You’d have to be under the proverbial rock to be a screenwriter and not know about johnaugust.com. It’s the first blog I’ll profile and it’s my #1.
God knows how many hours it’s taken John to write 245 pages worth of blog posts; nor how long it would take to read every post archived since 2003. His site is an unparalleled accumulation of knowledge given over for dollar $0.
Where does he find the time? The guy develops an app for Final Draft on the iPad, is developing a Broadway musical adaptation of Big Fish…and that’s just this half of June.
Here’s what John August is not. He is not a Type A, self promoting-consultancy-hustling-namedropping-faster-than-you blogger. That’s because John–like others I will profile here–doesn’t need your money.
Big Fish, Charley and the Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bridge…not bad. And those are only three of the movies he’s written.
Hard to pick from eight years worth of posts, but let’s go back 245 pages to 2003. This, for instance, from September ’03 on How I Got My Agent (John’s writing is italicized):
“Some of my most talented writer friends have trouble getting a good agent, even though they live in Los Angeles and are doing everything “right.” It’s frustrating for them and it’s frustrating for me. If we were all beginning screenwriters living in Wichita, we could chalk it up to being some sort of California conspiracy, but it’s harder when you know the agents involved and understand their very difficult job.
So before getting into any how-to, let me lay down a few simple truths:
- You don’t have to have an agent. It’s not like a driver’s license; you’re not breaking any laws. Even though I had an agent at the time, the first few writing jobs I got were through other contacts I’d made at grad school and working as an assistant. My agent handled the deal-making, but in truth I was being paid the least the companies could legally pay me (called “scale”), so a lawyer could have done the same job.
- Agents need clients who work. That sounds obvious, but other than disliking your writing, it’s the main reason an agent will pass on you. Before she signs you, the agent has to believe that (A) enough people will be willing to pay you good money to write movies for them, and (B) you’ll be able to make those people happy.
- Most beginning writers worry about agents way too much. After fantasy-casting their script and practicing their acceptance speech, a newbie writer spends 20 minutes a day fretting about an agent. It’s wasted time. Work on your script; enter some competitions; make a real plan. Anything is better than sitting around worrying.
In my first year of graduate school at USC, I wrote a script called HERE AND NOW. It was a romantic tragedy set in Boulder, Colorado (my home town), and in hindsight was very overwritten. But still, it was well-overwritten. Friends who read it liked it, and I could get about 35% of readers to cry, which ain’t bad.
An instructor at USC took a shine to it, and gave it to a literary agent at CAA. Every day when I came home from work (I was interning at Universal), I checked the answering machine, hoping to hear that CAA loved it and wanted to sign me. For more than a month, nothing. I was paralyzed and despondent. Finally, the agent called the instructor and said no, thanks.
Those weeks spent waiting were completely wasted. It was an important lesson to learn.
That same summer, a friend in my grad program was interning for a producer, and gave him my script to read. The producer liked the writing and wanted to submit it to the studio where he had an exclusive deal. Supressing my joy, I said sure, but that I needed to get an agent first, and asked if he could help.
We made a list of agents we thought would be right — all of them smaller than the powerhouses like CAA. He called and got them to read it. I ended up signing with one at a boutique lit agency about a week later. That first script never sold — and probably shouldn’t have. But it got me meetings with a lot of other people whom I’d later work with.”
With the announcement of Amazon Studios came a blog post last November that was controversial:
“If Amazon Studios were a simple finance and production outfit like Relativity or Morgan Creek, there would be nothing more to say. But Amazon Studios has an unusual strategy:
Amazon Studios invites filmmakers and screenwriters from all over the world to submit full-length movies and scripts, which will then get feedback from Amazon readers, who will be free to rewrite and amend. Based on reaction (“rate and review”) to stories, scripts and rough “test” films, a panel of judges will award monthly prizes.
Several readers have written to ask my take on all this. I won’t conjecture about anything beyond what’s on the press release and website, but I’m left with some pretty big questions. I have a hunch other screen-bloggers will be tackling some of the glaring ones, like copyright, authorship and the 18-month free option.
So I’ll just ask one:
Do you really want random people rewriting your script?
To me, this feels like the biggest psychological misstep of the venture. Sure, most aspiring screenwriters yearn for access to the film industry and the chance to get their movies made. That’s why they enter screenwriting competitions, including things like Project Greenlight, which feels like its closest kin.
But here’s the thing: each of these writers wanted to get his movie made. I’ve never met a single screenwriter who hoped anonymous strangers would revise him.
Can I make it so that no one else can revise my original work?
No. But if someone makes changes that are bad, their version is not likely to get a lot of attention. And if someone comes along and makes your work better, you’re more likely to win a prize and get your project made. Sometimes other people can bring a different viewpoint or a different set of skills that take the story in a new direction or add new elements that make it even more compelling.
Look, I know your script was about a blind cheerleader in Harlem. But ramsey22′s revision making the cheerleader an elephant is so much funnier. And blueGoblin has a good point: a safari park is a better setting for a story about elephants.
In software development, the open source movement has succeeded in bringing teams of strangers together. But writing code is a lot different than writing a screenplay. A bad line of code is obvious; it doesn’t do what it needs to do. A bad line of dialogue is a judgement call. A thumbs-up, thumbs-down voting system isn’t likely to fix this.
Hollywood already has a bad track record of messing up projects by bringing in too many writers — and that’s when they’re paying people who have already written and produced movies. The idea that an undiscovered screenwriter in Wichita will rewrite someone else’s screenplay on his own time seems far-fetched, and to me smacks of spec labor.”
John August strikes me as an understated guy, very much the gentleman, as you can see by his measured reader responses. Here, for instance, about why we must have board-game movies:
“So, I understand the merits of re-making movies from the past, or making old TV shows into features. I also get it from a studios perspective inasmuch as it’s a known property that has a fanbase, or has made a profit in the past.
But when I see studios making adaptations of toys like “Magic 8 Ball” or “Battleship” or “Stretch Armstrong” it really bums out the aspiring writer in me. It makes me think Hollywood doesn’t want my original idea. Can you talk me down from the ledge?
– Logan
Los Angeles
Logan, I’m right there on the ledge with you. But when you look down past your shoelaces, you realize that it’s not rocks and crashing waves below. The ledge we’re standing on is about eight feet high. At the bottom is concrete.
Jump wrong, and it’s going to be painful. Jump carefully, and you’ll be fine.
Yes, I rolled my eyes when the “Battleship” movie was announced. But I’ll happily see a modern naval war movie, and if it has to be named after a Milton Bradley property, so be it. A hidden upside to writing a movie based on just a title is that the screenwriter has huge latitude, unlike a book or TV adaptation.
Pendulums swing. It was dumb to make a movie out of a theme park ride before Pirates of the Caribbean. This trend towards making movies out of properties with no inherent narrative will eventually end. (A big success from an original like Inception might help.) In the meantime, let’s root for the best versions of these projects….”
If I was a break-in screenwriter, I’d look for truth-tellers and teachers. I’d want a mentor who would fire me up, inspire me, and raise me up instead of constantly beating me down with the odds against me. John August is often a source of inspiration, as a May Post on Christopher Hitchens shows:
“As he loses his voice to cancer, Christopher Hitchens writes about the idea of literary voice:
‘To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a a huge and loathsome snake: “How many people in this class can talk? I mean, really talk?” That had its duly woeful effect.
I told them to read every composition aloud, preferably to a trusted friend. The rules are much the same: Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don’t say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was a boy, in which case you have probably thrown away a better intro. If something is worth hearing or listening to, it’s very probably worth reading. So, this above all: Find your own voice.’
College was the first time I started writing how I speak.
Or, more accurately, college was when I stopped trying to write the way I thought I should write. Whether through explicit instruction (topic sentences, Roman outlines) or imitative insecurity (we all had a Hemingway phase), any unique quality in my prose had been flattened. The occasional quirks were mostly borrowed from Spy magazine, whose pithy precision I worshipped without really understanding.
A freshman year newswriting class probably changed me more than anything. J54 taught us how to align fact-bearing sentences in a deliberate pyramid structure so that the story could be truncated at any point without losing its meaning.
We learned the rules. We wrote the articles. The process was almost automated; given the same facts, any two news writers should generate very much the same story.
I hated it. I revolted. Why should I waste my time writing something anyone else could have churned out?
Writing isn’t harder than speaking, but it’s lonelier. It’s a conversation with someone who isn’t there.
When you’re writing, you end up hearing your own voice a lot. I think that’s why so many people struggle with it. We don’t like to be alone with our thoughts. They scare us. But in the same way people don’t stutter when talking to a dog, it helps to envision a friendly reader at the far side. Let writing be talking with someone you like.”
John, I’ve learned a lot from you. Thanks for your contribution.
