hog a line to themselves. You find them both in action and dialogue.

HOFFMAN

Oh, I agree. He’s quite the catch, for a fisherman. Caught myself trolling more than once.

If you pull the right-hand margin of that dialogue block very, very slightly to the right, you can often make that last word jump up to the previous line. Done right, it’s invisible, and reads better.

I generally don’t try to kill widows in action lines unless I have to. The ragged whitespace helps break up the page. But it’s always worth checking whether two very short paragraphs could be joined together. ((I try to keep paragraphs of action and scene description between two and six lines.))

**Watch out for invisible orphans.** Orphans are short lines that dangle by themselves at the top of page. You rarely see them these days, because by default, most screenwriting programs will force an extra line or two across the page break to avoid them. ((While I rag on the program, Final Draft is smart enough to break lines at the period, so sentences always stay intact. It’s a small thing, but it really helps the read. Other programs may do it now, too.))

Here’s the downside: every time the program does this, your script just got a line or two longer. So anytime you see a short bit of action at the top of the page, see if there’s an alternate way to write it that can make it jump back to the previous page.

**Nix the CUT TO:’s.** Screenwriters have different philosophies when it comes to CUT TO. Some use it at the end of every scene. Some never use it at all. I split the difference, using it when I need to signal to the reader that we’re either moving to something completely new story-wise, or jumping ahead in time.

But when I’m looking to trim a page or two, I often find I can sacrifice a few CUT TO’s and TRANSITION TO’s. So weigh each one.

Cutting five to ten pages
—-
At this level, you’re beyond the reach of perceived cuts. You’re going to have to take things out. Here are the places to look.

**Remove unnecessary set-ups.** When writing a first act, your instinct is to make sure that everything is really well set up. You have a scene to introduce your hero, another to introduce his mom, a third to establish that he’s nice to kittens. Start cutting. We need to know much less about your characters than you think. The faster we can get to story, the better.

**Get out of scenes earlier.** Look at every scene, and ask what the earliest point is you could cut to the next scene. You’ll likely find a lot of tails to trim.

**Don’t let characters recap.** Characters should never need to explain something that we as the audience already know. It’s a complete waste of time and space. So if it’s really important that Bob know what Sarah saw in the old mill — a scene we just watched — try to make that explanation happen off-screen.

For example, if a scene starts…

BOB

Are you sure it was blood?

…we can safely surmise he’s gotten the necessary details.

**Trim third-act bloat.** As we cross page 100 in our scripts, that finish line become so appealing that we often race to be done. The writing suffers. Because it’s easier to explain something in three exchanges of dialogue than one, we don’t try to be efficient. So you need to look at that last section with the same critical eyes that read those first 20 pages 100 times, and bring it up to the same level. The end result will almost always be tighter, and shorter.

Cutting ten or more pages
—-
Entire sequences are going to need to go away. This happens more than you’d think. For the first Charlie’s Angels, we had a meeting at 5 p.m. on a Friday afternoon in which the president of the studio yanked ten pages out of the middle of the script. There was nothing wrong with those scenes, but we couldn’t afford to shoot them. So I was given until Monday morning to make the movie work without them.

Be your own studio boss. Be savage. Always err on taking out too much, because you’ll likely have to write new material to address some of what’s been removed.

The most brutal example I can think of from my own experience was my never-sold ([but often retitled](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2005/a-movie-by-any-other-name)) zombie western. I cut 75 pages out of the first draft — basically, everything that didn’t support the two key ideas of Zombie Western. By clear-cutting, I could make room for new set pieces that fit much better with the movie I was trying to make.

Once you start thinking big-picture, you realize it’s often easier to cut fifteen pages than five. You ask questions like, “What if there was no Incan pyramid, and we went straight to Morocco?” or “What if instead of seeing the argument, reconciliation and breakup, it was just a time cut?”

Smart restructuring of events can often do the work for you. A project I’m just finishing has several occasions in which the action needs to slide forward several weeks, with characters’ relationships significantly changed. That’s hard to do with straight cutting — you expect to see all the pieces in the middle. But by focussing on something else for a scene or two — a different character in a different situation — I’m able to come back with time jumped and characters altered.

Look: It’s hard to cut a big chunk of your script, something that may have taken weeks to write. So don’t just hit “delete.” Cut and paste it into a new document, save it, and allow yourself the fiction of believing that in some future script, you’ll be able to use some of it. You won’t, but it will make it less painful.

Strike, days 42 and 43

Strike

Yesterday was the last official day of picketing before the new year. I was happy to see a large contingent turning out at 5:30 a.m. for my home gate at Paramount. Blog reader Andrew brought along his girlfriend Olivia. Since she’s not even a future WGA member, I felt an obligation to promise her that if the UCLA psych-bio majors ever go on strike, I’ll carry a sign at her picket.

Paul Weitz came as well, which gave us an opportunity to talk about the experience of being in the audience at a Sarah Silverman show. Mostly, it’s really funny. And then a moment comes when you realize the boundary between hilarious and offensive has been breached, and you find yourself replaying the last few jokes to figure out exactly when it happened.

I missed the general membership meeting last night in Santa Monica, because (a) we had guests over for dinner, and (b) open microphones make me squirm. I was in bed by nine.

This afternoon, I’m having the Disney Feature Fellows over for a chat about craft and career. It’s a cold, drizzly, sleepy day, which seems perfect for quasi-academic conversation.

In a previous comment thread, reader Paul Ramos (a friend from Boulder) asks…

Is it totally outside of the realm of possibility that the WGA can form its own production house that offers the terms that writers are looking for? Or is it just completely financially un-doable? Why must writers deal with production houses that don’t want to play ball? I realize that these questions probably seem rather naive. But wouldn’t distributors of media still be interested in a movie shot by the WGA vs. by Paramount or some other large production house?

Not naive at all. While the WGA itself can’t be in the movie or television production business (it’s a union which represents writers, rather than employing them), there’s nothing preventing writers from finding alternate sources of funding and setting up their own productions.

And, in fact, that’s [happening as we speak](http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-webwriters17dec17,1,299083.story). There are venture capitalists who recognize this as a unique opportunity: you have giant pool of unemployed content creators, and a hungry distribution system (the internet). Depending on the nature of those deals, they would probably need WGA vetting. But there’s a history of alternative deals being reached.

At the Indie Gate last Thursday, I heard it put thusly:

After the first time negotiations fell apart, the message was, “Come back, baby. We can work this out.”

After this last blow-out, the message is slowly becoming, “Maybe we should see other people.”

Look, the strike will end eventually. We’ll go back to working with and for the studios, writing TV series and summer blockbusters that make money for everyone. But we’re at a strange point in time. Certain ideas, certain properties, may not need giant corporations behind them. If you created the next South Park, or the next It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, you as the creator might find it more profitable to deliver it through the internet, where the playing fields are much more level.

That’s one irony of the strike: the key issue of internet distribution may become more viable because of the strike itself.

Five things

Meta

I got tagged with the [Five Things Meme](http://www.google.com/search?q=five%20things%20meme&), in which I’m supposed to share five pieces of information most readers probably don’t know about me. Fair enough.

1. __I’m an Eagle scout.__ I can tie all my knots, splint a broken bone, and build a fire without matches. Growing up in Colorado, I also learned to dig snowcaves, gut fish and cook a delicious snipe. My troop had the Frost Point Award, which worked thusly: for every campout during the winter months, they’d bring a thermometer. For every degree below freezing it fell, you’d get a frost point. The goal was to collect 100 frost points during the winter camping season. I got the award three years straight. Yes, in retrospect, it was crazy.

2. __Raspberries are my kryptonite.__ One raspberry and I’m curled in the fetal position, waiting out the abdominal pain and feeling like I’ve been poisoned. This has only been going on for a few months. I think it may related to some undercooked ostrich I ate.

3. __I was all-state orchestra.__ I wasn’t a prodigy, but I was very good at clarinet through high school. Then one day I realized I was never going to be great. I was never going to do it for a living. What’s more, I didn’t really enjoy it: I kept playing because I was good. So I gave it up completely. No regrets.

4. __I’m not the smart one in the relationship.__ By any metric, Mike is demonstrably smarter when it comes to math, history and languages. At a certain point, most couples divvy up responsibility for life’s chores: cooking, pet care, dealing with solicitors at the door. I have ceded all responsibility for calculation, navigation and scheduling. I have claimed baking, swimming instruction, and ripping the meat off rotisserie chicken.

5. __I was a vegetarian for seven years.__ I gave up meat during a summer film program at Stanford, largely for economic reasons — pasta was cheaper. Mostly through inertia, I stayed a milk-and-egg-eating vegetarian without complaint or incident, until I started working out and found myself ravenously, deliriously craving protein. Tuna was my gateway meat, and within a year I was eating KFC. But I still don’t eat mammals.