John August

Mine is scriptnotes: https://johnaugust.com/scriptnotes Two well-known scriptwriters (John August, behind e.g. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Craig Mazin, behind Chernobyl and The Last of Us (HBO)) discuss screenwriting and the movie industry. They have great guests as well - most recently Neil Gaiman for example. They are very interesting to listen to, and give great insight into the different aspects of screenwriting. At the same time, it is different enough from tech where it does not feel like work, while I still learn fascinating stuff.

That way of boiling down Finding Nemo seems to miss why the story is designed that way. It doesn’t describe anything about what happens to Marlin as a character, just a few basic plot points, and then in the end he somehow learns that “love depends on trust”. Uh, ok. If you actually want to understand why Finding Nemo “consistently tugs at heartstrings worldwide”, Craig Mazin used it as his primary example in “How to write a movie”, episode 403 of Scriptnotes[1]. (TL;DR: the purpose of everything that happens in a movie is to expose the hero to as much agony as possible, so that the change they’re forced to go through feels real. I don’t know what that means for your startup pitch, though.) 1: https://johnaugust.com/2019/scriptnotes-ep-403-how-to-write-a-movie-tr…

> Or, in other words, they don't have their own version of this strategy chart: https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/disney_cha... (Disney corporate synergy, dated 1957) I really love that chart because it tells you so much about the company culture that drew it up. Almost any other company would draw this diagram in some depressingly corporate way, but Disney drew it as a cartoon with little characters running around. It's a corporate strategy, expressed in concrete terms, in a way that demonstrates that the company was still run by artists.

John August also talks about it in episode 74 of his podcast with Craig Mazin called Scriptnotes: http://johnaugust.com/2013/three-hole-punchdrunk Although you need to pay to access archived podcasts they have all of them transcribed: http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-ep-74-three-hole-punchdrunk-tra… I highly recommend the podcast to anyone even remotely interested in the movie industry. I've been listening for around 6 months now and can't stop.

Two Hollywood screenwriters really dove down into Groundhog Day and is a discussion you might find insightful: http://johnaugust.com/2014/scriptnotes-ep-133-groundhog-day-transcript

Most good blogs and communities are more specialized than that. Aspiring screenwriters go to John August's blog [1], documentary filmmakers go to The D-Word [2], cinematographers go to forums like DVXUser [3] and RED User [4], sound folks go somewhere else, etc. Your idea sounds swell, though. I think a lot of people would be interested in a such a site, if done well. [1] http://johnaugust.com/ [2] http://www.d-word.com/ [3] http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/ [4] http://www.reduser.net/

The resulting story is (as expected) not good. As for the cost, assuming 10 words per sentence on the average, he pays $0.01 per word. Compare with what some magazines pay: http://johnaugust.com/2009/how-much-does-a-short-story-earn-in-a-magaz… since most sentences will be crap, it's not that much cheaper. However, I still think this is fantastic! Obviously it can be of use of seeding thoughts to get out of a writer's block, someone can offer this as a service. However, the cooler application would be to couple this with an AI trained on contemporary literature to select more promising sentences automatically. This may also be applicable to other fields, i.e. painting, where you can ask people to come up with local abstract designs and put them together to get the final picture.

Then you might enjoy Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting: https://johnaugust.com/scriptnotes It's hosted by John August (Big Fish, Corpse Bride) and Craig Mazin (Chernobyl, The Last of Us).

It's not just century-old movies, many much more recent movies which were available on DVD are almost impossible to find now that everything is to the whim of streamers and online services. Here are some examples: https://johnaugust.com/2018/missing-movies

Fountain: https://fountain.io/ Highland 2: https://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland-2/ About John August: https://johnaugust.com/about

A refrain on the Scriptnotes podcast[1] (hosted by John August and Craig Mazin) is that you're more likely to be an NFL player than a working screenwriter[2]. 1. https://johnaugust.com/scriptnotes 2. https://johnaugust.com/2015/scriptnotes-ep-215-pg13-blood-boobs-and-bu…

There are a surprising number of movies that aren't available on any streaming platforms. https://johnaugust.com/2018/missing-movies

> As promised, I have made the scripts for #ChernobylHBO available for download... On June 4, 2019 Craig Mazin announced[0] that scripts of all episodes of «Chernobyl» miniseries now available for free downloading (as PDFs) from John August's Library site.[1] P.S.: All links archived[2] ;-) [0] https://twitter.com/clmazin/status/1136051861952258048 [1] https://johnaugust.com/library [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20190605055939/https://johnaugust.com/libr…

Looks like here's the original announcement, which has more background on motivations and has a comparison with regular Courier: http://johnaugust.com/2013/introducing-courier-prime

Now I just wonder if script readers will react "ooh, I don't know why but this looks nice" or "ugh, something's weird about this script but I can't tell what." The original announcement that someone posted [1] says that Courier Prime was developed by iterating on blinded feedback from actual screenwriters reading sample screenplay manuscripts, so I'd expect it to be reliably better in practice. Interestingly, and agreeing with the comment chain explaining the history of the font and the failure to take ink-bleed into account, the feature that apparently consumed the most optimization effort was in fact the weight, which had to be refined quite a bit over successive iterations. Neat! [1]: http://johnaugust.com/2013/introducing-courier-prime

alangpierce commented with the original announcement, which has a much better close-up comparison: http://johnaugust.com/2013/introducing-courier-prime

How does this compare with Highland? https://johnaugust.com/screenwriting-software

On episode 54 of Accidental Tech Podcast [1], they mentioned a recent flair-up about the screen writing software Final Draft. It seems the CEO went on a podcast about script writing called ScriptNotes two times [2] and it sounds like he was caught totally flat by listener feedback about how far behind his product was. Film director Kent Tessman wrote up a post [3] about how foreseeable much of this was and just how bad the situation is. It reminded me quite a bit of this article. An old & dominate piece of software that is built on old technologies and has obvious deficiencies that doesn't seem to be progressing and seems ripe for disruption. 1. http://atp.fm/episodes/54-goto-fail 2a . http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-one-with-the-guys-from-final-draft 2b. http://johnaugust.com/2014/period-space 3. http://www.kenttessman.com/2014/02/notes-on-scriptnotes/

John August has some scripts at http://johnaugust.com/library but I'm not aware of an Internet-scale script repository.

I'm disappointed in the shallow look people are giving this. You can't just read the marketing copy and take it at face value. Amazon Studios is actually pretty terrible for creatives, as many successful screenwriters et al. have been pointing out for over a year now: http://artfulwriter.com/?p=1103 http://www.hitfix.com/blogs/motion-captured/posts/the-morning-read-why… Since those were written things have improved slightly, but anyone thinking about participating should still have serious reservations: http://johnaugust.com/2011/amazon-studios-now-slightly-less-terrible

For a more general look at this topic: http://johnaugust.com/archives/2006/air-vents-are-for-air

> It's a real term [..] the showrunner can also have one of several actual official titles Q: Is "showrunner" an official title, or not? EDIT: apparently not[0]: "The highest ranking producer is the showrunner, the man or woman ultimately responsible for the creative direction of the series. Showrunner is a function, not a title — this person is credited as an Executive Producer. In many cases, he or she has “Created by” credit on the series" [0] https://johnaugust.com/2004/producer-credits-and-what-they-mean EDIT2: "A showrunner is the unofficial title given to the top-level creative decision maker and manager overseeing all episodes of an individual season of a television/episodic series. The showrunner is usually credited as an executive producer, producer and/or writer. "[1] [1] https://help.imdb.com/article/contribution/filmography-credits/showrun…

> To me that just looks like an odd relic from typewriter times. This is the initial reason. It persists because it is part of the shorthand filmmakers use to estimate time from text. A page of screenplay translates to about a minute of screen time. That conversion is deeply ingrained in Hollywood. Everyone will look at the page count of a screenplay and make assumptions about the running time of the resulting film. If you change the font metrics, that conversion breaks and it would confuse the hell out of everyone. And if different screenplays (or different drafts of the same one) use different metrics then you lose the ability to compare their length just using page counts. It's important to remember that screenplays are real physical working artifacts. In the production of a film, people will be carrying around dog-eared copies of it. The director will say things like, "We're going to try to get through three pages today." Pages are a real concept, not just an arbitrary subdivision of a continuous string of text. Also the font is part of film culture at this point. Using a different font would convey that you are an outsider or don't care about the norms and history of cinema. It's exactly how when you see a page set in Computer Modern you think, "Ah, this is a real CS paper." A screenplay not set in Courier would look like a fraud. If it makes you feel better, John August has a slightly more modern font that preserves the exact metrics of 12 point…

Because most toy companies don't / can't understand vertical integration and increasing value capture. Or, in other words, they don't have their own version of this strategy chart: https://johnaugust.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/disney_chart.jpg (Disney corporate synergy, dated 1957) Your primary consumer has the attention span of a 10-year-old, and no disposable income. Why are we surprised this is a terrible industry? A smarter approach would be what Tim Sweeney is talking about with Fortnite (and Amazon infamously does): you have to do everything you can to pivot any initial success into a durable advantage, by aggressively expanding into adjacent opportunities, even if they're very different businesses (e.g. movie theaters). They've made token moves towards this with the physical toy + computer game mash-up genre, but from an external perspective I don't think any of them quite get how it's supposed to work. Efforts seem under -capitalized / -resourced / -inspired.