So now I have 120 pages of the funniest damn stuff you’ve never seen and I have to describe it in three or four sentences. How do you convey the witty dialogue, the clever visual gags, the essence of the humor in a logline?

Whenever I write one it ends up sounding like it’s describing an action movie or drama. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

--Jeff

You aren’t going to be able to summarize the visual gags, puns and one-liners in a logline, so don’t try. Rather, you want to distill what’s funny about the idea of your movie. The best practice is to take existing movies and figure out how you’d boil them down if you had to write a logline.

None of these would classify as John’s Best Effort, but they get the point across:

I happened to stumble upon a bootleg VHS copy of your Ozzfest documentary, We Sold Our Souls For Rock and Roll, which is one of your best flicks to date.

I have heard rumblings of an upcoming direct-to- DVD release, but I was just curious how a film of such quality could sit on a shelf for so long and never get a proper theatrical release. Please advise.

--Tom

Thank you for asking about We Sold Our Souls For Rock and Roll and I humbly agree that it is one of my best documentaries, if not the best. I shot the movie on the ¹99 Ozzfest Tour and worked on it for over two years after that. With four cameras, two High Def and two Mini-DV, I ended up with 283 hours of footage. Sorting through and organizing that much material and trying to find the thread to pull it all together was a tedious, even grueling process. There was so much amazingly good material on not only the ten or so bands we were dealing with, but also with the heavy metal enthusiasts which made up the monstrous crowds.

I made the film before "The Osbournes" TV show and had even tried years earlier to make a theatrical feature length comedy starring Ozzy which was called "Shooting Stars". We really could not get that film going because none of the production entities we approached, major studios included, would believe in the idea that Ozzy Osbourne could be funny. Shows you what they know.

The reason the film has not been released yet is because of issues with music clearance, which will hopefully be resolved soon. I think the film would do well in theaters, especially now that the general public has a better predisposition about documentaries, but it might just go to DVD. I will just be thrilled for people to finally be able see it as it is an amazing testament to middle-America¹s voracious appetite for partying.

Who can be officially credited as the inventor/owner of the Zolly shot? I heard some fans say Hitchcock can claim ownership when he used it in Vertigo. Others believe Spielberg perfected it in Poltergeist and Jaws (I'm not sure which Jaws-- I think it was the second one). But who officially used it for the first time and which film or TV project was it used in?
-DJ Heinlein

Hitchcock is generally credited with inventing the “trombone” shot which is another name for it.

It's now been used so many times it’s almost a cliché.

For most scenes in a film, on average, how many cameras do you have at hand being used simultaneously?

Mostly one for a normal dialogue scene in a room. 2 for daylight scenes involving some complication ie children, animals, weather etc.

Then 3 upwards for action scenes or any scene where doing it again is a problem – like blowing up a house etc. The main problem with using more than one camera is that it is hard to make the lighting look good from more than one angle, although if the 2nd camera is used carefully then it can provide very useful additional footage.

John August's screenwriting credits include Go, Big Fish, Titan A.E. and both Charlie's Angels movies. His current projects include Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Tarzan, and Corpse Bride. He also maintains a screenwriting-oriented website at johnaugust.com.

Born and raised in Boulder, Colorado, John earned a degree in journalism from Drake University in Iowa, and an MFA in film production from the Peter Stark program at the University of Southern California. He lives in Los Angeles.

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