It’s available on Kindle and Nook, on sale for $9.99 today.

Rubin walks the reader through the genesis of the idea — and all the other ideas competing for his attention. The ebook includes a lot of marked-up pages from his initial notes and drafts. Most of these are readable on a traditional Kindle, but it’s one of the rare titles that actually works better on an iPad.

Groundhog Day is nearly 20 years old, but still feels very contemporary in terms of high-concept comedies, with its simple-but-clever premise and curmudgeonly fish-out-of-water protagonist. My only caution to readers that even though we keep making variations of this movie (c.f. Click, Liar Liar, A Thousand Words), the film industry itself has changed, so descriptions of the business and process might not reflect current reality.

Writing for games is different from any other genre. The interactive nature of the story demands that the writer fully understand the term “Gamer Experience.” In the last five years, I’ve heard this term come up in game story discussions more and more. It’s a powerful concept, and once understood, it not only changes the way a writer approaches narrative, but the gamer experience can change depending on the genre of game you’re working on.

RPGs are the extreme example of how a game story can be unique to each player, but even on RPGs we don’t have the money or time to build more than three or four splines for the story. In a linear action adventure game, the degree of “unique experience” is much less. Still, every player wants to feel like they’ve had a unique experience. We don’t just provide an illusion of this -— we now have systems in place that make this a reality, like systemic scripts, dynamic dialogue systems, and perhaps most importantly, user-created experiences that abound in multiplayer, co-op and social games.

A good writer must be focused on creating narrative systems that tell the player’s story, not their own. It’s an important distinction.

Richard Dansky follows up with what he’s looking for when he hires a game writer:

A good game writer understands that the game isn’t about them, or their story, or their witty dialog. The rest of the team isn’t there to realize their vision, and the player isn’t there to admire their brilliance. The game writer I want to work with wants to collaborate with the team to create the best player experience possible. That means crafting a story that shows off the features that the game is built around — no setting key plot moments on the featureless Siberian tundra for a stealth game, thanks.

Game writing is an odd form. Instead of a single script at the end, you often deliver a patchwork of moments that add up to a story.

Given the tremendous overlap with screenwriting, Craig and I have argued that the WGA needs to step up its efforts to represent videogame writers.

Overall, I found Amazon’s ebook tools satisfactory, but the price structure was frustrating:

Amazon doesn’t distinguish between free and paid content on their Kindle bestseller list. In fact, 19 out of the top 50 books are free. There’s nothing wrong with free, but it’s a semantic and tactical mistake to include them on a “bestseller” list.

They’ve fixed that.

Free books are now listed separately, and with the introduction of the KDP Select program, self-publishers can finally price a title as free for up to five days. (Before this, only major publishers could set the price at zero.)

After reading David Kazzie’s post about his experience with KDP Select, I decided to try it out on another one of my short stories, Snake People, which had gotten nice reviews but never achieved the traction of The Variant.

To enter KDP Select, you have to promise that the title isn’t available for sale anywhere other than Amazon. Unlike The Variant, I wasn’t selling Snake People as a PDF, so there was nothing to take down.

Dropping the price is handled through a pop-up box called the Promotions Manager. The only option listed for me was “free book,” but the system seems to be designed for more-extensive campaigns. You’re allowed to be free for up to five days total, divided however you want.

Snake People went free yesterday (February 1st), and as of this writing sits at #20 on Kindle’s free short stories list, with 75 copies “sold” in the last 24 hours.

The list is everything

From our experience with Bronson Watermarker, we’ve learned that where you fall on the lists has a huge impact on sales. The higher you’re ranked, the more people see you. The more you’re seen, the more you’re purchased. Winners keep winning.

The pure ranking matters, but even more important is where the page breaks.

For Bronson, we made the front page of the Mac App Store in the “New and Notable” section. For the two weeks we were there, our sales were ten times normal. Once we fell to the second page of “New and Notable,” we quickly regressed to the mean.

I realize that writing about Snake People while the experiment is still running will inevitably corrupt the data. Some readers will click and buy it because hey, it’s free.

And that’s okay. I mostly want more data to answer correlation questions: If 75 copies lands a title at #20, how many copies is the #1 short story “selling?”

In my initial experiments with The Variant, I was able to estimate how much Stephanie Meyer was bringing in off of her Twilight books. (A lot.) I’m curious what the numbers mean in Kindle’s new free ecosystem.

So if you haven’t checked out Snake People, go get it before the promotion ends on Friday. I’ll publish a follow-up on Monday with numbers.

John August: Hello and welcome. This is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And you are listening to Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

How are you, Craig?

Craig: I’m doing great. I know that that is a rhetorical question, but actually lately I have been having…

You know those days where you can’t seem to get on top of your own schedule? You are running behind on everything, and even the strange little quirks of circumstance seem to conspire against you and make you later, and later, and later? And for the last week everything has just been falling into place. Like today I knew that I had to be here to do this podcast with you and I was at Universal and this meeting was running long and then there was a lunch, and it just worked out almost to the minute that I was here on time.

Because… — I don’t know. The clouds parted. The sun shone through. Just things have been going my way.

John: Well that’s great. Congratulations.

Craig: No, no, no. That’s not great. That means that very soon…

John: Oh, I’m sorry, yes. I feel bad for you because it clearly means that your run is about to end and you will be sad soon.

Craig: The regression to the mean will occur.

John: The regression to the mean will inevitably occur.

Craig: Inevitably.

John: I had a… — I was in New York for almost two weeks to do casting for Big Fish. And I had to speak… — I was invited to speak to the film school out in the Bronx. It’s this public school that has this amazing film program there and so they invited me to speak. And it was… — Of course I’m going to go out and speak to them.

And I was so convinced that I was going to make it there in plenty of time. I was taking the 6 and I was going to get up there, and the trains conspired against me.

Craig: Mmm.

John: So, it was one of those days where I had the opposite of the Craig Mazin luck, and I watched as my speaking time passed while I was still on the train that was stopped on the tracks for about 15 minutes.

Craig: No way!

John: Yeah.

Craig: It was stopped?

John: It was stopped.

Craig: Oh, eh, it was probably a suicide.

John: Oh, yeah. That’s a good way to think about it.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So my minor inconvenience versus some family who lost a loved one.

Craig: Well you always want there to be some kind of death at the other end of any kind of commuting stoppage. I feel like if I am going to stop, there should be a price in blood.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Yeah.

John: But I did finally make it to speak to this film school in the Bronx, which is this amazing film program which I was so incredibly envious of these students because they are in high school but they are studying making movies. And they have to do all of the normal stuff you have to do in high school, and all the basic requirements, but they get to shoot movies and talk to filmmakers. And I am just incredibly envious of people who get to come of age in this time of wonder.

Craig: Yeah. What school is this in the Bronx?

John: It is called — and I will put a link to it in the show notes — but it was called the Cinema School. It is a New York Public School, but it is especially funded for the arts. And so I think it is an equivalent of the Fame school if you were a dancer, but if you were a director or a screenwriter you might get to go to this school.

Craig: Right. Like there is the Bronx High School of Science which is the science version of that; it’s public. And it is selective I presume?

John: It is selective. Yes. You have to sort of apply to it and get in to it. But it is not a charter school in the normal sense.

Craig: Right.

John: It somehow magically works and they got money to do it. And God bless them.

Craig: Yeah, no, it’s like Hunter High School and Stuyvesant High School, Midwood — I think it is called — yeah, it’s like a pre-med.

New York actually has a really cool system like that; it’s smart that they have a movie one.

Yeah, you are envious of those kids in a positive way, and I hate them for having advantages I didn’t have. So…

John: That pretty much explains the difference between you and me.

Craig: Yup. White and dark. Here we go. Yin and yang. Let’s do this. [laughs]

John: I was talking to Dana Fox this week, who is busy casting her TV show. She has a… — Dana Fox, who is my former assistant and a very good friend, she sold a show to Fox, the studio, and Fox the network about her brother, Ben Fox.

So there are so many Foxes involved that it is kind of crazy.

Craig: Yes. I mean, I could say that is pretty Foxed up, but, well, I’m not going to say that.

John: Yeah, that would be kind of a hackneyed joke.

Craig: I did not just say that. It didn’t happen.

John: No. But I’m not going to let Stuart cut that out. That’s going to stay.

Craig: No. He shouldn’t cut it out. It is evidence that I didn’t do it.

John: Ah, okay. Yeah. But talking to her about casting, because she is in the middle of casting right now, and I just came out of a casting thing, made me really think about the difference between feature casting, and TV casting, and Broadway casting.

When you are casting a feature, you have actors come in and they are reading the sides; they are reading the scenes from the actual script of your movie. Or, sometimes you will write special scenes that are better for figuring out who these people are. But your only question is: Can they perform the scenes that are in your film?

When you are casting a TV show it is really a different experience because you are wondering, “Well, will they be good in the pilot, but will they also be able to do stuff like three years down the road when our show is a giant hit?” It is all of this sort of… — You are banking on what that person is going to become. It is a very different process.

Craig: Mmm. Yes. I could see that. Casting for movies is very limited and narrow and, yes, you are going to…

And also, you only have to perform it once for a movie. But you have to find somebody with some kind of stamina, social stability, the availability to just commit to this for a really long time. Totally different animal.

John: It is. If you are casting a feature, sometimes you are willing to put up with an incredibly difficult person because it is just a feature, and they are going to shoot however many weeks and then they are done and they are gone. You never have to see them again.

Craig: Right.

John: If you are casting a TV show, you are saying, “Do I want to show up to work every day to deal with this person?” And a lot of times the answer is no.

Craig: Yeah. Yeah. So, how is that going for her?

John: Good I think. I think it is going to have an amazing cast. It’s a good, funny script. She’s awesome.

Craig: She is definitely one of the… — I would say she is probably the sunniest writer I have ever met.

John: Yeah. Sunny is a nice word. I like sunny.

Craig: Yeah. Very sunny.

John: Right now, she is a consulting producer on, or some sort of producer, on the New Girl, and the new show has a similar vibe and, I think, a similar opportunity for future success as that show.

Craig: Cool.

John: Speaking of success, I thought today we would focus on, well, what I would call “Six Figure Advice.” Because we did a previous podcast, I called it “Five Figure Advice,” which is when you are just starting to work, and you are starting to make five figures. So, $50,000, $60,000, you are getting paid to write and that is a great thing. So we talked about what life was like at that level.

Craig: Right.

John: Now I want to talk about the six figure advice. So, you are making more than $100,000, probably a fair chunk more than $100,000, and a lot of your decisions about things might be a little different. Your life looks a little different. And, based on my experience with screenwriter friends, the people who have problems with money and finances, a lot of times it really happens at about this level.

Because when you are just starting to make money you kind of know what that is like. You sort of know what it is like to live paycheck to paycheck. You know how to sort of pay for things and sort of how much, you know, to pay off your credit cards and that kind of stuff. When you hit the six figures, you are not sure if you are rich or not. You are not sure how much money is really coming in. You are not sure what your life is supposed to look like. And people make the wrong assumptions about what their life should look like. And then they end up having to take jobs out of desperation because they burned through their money quicker than they thought they would.

Craig: Yeah. Well that is a really good way of putting it, that people sit around and think to themselves, “What should my life look like now that I am a writer of a ‘this’ kind of movie or now that I have made this much money in a year?” And that is exactly where people go wrong because if you decide what your life should look like, what you are really basing it is on other people’s lives.

And what I have come to discover is, you have no idea truly what is going on in other people’s bank accounts. There are people who make so much more than I do, and you would never know. There are people who make so much less than I do, and you would think they make way more.

John: Yeah.

Craig: People spend and borrow at rates that are widely disparate. So, put out of your mind what you think your life should look like, and instead just take a look at what is real for you; so that is sort of a basic starting place.

John: Yeah. The underlying advice behind all of this is: really pick a life that is comfortable for you, that you can easily maintain, at even less money than you are making right now. And pretend that you never make more money than that, and then you won’t go bankrupt. Then you won’t run out of money most likely.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, I guess, first of all, don’t be the kind of person that defines your life by the stuff that you buy, which is hard for some people I think.

But I like, sort of the first advice is, because I feel when you start making a certain amount of money and you are looking at ways to maximize what you earn, the number one way to maximize what you earn is to pay less in taxes. [laughs] That is… — Because that is something that you actually have some control over, whereas an agent will take 10%

So we talk about incorporating, and we talk about saving money for retirement. So I guess we should probably start with incorporating.

John: We should talk about incorporation. So, maybe a little bit of prefacing: By the time you are making six figures, you likely have some sort of a team who is working for you. So you would have an agent, certainly, at this point. You would have a lawyer who is making your deals. Those are kind of givens; it is unlikely that you are paying a lawyer per contract or something. You have a lawyer who is taking a percentage, taking 5%.

Craig: Right.

John: You might have a business manager — sorry — a literary manager, someone who is your manager, who is legally not soliciting work on your behalf but is working for you. So that might be another percentage of some money going out.

You are also probably incorporating at some point in this stage. It always used to be, the rule of thumb I always heard is, when you are making more than $200,000 a year consistently…

Craig: Right.

John: …then you incorporate. I don’t know if that is still the advice, but…

Craig: Yeah. I have heard the…

John: Your lawyer would tell you that.

Craig: $250,000. I mean because the deal is that there are benefits that come with incorporating but there are also some costs that go along with incorporating. And so the math is to do the cost benefit and the break point where it seems like it evens out is somewhere in that $200,000 to $300,000 a year range. So, you are right. The first thing you have to ask yourself is, “Is this real? Am I actually going to be making this on a year-to-year basis?”

So you have to actually get good at sort of figuring out what your deal is, and whether you have just had one big success that you may not be able to replicate. And the key is year after year. If you sell a script for $1 million in 2013, and then you don’t sell anything in 2014, you would get hurt by the corporate stuff in a weird way, I think.

You need to kind of be able, I think, you need to be able to replicate your success, in some way, year after year after year. And to that end, and it is a little difficult to do sometimes, talk to your agent and say, “Let’s just have a, forget about coddling me, don’t worry about my feelings, let’s just be super realistic so I can plan for my family — for me and for my family. What do we expect?”

John: And really, you can only be planning it based on, I think, writing assignments. Because you can’t plan, “I’m going to sell a spec every year.” That is just not going to happen.

Craig: You are so right.

John: Yeah. You are only going to be making $200,000 to $300,000 a year if you are pretty consistently being hired to write things for people. And, so if you have nested jobs where you are doing a rewrite on something and you are starting a first draft on something else, and that is pretty consistently your life; if there are always two things that are vying for your attention, likely you are going to start to make the kind of money where incorporation makes sense.

But if it is just a situation where you sold one script, then it is not time to incorporate yet. I didn’t incorporate until after Go. So, I had already sold three things — been hired to write three things — but I wasn’t making enough money that it made sense for me to incorporate.

So when I get my residual statements it is really interesting, sort of like a little history lesson.

Craig: [laughs] Right.

John: The residuals for Go go to John August. The residuals for everything after that point go to my loan-out corporation, because by the time I made the contracts for those other movies I was a loan-out.

Glossary entry here. A loan-out is another word for a corporation. So a loan-out is basically the company; rather than hiring you specifically, they are hiring your corporation. And your corporation is hiring you and loaning you to the company to do the work.

Craig: That’s right. Usually people are an S Corp. There are two kinds of California corporations, S Corp… — Actually, it is a federal designation, S Corp and C Corp, I think. And the idea is not to shield you from any legal stuff; it doesn’t. All it really does is give you the benefits of some tax work so that you minimize the amount of tax you pay. That is pretty much what it comes down to. Taxes.

John: It does. And when you are saying shield you from taxes, what it lets you do is expenses that you are accruing in business, you are able to take them, to pay for them as the business rather than having to pay for them as an individual.

So, rent on an office, an assistant if you have an assistant, agent fees, other things like that can be taken out on a corporate level before you are writing the check for yourself as an individual.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So, essentially, the corporation is paying you on an annual basis, or more often than annually. But in return for that, you have to do quarterly taxes and a lot of other special filings that are a hassle.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, first of all there is an expense involved in just incorporating itself. But, there is another thing, one of the more hated aspects of the tax code is called the Alternative Minimum Tax where basically if you are an individual and you make a lot of money you can write-off a whole bunch of stuff if you want, but then they basically at some point say, “You have still made too much money. We are just going to now add more tax on.” You can’t write-off all that stuff because you are not a business. You are an individual. You couldn’t possibly be doing that much as an individual that is a business expense.

But corporations don’t have alternate minimum taxation. If you run a business and you bring in $1 million, and you spent $1 million to get that $1 million, you have a net taxable income of zippo.

So, while screenwriters don’t have the kind of expenses that go along with a shop, we do have our internet, and our cable, and if we go to see movies for research, and buying books, and traveling, and leasing a car, and all this other stuff. Oh, like I have an office, you know, so my rent here. And all of that gets taken off of the amount.

So, right off the bat, you have to talk to your accountant if it is time for you to incorporate and you incorporate. And I would say every single professional screenwriter we know that has been working for more than a couple of years is incorporated.

John: Yeah. Now I want to back up, because my understanding when I first formed a loan-out was that there was some legal shielding, that there were good reasons for, like, not losing your house for going through a loan-out rather than going directly, making a contract directly. But that is not your understanding?

Craig: Eh, they call it “piercing the veil,” where if you have a corporation that is really just you, and your corporation incurs some kind of legal liability, they will go after you. They can go after the officers of the company if their feeling is that people are individually doing wrong, but then hiding behind a corporation as if the corporation did wrong. There are fewer protections than you would think.

Now, that said, I should point out we don’t have that problem as screenwriters, because the only real liability we can incur is when a studio…

For instance, when The Hangover, when Warner Brothers, and Hangover Part II, and Todd Phillips, and I, and Scott Armstrong were all sued by this kooky guy who claimed that we stole his life, I got served papers until he withdrew the suit. But in our deals with the studios, they always indemnify us. They always say, basically, “You say that you didn’t steal it and we promise to cover your legal fees and all the rest of it if you are sued.”

So, given that, because I don’t really know what other legal liability we could incur.

John: But couldn’t it be sexual harassment or some other kind of discrimination?

Craig: Hmm.

John: I just could envision some other things which they might go after you differently as a corporation.

Craig: That’s true. I guess, like, for instance if you are on a set and you do something to sexually harass somebody. The point is, no, your corporation is not going to protect you from that because your corporation didn’t sexually harass somebody, you did. [laugh] And they are too smart for it.

I mean you can’t… — Maybe I suppose in some narrow place it might be advantageous legally, but really what it comes down to is taxes.

John: Yeah. Now on the subject of taxes, at this stage you would likely have an accountant who is figuring out your taxes, because your taxes would be more complicated than what you are likely to be able to do with just simple Quicken and the tax software.

Craig: Oh yeah.

John: It gets more complicated. A lot of people will have a business manager. I had a business manager right about the time that I formed the loan-out corporation. But I think you don’t. Is that still the case?

Craig: I do not. Yeah. I do have a tax guy who handles my taxes. And I have obviously an investment guy who handles investments. But when it comes to… — Business managers tend to do things like pay your bills, calculate the taxes that you might expect to owe and make the installations, handle your payroll. Because one of the quirks of being a loan-out company is that you tend to have to employ a payroll service to make it seem like a real company. So you actually pay yourself from one account to another, which is a bit odd. And then they handle things like your dues and, I don’t know, stuff like that.

I do all of that on Quicken. It is not that hard, you know. So I take 45 minutes every third day, pay my bills, do it all through Quicken. Bing, bang boom and I am done.

John: Yeah. So I have a business manager so I don’t do that. And partly it is because I will be gone on a set and I won’t be able to think about that stuff. I will just submarine into a project, and I won’t come out for a long time, and stuff wouldn’t get done otherwise, which is just the reality of sort of my life and my situation.

The danger of having a business manager, I would say, is it can insulate you from the realities of your money.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And the people who run into problems, they really have no sense of how much money they have or what they could be doing or should be doing, and that can be very dangerous. So I think it is less likely that your business manager is going to rip you off. It is more likely that you are not going to be paying attention to how much money you actually have and will get into trouble because of that.

Craig: Yeah, look, there are two problems with business managers as far as I can tell. One is precisely what you said, that you become infantilized to some extent, and everybody is different, and I suspect that you are pretty grown up about it. But some people really do in an almost child-like way hire these people to be their mommy and daddy, almost like they are living on an allowance from these people. And so they don’t know what their liabilities are, and they are not really in control of their destiny. The other problem is that they cost 5% often, and that is a lot of money.

Any percentage of what a very successful screenwriter makes is an enormous amount of money for what oftentimes amounts to somebody who is basically doing what I am doing 45 minutes every few days on Quicken.

John: Yup. I’m paying a flat monthly fee…

Craig: Okay, that’s better.

John: …which is, I think, a little bit more reasonable.

Craig: Yes. And that is fine. And I would say that I am in the minority, probably, of screenwriters in that I don’t use a business manager, but I do stay on top of my money and I know where it is. I like to have control of these things.

John: Yeah. On sort of control, insurance is the kind of thing that you are going to start thinking about more as you get into six figures. So you will have health insurance through the WGA. If you are working consistently, you are going to have health insurance, which is great. But you may need disability insurance, which was a real surprise when it was first raised to me.

As presented to me, disability insurance is important if your earning potential is much greater than your actual assets are going to be. So, as it was explained to me, and you can correct me if you feel that I am misspeaking, if I got hit by a bus and was no longer able to write, at a certain stage in my career that would have been really catastrophic because everything I could have made I would not be able to make anymore, and that was going to be a real problem. Now that my assets are bigger than sort of the money that I can make over a couple of years, it is less of a factor.

But for a time, it was really important that we find somebody to give me disability insurance. It ended up being, like, Lloyd’s of London to protect me in that situation.

Craig: You are absolutely right in the way you described it. I never did it. And I didn’t do it because there were a couple of problems. One, when you get disability insurance as a screenwriter, it is a little punitive because they are going to presume that whatever money you made this year, or whatever money you made in the most, that is what they are going to have to pay out. So they jack your premiums up pretty high. And the truth is, what disability short of brain damage is going to incur in such a way as to keep me from writing. If you smash my fingers I can still write. If I get hit by a bus, and I am laid up for a few months, I can still write. It is not like we drive a bus or use our eyesight. I mean, we can be blinded. [laughs] I started running down the list of stuff where it was so extreme that, basically, it was far more likely that I would be dead than disabled to the point where I couldn’t write anymore. So…

John: Yes. A traumatic head injury; that’s always my favorite.

Craig: Pretty much traumatic head injury. Eh, I don’t know. It is a little bit like earthquake insurance. Like, for instance, here in California, the State of California requires insurers to offer the option of earthquake insurance or they are not allowed to basically sell any insurance in the state. The insurers, of course, turned back to California and said, “We can’t offer earthquake insurance. It is impossible, because when an earthquake happens we are going to be bankrupted.”

So they came up with this nonsense called the Fair Plan, where basically they charge you a very high amount of money and, in exchange for that amount of money, you are insured against earthquakes. But you are not really insured against earthquakes because there is a premium. So if there is earthquake damage, you have to pay 20%, I think, of the value of your house just right off the bat.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And then they cover the rest of the structure. But the point is there is never 20% damage to your house. It is like 5% or all of it. So if it is all of it, just walk away. If it is 5%, you are not going to get any insurance money anyway. So very few people take the earthquake insurance, and that is kind of the way I saw disability.

I’m sure people are going to write in angrily and say that I am insane and I should get it, but…

John: Yeah. And I am not sure it is going to be as important for you to get it at this stage in your career as it was a couple of years ago.

Craig: So I got away with something. [laughs]

John: You snuck away with it.

Craig: I love it.

John: Look at my friends Chad and Dara. They just recently got disability insurance because they are at exactly that stage in their career where their earning potential is much greater than their actual assets would be at this point.

Craig: Right. That makes sense.

John: And life insurance is a similar situation where life insurance is important for a family up to a certain point of income, up to a certain point of assets. But once the assets are actually significantly bigger than the yearly income it is not as big a deal.

Craig: It is not as big a deal. And obviously, the older you get it becomes less and less important.

John: Now simpler decisions, I think they are simpler decisions, for younger people who are facing this is your student loans. And I think I see people rush to pay off their student loans, which I think can be a mistake. Student loans are the cheapest loans you are going to find outside of a mortgage. If the money is burning a hole in your pocket, I guess better to pay off your student loans than buy a fancy car.

Craig: Right.

John: But it is not the best use of your money.

Craig: Well, yeah, let’s talk about loans in general, because as you make money you do… — Look, you don’t need to become obsessed with finances. I actually, I don’t really like the subject of money. And when I say I don’t like it, it is not that it turns me off, it is just not… — I don’t have any passion for it.

But it behooves us to at least know some basics. And one of the basics of finance is what is the cost of money, what is the interest rate, what do people charge you for loans. And right now they are at historically low rates.

Student loans have traditionally always been artificially low because they are supported by the government, to some extent. And you are right; if you can, there are some kinds of loans that are good to have. I have a mortgage. I could pay off my mortgage, but I don’t because the interest is deductible for my taxes. I might as well just hold on to that money, let it grow at a certain rate, take the tax benefit, and if it is such time that rates should move in such a way that it doesn’t make sense, then I will pay it.

So, there are certain kinds of loans where it is okay to have. Here are the loans that are not okay. So, yes, student loans, yes. Mortgages, yes. Smart mortgages. Credit cards. Never.

John: Yes. You should never. And if you are making this much money you should never be carrying a balance on your credit cards. That is ridiculous.

Craig: Ever. I mean, I don’t care what you make. If you’re…

John: But particularly at this level of the podcast you should not be paying less than everything.

Craig: That’s right. Because credit card interest rates are always much, much higher than what you can get in the bank, and oftentimes wildly higher to the point of usury. You see rates of 17%, 18%, 19%, 20% when the prime rate right now is almost zero. Money is almost free at this point.

So, get all of your money off your credit cards. If you have any on your credit cards it is insane. And then start, I would say the next best thing you could do is figure out retirement, which seems a little weird, because I started thinking about that when I was 21. But it is the best savings, the best investment you can make.

John: Yeah. So, to back up a little bit, if you have a loan-out corporation, one of the advantages of your loan-out corporation is you can set up a pension plan.

Craig: Yup.

John: And that is one way to sort of divert some of your money to that pension that is in your name. And you can’t sock away all that much money, but you can sock away some money, and that helps.

Writers Guild has a pension. It is not going to be a ton.

Craig: Well, it depends on what you earn and how many years you have earned. I mean, it could be nice.

John: Yeah. But most of what you are thinking about for retirement is really just the money you didn’t spend. That’s the money you earned that you stuck in an account and forgot about. And that is your retirement.

Craig: Well, there is, look, level one as you alluded to, there are what they call Qualified Plans. A Qualified Plan is any kind of investment plan where you put your money in, specifically for retirement. You can’t touch it until you are 65; if you do there are penalties. But if you can be good, and not touch it until you are 65, there is a tremendous tax savings on that money.

Traditionally, you don’t actually get taxed on that income. So if you can sock away, and when you have a corporation you are right, you can set up your own 401(k) plan. Maybe you put in $40,000. That is $40,000 untaxed dollars. And when you are a big shot screenwriter, your tax rate is nearly half. So, that’s a lot of money that you are saving right then and there.

So, job number one is maximize as much as you can into a Qualified Plan. It saves a huge amount of money.

Then, I think the next thing that you are talking about is saving. The lost art of saving.

John: Yeah. Keeping the money. Just don’t spend it. Don’t be Derek Haas and set up your line of credit at the Hard Rock Casino.

Craig: Well, you know, you can, because I have gambled with Derek, and he is like a leprechaun.

So, like, he has a line of credit and then amazingly… — I didn’t understand how that line of credit stuff works, and then I did it with him. We were at the Wynn. So, you open up a line of credit, let’s say for $10,000. And then you sit down at a table and you say, “I want a marker for $2,000.” So they give you $2,000. You don’t have to give them any cash. And then they have you sign a check, and the check is to them for $2,000. Right.

Then, let’s say you win, and now you have $4,000 in chips. You go to the cashier and you say, “I would like to buy back my marker.” And you give them $2,000 in chips and they come back and they give you that check and you rip it up. And ripping that thing up is the greatest feeling in the world. It is actually, really; it is like a huge dopamine reward. Super… — God, gambling is pernicious.

John: Yeah. It’s all the fun of destruction, plus there is money involved.

Craig: Yeah. Yeah. And just like how cool — you are like, “Look at me. I’m ripping up a check! Screw you. I win.”

John: On a less dopamine-inducing aspect of money, if we are talking about retirement, I think we have to be honest about the lifecycle of a screenwriter.

And so you are unlikely to be making this six figures for your whole career. And your whole career may be a lot shorter than you would like it to be. There are not many screenwriters in their 50s who are making that much money.

And that is the issue, is that your maximum earning as a screenwriter tends to come in maybe, it’s not your first year. It is probably years five through ten.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And after that point, some people will continue to make a ton of money, but most people won’t so much.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, look, what they don’t… — Everybody has their eye on what they call their big break, where you break into the business. And no one tells you that right after the break is a cliff where almost everyone that got their break falls off the cliff. And this is what is so, and frankly, it has gotten worse as far as I can tell. It is a harder business to stay alive in, because when you and I broke into the business Hollywood was making way more movies.

Now they make fewer, which means they develop fewer, which means they hire fewer of us, which means there are fewer of us.

When people ask, “How long can I expect to work in this business?” obviously the answer varies wildly according to your talent and your abilities to make your weight. But let’s just talk about averages. Not long. In truth, it is a bit like professional sports where a lot of people get their break, they play for a season or two seasons, and then they hurt themselves, or they just don’t quite click. And they are gone.

And there are guys who work five years and then are gone. There are people who work ten years and then are gone. To have a career that goes more than 20 years, you are in rarified air. You are in limited territory. There are not many of us. Look, I am on year 16 right now. You probably are similar to that I would imagine.

John: Yeah.

Craig: I would like to think I can get another four years. I would like to think I can hit that big 20 year mark. I think I will, but to be one of those guys that can put together… — Look, when I look at some of the names of people that say to me, “I’m having trouble finding work,” my heart sinks. It is a very difficult thing to make an actual, real career out of this.

And, please, for those of you who do have that wonderful day where you get that break, do not confuse that with a career. That is the beginning. In fact, the hardest work is yet to come. So, be prepared for that. If you are, you have got a shot.

John: Yeah. What I will say is you and I are approaching this from a pure screenwriting point of view, where we are writing screenplays that will become movies. Some A-list writers and sort of near A-list writers transition to TV and do other amazing things because TV is better in many ways. And sometimes people extend their career at the edges of what is a traditional screenwriting career.

Craig: Right.

John: So there are other things other than just falling back and teaching at a university, but it is important to be realistic about how much time a person ends up having a screenwriting career.

Craig: Yeah. And you know, there is also something very cruel about the way the business functions. There is this famous experiment that was done many years ago with rats where they would put them in a cage, and then they would flash a green light, and then shock the bottom of the cage. And they had another cage where they would just shock them occasionally, but there was no green light. And the rats in the green light cage lived twice as long because they were able to prepare for the pain.

But random jolts of pain are disturbing. Similarly, random jolts of success are disturbing. And, you know, Pavlov found out that if you didn’t always reward the dog when you rang the bell, but occasionally, it was even a stronger effect, because there was this anxiety of maybe this time. That’s why casinos function so well. And screenwriting can do that to people. I have seen people just go for years and years, and then there is this burst of activity, and like, finally, it is going to be okay.

And they ride that for another three or four very difficult, difficult years. And then it happens again, or it doesn’t, and I have to say at some point, you turn around and go, “Wait a second, did I just waste 15 years of my life in panic?” And it is just a very hard career.

I have to say, of all the arguments that the Writers Guild make to the studios about why we should be paid more, or how we should be paid, or two-step deals and all the rest of it, I do feel one of the strongest arguments we make is that the studios have effectively made this, it’s like it’s not a career anymore. They have ruined it.

I don’t know why anybody would get into this as a 21-year-old expecting to be able to support a family and make it to retirement as a screenwriter. It is just brutal.

John: Well that was a very depressing look at six figure advice, which really wasn’t meant to be so depressing. If you are making six figures, that’s good. It’s a good thing. It’s a good thing. Congratulations, you are making six figures.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And we realize that this is sort of esoteric advice because most people aren’t going to have a screenwriting career that gets them to that point and they won’t need to incorporate, but we always get those kinds of questions. And when we talk to real screenwriters who are working, some of the first questions they ask is, “Hey, do I need to incorporate? What should I do? Do I need insurance?” And so we thought we would talk about that.

On a future date, we will talk about seven figure advice, because then everything changes, because then you are looking at, well, like what kind of wood is best for the yacht that you are building.

Craig: Right. Exactly. And where can I legally kill and eat a panda.

John: Yes. And then there is eight figure advice, which is really esoteric because I don’t think there is any screenwriter who makes eight figures.

Craig: Not in one year. No.

John: No.

Craig: No. Not in one year.

John: I think a couple of the super producers make eight figures in a year, but there is no screenwriter. And precious few directors make eight figures a year.

Craig: Yeah. I know one who definitely had a pretty good year.

John: I don’t want to… — One who you are working with who had a very good, lucky year.

Craig: Yeah. I don’t know how lucky, but definitely it was… — He earned it, but man, that was a big year.

Yeah. I have to say, in summary, that if you are making six figures, I am thrilled for you and frankly any depression I have is related to the fact that it has become harder to become one of those people. And I want screenwriting to be a successful, viable career where people can actually work at it for the big bulk of their productive years. And right now, the squeeze is very difficult. And I do think that the studios are going to have to confront the fact that they are depleting their farm system in a dangerous way. And screenwriters need to be nurtured just like anything else.

John: Yup. We are the research and development for the film industry. And if they cut the R&D, then innovation will suffer, and things will get very, very bad.

Craig: Very, very bad.

John: I was just talking with a mutual friend of ours who is now segueing out of screenwriting and into digital development, so doing stuff for the iPhone and for other applications. And so she was meeting with VC people, and the VC people would say, “Oh, we like your idea but we only write like $10 million checks. We don’t really do the $3.5 million checks.”

And I was torn between my desire to congratulate her, I guess, and find those people and either throttle them or take their wallets.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Because I feel what we are mostly wrestling with here is just a lack of money. And if we could open up some purse strings here, I think there would be a happier time for a lot of us.

Craig: Yeah. I don’t see that happening any time in the near future.

John: Yeah. We need another Village Roadshow or some other outside entity, to come in with a lot of money, and start throwing money around. And they will make stupid choices, but their stupid choices benefit us greatly.

Craig: I think even more than that, what would be useful is a new market. You know, whatever, if they could figure out downloads in a way that was really awesome or, I don’t know. It is getting tough out there man.

John: Yeah. But you know what? It won’t be our generation that figures it out. It will be the next generation.

Craig: We will be old and doddering in our chairs watching the world burn around us, giggling into our glasses of panda blood.

John: Do you know who is going to benefit from it?

Craig: No, who?

John: The kids at the Cinema School in the Bronx.

Craig: Those kids.

John: Those kids will figure it all out.

Craig: Those kids are going to graduate and go, “Wait, what?! I get what?! I’m going to earn…oh God.”

John: Those fools.

Craig: “I should have gone to pre-med.”

John: Yeah.

Craig, thank you for another podcast.

Craig: Thank you, John. It was a good one.

John: I will talk to you soon.

Craig: Bye.

John: Bye.

High-class problems? Sure. Not many aspiring screenwriters will reach that level of success, or sustain it. But in our experience, it’s shortly after having “made it” that many writers find themselves flailing financially, because it’s such a different experience than living paycheck-to-paycheck.

At what should point should you form a loan-out corporation? Should you pay off your student loans? Do you need disability insurance? How about a 401K? And how do you set up a line of credit at a Las Vegas casino?

Esoteric topics to be sure, but if you gather together a group of working screenwriters, this is what they’ll eventually be talking about — the career rather than the craft. Ultimately, a lot of what we discuss this week applies to anyone working for themselves.

Also touched on this week: the difference between casting TV and features, and The Cinema School in the Bronx.

LINKS:

• Dana Fox’s pilot for Fox
• The Cinema School
• Five figure advice
• INTRO: Big Blue Marble intro
• OUTRO: Mo Money, Mo Problems

You can download the episode here: AAC | mp3.

UPDATE 2-1-12: The transcript of this episode can be found here.

Under a new deal between the two companies, Netflix users won’t just have to wait 56 days to rent Warner Bros. movies on DVD. They’ll have to wait 28 days to add the movies to their queues. [...]

Beginning Feb. 1, when the new agreement goes into effect, Netflix customers won’t even be able to add Warner movies to their queues until four weeks after the DVDs go on sale, a knowledgeable person not authorized to speak publicly confirmed. They would then have to wait another four weeks until Netflix starts shipping the discs.

Granted: Netflix would love to get out of the DVDs-by-mail business anyway. But taking away a basic feature that users have come to expect hurts the company’s reputation.

(Maybe that’s why they wanted to be called Qwikster.)

John August: Hello and welcome to Scriptnotes. This is episode 21. My name is John August.

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And usually this is the point where I would say, “Welcome to Scriptnotes.” But I actually said that in the intro because everything is a little thrown off because I am in New York.

Craig: New York.

John: New York City. It’s the Big Apple.

Craig: My birthplace.

John: You were born in New York City?

Craig: Yes sir.

John: What part of New York City?

Craig: Brooklyn.

John: Ah, how nice.

Craig: Yeah. I don’t know if you know this because you are a Lutheran, I think, I’m just guessing. [laughs]

John: [laughs] I think I am technically a Presbyterian…

Craig: Presbyterian?

John: …but I haven’t been anything for a very long time.

Craig: But all American Jews come from Brooklyn. There is a factory there. That is where Jews are made. We are born in Brooklyn and then shipped off to the rest of the country.

John: Now are they still made in Brooklyn? Or are only hipsters made in Brooklyn?

Craig: Now only hipsters are made in Brooklyn. But my generation of Jews were manufactured entirely in Brooklyn. Todd Phillips and I, for instance, were born three months apart in the exact same hospital.

John: That is pretty amazing. Josh Friedman and I were born at the same hospital several months apart, too. So, there are going to be many of those synchronicities as we travel through life.

Craig: Apparently Josh Friedman is not Jewish.

John: Uh, yeah. Maybe he… — That is a very good point. I assumed he was Jewish but possibly that is not the case because he was born at my same hospital and all Jews, apparently, are born in…

Craig: Yeah. He meets most of the criteria for being Jewish.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Anxiety. [laughs] He’s got a lot of that.

John: A love of Chinese food.

Craig: Ah, huge. Such a big part. Such a big part of our ethnicity.

John: Yeah. So I am in New York because we are doing casting for Big Fish and I have been through a lot of casting before and secretly I am kind of a casting director. Like if I didn’t have writing chops I would… — Here is my ranking of what I would probably end up doing:

I’m a writer because it is probably what I am best at. I’m also pretty good at the graphic design, sort of like laying out stuff and fonts and stuff like that. I don’t do a lot of that anymore. But just one small notch below that is casting because I am really good at sort of remembering the guy who was in that one episode of Melrose Place like seven years ago.

Craig: Mm-hmm.

John: And when that person comes into the room for casting I am like, “You were so good in that one episode of Melrose Place,” actually probably 17 years ago.

So, now we are in New York for casting on Big Fish and it is actually really exciting because this is kind of in my wheelhouse.

Craig: Right. Now let me just run this down. You are really good at graphic design and casting. Hmm…now what does that indicate to me? What? When does that normally go together? Hmm.

John: Yeah. If I said like ballet or said like cutting hair or flower arranging, those would be skills where I think I am even more a little bit more stereotypical.

Craig: [laughs] I will say that casting is one of those areas like costume design in movies where I don’t trust straight guys. If you are a straight guy in casting, something is weird, it is off to me.

John: Yeah.

Craig: I don’t like that.

John: Casting is one of those areas that does tend to be dominated by the gays. Not exclusively the gays, I have to point out — and I have made some bad assumptions assuming that everybody in casting is gay, because they are not.

Craig: Uh, yeah they are. [laughs]

John: No, I can promise you they are not…

Craig: Really?

John: …because occasionally I have made that assumption and then I will get a Christmas card of the casting director with his wife and two kids.

Craig: Oh, that’s right, I forgot. Gay men never get married to women and have kids. [laughs]

John: Well, okay. [laughs] But anyway, the point, not to the larger sort of closeted gay point or whatever…

Craig: Exactly, thank you.

John: … is that casting is actually a fascinating and very important part of, like in a musical, of making a TV show or making a feature, too. And screenwriters sometimes do get involved in casting. And that can be great because you have this memory of what those characters were to you and that handoff doesn’t really happen through the director. That handoff is sort of in a weird way direct.

Like for a long time you are playing all the characters yourself. And then one by one those characters are assigned out to actors. And that transition doesn’t happen through the director, it just happens through the casting process. So if you are lucky enough to be involved in the casting process, you can sometimes be really helpful.

Craig: That’s true. That is absolutely true.

John: Because you have a memory of not only what they have to do in the two selected scenes that have been chosen, you have a memory of like, okay, this is what the whole journey of the character is and there may be reasons why that person that is in front of you is great in those two selected scenes but is not ideal in those other scenes. Or, there may be reasons why as you are picking what those two selected scenes are, you can be an influential voice in saying, “Yeah, look, let’s see what this moment is, but also see what this moment is. And by the way, let me write you some better scenes that more succinctly show what it is that this character is going to need to do.”

An example I was thinking about came up in Big Fish, too. Sometimes a character will only have kind of responses to other characters and won’t have a really meaty scene by themselves. But you need to have the right person.

In Go the classic example was Mannie who is the guy who goes along with Ronna and Claire on their journey to make this drug deal. And he has moments but he doesn’t have like a whole scene to himself. And so when we were casting for Go I wrote a special scene just for Mannie that is a whole speech that he doesn’t actually have in the movie, but we needed something to look at so that an actor could come in and actually perform something to let us see who Mannie is.

Craig: Yeah. Traditionally in features casting is done under the auspices of the director. Occasionally screenwriters are involved just as friends of the court. I find…

Well first of all, to underscore what you are saying, casting is of the utmost importance. The most magical thing you can do to a movie is cast it properly. Screenwriting isn’t magic, per se; we write a script and everybody reads it and thinks about it. Same with dailies. “Okay, let’s watch the dailies.” But there is something magical that happens…

I guess the only thing that is close is music because sometimes adding music creates magic. But good casting suddenly transforms everything. And for us, as screenwriters, the most important thing we can do is to make ourselves be available as screenwriters to what the casting suggests because there are going to be times when the casting is either wonderful but sort of takes you even further than you thought a character could go or should go.

Sometimes the casting is just different than what you thought. It is the casting of the movie. No sense in fighting it at that point; better to work with it. At which point you do have to become available to conform the script to who is going to be performing it and also ideally write into that casting. I guess that is the best way I can describe it.

Write to those actor’s and performer’s strengths because that is who you got.

John: Yes. You have to look at cast as a resource. And every movie is going to be resource constrained or resource rich depending on sort of what you end up getting.

If the resources you have when you are making a movie, you have your cast, you have however much money you actually have. You have the locations that you are able to find.

So, as a screenwriter, you have on paper anything you can possibly want to do, you can do. When it comes time to actually make the movie you may find out like, “Wow, we don’t actually have the money to do that elaborate of a sequence. We are not going to be able shoot that many days. We don’t have the money for visual effects for that. We are going to have to think of something different.”

You may find that it is actually impossible to shoot in locations that you would love to shoot, so you look at, “Well these are the locations we can shoot.” You visit those locations and it’s like, “Well, if we are going to be here, this thing is actually really interesting and fascinating. I can write something great for this moment. Or we can acknowledge the space that we are in and it is going to play really well.”

You might have written something for… — A friend of ours wrote a very dark TV pilot that USA bought and USA said, “We love your very dark TV pilot called Burn Notice, but we want it to be bright and sunny, so we are going to move it to Florida.”

Craig: Right.

John: So they moved it to Florida and the show needed to change in order to move to Florida, but that was the resource that he was given. And given that resource he could change things.

Cast is the same thing. You may have a vision in your head of who these characters are. And you may even have had some actors in your head as you were writing them. Those may not be the actors who are in your final project. Once those people are in your final project, you need to figure out what their strengths are and accommodate their strengths and deal with their lacks so that you can make the best possible movie.

Craig: Yeah. I mean this is why screenwriting is one of the most frustrating kinds of writing to do because your script is going to be made into one movie. That’s it. I mean even Big Fish, there will be performances, there will be casts with an “S” at the end. You will hopefully have a huge success with this thing and it is going to run on Broadway and it is going to run in London and it is going to run in LA. And there will be cast changes. And over the years people will interpret it and put their own spins on it and if you might not like somebody playing a particular role in the beginning you will be able eventually to get your licks in and have somebody playing that part later on that is perfect for you.

Not so with movies. This is it. [laughs] So, you better write for who you’ve got. And I will also say that for anybody that is writing a screenplay — and most screenplays are written in the absence of cast, of course — pick a cast. Write for an actor because it helps focus the voice.

It is so much easier for me to write when I know who is going to be playing it. And when I am writing a script that isn’t already with cast attached, I can have anybody play it. So, why not?

John: Exactly. By writing with an actor’s face in your head, you have a sense of like could this person actually say these lines. It helps you to sort of create not just the character but create the reality. Do you believe Harrison Ford saying these lines?

And you should pick, hopefully, people who actually really exist. It is helpful just because, you know, picturing Harrison Ford as when he was Indiana Jones at his prime when the first movie came out, well that is great, but that person doesn’t exist anymore. So maybe pick who would do that role now. It’s very unlikely that is going to be the person who actually is doing your movie…

Craig: Right.

John: …but it helps you find a consistent face to put with that character throughout the whole writing process.

Craig: Yeah. And when people talk about… — A very common criticism of new screenwriters is that all the characters sound the same. And that is a function of the writer not actually writing for actors, but really just writing themselves into characters. And we can’t do that.

And I find that there is so much that doesn’t need to be said when someone can say to you, “This character should be played by this guy.” The difference between “this character should be played by Harrison Ford” and “this character should be played by Will Smith” is enormous. I know so much about how many words they say [laughs] to get across their idea.

I know if they are funny or not funny. I know if they are one or two word kind of guys or if they are 20-word kind of guys. And I suddenly start to flesh out this human being. You have to do it. I don’t know any… — I think it is insanity to not cast the movie in your head when you are writing the script because someone is going to be casting it later and if you haven’t casted it in your head, trust me, they will cast it for you and you will be shocked.

John: And so a crucial piece of advice here: As a screenwriter you cast it in your head. You never put that name in the script. Never.

Craig: Right. [laughs]

John: So what you do is when that character is introduced you give a description that very, just perfectly matches who it is you want to have, not physically, but matches sort of the type of person you want to have in it. And if you do it just right you can create that image in the reader’s head so they will see Will Smith as they are reading the character and all will be happy and good.

The weird magic is even if they don’t end up picturing Will Smith, they will have a consistent idea of who that person is supposed to be.

Craig: Yup.

John: So if they are seeing it is a well-meaning but somewhat smart-ass guy who challenges the system, that is a terrible sort of character description, don’t use that. But, you get basically two sentences to introduce that character which are just sort of gimme lines, like they don’t actually have to be playable moments. You are just telling the reader, the audience, this is who this person is.

Craig: Right.

John: Use those so well so that the person knows what those are. And if it is just a bit player, give that person a really specific name that immediately conjures the kind of person you want in that role.

Craig: Yeah. And once you start thinking that way you will surprise yourself with how much more variegated the characters are. There are some characters who will explain to you who they are and what they are doing. There are other characters who don’t want to talk. So other people are asking them, “What are you doing? Are you doing this?” And they will say, “Yup.” [laughs]

And that kind of stuff, that is the variety that is required. Otherwise, again, you run into that situation that a lot of new writers do where everybody sounds the same.

John: Yeah. Occasionally you can just cheat. And, so, for several movies in a row, dating back years, I would right “Octavia” in when I wanted Octavia Spencer to be cast in the role because if I wrote “Octavia” they would absolutely bring her in for casting and she would always get cast.

Craig: Right.

John: So I did that for Blue Streak and she is also in The Nines as just “Octavia” because she is Octavia.

Craig: I don’t think you can get away with that one anymore.

John: Yeah. She is a Golden Globe winner so that is not going to be so simple anymore.

Craig: No. No.

John: I may have to think of some other name that will make people think, “Oh, what would be a great, interesting choice that no one is going to think of? Octavia Spencer” I’m like, “Wow, you’ve read my mind. I actually hadn’t even thought about that but it is a great idea. So let’s not go to anyone else until we hear back from Octavia.”

Craig: We could do an entire podcast on how to make your ideas seem like other people’s ideas. [laughs]

John: That is easily 40% of the work of screenwriting.

Craig: Amazing.

John: Yeah. The other work of screenwriting is figuring out what stories to write. And there was a really great New York Times article about Lindsay Doran this week. And so I wanted to spend the rest of the podcast talking about that.

Craig: Sure.

John: Lindsay Doran is a producer and a former studio executive. I first met her when she was running United Artists which was, I don’t know if at that point it had merged with MGM or separated from MGM. It always gets bought and sold and bought and sold.

Regardless, she is really smart — really, really, smart. She is not a screenwriter but everyone sort of likes her in terms of her knowledge of story.

Craig: Yeah.

John: I first met her because I had written a treatment about a man who is a former spy, a retired spy, who meets somebody who claims to be the younger version of himself. And I had written up this treatment, planned to make it into a movie, and so that script was called The Nines. That treatment was called The Nines. And has nothing to do with the actual movie The Nines except that the number 9 keeps showing up a lot.

Ultimately I ended up rewriting it many years later as a short story called The Variant. But I had written it as a treatment. And we had sent it all over town and she was one of the few places that really responded to it. She was like, “I think there is a movie here,” so she called me and we talked about it. We couldn’t quite figure out the movie but I remember thinking, “Well, she likes me so she must be really, really smart.”

Craig: [laughs] Yeah. She likes me, too, so obviously she is a genius.

I love Lindsay. I met her many, many years ago. I’m not exactly sure what the circumstance was; I think it was one of those general meetings that turn into a nearly decade long friendship, I think. She is incredibly smart. She is a thinking writer’s producer.

We talked about producers and how there are all sorts of different kinds. She really understands story and I think more than anything loves writers. She actually loves the process of writing and she knows how to talk to writers and help them. And I find her to have terrific taste and sensibility and I just love her.

And it was nice to read that article. It was a very Lindsay kind of thing. I’m sure you will put the link up. She is always thinking, she is always coming up with… — Well, she is a questioner, which I like. I think everything should be, all tires should be kicked.

John: Yeah. So all of this is framing because I think Craig and I have gone on at length in a previous podcast about our distaste for so-called experts and gurus who aren’t themselves screenwriters.

Craig: Right.

John: And so this is all providing context for why this is why we think her opinion is really interesting and sort of worth discussing.

Also, I think what is fascinating about this New York Times article is she is talking about the “what” rather than the “how.” She is not talking about, “Here’s a template for movies. These are the beats you need to hit. This is where on this page things should happen. This is how to sell a screenplay.” It is more a questioning of what kinds of movies are we telling and within the movies that we are choosing to write what stories in those movies are we choosing to highlight or choosing to flesh out.

And that was actually really helpful for me, just even this week. So some context setting. Her basic argument, her idea is drawn from an author whose book I haven’t read. His name is Martin Seligman. And he identified five essential elements of well-being. And so these five essential elements are positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning, and accomplishment.

So, the point being that it is your ability to achieve these five things or your ability to — your quantity, your quality of these five things determines how good you feel about yourself, how good you feel about your life.

Craig: Right.

John: And those seem like reasonable choices. They are not the obvious choices. It is not money, it is not victory over your foes, but positive emotions, a sense of happiness, a sense of the world being good…

Craig: Joy.

John: Joy. Joy is a simpler synonym for that. Thank you. You are very good at this.

Craig: Yes. [laughs] I really like short, short words.

John: [laughs] Yeah. You are like a walking pocket thesaurus.

Craig: [laughs] Thank you.

John: Engagement. Engagement, sure, the ability to latch onto the thing that is in front of you. Relationships, sure, great. Meaning, so a sense that what you are doing is actually meaningful, that there is a reason behind stuff. And accomplishment which is a nicer way of saying victory, but just having achieved something. And those all seem like reasonable goals.

And crucially I would say Lindsay’s frame is not like, “Oh, let’s write in success for all five of these qualities.” It is about earning those in a sense of achieving success in those five areas.

Craig: Yeah. What I liked most about this was that it is not telling us anything we don’t already know. We know that generally we like what we call happy endings. What she is really doing is asking us why do we like the happy endings, because sometimes understanding why helps us get to write good ones because there are boring happy endings, there are rote happy endings, and then there are interesting ones.

Seligman is a name that should be familiar to any psychology major such as myself. He is the founder or one of the co-founders of the term “learned helplessness.” That was what he described as the root of depression, learned helplessness. And you can see how in movies a lot of times characters are stuck in learned helplessness.

When you look at the state of a character on page 10 they have come to be instructed by life through circumstance, through the people with whom they interact, that they are helpless. They cannot change things. And then something happens that forces them to ask the question if maybe they can change things. That to me is a more interesting way of approaching structure than “on page 10 a thing happens.” Yeah, buy why?

So I really like that she puts everything in the context of the character’s emotional and psychological state and arrives at this interesting place at the end where it is not just about experiencing joy, it is about sharing joy which I thought was great.

John: Her point which is that it is not about just victory, it’s not about accomplishments, it is shared accomplishment.

Craig: Right.

John: Which feels true to actual real life, too. If you are playing a video game and you finally — I’m thinking Sky Rim for example.

Craig: Yes!

John: I had to keep saving and restarting this one thing because I lost my follower guy and I was just at a level that was beyond where I could really be. And there were these two bosses sort of coming at me. And I was finally able to assassinate the one guy with the arrow and take care of the other minion boss in time to sort of get through it.

And there were maybe ten restarts in order to get through that moment. And it was like, “Woo, that was just a moment of real accomplishment!” But I’m sitting alone. [laughs]

Craig: [laughs] Yeah.

John: In the downstairs office. And no one knew that I was doing that. And so it was an accomplishment but there was no one to share it with. There was no one who knew I wanted to do it. There was no one who knew that I was trying to do it, so like I did it and it was like, “Oh okay.”

Craig: Yeah. We define for ourselves, we define joy, whether we know it or not, in the context of relationship with other people. There is no joy in solitude. It is a bit like watching a comedy in a theater or watching it at home alone. You will smile a lot when you are at home alone, but you will laugh in a theater because you are sharing something with others.

The line that immediately came to mind when I read this article was, “Yo Adrian, I did it.”

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: I mean he lost, right, but he won in his own way, of course, and we don’t need to rehash why the ending of Rocky is interesting. But, he had to say, “Yo Adrian, I did it,” and then we feel something. Because there is somebody else on the other end of his emotional phone call that matters to him. And that is everything.

John: Yeah. In some ways it is a way of restating the cliché, “What does the character want versus the character need?” So classically that means he wants to win the fight, but what he needs to do is save his relationship or make this smaller achievement. He needed to change his life. I kind of buckle against that just because it has become such a cliché, but when you actually sort of break that, you pull back and look at sort of all the little things he needs, that can be very instructive.

Because one of the things, I think, she has hit on is how important it is to look at your whole story and look at are you really paying off all of those threads. Are those characters who you are introducing along the way, are they just helping out the character, your protagonist, your lead character, your hero, or are they really relationship set, change and evolve and are going to be able to highlight the sense of accomplishment at the end?

Craig: Right.

John: If you look at Star Wars, at the very start of Star Wars we establish the battle plans for the Death Star. So one version of Star Wars is basically, “We have to blow up the Death Star.” And the movie can be about that. It can be about finding and training Luke Skywalker to blow up the Death Star and he can blow up the Death Star, and he blew up the Death Star and it is great. Yay, success.

But that wouldn’t feel like a successful movie because what is really the success of that is not that he was able to blow it up but that everyone was cheering for him after he blew it up. My theory is if you were to take the ending of Star Wars and take out the victory celebration at the end of that you wouldn’t have the same satisfaction in the movie.

Craig: Right.

John: It is not about the explosion, it is about everyone cheering.

Craig: Yeah. I mean he has an internal goal that he has to achieve. He has to learn what it means to put his faith in the force, for whatever value that is. And the truth is the value of that is minimal. Obviously in the movie it has great impact in terms of plot, but in terms of his character and his emotion, and my emotion as an audience member, eh good, that’s good, but you are absolutely right — there are friendships, there is loss that matters to him. It is all in the context of the relationship between the characters. That is the only thing that matters.

And you are right. The award ceremony at the end is a great way for them to kind of come together and be together. And it is, to me, cliché is only in the execution. But all movies, I think, ultimately if there is some kind of joy at the end it is joy in the context of what you have done for others or what you have done for yourself in order to be better for others. This is natural human instinct.

John: Yeah. I think it is crucial to talk about, we are not, it is not just a pitch for happy endings in a strange way. There are some of these movies that don’t end on happy notes. You look at, Obi-Wan dies, Yoda dies. Most of the people on the Titanic die. A lot of the Pandorans die. A lot of great movies don’t end with fantastic — they are tinged by loss. And in a strange way the character who succeeds with a smile but has sort of that tinge of loss to them, that is the guy you love the most.

Craig: Right. Well, and also the flip side of this is there is a way to deliver tragedy by leaning on this lever as well. They mention The Godfather in that article. And I didn’t quite…

John: I didn’t quite get The Godfather, but it wasn’t fresh in my head.

Craig: Yeah. I have a slightly different angle on that. There are a ton of reasons why The Godfather is probably the best movie ever made, but one of them is it presents family in a way that is really exciting. It actually romanticizes something that is very bland and hokey to us which is family. I mean the worst thing in the world is a “family film,” right?

But in The Godfather, not only are they a family, but they are a family of these awesome murderers that can run things and they stick together, and loyalty. And the whole movie is soaking in this kind of shared compatriotism.

But, the tragedy is that there is a price to pay for it. And at the end the protagonist of the movie is somebody that in a weird way stands apart from family. He is messed up. He is shutting the door on his wife. He is not like his father. He kills his brother-in-law. He is, in his attempt to be the family man par excellence, he has become sort of a corruption of that.

And that is why there is a tragedy there. And it is tragic to us because entirely he is voiding what we believe is so important.

And then, look at what happens in the second movie? They take, I mean Coppola and Puzo take it to the next level and have him kill Fredo.

John: Yeah. It was an HBO series before its time.

Craig: That’s right.

John: Yeah. And one of the things I found myself doing as I was preparing for this downstairs, I said, “Oh, I’m going to pull up the list of the AFI 100 Top Movies and sort of see how this applies to things.” And I was sort of skipping through and I found that, “Oh no, I’m doing that thing that I hate.” I was doing that thing where I was trying to apply this pattern, this template, to movies to try to make them fit into things.

And what I think is especially rewarding about this article is in no way is it sort of advocating that all great movies match this template, that this is the one magic formula behind things. It feels more like a challenge. More like, “Hey, look at the movie you are writing right now and see if you are paying off relationships in a way that is meaningful. See if your accomplishments are being tracked in a way that is meaningful to the characters in your story.”

Craig: Right.

John: And don’t panic if maybe you don’t have a lot of plot-plot-plot if the overall feeling of your movie is rewarding. She cites Ferris Bueller which, I think, is a great one. The stakes in Ferris Bueller are not especially high, but the whole movie is constructed in a way — and I actually think a lot of John Hughes movies are structured this way — that the world is good and the world is safe and it is a very rewarding place to spend your two hours of time.

Craig: Yeah. I mean John Hughes had a real talent for staging movies through the eyes of melodramatic teenagers. And melodramatic teenagers, and since I was one, have an amazing ability to narrow the focus of drama in the world to what is happening today. And he honored that.

I mean detention was massive. People forgetting your birthday on your Sweet 16 was massive. Just getting a day off from school was massive. And in doing so the stakes felt real to me, but he always found his way back to what we are talking about which is the relationships.

That is why when you watch Ferris Bueller, I mean Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, who is the star, who is the protagonist of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off? You think it would be Ferris Bueller but it is not.

John: No, it’s his friend.

Craig: It’s his friend. It’s Cameron. And understanding what Cameron needs is why that movie works. No Cameron, no movie.

John: Completely. When we were making Go I would glibly pitch Go as sometimes “The Breakfast Club with a body count.” Of course there really isn’t a body count, but it is a more plotty movie than the John Hughes movies are. And it is sort of pushing back against the John Hughes movies.

But when you actually look at where the movie spends its time, especially where you look at how the movie spends its last ten minutes, the movie could end significantly earlier on. You have wrapped up a lot of sort of the plot stuff that has been set up. But the experience of watching the movie, you really need Ronna to wake up in the hospital room. You need to see her reconnect with Claire. They need to go find Mannie. And they all need to get in the car together after having their conversation and you need to see that they are all going to be okay.

Craig: Right.

John: And that setting the road forward, “Well what are we doing for New Years?” You need to know that everything is going to be resolved and that what happened happened — the whole world didn’t change. And no one is going to say, “That’s the night that everything changed,” but their relationships are retained and changed in a way that is meaningful.

Craig: That is the stuff the audience tracks and I think that a lot of producers sometimes, and studio executives, and directors, and writers sometimes miss that and concentrate on the stuff, the action. And they sort of feel like, “Well, the thing blew up, the bomb went off, you saved the day, movie over. Let’s just skip the rest of this stuff and head for the hills.” And it is not the case.

John: They concentrate on the intellectual logic and not the emotional logic.

Craig: That’s right.

John: They don’t see how the whole thing fits together and what the experience is going to be.

And the challenge of being a screenwriter is you are the only person who has seen the movie. You know what the movie feels like because you have seen the whole thing. The whole movie has played through you and you have to be able to tell them that. Even on this project I am working on right now, there is one scene where they kept saying, “Well couldn’t you lose that?” And I say, “No, this is a crucial moment. I kind of have to walk you down the hall because I know you are not going to get there emotionally unless I have taken you through this place.”

It is like how we set up a joke. I mean punch lines aren’t funny, punch lines by themselves. They are only funny because you had the setup. And emotionally the same thing is true. Even if it is not a joke you are going for, you can only get to tears if you have taken the audience carefully through a process.

Craig: Yeah. That is one thing that I know Lindsay and I agree on vehemently, but I often find myself having…

John: Can you vehemently agree?

Craig: Yes. We violently agree on this.

John: [laughs]

Craig: But I often have to be the sort of lone defensive voice on this one through the things that I write. We both put a lot of stock in healthy first acts. Nice, good, long first acts. It is okay, take your time, set people up. Don’t be panicked that they are going to get bored 20 minutes in. They don’t get bored 20 minutes in. They get bored 60 minutes in when you didn’t spend the time in the beginning and they don’t give a damn about any of these people because they don’t know what their problems are and they don’t know what their relationships are so the payoffs don’t matter.

I mean, the setup of a joke, set up punch lines, the same deal. I thought that she… — It was a very good article and it was definitely, you know, it was in our kind of Zen mode of anti-structure structure and anti-gimmick gimmick. So I liked it.

John: Yeah. So highly recommended. Links to anything we mention in the podcast are always going to be on the podcast notes which are at johnaugust.com/podcast. So we will have a link to that article and to things that are related to that article.

And, Craig, thank you very much.

Craig: And thank you, John. Have fun while you are continuing with your casting in New York. And we will see you when you get back.

John: Great. Thanks Craig.

Craig: Bye.

John: Bye.

“Room 237,” the first full-length documentary by the director Rodney Ascher, examines several of the most intriguing of these theories. It’s really about the Holocaust, one interviewee says, and Mr. Kubrick’s inability to address the horrors of the Final Solution on film. No, it’s about a different genocide, that of American Indians, another says, pointing to all the tribal-theme items adorning the Overlook Hotel’s walls. A third claims it’s really Kubrick’s veiled confession that he helped NASA fake the Apollo Moon landings.

Of course, we’ll never know Kubrick’s true intentions, because he’s dead.

Unless he isn’t.

Doran argues (persuasively) that successful movies are often less about whether the hero wins or loses, but rather how his achievements are measured. For example, a character’s victory is much more satisfying when there is someone to share it with — the real moment isn’t the game-winning touchdown, but when the quarterback kisses his wife afterwards.

She’s not pitching happy endings, but rather positive outcomes. It’s an interesting way to look not just at how we tell stories, but also which stories we tell.

We also touch on the advantages of mentally casting your movie as you write, writing (or rewriting) for the cast you are given, and the delicate art of making someone think he came up with an idea on his own after you plant it in his head.

This and more mind-control tips on the 21st episode of Scriptnotes.

LINKS:

• Go casting sides for Mannie
• The Remnants casting sides
• The New York Times on Lindsay Doran
• Martin Seligman on Wikipedia
• INTRO: Wild Wild West theme
• OUTRO: Pizzicato Five – Sweet Soul Revue

You can download the episode here: AAC | mp3.

UPDATE 1-26-12: The transcript of this episode can be found here.

As Mike Davidson puts it:

If you want to pass any sort of bill that affects the internet, you better vet it with the people who control the internet. […]

It would be like the EPA trying to sneak through a law that automobiles get 100mpg by year’s end without even talking to the car companies first.

But that’s just what Congress did, and was shocked when freedom-loving citizens and giant corporations — never best buds — rose up together in protest.

When you stir stupid and lazy together, they form a toxic compound called Smug Ignorance. It’s non-partisan and always fatal. The symptoms are phrases like, “I don’t know much about computers, but…” or “Look, no one knows if climate change is real.”

Senator, someone knows. It’s your job to ask.

Where do the missing 25 minutes go? Do we experience the film as shorter than 105 minutes? Not really. […]

First, most of the action takes place in the living room of a penthouse in summer, and the skyline of New York City is visible through a panoramic window. At the beginning of the film, the light suggests late afernoon; by the end night has set in. Our daily experience of fading daylight makes us perceive the real-time action as taking long enough to cover the several hours of the coming night, when in fact, those changes in light are artificially accelerated by Hitchcock.

His analysis of Rope’s timeline is a sidebar to a longer article about how the brain time-stamps information to make the past seem orderly and the present feel “present.”

But in terms of Hitchcock’s film, I think Damasio overstates his case.

All movies exist in unreal time, not because of cuts and gimmickry, but because the experience of watching a movie involves surrendering to that film’s reality. We go into dream mode, especially when watching something on a giant screen in a dark theater.

Psychologists could — and I suspect have — shown test subjects a hour-long continuous shot of humdrum video. When asked to report its duration, guesses would vary considerably.

That’s not cinematic mastery. That’s our brains being only so-so at gauging time, particularly when denied outside clues.

In movies, unless something seems wildly impossible — driving from LA to New York in an hour — audiences are extremely forgiving about time, particularly if overall story logic seems to be consistent. In many of my favorite movies, I couldn’t tell you how many hours or days or months have elapsed in story time.

When movies work, you don’t care.

The rest of Scientific American’s special A Matter of Time issue (on newstands) is fascinating, by the way, touching on quantum matters, ancient clocks and other geekery. My very first screenplay was about Boulder’s atomic clock, so I’m a sucker for these things.