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Strike

One Year Later

Episode - 367

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September 11, 2018 Citizenship, Film Industry, Follow Up, Los Angeles, News, Producers, Scriptnotes, Strike, Transcribed

Aline Brosh McKenna joins John and Craig to discuss the progress made in the year following the Weinstein revelations. Have the systems for reporting and preventing sexual harassment improved, or are we still just dealing with hurricanes?

We also follow up on The Academy’s decision to nix the Popular Film category, the IATSE agreement, missing movies, and Craig’s distaste for ventriloquism. And Final Draft teaches us that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.

Links:

  • The Academy decided against adding the Popular Film Category this year.
  • Site supporting the IATSE Basic Agreement
  • A listener let us know when he saw a familiar looking typewriter, but Final Draft apologized.
  • Matt followed up with insight on how murky rights keep movies in limbo.
  • Even Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop, 12-year old Darcy Lynne on America’s Got Talent and Avenue Q can’t change Craig’s mind about ventriloquism.
  • An iPad stand
  • Awards Are Stupid, Jerry Seinfeld’s acceptance speech for his HBO Comedian Award
  • The USB drives!
  • Aline Brosh McKenna on Twitter
  • John August on Twitter
  • Craig Mazin on Twitter
  • John on Instagram
  • Find past episodes
  • Scriptnotes Digital Seasons are also now available!
  • Outro by Luke Davis (send us yours!).

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

UPDATE 9-19-18: The transcript of this episode can be found here.

Video from Rancho Mirage Q&A

April 27, 2009 Education, How-To, Strike, Video

Synthian Sharp, one of the nicest folks I met during the strike, took it upon himself to tape my Q&A in Rancho Mirage. He now has it online at Vimeo, where you can also download a much beefier 934MB version.

This talk was very much geared towards a general audience. While there were some film students, most of the crowd was over fifty. We spoke more about the career than the craft of screenwriting.

I showed five clips. Weirdly, I didn’t pick one from The Nines, but I did show one scene from Scott Frank’s Minority Report that had my fingerprints on it.

At 112 minutes, it’s quite a time commitment. If you’re skipping around in the video, here’s the rough order of what I talk about:

  • How I got started
  • Go
  • DC
  • Charlie’s Angels
  • Minority Report
  • Big Fish
  • Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
  • God (the short film on The Nines DVD)
  • The Nines
  • Audience questions

Thanks to The Friends of the Rancho Mirage Public Library, Palm Springs International Film Society, and moderator Deborah Dearth. And of course Synthian for putting this up.

On being here or there

February 23, 2009 Strike, Travel

I flew to Paris for a meeting this weekend.

That’s absurd, of course, spending 22 hours in the air just so I could sit around a small table with two other jet-lagged people. But it was an important meeting, a kind of reality-check on a project everyone wants to see done right. As a screenwriter, you quite literally need to make sure everyone is on the same page, so sitting down in person makes sense.

And sitting down in Paris is lovely. With my spare time, I took a Vélib bike across the city to check out a future apartment and encountered my very first grifter, whose gimmick (a found ring) was so smoothly delivered I almost wanted to tip him for the performance.

I woke up at 2:30 this morning, hoping to see the Oscars, but the hotel’s TV didn’t carry them. So I found myself following the action via Twitter (#oscars), letting a thousand strangers tell me not just what was happening, but how they felt about it. 1 It’s like swimming in a giant stream of consciousness.

It’s exhausting. I only lasted an hour. But for those sixty minutes, I had effectively outsourced television watching. It was the next best thing to being there. “There” being a television in America.

In a less jet-lagged state, I could probably write more eloquently on the implications of this dislocation. But my hunch — my possible thesis — is that quick flights to Paris and text-watching the Oscars are markers of the same general condition: a frustration that we can only physically be in one place at a time. It’s an unsolvable problem, but the ways we try to compensate for it are telling.

For starters, we move faster. Broadband is ubiquitous enough that when we don’t have it, it feels like going back to outdoor plumbing. My husband was in Asia for ten of the last fourteen days, but our daughter saw him every morning at breakfast thanks to iChat. She is growing up in an age in which no one actually goes anywhere: Daddy isn’t gone; he’s on the computer.

But faster isn’t everything. An article in today’s International Herald-Tribune celebrates the Concorde, a plane I never had the opportunity to fly. I didn’t realize it was often twice as fast as today’s airliners: London to New York in three hours. That’s great, but it’s not really transformative in an age when so many things come Right Now. Given its price and relative lack of luxury, the Concorde was ultimately competing against email. Digital won.

Another way we compensate for not being places is through constant communication with folks who are. That’s what Twitter and Facebook status updates do. At an all-WGA meeting at the Shrine Auditorium near the end of the strike, leaders scolded someone in the audience for live-blogging what was being said. Just a year later, that already seems quaint. Of course people are going to be Twittering. Some people can’t be here; why shouldn’t they be included?

The TV show Lost is all about location and isolation. For the first few seasons, the survivors didn’t really care where they were, they just needed to tell someone off-island that they were alive so they could be rescued. That’s shifted in the past two seasons, with all the focus now on reconnecting with those left behind. 2 The question of where the island is only matters once you’re off it.

The third and I think most dangerous strategy for coping with the place problem is simple denial. We psychologically stay home, even when we’re gone. I’m doing it at this moment, typing on my laptop while Paris awakens outside. My friend Dan moved to New York to produce a TV show, and says never really saw the city: he had thirteen nights free in four months. He was either on set or on the phone with Los Angeles the rest of the time, and came to see the JFK-LAX flight as a commute.

I see it happening with this generation of college students. When I left Boulder to go to Drake, and when I left Drake to move to Los Angeles, I left people behind. Through phone calls, letters and visits home, I maintained relationships with a few close friends. But ninety percent of the people I knew vanished in the rearview mirror. That doesn’t happen as much anymore. Through Facebook and email, it’s trivial to keep up with dozens of classmates more or less daily.

But is it really a good idea?

Your twenties are a crucial time, and I’d argue that it’s harder to discover yourself — or reinvent yourself — when surrounded by a vast network of people who already have a fixed opinion of who you are. I went to college and grad school not knowing a single person, and while it was a little terrifying, it was also liberating. Decoupled from my previous opinions and embarrassments, I was able to become the 2.0 and 3.0 versions of myself. I could only do that by going somewhere new. By changing place.

I’m packing up to fly home. Before I do, I’ll post this on the blog. But it occurs to me: I have absolutely no idea where the servers hosting this site are located. If I wanted to see the hardware, where would I go? That this question never occurred to me is also telling.

  1. Twitter’s atomic bundling of opinion and reportage is new. If the telegraph had made it to individual homes before the telephone, we might have had a precedent. ↩
  2. As one might guess from The Nines, I’m partial to the Desmond episodes. The idea of a “constant,” while narratively murky, feels right: you need someone who knows you independently of the present madness or you’re screwed. ↩

WGA Board election preview

July 17, 2008 Film Industry, Strike, WGA

Because a sizable number of WGA members read the site, I want to spend a few paragraphs talking about the Board of Directors election coming this September.

Since joining the guild in 1998, I’ve always read the candidate statements carefully — they come in a booklet along with the ballot — trying to balance two competing goals:

  1. Who would think most like me?
  2. Who brings a different voice to the board?

I score each candidate, then figure out my top eight (or however many are needed that year).

The ballot and booklet haven’t come out yet this year, but one candidate, Howard Michael Gould, has started a blog outlining his positions and reactions to events affecting the WGA and the community.

I first met Howard on the telephone, discussing a cinematographer he was considering hiring for his movie. Since then, I’ve followed him mostly through his work on the Negotiating Committee — you may remember his speaking at the big WGA meeting at the LA Convention Center. His positions haven’t always been in line with Patric Verrone’s, and I’ve appreciated his candor and thoughtfulness when talking about the strike and Where We Go From Here. In that way, he meets both of my criteria.

I think candidate blogging is a very good idea, one that I hope other candidates will emulate. I’ll happily link to anyone who does.

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