Archives for 2011

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/five-figure-advice).

**John August:** Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, you are doing our first live from the field reporting.

**Craig:** That’s right. I’m at the Austin Film Festival here in Texas. It’s a big deal. I mean, it’s not a big deal that I’m here but the film festival is a big deal.

**John:** The Austin Film Festival is one of the few festivals that is really setup for screenwriters. Screenwriting is the focus of the festival I would say.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. There’s the National Screenwriting Conference but that really isn’t a film festival. That’s specifically just about screenwriting. The Austin Film Festival does have actual films.

It has a pitch competition, a screenplay competition, a ton of panels and seminars and big, big names here. Larry Kasdan’s here and John Lasseter from Pixar and I believe Johnny Depp is in town, your buddy.

**John:** Good stuff.

By the time this podcast is actually up on the site it’ll probably be past and no one can come see you at your speaking engagements, but what panels are you going to be on? What are you going to be talking about?

**Craig:** I already did two today. Today I did a how to pitch seminar and then they do these round tables where you sit down and just meet people and talk to them and then after 20 minutes you go to the next table, a little bit of a speed dating thing. Then tomorrow I’m doing — I’m flipping through the book to see what I’m doing tomorrow.

I think I’m doing a thing on comedy. Yeah. It’s called Comedy: The Hardest Genre, and it’s at nine in the morning, so yeah — at nine in the morning it is the hardest genre. Then something else. Then there’s some creative — I don’t know John. [laughs] Honestly I should know and I keep checking this booklet and I keep forgetting what I’m talking about, but hopefully I’ll be fascinating when I say it.

**John:** Last year I was at the Austin Film Festival and I gave a special master class seminar on Big Fish which was scheduled super early in the morning. It was like a 7 AM session on Big Fish.

I enjoyed doing it. The challenge was that I had to talk about Big Fish as if it was some project I had worked on many, many years ago, because at that point we hadn’t announced that we were doing the Broadway musical.

So there were several moments during the presentation on the choices of the adaptation that has to say like, “Now, if you were going to do this, for example, as a Broadway musical, you might make some different choices about these kinds of things,” but it couldn’t be too specific.

Of course I was literally hopping on a place to fly from there to work on the Broadway musical so it was a strange thing. People said, “Wow, you seem to remember that story very, very distinctly and clearly. Did you bone up for it for the session?” No, it was all there. It was all live.

**Craig:** No one bones up for anything.

**John:** No. We pretty much show up and talk about the kinds of things we know to talk about which is screenwriting and answering questions about screenwriting, which is why I thought today we might take one of our listener questions that came in. This came in today from a young woman. I assume it’s a woman. I assume she’s young.

These are just random assumptions. A person named Alana. She writes:

“I’m a pretty new working writer. Last year was the first year I did real work for a studio, and now that I’m done with that project and back on the merry-go-round of meeting some producers, I don’t really know how to plan my career or, indeed, if that’s even a thing people do. When your agent and manager bring you possible projects or people who would like to meet you, should you just say yes to everything, pitch on everything, develop ideas with every producer who wants to, or should you pick things that you think will lead you in the overall direction you would like to do? Basically, should you have rough goals for the next few months, the next year, should you have a five year plan?”

This is a very broad question I thought could be a good… Let’s talk about your first couple years as a screenwriter jumping off place both in career advice but also overall life advice.

**Craig:** That’s a great question. It’s a great question. I feel like I’m still wrestling with that one to some extent. Almost all those things I could answer yes to all those oppositional questions. Should you plan? Yes. Should you say yes to everything? Should you be picky? Yes. I feel like I’m always vacillating back and forth between those poles. I don’t know about you.

**John:** Definitely. So I think it’s going to be best if we break this into smaller, manageable chunks that we can address. So let’s talk about career advice in terms of Alana as a screenwriter. Let’s talk about meetings. Should she take every meeting that she’s offered at this point?

**Craig:** Yeah. I would say so.

**John:** I would agree. Your agent and your manager are going to send you out to meet with a bunch of people, and a lot of those are people who they have other clients working with, people they know socially. They’re basically going to throw you against a lot of walls and see what sticks.

The reason behind this is people will have read your stuff but nobody’s going to feel comfortable hiring you to do any project unless they’ve sat with you in a room and seen, “Oh, she’s this kind of person, this kind of writer. I can see calling her on the phone and talking about a specific project.”

So you’re very unlikely to get hired for any of these early jobs unless you’ve actually sat in a room and talked with these people.

**Craig:** It’s true. Sometimes there’s a magical little thing that happens. Inevitably, these meetings have some context. They say general meetings, but there’s no such thing, because everyone that’s having a meeting with you has something they need and they’re going to mention it.

“We would love to have somebody write a movie like this.” Every now and then you have one. You have that thing that they’re looking for, even if it’s just the germ of an idea, and you might just start talking about it and they might just get excited and suddenly you’re generating a possible job.

I always think of general meetings as specific meetings that just don’t know what they’re specific about yet.

**John:** I’ve talked about this in sessions like the Austin Fall Festival but I don’t know if we talked about it on the podcast is that every one of these meetings has the same kind of template, which is that you will show up at the office, you will be a few minutes early, the assistant will offer you for something to drink.

You should ask for a glass of water or a Diet Coke or something that they will have, so they can get you something and bring you something and feel like they’ve done some part of their job.

The meeting will start a little bit late. You’ll go into that person’s office, you’ll sit in whatever chair is appropriate to sit in, and you’ll spend the first five minutes talking about nothing important at all.

It’s just really general chitchat about the most recent movies, about random stuff, where you grew up, where you went to school. At some point it’ll segue to “This is what we’re working on. Tell us what you’re working on. Is there something together that we should be working on?” A lot of times this is the same template as going in for a pitch, where there’s the general stuff before you get to the meat of it.

In a general meeting it’s just, “I’ll show you some of what we’re doing if you show me some of what you’re doing.”

**Craig:** Exactly, and usually there’s some pretext for the meeting, even if it’s just, “I love your agent, he insisted that I meet you and then I read your thing and I really liked it.” There’s always some pretext. Nobody really has a meeting with somebody that is a complete blank with them. There will always be a little something to talk about.

**John:** At the same token, you should be able to have a conversation about the kinds of things you want to write and the kinds of things you want to work on. So you don’t have to be able to pitch specifically what it is you’re trying to do.

If you’re the kind of writer who is working on thrillers you might say, “I’m working on a thriller set in the Boston financial market,” which I’m not even sure makes sense.

It’s a general enough pitch that describes the kind of idea that you’re working on without giving up all the details of what specifically you’re trying to do. If you just sit there and respond, “Oh, that sounds good,” or “That sounds interesting,” they’re not going to have any more specific idea of what to pitch to you when something comes three months down the road.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s an opportunity also for you to start showing them what you can do. They might say, “Well you know we’ve had this idea that we’ve been working on for a while that’s the kind of thing we love and it’s this,” and they briefly describe it.

There’s nothing wrong with saying, “I really like that. When you pitched it to me where I was thinking it was going was this or this.”

The truth is that’s what they’re hiring you to do. They’re certainly not looking for people to go, “Oh, Okay. Thank you for spoon feeding me something.” They want people with an opinion, as long as it’s a smart opinion. So it’s a chance for you to begin to show off the quality of your mind. So I would say take every meeting you can when it’s early on in your career.

**John:** The more challenging decision is whether to pursue every project that comes up, every project that enters your universe of maybe-you-could-be-hired-to-do-this. When you and I were both starting, projects would come up.

The first idea I ever pitched on was How To Eat Fried Worms, which is an adaptation of a great kid’s book that Ron Howard’s company was doing.

It was presented to me as this is something you might be considered for. This was before I’d written Go. I’d just written a romantic tragedy and the novelization of Natural Born Killers, so it wasn’t a great choice on paper to be doing this.

But it was a book I knew and a book I liked so I pursued it hard and tried to get it, and I was able to get it.

There were a lot of those kinds of opportunities, and you had to be careful about which ones you were going after, because you could spend all your time chasing these projects that either aren’t real or were that they’re meeting with 15 writers and your odds of actually landing the job are pretty small.

**Craig:** That’s gotten worse, I would say, with the contraction of the release schedule. They just make fewer movies now, so there are fewer things to go in on, which means that the group of people that you were going up against — that cohort — has increased dramatically.

Early on in my career, most of the stuff I was working on was self-generated with my partner. So we would come up with ideas and pitch them and just try and get our own stuff going, which is always a great way to keep these meetings going because it’s a relief for them. They don’t feel like they have to do all the work and that they somehow are convincing you to let them pay you for something.

But when it’s early on you have to ask the fundamental questions: “Okay, do I need money?” “Am I starving?” “Am I making my rent?”

If you need money and a job comes in, take it. If you’re doing okay and there’s not going to be massive opportunity costs and a job comes along that just seems like a bad idea, you have to push the plate away.

That’s a lesson that it took me a while to learn, and I think I suffered, frankly, because I wouldn’t push the plate away. I grew up with… My parents are public school teachers and it was a very firmly middle class life where somebody offers you money you do the work.

I had to shake myself out of that a little bit, because eventually you start to become connected and associated with those jobs whether you like it or not.

**John:** The second scenario, though, that you’re talking about, where somebody comes to you with a job and you say, “No, no, I don’t want to do that job,” that’s a luxury problem, and I feel like this early on in her career that’s probably not going to happen very often.

It’s unlikely that someone’s going to come to her and say, “Hey, do you want to do this movie for us? You don’t have to pitch against nine other people. This job is yours if you want it.” That’s going to be unlikely where she’s at right now.

**Craig:** So the question is whether or not she should be pursuing the chance to write something?

**John:** Exactly. My instinct is if it’s a job she really wants then she should pursue it, but she should also be asking her agents and her managers how many other people are going out for this, which is information which I think contractually the studio has to say how many people are going out for it.

Producers will sometimes fudge and not really say how many people they’re bringing in or how many people they’re talking to about a project. If you find out that fifteen writers are going in for this adaptation of this book they just bought, that may not be the best use of your time.

**Craig:** If you love it then I think there is a case to be made that it’s good practice. Again, if you’re early on in your career it’s good practice. God knows how many stories I broke early on in the pursuit of chasing down work. It’s a way of honing your craft and getting better at it while exposing your potential value to people who hire writers.

But if you’re marginal on it or if your agent is excited about it for you but you’re not then, yeah, you might be better off working on your own thing.

**John:** What might be important to talk about is how many days to spend prepping that first coming in with your idea. Don’t spend two weeks on it.

I think it’s a great thing to be spending a couple days figuring out your take on it, being able to pitch what your idea is, but if you are writing a ten page outline even for yourself on that project you’re probably spending too much time pursuing something that’s not a real job for you.

Being able to go in and pitch a good version of a movie, especially if you’re one of the youngest writers, the most junior writers, going in on the project, that may at least impress them and get them thinking about you for the next job, certainly.

**Craig:** Yeah. And these things have levels in that you want to go in and pitch a take on it. You don’t need to give them your scene by scene description of the movie you would write; give them your take, your vibe, your approach. If they get really excited by that that is a green light for you to continue on it because there is a real possibility. If they’re lukewarm or negative you just saved yourself a bunch of time.

**John:** Absolutely.

Now let’s talk about the types of projects she should be pursuing, because in her question she didn’t say what kind of project it was that she got hired on, but my instinct is whatever it was she got hired on was probably based on other stuff she’d written before.

So if she’s a comedy writer she had written some comedy specs, she wrote a comedy for these people, the first studio job, and that’s what people are seeing her as.

This is not the time for her to say, “I’m going to write a political thriller.” I think if she’s being perceived as a comedy writer she would do herself best by continuing to write comedy and continuing to go out and pitch comedy.

**Craig:** Certainly from the point of view of building a continuing career, no question. Everybody’s a little concerned about being pigeon holed, but the truth is that is a rich writer’s problem.

You can write yourself out of your pigeon hole. You can’t write yourself into a career if you’re all over the place. People want to know what list they should put you on, and they do have list. Your agent, too — by the way, your agent will get very confused.

**John:** Yeah. If your agent doesn’t know which jobs to put you up for, that’s going to be a real problem, so you need to be honest about that. To a degree, to broaden your perception of how people see you as a writer, that’s why you need to be continuing to write specs even while you’re going out after these assignments.

You need to be working on your own stuff that is not beholden on anyone else hiring you to do stuff so that you can have new stuff to show.

**Craig:** I would say that the nice thing about specs is if you do want to branch off and show another side, I feel like you’re always allowed to do that in a spec, because the proof’s in the pudding. If you are getting comedy work but then you go turn around and sell this amazing horror spec, now you’re a double threat and that’s great.

In terms of pitching and going after jobs, don’t really think that anyone’s going to take you seriously if they don’t have evidence that you can deliver.

**John:** My first two jobs were How To Eat Fried Worms and A Wrinkle In Time, so at that point I was perceived — and pigeon holed — as being a guy who adapts kids’ books. So I was getting sent everything that involved gnomes, elves, dwarves, and Christmas. I liked those movies, but it wasn’t the only thing I wanted to write.

The luxury of having Go as a spec is that people could read Go and say, “Oh, this is a guy who writes comedy or writes action movies or writes drama or whatever.”

People could read Go and see whatever they wanted to see in it, and even before we made the movie it was very helpful for me getting considered for lots of different kinds of projects.

I would only be able to have a writing career at all because I had written these other movies that were so safely pigeon holed.

**Craig:** I don’t get really fussy or embarrassed about whatever it takes to break your way into the business. There are very glamorous, apparently creatively honorable ways to get in, but I’m not obsessive over purity.

It sounds great to say, “I wrote an incredibly heartfelt spec that was shatteringly brilliant and that’s why I am the biggest writer in the business,” which I’m not, but you don’t have to be that.

That’s an unnecessary burden to place on yourself, particularly when it’s early on.

**John:** While she didn’t ask the question I will append the question: She should also be considering TV. If you’re a future writer who likes television you should also consider TV, especially at this early stage in your career. You don’t know that you’re going to get another feature job for a year or two years or ever.

There’s more jobs in TV overall, so if TV is something that you like and something that you feel like you can write, I think you’re doing yourself a service in 2011 also writing television and trying to get television shows set up, trying to get staffed, trying to make good television shows, because that’s where the best writing and the most writing is happening.

**Craig:** Makes sense.

**John:** Let’s talk more life stuff for her in terms of a five-year plan. In terms of a five-year plan I think you have to ask yourself, “€œWhat kind of writer I perceive myself as being?€ Do I want to be a feature writer who is known as a brand of a writer?” If so, then probably picking a genre and being very true to that genre will serve you very well.

If you want to be a writer/director you need to start thinking about, when are you going to direct a movie? If you perceive yourself as being a writer/producer, like Kurtzman/Orci or Simon Kinberg, you need to start thinking about writing the kinds of movies that require such care-tending.

— Care-tending? Care-taking?€

**Craig:** I like care-tending€ Own it.

**John:** — Care-tending that requires such oversight and such producorial function that people start perceiving you as the guy that can keep the ship from sinking. You look at the writer/producers who do that and they are responsible people who are good writers but are also able to deal with all the politics and all the personalities of getting a movie made and can deliver a movie for a studio.

Kurtzman/Orci do it for Dreamworks; Simon Kinberg does it for Fox. There’s a lot of value.

**Craig:** The thing is, you have to know what your goals are and lay out perfect what the options are. Plan implies that you can chart a course that is followable, and I have to say I don’t think there is such a thing. What we’re dealing with is a highly chaotic business, and at its best there is still this enormous questionable outcome.

Even if you get your movie made, who knows how it’s going to hit the audience, how it will perform, how it will be received within the business, how the perception of you as a writer or writer/producer or director changes?

The important thing is to keep your goal in mind. Try and nudge this thing towards the goal, keep moving forward as best you can, but prepare to adapt, because you will get thrown curveballs. You may say, “I want to be a writer/director,” and you may turn out to be a writer/producer or just a writer, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Hard to plan, I have to say.

**John:** I think it’s hard to have a plan. It’s easier to have templates. I remember as I was first getting started, Go’s production offices or pre-production offices were actually shared with Kevin Williamson’s space. I would see Kevin Williamson writing Dawson’s Creek.

I’m like, “Oh, that seems really, really hard but I see that he’s working really, really hard and I can work really, really hard so I could probably have a show on the WB as well,” and I did. It was good to see that.

I always kept Kevin Williamson as an aspirational figure in those early years. Here’s a guy that’s making movies and doing TV shows at the same time and it’s all good and happy.

I think now with the rise of the show runners — or at least the publicity we now have for show runners — you have a better sense of whether it’s JJ Abrams from the Alias days or Joss Whedon, people who are running these major shows.

You see what it’s like and you can say, “I want to get to the stage where I can create a show and become a show runner and that’s not going to be easy,” but that’s a template.

You can see how those specific people did it.

**Craig:** Right. You define a goal, you look at how other people achieved the goal, and then you move towards it the best you can, but be open to things that you didn’t think would be there.

I never thought of myself as producing movies until I started producing movies. Keep your knees bent and stay loose because it’s going to turn out differently than you think. Over planning is just going to choke the life out of you. You need to be able to be prepared when serendipity strikes.

**John:** On the topic of being prepared, let’s segue to the life advice, particularly money, because you talked about, “Should I pursue this job? I need the money.”

Money was a huge concern for my first four or five years as a screenwriter in that what’s so different about screenwriting versus other jobs is we don’t get paid regularly. We get paid in these chunks and then that money dissipates.

So what I would do is as I would get paid to start a new draft…

Actually, I should explain how screenwriters sort of get paid in case people aren’t familiar with it. When we are hired to work on a project, we are given a certain amount of money to start the first draft. And then when we deliver the first draft, we’re paid the other half of that money.

So usually, the biggest chunk of money comes from that first draft, and we’re paid half upfront and half when we deliver. If we’re brought on for the rewrite, we get half upfront and half on delivery for that rewrite.

Once you’re hired onto a job, you have some sense that money is going to be coming in and you have some control over when that money should be coming in — hopefully they’ll pay on time, based on how long you know it’s going to take to write stuff.

Being an organizer and a planner, I would make a spreadsheet that would list all the months ahead. I would mark when I was expecting money to come in and I kept really careful track of all of my expenses.

I would say like, “Okay. This is how much it’s costing me to live each month in Los Angeles. This is my rent. This is how much I’m paying on food. This is how much I’m paying for my car. This is how the money disappears.”

And I could track that. Like, “I would be okay for six months at this point and hopefully, I will have another job before then to keep paying. And hopefully, I will overlap some of these checks so it’s not just, ‘Watch all of John’s money disappear.'”

But that’s very much the experience of being a screenwriter. You’re not getting a weekly paycheck, and without getting that weekly paycheck, you have to really be looking quite a few months down the road.

**Craig:** Certainly the best financial advice I could give to a screenwriter who is working and is early in their career is: live beneath your means.

Think of yourself like a professional athlete. You’ve managed to make it all the way past all the barriers to achieve this incredible goal of playing professional sports. All it takes is one torn ACL and you’re out. You’re done.

And things can happen in the movie business and suddenly the work goes away. It happens all the time, often terribly, terribly unfairly. Live beneath your means.

It’s funny listening to your heuristic of how you analyze what you should spend and all the rest of it. I made it really easy myself. I just said, “I’m going to spend as little as I can, just in general, so I don’t have to do much math. Just spend as little as I can. Keep socking it away. Keep socking it away.” And then at some point, adjusting that floor upwards as money would come in.

It is a difficult thing for anyone to master, the kind of financial planning with intermittent, unpredictable income levels. It is that much more difficult for people who aren’t naturally inclined to these things. The venn diagram of writing doesn’t overlap quite neatly with the venn diagram of financial planning.

And look, I know writers that have run into real trouble. And when you run into trouble, then the problem is this business is very high school. No one wants to date the guy that needs a date. When that pressure starts kicking in and suddenly you need a job and you need the money, they can smell it. It’s not good news.

**John:** You were talking about living beneath your means. The first four or five years I lived in Los Angeles, I didn’t have a bed. Instead, I had the two of those egg crate foam mattress pad covers and that was my bed and that was absolutely fine. I ate a lot of ramen.

**Craig:** Dude, so much ramen. I had a futon mattress, not the frame. I had the mattress on the floor. My first apartment I shared with a college buddy. The rent was $705 a month. Now granted, it was 1992. But the point being, it was like a game. “How little can I spend?”

I’ll tell you, there’s really nothing better for you, frankly, than to be in your twenties and live right on the edge of what you can get away with because then, man, you appreciate it so much more when you’ve earned it, and you have it, and you get it.

**John:** I think it’s important for people to understand here and dangerous if you were to miss it is that we’re not talking strictly about the people who are aspiring to become screenwriters, who are living cheap with like that dream, “One day I’m going to get paid to write.” We’re talking about like when you are actually getting paid to write.

People are paying you money. The problem is you just don’t know how long that money is going to keep coming, so living beneath your means is so crucial at this point. And basically pretending you don’t have some of the money you do have so it can last a lot longer is crucial.

**Craig:** And it’s crucial for people to know that sometimes the numbers seem like a lot more money than it is. I’ll give a real life numbers example. The first script I ever sold with my partner in 1996 I believe. I believe we got paid — we were guaranteed a payment of $110,000.

**John:** Oh, my god. That’s so much money, Craig. You could live forever on $110,000!

**Craig:** Let’s do the math. Shall we, John?

First of all I had a writing partner, so let’s whack that in half. It’s actually $55,000. Now let’s remove 10% for the agent. So now we’re down to roughly $50,000. Let’s remove another 10% for the manager I had at the time and most young writers do have a manager. Now we’re down to $45,000.

Let’s remove 5% for the lawyer, so now we’re down to about $42,500. Now let’s take out federal income tax. Let’s take out state income tax.

**John:** It’s not fun if you take out the taxes, Craig.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know. But you have to because it turns out you go to jail like Wesley Snipes if you don’t.

And so, your big deal for $110,000 is actually putting maybe $30,000 in your pocket. Now interestingly when this deal happened, they said, “Okay, we’re going to pay you guys $110,000. Commence writing.”

Then they send over this contract that says, “We don’t actually pay you until this contract is signed,” which seemed totally reasonable to me until it occurred to all of us that the studio was taking a very, very long time to actually amend the contract to a place that was reasonable for our attorney.

So we had already finished the script by the time that contract finally got done. They withheld payment the entire time. So now we’re two months in and finally at the end of that rainbow, you get your commencement.

Now the commencement, that $110,000, that covered two steps of writing. The first step is always — you get a little extra in the first one. So I think it was something like 70/40. So okay, $70,000. But the commencement is half of that, 35. But remember, I split it with my writing partner. So that’s actually 17.5 and then the manager, the agent, the lawyer, the taxes.

Suddenly after all that time, maybe I had four or five grand in my pocket. And that’s what people need to get. Even if you write on your own, even if you make $500,000 and it’s just you, it’s less than it sounds like.

Oh! And I forgot. The Writer’s Guild takes a percent and a half plus an initiation fee of $2,500. I think I netted zero by the time the commencement was complete.

**John:** But you got paid $110,000, so the big party you threw because you got paid money to be a screenwriter was probably a little premature.

**Craig:** It was lavish.

In practice, I changed nothing. I took it all in stride. I did the math. I said, “Uh-huh. I get it. This is going to be awhile.” And it is going to be awhile.

People need to understand that there is no fast rise to the million dollar level, and these numbers seem bigger than they often in practice are. You have to, have to, have to save. You have to. No way around it.

**John:** So in general, my advice to Alana who’s at this early stage — and I guess this would be five figure advice. It’s not quite six figure advice, but she’s getting paid money to write projects with is awesome — I don’t know that she needs to keep a day job. I don’t know if it would be conceivable for her to really keep a day job and still take all the meetings she needs to take.

It would be great if she had a significant other who is also working to help even out the peaks and valleys of this monetary income. But in many ways, the degree to which she can pretend that she’s had no success at all will probably help her financially at this point.

**Craig:** And creatively by the way. I mean, stay humble in all regards.

**John:** Good. I think this is a good, sobering look at that first couple of projects for a working screenwriter.

**Craig:** I think we saved a lot day. [laughs]

**John:** We might have.

Down the road, I do want to have the more challenging but also more fun discussion of the six figure advice, which is for those writers who actually are working relatively regularly who have to start thinking about things like becoming a loan out corporation, and health insurance, and disability insurance.

You talked about the professional athlete who tears an ACL. At a certain point, I had to get disability insurance because quite rightly my business manager pointed out that if I got hit by a bus, it would be really, really bad and traditional insurance wasn’t actually going to help me out there.

**Craig:** We’ll call that “Rich Guy Podcast.” But there’s a lot of stuff that does need to be sorted through. We’re all in isolation, so I think that’s a great idea to talk about that stuff because a lot of it is boring procedural stuff. And yet, you can really, really screw yourself up if you do it wrong.

**John:** And I suspect you probably know how to do it right, so that’s why you’re a good person for this discussion.

**Craig:** I bet you do, too.

**John:** Craig, enjoy the rest of your Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Thank you, sir.

**John:** Are you going to have some barbecue tonight?

**Craig:** Tonight I think it’s Mexican food, which the only place in America that I think outdoes LA is Texas. So a little Mexican tonight, but there will be some barbecue in there somewhere for sure.

**John:** Sounds good. Thanks so much.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2011/the-good-boy-syndrome-and-whether-film-school-is-worth-it).

**John August:** Hello. Welcome. My name is John August.

**Craig Mazin:** I remain Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting, screenwriters, things that are of interest to screenwriters.

How are you today, Craig?

**Craig:** I’m good. Big gadget day today.

**John:** Oh, what happened?

**Craig:** Well, I’m on this new microphone that’s the same microphone you use, so theoretically I will sound as intelligent as you normally do.

**John:** That’s going to be a good step up for you.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m very excited about that. I have the new iPhone 4S. I’ve gone from AT&T to Verizon. I have completely screwed up the changeover from Google Voice, so that’s going to be a disaster for a while, but I’ll figure that out. Otherwise, yeah, big gadget day, so I’m excited.

**John:** So how did you get your 4S? Did you wait in line, did you pre-order it?

**Craig:** No, pre-ordered it. Because I was switching to Verizon… That night, that crazy night when Apple just fell apart on those pre-orders, Verizon was rocking. So you could go to their site, easily order phones from them. That’s what I did and it showed up today. Perfect.

**John:** I thought I’d start today with a quote because someone on another message board had left a quote about writing, which was really good, that referenced a Winston Churchill quote. So then I looked up the Winston Churchill quote, and it was great. This is the original Winston Churchill quote, which someone will probably actually find was not really something he said, the same way that all great quotes are always ascribed to Martin Luther King but he didn’t really say them at all.

But this is a good quote. “Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement, then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.” Winston Churchill writing a book.

**Craig:** It reminds me of… I think it was Antonioni. Somebody said, talking about making a movie, when you start making a movie your goal is to make a great movie, then as you proceed you just want to make a good movie, then at some point you just want to make a movie, and the last stage is you simply want to survive. [laughs] Very similar sentiment.

**John:** Definitely. I find any of the sort of project that takes months to do, I end up always going through that stage. I always think, “Oh, this movie that I write will be different.” I’m on my 40th thing right now. I just printed, about 20 minutes ago, I printed for the first time because I realized, “Oh, I actually have enough pages that I could print, and it won’t be embarrassingly small.” There’s actually enough that I could actually spend a good hour going through pages. I definitely find that manic depression, peak-and-valley thing happening.

A mutual friend of ours, who probably doesn’t want to be mentioned in the podcast, so I won’t mention her name, described when she was first starting on a project that she was sort of like a grandmother going in the ocean in that she would dip her toes in and splash some water on her ankles and then get back on the shore. Then she’d go in a little bit deeper and a little bit deeper, and eventually she’s in the ocean and she’s swimming, like, “Oh, I’m in the ocean. I’m swimming.”

That very much is what it is when I’m starting almost any project, is I’m always reluctant to start and then I finally get in and get going and recognize, “Oh, you’re more than halfway through.” Suddenly all the stuff that was keeping you away from the script starts sucking you into it. It sort of occupies every available brain cycle. I’m hitting that point in this project right now.

**Craig:** That’s a great time. There’s something magical that happens around page 70 for whatever reason, the notion that you’re leaving the forest and no longer wandering in. It just lifts you up. Page 50, for some reason, seems like the worst page to me.

**John:** Yeah, that’s a bleak time. Weirdly, on two recent projects I’ve had to turn in pages early because we could have theoretically lost a director. Both on Preacher and on Monsterpocalypse — I wouldn’t have lost Tim, but we needed to get timing and schedules and stuff figured out — I had to turn in like 45 or 50 pages.

Fortunately, they were a really good, strong 45 or 50 pages. And I felt really good about them, and people liked them, which is hooray, fantastic, that’s exactly what you want. But then to get the mojo back, like, oh my god, I felt like I was done to finish those 45 pages, and then you have everything else ahead of you. That can be a daunting period.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think the people that employ us have any sense of how emotionally fragile we are when we’re doing this stuff. Minor interruptions, anything sometimes, can cause three days of downtime and fetal position. The truth is there’s nothing we can do about it. They have to do what they’re doing. We all live in the real world. We’re writing movies that require many moving parts and the participation of a lot of people. You don’t always have the luxury of being able to just go through the way you want to but, god, anything that stops momentum is the worst.

**John:** It’s rough. The challenge I always have if I get notes too early on in a project is I’ll start to question fundamental decisions I’ve made about a story. Thank god in the case of both of those two movies people liked it and said, “Go, write, full speed ahead.” But if they had said, “Oh, we’re reconsidering this aspect of it,” I would have been doomed. That’s the risk.

**Craig:** We should remember this. There’s a good topic to be had, I know it’s not today’s topic, but the notion of the Good Boy Syndrome, of how you balance being a responsible professional who’s open to criticism because oftentimes criticism makes us write better work, how to balance that with the demands of your own voice and your own instincts so that you’re not bargaining away what matters the most. That is an internal war. Sometimes you have to be a bad guy for everyone’s sake because you’re right. Topic for another day.

**John:** I don’t know. I would actually propose that we talk about that today. The topic we were going to talk about today was film school and I can sort of talk about film school any time, I have my notes here and I can get back to that. I love this idea of the Good Boy Syndrome is that most of us as screenwriters tended to be decent students.

If we weren’t teacher’s pets, we were at least responsible enough to get stuff done. A lot of times my early writing was getting my mom to read it and say, “Oh, this was really great.” She was proofreading it, but mostly it was, “Hey, mom knows how smart I am.” So we don’t want to be the villains, and sometimes we have to be the villains.

When I was first directing for The Nines, where I decided, “Oh, I should direct this movie,” one of the things I had to get out of my head was this sense of having to feel like a host, having to feel like the person who was putting on the event, putting on the party, and having to make sure everyone’s happy and comfortable.

That’s not my job to make sure everyone’s happy and comfortable. My job is to get this movie made, and I can be nice and polite and friendly while getting this movie made, but it’s not my job to make sure the gaffer’s having a great day. It’s my job to make sure the gaffer know what it is I need to have done or the DP knows what I need to have done, so that everyone can do their job properly.

As the screenwriter on projects, a lot of times so much of our work is theoretical and mushy and you could go 1,000 different ways and there’s not a huge time pressure usually. You want to be the good guy, you want to be the hero, and it’s not always the right choice.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s not always the right choice. Think about two diametrically opposed extreme kinds of screenwriters, and they exist. On the one end you have a guy that is the classic resistant, defensive, “I’m not listening to you. I know what I’m doing. Don’t change anything. Don’t tell me what to write. You’re all idiots.”

When we look at that guy, we see someone who’s put his ego or his own fear or emotional needs ahead of what ultimately could be better for the movie. Because even if 90-percent of the people with whom you’re collaborating are idiots, 10-percent of them aren’t. Maybe even only one of them isn’t. Or maybe they’re all idiots, but the truth is one of them is going to be performing. You simply cannot do this job in creative isolation. Let’s call that the bad boy.

On the other end of the spectrum, though, you can have screenwriters who are so eager to please and over collaborate and who are steeped in enough self-loathing that anybody telling them, “I don’t like this,” triggers that impulse of, “Oh no, oh no,” that they agree to everything. Suddenly they find themselves under enormous, anxious stress because they are now writing toward pleasing people as opposed to making a good movie.

Both writers, in the end, will end up with a bad movie and negotiating within yourself, you need both sides of this or else you’re going to get crushed.

**John:** Yeah. That’s maybe a reason why some writing teams are successful is that one of them is that good cop people pleaser and the other one is the asshole who says, “No, we’re not doing that,” and you do need both functions a lot of times.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m sure the roles change, one guy can be the placater, the other one can be the defiant one and then for the producers and the director, whoever else is on the other side of the script, they can see, “Okay. Well, at least some sort of truce is being brokered. There’s a negotiation happening.” But if it’s just you, you have to be both of those things at once. Very difficult.

**John:** In projects that have come in to do rewrite work on, especially in the weekly rewrite work, part of my attraction for that is I do get to be the hero. I get to be the good guy. I get to be the person who arrives and fixes this problem and makes everyone feel better about the situation and then I get to leave. That’s the remarkable thing.

You recognize that a lot of the stuff that you’re finding in the script, a lot of the cruft and stacked up bad decisions weren’t because the previous writer or writers were bad writers. It’s that they were trying to address concerns that other people had, often not the same person’s concerns. So the director needed this and the producer said this and the star said, “I really want a scene where I’m eating hamburgers,” and all those things got put into the script that weren’t necessarily the right choice for the script at all.

**Craig:** Yeah. When you come on specifically to help something they’re literally saying, “Look, we need things. Give them to us.” So your job is very clear and you are sort of rent-a-writer and you don’t have to get super visionary about it because you’re only there for a week or two. And sometimes that kind of detachment is precisely what the movie needs. It doesn’t always mean that you’re coming in to deliver hackwork. Your emotional distance may be very useful.

But when you’re writing a script from scratch or you’re doing a page one rewrite or something like that you do need a vision and you do need something that you must protect. I’m still dwelling on the fact that you used the word “cruft.” Is that what you said? Cruft?

**John:** Cruft.

**Craig:** What is that?

**John:** Cruft. My use of the word comes from coding, and cruft is extra stuff that’s in code that doesn’t actually do anything, it just junks it all up.

**Craig:** Like an inefficient…?

**John:** Yeah. Again, I’m probably using the term slightly incorrectly, but cruft to me is sort of like the breadcrumbs that are left from previous ways of doing things. So it’s the loops that don’t really need to be loops. It’s the extra stuff. So it’s not the comments. It’s not the actual explanatory stuff. It’s vestigial stuff that’s left.

**Craig:** It’s vestigial. I was going to say it’s like a little tail hanging off of a baby’s butt.

**John:** Baby tails.

**Craig:** Baby tails. By the way, that is not normal.

**John:** If you have a tail, you should probably see somebody because that could be a problem down the road.

**Craig:** It’s biological cruft.

**John:** I’ve had tail bone problems before and I think part of the reason why we have back problems is that our ancestors had tails and things just worked differently. From sitting in my chair for so much of my day I will develop aches in my hips and the sacrum, which is where your tail bone is. If I just had a tail I could crack something, but there’s nothing to crack.

**Craig:** The human back is the greatest refutation to intelligent design theorists. It’s the worst design ever.

**John:** We’re a series of compromises. Just like every movie is essentially a series of compromises. The human body is a huge series of compromises. We’re born at nine months not because we’re ready to be born, but because otherwise our giant heads would not fit through the pelvis.

**Craig:** Correct. That’s why the first two and a half months of an infant’s life are useless.

**John:** It’s the fourth trimester.

**Craig:** It’s the fourth trimester. Horses are born, they plop out, they stagger around for two minutes, and then they’re running around eating oats. We can’t even hold our heads up.

**John:** We’re sad and we’re pathetic.

**Craig:** Useless. We’re cruft. [laughs]

**John:** There’s a lot of cruft there. Because of this sort of biological problem, this engineering problem, the first two months of a child’s life for parents is just horrible.

**Craig:** Worst. The worst because your child gives you nothing.

**John:** Their brains can’t actually do any of the stuff that would cause you to have a parental attachment. They can’t smile at you, they can’t roll over. They can just poop and eat. We love them just because we have so much sunken cost into them during those two months. It’s tough. It’s not intelligent design.

**Craig:** I’m sure there is a biological, hormonal component to postnatal depression, but I do honestly believe at least half of it is the crash that comes from the expectation what it means to have a baby and then have no emotional connection to it. Babies, that first four, five, six weeks they don’t even recognize you. It’s awful.

**John:** My biggest frustration is couples, women mostly, pregnant women, who will go through this whole elaborate thing about exactly how they want the birth to be, because like with the birth is a big, bigger thing. And they haven’t planned for like two minutes after the birth. They know exactly how they want the room set up, and what they want the doula doing, but they haven’t figured out like, “Oh, what are we going to do in that first horrible month when no one is sleeping?”

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. And you know what? It’s people when they’re having babies — this is now, we’re once again back to gynecology, which I love — when people are going to have their first baby, they want to apply as much control as they can. But the only thing they can control is the birth, and they’ll get really, really finicky about it, but the baby upon birth dashes all of your plans to hell, because she’s screaming.

So that’s it. Plan’s gone. When I had my second kid, I didn’t care about any of that birth nonsense. All I cared about was lining up a night nurse. To me, that is like I would sell anything for a night nurse. I would rather have a night nurse for the first month of an infancy, for a new baby, than a car.

**John:** A night nurse, for people who don’t know, is a woman — generally — you hire and who comes and takes care of the baby overnight. Basically feeds and diapers the baby overnight, so that the parents can sleep. You don’t hire the night nurse for the baby. You hire the night nurse for yourself.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** So you get a night of sleep.

**Craig:** And you cannot imagine the difference it makes in your experience with this child. The day is annoying anyway, because the child gives you nothing and screams and cries and poops, but at least you’re not exhausted to the point of tears. You’re functional. Again, nothing to do with screen… Although it is, you know what? If you’re a screenwriter and you’re having a baby, you can’t write without a night nurse. So that’s it. [laughter]

**John:** Actually, I have a better way to sort of bring it back to the actual process of screenwriting is that these couples — these women who are planning for the birth, and they’re focusing all of this energy on the birth — are very much like the producers and studio development people who are focusing on the screenplay.

So they’re trying to make this movie, and they’re focusing only on this script that’s in front of them. But they’re not focusing on, like, “Oh, you know what? There’s actually going to be a movie.” And that the minute you start production and the minute you get to that first test screening and all the stuff down the road, they’re not thinking about that final movie.

They get so obsessed with this little one moment on this page, and making sure that thing is exactly what they want it to be, that they sometimes stop thinking about the entire… the actual point of the work that they’re doing, which is to make this movie.

**Craig:** That is a genius analogy. It’s so true. The obsession over minutiae when you’re writing a screenplay is entirely about people who are afraid — and we all are, not just them; all of us, everyone’s afraid of this — exercising control over it, but it is endlessly amusing to me that all the things that we all have god knows how many hours of conference calls over tiny little things get dashed to pieces when the director shows up and says, “You know what? On the day, I think it should just be this.” And everybody’s like, “Okay,” because you’re the director.

That’s like, “I’m giving you the baby now. You raise the baby, but boy, we really sure put a whole lot of time into thinking about what it should wear on Wednesday morning.”

It’s a perfect analogy, and the more you recognize as a screenwriter that many of the notes are about exercising control out of fear, the more you can actually relax about them. Because we get bad notes sometimes. They’re not trying to hurt you. They’re just trying to protect their fear level, which is extraordinary.

**John:** And generally, as you’re getting notes and you’re job as a screenwriter is to figure out who’s notes are really coming at you, and which are the important notes.

And the best analogy I can actually think of is something that happens every time you go into a creative meeting. You’re in somebody’s office, and an actual okay question to ask is, “Where should I sit?” because there’s one chair that the person who’s the most important person in the room wants to sit in, so you make sure that person gets the chair they want to sit in.

And you should be sitting someplace where you can look directly at that person, and you can turn your head and look at everybody else, but really you’re talking to that one person. And when you go into those meetings and you figure out who is the actual most important person in the room — that’s the same experience of these notes. It’s that you could try to address everybody’s notes and make sure everyone gets heard, but then you’re just being a good boy, and you’re not necessarily being a good writer.

**Craig:** That’s right. And the instinct or ability to determine who needs to be listened to primarily — that is unfortunately one of those things that requires some experience. I mean, I’m sure some people are better at it than others right out of the box, but for new screenwriters, you are going to have some dramatic, clumsy meetings where you blow it. And you just blow it because you’re learning how all this stuff works. In the end, everybody figures it out.

**John:** One of the very smart things my first agent, who in the last podcast I talked about how I let him go —

**Craig:** Oh, your first agent in quotes, the one that doesn’t exist?

**John:** Yes, who apparently doesn’t exist — my imaginary first agent. One of the smart things that he did or I did myself somehow, was he sent me out on fifteen meetings, like right away. And they were really unimportant meetings. They were sort of the junior executives at various production companies. And so they’d read my script and we’d talk, but it was mostly, I think, just to burn me through my first fifteen terrible meetings, so I got better at it.

**Craig:** Yeah, I like this. Yeah, that’s smart. Good… It’s sort of like spring training for meetings. I like it.

**John:** So we have a little time here, so I think I may jump ahead, and I do want to talk about film school, but I think we can tie a lot of this back in here. So we’ll see how this goes.

**Craig:** OK.

**John:** This last week I got to talk at UCLA. So it was a group of students who had just watched The Nines, and had watched God, the short I did with Melissa McCarthy before that, and so it was great to be sitting in a room with people who had just very recently seen the two movies I had done and could talk about them in a smart way. This was mostly a graduate group, some cinematographers, some directors, and I got to see what the UCLA Film School looks like, which is pretty nice. It’s not as nice as the new USC building, but it’s pretty nice.

And then over the last month I’d been up to USC three times to talk to students, both in the screenwriting program and some of the incoming freshmen, and it’s got me thinking a lot about film school, and college and graduate school overall.

So I made a list of eight reasons why you go to college or grad school at all, whether it’s film school or any sort of college program, some reasons why you’d want to go. As I’m talking, keep note of those and see which ones you think are actually important and which ones I’m just talking out of my ass.

**Craig:** I’m getting a pen. I’ve got an index card. I’m taking notes.

**John:** All right. Reasons to go to college or a grad school program. The information, literally so you learn this thing that you’re supposed to be learning.

Two, a degree or some sort of certificate that proves that you know how to do this thing. And in some professions, that’s incredibly important, like engineering — you have to be certified to be able to do certain things. Medical school, obviously.

Number three, access to special equipment.

**Craig:** Wait, wait. You need a degree to do medicine?

**John:** In the U.S., you do.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Yeah. Sorry.

**Craig:** Oh, boy.

**John:** Is this going to be problematic for you there, Craig?

**Craig:** Ooh, no. I, I… Send him out. I can’t do it. Not today. Okay, go on. Number three?

**John:** Number three, access to special equipment. For some things, that’s really obvious. If you’re doing nuclear engineering, you probably need some kind of special stuff, but even, like, a law library is sort of special equipment. It’d be hard to do law school without access to some sort of law library.

Number four, structure. That’s the sense that’s like, “That’s me learning calculus.” I never had a real calculus class. And so I kept thinking, like, “Oh, I could teach myself calculus.” But I’ve never taught myself calculus, because I would need the structure of having to actually work my way through the book.

The last four reasons are sort of people-related.

Number five, professors. Professors are experts, like the learned people in that field who are the teachers who will teach you.

Number six, peers, people who are there to do the same thing that you’re trying to do.

Number seven, alumni, people who are going to be helpful for your learning process, but ultimately to get a job and to sort of thrive in your career.

And the last reason, so these are kind of out of order, but the last reason is because you enjoy it, because you want to have a good time, and it’s a good way to spend a couple years.

**Craig:** None of these reasons are sex.

**John:** Well, sex is enjoyment.

**Craig:** Oh, I see. Okay, fine. Now I understand number eight. I didn’t understand until you said that. Okay.

**John:** I would argue that a lot of our traditional liberal arts education or our four year college education is really about the four years aspect. It’s like you’re taking kids when they are 18 years old and letting them grow up to be 22 years old without killing themselves, and they’re going to have sex in a safe environment — a safer environment — and drinking a lot, but they have a safe place to land.

**Craig:** All right, all right. That’s a pretty good list.

**John:** Of those eight, let’s think about film school, and which of those do you think are important for film school or not relevant anymore.

**Craig:** Let me go down the list. Info — of questionable importance for film, to me at least, and I’ll preface this by saying I didn’t go to film school. But I think that much of the information that we need to write good stories is available elsewhere. It may not be available to the extent or in the concentrated form, but that’s covered by some of these other things. So I’ll give it sort of a…

**John:** Partial.

**Craig:** …a partial. Degree — totally irrelevant.

**John:** Completely irrelevant. I have no idea where my MFA is. I have an MFA in film. I have no idea where it is. I assume I still have it someplace. No one will ever ask me for my film degree. No one cares.

**Craig:** No, no one cares. Special equipment — used to be the case. No longer.

**John:** Very true.

**Craig:** Used to need the moviolas and all the rest of it. Now, you just need a laptop.

**John:** It’s interesting looking at USC, because USC just built an amazing new complex for the cinema school, and at the same time, with their freshmen who are showing up there have 5D or 7D cameras of their own, and they have Final Cut Pro 7 on their laptops, so they’re able to make… Smartly, USC is having them make a lot of stuff right away, so they’re shooting stuff constantly and they’re doing it all on their own stuff.

And so downstairs at the USC complex they have these amazing rooms and rooms and rooms of Avids and George Lucas kind of special equipment. And there’s some special things it would be very hard to get any place else, like they have motion capture equipment and 3D labs and stuff like that that would be hard to find other places. But equipment is not nearly as important as it used to be. When I went to film school, you were going to have hard time getting a 16 millimeter camera any place else, and getting your film processed — that was all a big deal.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** And now it’s not.

**Craig:** It’s just all gone, so that’s…

**John:** And, Craig, with your 4S, you have a better camera than anyone in film school had up until…

**Craig:** Isn’t that amazing?

**John:** …the mid-’90s, probably.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s nuts-o. So, I mean, special equipment — certainly doesn’t play anymore. Structure definitely, I think, is a huge benefit of film school. You are forced by the demands of your curriculum to write, produce, cut, edit, do whatever else is required. It forces you out of your normal state of procrastination, so that’s a helpful thing.

**John:** A helpful thing.

**Craig:** Professor mentors — obviously, you can’t get them unless you’re… I mean, you can’t get professorial mentors unless you’re there. I would argue, however, that you can get mentor mentors elsewhere. You don’t need film school to get a great mentor. And frankly, one of the hidden dangers of film school is that a lot of times, the professors are slightly more academic than you would want, I think.

**John:** I think it’s a really valid question to ask about any film program you’re looking at, is like what have these people actually done? Do they really know what they’re talking about as it relates to the film industry right now versus the film industry 20 years ago? If you’re going to film school for critical studies, that’s probably much less important, because you’re talking about the history of film. Well, you want somebody old, that’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, if you are trying to be a director, a writer, a producer, and you’re not going to NYU or USC or UCLA, I’m not really sure why you’re going to film school at all. Because I don’t know if they are attracting the kind of people that really can steer you in a smart way. I mean, maybe there are other ones out there, but sometimes I meet people who are going to film school at a tiny, I don’t know, Arizona State Film Studies program, I just don’t know why they’re there.

**John:** I would say that number six might be a reason why — it’s the peers situation. I think of anything, I think peers is probably the most important reason now to consider film school. It’s that I look at these kids who are in the UCLA program and especially the freshmen, entering freshmen at USC’s program, is they are surrounded by 100 other people who want to do exactly what they want to do, and want to stay up all night doing what they want to do. And that’s a huge help.

They can make a lot of really amazing things. The people who were most helpful for me as I got started in the film world were not the people I knew who were more powerful. They were people who were doing exactly what I was doing. I showed up in Los Angeles knowing 25 people who were exactly the 25 people in my film program, and those are the only people I really knew for two years, and they became best friends and mortal enemies and everything in between, but they were incredibly important to me.

**Craig:** But that would still, I think, and when we get to alums, it argues for going to an excellent program, because the better the program, the better the peers, and certainly, in the case of USC, NYU, UCLA, the alums are… That’s the one I said wait okay yeah, I mean, man I wish that I had had USC alums helping me out when I showed up. I didn’t have anybody. That’s obviously a big one. And then sex — I feel like, ah, it’s an expensive way to get laid.

**John:** It is a very expensive way to get laid. I think, you know. We’ve intended to label our podcasts very conservatively, but “an expensive way to get laid” is really a good title for something. [laughter]

**Craig:** Yeah, tuition, also known as an expensive way to get laid.

**John:** I think going to undergrad with that as one of your stated goals is completely noble and good, but you shouldn’t be paying $35,000 trying to get into a top-tier film program for just that reason.

**Craig:** Yeah, super bad idea.

**John:** Plus the people who are going to applying to a film school program aren’t necessarily going to be the most attractive people you’re going to meet.

**Craig:** Exactly, for $35,000, this man or woman should be spectacular and do everything.

**John:** Instead, they’re going to be able to talk about the early films of Tarantino, but that’s not necessarily what you want out of that.

**Craig:** That’s correct.

**John:** Let’s recap this list. What is still important about film school in 2011? Partial credit on the information. When I went to film school, the Internet really wasn’t what the Internet is today, so I couldn’t find out about that stuff. I had Premiere Magazine. That was my source of film information, so I showed up not knowing what the studios were.

I’d not really read a script, the first script I read was the printed script in Soderbergh’s diary for Sex, Lies and Videotape. So I’d seen kind of a screenplay, but it wasn’t even formatted properly. Now the Internet is lousy with information about that.

Certificate? Useless, you don’t need a degree. I would say if you’re going to film school and an amazing opportunity happens halfway through, bail.

**Craig:** Totally, what’s the point of going? It’s a vocational school.

**John:** A mutual acquaintance of ours, Jon Glickman, was in my graduate school program and bailed, and now runs MGM Studios.

**Craig:** It’s not like he just became successful. Jon produced the first movie he ever wrote. He and I began at the same time, and you don’t need… If you get the job, go. That’s the whole point.

**John:** But it was a good thing he was in that graduate school program with me, because I remember being in the elevator with Jon Glickman. We were going to a class, and Joe Roth was going to speak in the class. Joe Roth, who was running at that time… I guess he’d left Disney, was running Revolution, or was right at that time.

**Craig:** It was Caravan, the forerunner.

**John:** Caravan before Revolution. I’m in the elevator. It’s me and Jon Glickman and Joe Roth. This is before the class, and Jon Glickman, to his credit, and his audacity, is like, “Hey, I’m Jon Glickman, I really want to work for you. After class, I’m going to give you my stuff and I really want you to hire me at your new company.” Joe Roth did.

**Craig:** It’s amazing is that he went to go work for Joe Roth. Joe Roth was partners with Roger Birnbaum, and then Joe Roth went off later to do Revolution. Jon has stayed with Roger the whole way through. Talk about a fateful elevator meeting. You’re right, I guess that falls under peers and alums.

**John:** Yeah, getting to meet people who will help you. Access to special equipment, not nearly as important. I think there’s still some amazing things you’re going to be able to do at USC Film School or UCLA Film School that are going to be hard to do on your own, but the special equipment is a much less important thing now.

**Craig:** You know what, it literally comes down to lights. That’s the only equipment I can think of. Lights and maybe a dolly.

**John:** I would say some of the 3D stuff, and some of the gaming, there’s some really special digital things that USC does now.

**Craig:** Like mo-cap and so forth?

**John:** They have a whole mo-cap stage.

**Craig:** By the way, in five years, watch.

**John:** Five years, it’ll totally happen. We’ll have mo-cap, easily. Did you watch the Trey Parker South Park documentary? It’s really good.

**Craig:** I haven’t seen it yet. I’ve got to watch it, I love it.

**John:** They talk about the six days to air, so they do South Park episodes in six days. What’s encouraging to hear is that they used to spend a ton of money on the technology to make it happen, and now they’re just buying Macs off the shelf, and that’s mostly what it’s done on. They’re able to do it in six days because technology has advanced, not because they necessarily want to do it in six days, it just became possible. Structure, still important?

**Craig:** Yeah, I think so.

**John:** I think it’s really important, and having to get stuff done at a certain time is really important. A smart thing that USC is doing with their incoming freshmen is in addition to their class structure, because incoming freshmen, they have a lot of general ed requirements, so they’re taking a lot of stuff that’s not film related. They have this amazing game that’s being played this first semester where students are shooting projects constantly on their own. It provides a structure even though it’s not classically your education.

[Siren]

**Craig:** Siren.

**John:** I think they figured out that you’re not really a doctor, and they’re…

**Craig:** No, that was the ambulance I called for this guy. Just so you know, he was open, I was about to go in. We had him prepped, and then you dropped…

**John:** A crisis of faith.

**Craig:** No, you dropped this bomb on me all of a sudden that I can’t do unlicensed surgery in my office in Old Town Pasadena. Anyway, we wheeled him down over to the Cheesecake Factory, and left him there on the corner. He’ll be fine.

**John:** He’ll be fine. Cheesecake Factory is a pretty good restaurant, I think he’ll be fine.

**Craig:** He’ll be fine. Everyone’s such a baby about unlicensed surgery. God.

**John:** I know, come on. What is it, a manicurist can do your nails, but you can’t remove someone’s appendix?

**Craig:** This was a little more complicated than that, to be fair. I was doing a bypass, and I knew I was in over my head. I opened him up — sometimes I get excited about these things. I don’t think them through.

**John:** Again, women with childbirth. They have the doula, they have the whole water birth thing all set up.

**Craig:** That’s me.

**John:** Yeah, that’s you.

**Craig:** I got so excited about doing surgery, I really controlled everything up to the point where I was staring at a beating, exposed heart. Then I froze up.

**John:** Did you ever play the Macintosh game, the surgery game?

**Craig:** I totally did, I remember it exactly.

**John:** You had to draw with the mouse the little scalpel line. If you’d go too deep, he would start bleeding out.

**Craig:** I loved that game. They would also throw things at you, like, “Uh-oh, he’s going through bradycardia,” and you had to know, “Do I inject him with lidocaine or epinephrine?” And if you screwed up, the patient would die, and I killed thousands of Macintosh patients. Thousands, I don’t think I ever made anyone live. This is when I realized I shouldn’t be a doctor.

**John:** The thing about those early games is so many of them, you would just always lose, and then you just kept playing.

**Craig:** I think that’s why. It’s funny, they just released for the iOS platform this classic game called Out of this World, which was this gorgeous, rotoscoped game, revolutionary game from 1990. It’s impossible. I’d forgotten how impossible it was.

**John:** The nostalgic stuff being brought back to new platforms is a weird trend. There’s one video game I’m involved with that’s doing a bit of that. The fascination with pixel art I hope goes away.

**Craig:** It will. It was stupid to begin with, so we’re just remembering a stupid thing, and then we’ll stop, because it was stupid. Pixel art, ASCII art, all that stuff was ridiculous.

**John:** Let’s go back to our list here. We went through professors and experts. The real challenge of people who are teaching a film program is you have to ask, “Why are they teaching a film program rather than doing the thing that it is they should be doing?”

In many cases, they really are working professionals. That’s the luxury of going to film school in Los Angeles, is that a lot of people who are going to be teaching here really are working every day. The guy who’s teaching the class at UCLA is an editor on Fringe. That’s exactly the kind of person you want teaching a class.

Peers, peers are crucial.

Alumni.

**Craig:** Big time.

**John:** The whole reason I was at USC was because I was an alum. That’s why I stayed there. And enjoyment, sex.

**Craig:** Sex camp.

**John:** Still some good reasons to go to film school, fewer than there were 5 or 10 years ago.

**Craig:** I’d say. Given the way the economy is right now, if you have to take out a loan for it, think thrice. That would be my advice.

**John:** People cite the economy, but if the economy is great, should you go to film school then? Right now, I think a lot of people who are in film school, they wouldn’t have a great job anyway. Maybe it’s the time to get some schooling.

**Craig:** I don’t know, the burden of those loans. These are expensive schools.

**John:** You should have rich relatives who send you to film school, then it’s solved.

**Craig:** That’s kind of what I’m saying, if your dad’s rich, or your mom, or uncle, whatever, then sure. Go for it. But if you can get away with it without going to film school, do it.

**John:** One of the things I stressed to both these classes was that I envy them in the sense that this is just an amazing time. I think we’re making good movies, I think we’re making amazing television, and I also think we’re making more different kinds of things than at any point in our cinematic history.

It very much feels like the 1970s in the sense of you have people who are just forging whole new ways of doing stuff. Access to technology, and access to these great, cheap cameras that let you shoot things you could never shoot before. This is the time to be making those movies.

**Craig:** Without a doubt. Talk about just a different world for film students. We’ve often talked about the value of production for the screenwriter. The experience of seeing your pages produced will always make you a better writer, always. It’s so much easier to do that now, with actual expertise, than it ever was before.

Like you said, you could run around with a chunky VHS camcorder when you were a kid, or eight millimeter film, but then you’ve got to cut it, and edit it, and put it in the soup and transitions, all the rest of it. What you can do now almost compels you to do it. There’s no excuse to not.

**John:** At UCLA, they screened God, my short film, and that was a thing I made with Melissa McCarthy, and I’d taken part of the reshoot crew for Go, and we just splintered off and we shot the short film in two days at my house. That was $30,000 to do, and that was using short ends of 35 millimeter film and borrowing time on an Avid, and all those processing kinds of costs.

The thing that I can’t believe now is there’s just a superimposed title that says “God” over this opening tracking shot, and that was three days of opticals and $4,000 to get that one word over a moving image. Everything that we had to do to shoot God back in ’99 would be simple to do on any camera right now. We’d do it all on a computer.

**Craig:** No question. By the way, good on you for seeing how brilliant Melissa McCarthy was so early on.

**John:** I have a good track record of spotting people who will do well. After she got cast in Go… She was fantastic in Go. I watched the cut, and I was like, “My god, she’s terrific.” I bumped into her at Starbucks, and I said in that sort of brief, awkward seeing her again, “You’re amazing. I’m going to write a short film for you, and we’re going to do it, and it’s going to be great.” Then two weeks later I had her licking a parking meter for my movie. She used that as her audition real for years and years after that.

**Craig:** Yeah, she’s awesome.

**John:** People say, “Do I have to move to Los Angeles?” That’s the reason you have to move to Los Angeles. Not just so you got your first movie made, but that you bump into her in Starbucks again, and you make short films with her, and make a series of movies with her after that.

**Craig:** 100 percent.

**John:** We talked about a lot of stuff today.

**Craig:** We did amazingly well. I want people to give us some credit. I want credit.

**John:** I hear some applause, but I’m traveling back through time for it.

I feel like we covered a lot today, and I’m really glad we got back to the gynecological issues that really were the genesis of this whole podcast.

**Craig:** Eventually we’re going to have a huge audience that just comes for that. Next week’s podcast is entirely about vaginosis.

**John:** I like it. Things I know, we’ve gotten some reader questions, and I’ve put that up on the blog. Before we go, I’ll say this. If you have a question that you want Craig and I to talk about, if you want Craig and me to talk about it — that was bad — email at ask@johnaugust.com. There’s a big bucket of questions, and if you ask a question that would be interesting for Craig and I to talk about, we’ll talk about it. Other than that, thank you for listening.

**Craig:** Yeah, thanks. People keep coming up to me and saying they’re listening to this. They really are, that’s awesome.

**John:** Thank you, Craig, and have a great weekend. We’ll talk to you soon.

**Craig:** All right, bye bye.

**John:** Bye.