When his third grade teacher in Boulder, Colorado told students to write to a famous person, eight year-old John Meise didn't choose President Jimmy Carter or a sports hero; he sent a letter to Roald Dahl. So how excited was he, twenty-odd years later, to write the screenplay for Tim Burton's version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Very! By that point, he had changed his name to John August and had seen six of his screenplays produced, including Go, Titan A.E., both Charlie's Angels movies, and Big Fish. Next came The Corpse Bride. He also runs a no-nonsense website for budding screenwriters, where he is forthright about the eleven finished scripts he can't get made, and, gratis, answers readers' random questions about their work. In June 2008, he married his longtime partner. Earlier, the NYT wrote, "Mr. August said his sexual orientation has helped him notice things others miss," and quoted him saying, "I suspect every gay screenwriter has a big gay-catharsis movie inside them. But then you go to a gay film festival and you see everyone else has done their movie, and there's not a pressing need for you to do yours." Next year, he's exec-producing the video game movie Prince of Persia with Jerry Bruckheimer and, for 2011, he's writing Tim Burton's feature-length Frankenweenie.
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