John August

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A Thousand Roads lead to this

Video

About a year ago, I took a Final Cut Pro class at UCLA Extension. It was a mixed success. I already knew too much for a beginner class, but wasn’t proficient enough for a more advanced session. So I ended up having a lot of extra time to fiddle around with the test footage that comes with the FCP tutorial — in this case, from [A Thousand Roads](http://imdb.com/title/tt0407254/), which is apparently a movie about the Native American experience.

One lesson I learned from the first Charlie’s Angels: when characters are speaking in foreign languages, the subtitles can say anything.

Location scouting

The Nines

One of the first tasks in getting [The Movie](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2006/so-i-made-a-movie) on its feet was picking locations. We spent about three weeks scouting — almost as long as we shot.

I didn’t think I’d written a very location-driven movie, but it ended up being a bit of a monster. Part of that was budget — if we’d had serious money, we could have spent our way out of some problems. But the bigger issue was the schedule. The movie is broken into three parts, and for reasons I won’t divulge, we had to shoot the parts in a very specific order. We couldn’t swap Day 4 for Day 9. Which meant we had to have a given location available on exactly the right day.

Complicating matters, we needed dense forest close enough to Los Angeles that we wouldn’t have to put up crew overnight. In Vancouver, you’ve got forest everywhere. In Los Angeles, we have Angeles Crest, but the parts that looked right were way too far from the main roads. Logistically, it would have been impossible.

Fortunately, we found great stuff in Topanga and Malibu. The rest of our locations had to fit in around them.

The movie was shot almost entirely on practical locations (that is, real places rather than sets). The exception was one day shot at the Hearst Building in Downtown LA, an old newspaper plant that’s been converted into standing sets for film and television. It’s a super-creepy building made even stranger by the sets. Walk around a corner and you’re in a hospital. Open a door, and it’s the filthiest motel room you’ve ever seen. It’s hard to tell where movie-squalor ends and actual squalor begins.

I’ve put together a two-minute reel of the locations we ended up using. When the movie’s done, you’ll be able to see how we used them. The last clip is the hotel we shot in New York City.

(Because you’ll ask: The music is by [Alex Wurman](http://imdb.com/name/nm0943391/), our composer.)

Professional Writing and the Rise of the Amateur

First Person, Rant, So-Called Experts

Last night, I had the pleasure of giving a guest lecture at Trinity University in San Antonio. While I speak at various screenwriter-oriented functions fairly often, this was unusual in that the event was university-wide, and the focus wasn’t specifically on film.

Part of the deal was that I had to announce the title of my speech months in advance. I picked, “Professional Writing and the Rise of the Amateur,” figuring that in the intervening months I would think of inspiring examples of how the World of Tomorrow was going to be a wonderland of possibility for the undergraduates in the audience.

But the more I thought about it, the less I wanted to talk about the future. Instead, I wanted to focus on one of the biggest challenges of today: in our celebration of the amateur, we kind of forget what it means to be professional.

As I spoke with various classes before the big presentation, I promised I’d post the whole speech on the site for those students who had night classes. And, of course, for anyone else who might be interested.

Let me warn you: this is __long__. My speech lasted 45 minutes, and that was without a lot of riffing. So if you’d rather read the whole thing as a .pdf, you can find it [here](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/professional.pdf).

. . .

It’s a pleasure to be here talking with you tonight. Over the last two days, I’ve been visiting a lot of classes, talking about screenwriting and movies, and well, basically talking about myself. Which I’m really good at. But when I agreed to give a formal public lecture, one of the requirements was that the presentation actually have a title. By which I mean a topic, a thesis. A point.

It all feels very academic, and I love that. I miss that. None of you will believe me now, but some day you’ll look back on your college careers and be wistful. Nostalgic. Because there’s something comforting about having to write a fifteen page paper on the use of floral imagery in “Pride and Prejudice.”

I think what it is, is that even if you’re completely wrong, it just doesn’t matter that much. For the rest of your life, you’re going to get called on bullshitting. In college, you’re graded on it.

Anyway.

I decided I wanted my lecture tonight to be not strictly about screenwriting, but about writing in general. Because everyone in this room is a writer. You might write screenplays; you might write research papers. You definitely write emails. Every one of you is, and will be, a professional writer in some field.

So I wanted to talk about what that means.

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