Archives for 2012

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: And my name is A Very Christmas Craig Mazin.

John: This is our Christmas episode of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Now, Craig, we’re recording this a few days early so we’re not literally just sitting by the tree. There’s probably no eggnog in our hands. Maybe you have eggnog, I don’t know.

Craig: No. I think eggnog is gross.

John: I love eggnog…

Craig: Ew!

John: We might have to have a big fight about this. Eggnog is amazing. It’s essentially just melted ice cream that you get to drink out of a cup. And it’s just the best.

Craig: It’s melted ice cream with weird spice in it.

John: What is weird about nutmeg? Nutmeg is one of the most wonderful spices if used in moderation.

Craig: You know what it is? It’s the word “egg” and the word “nog” are so gross. Plus you have those two Gs, eggnog. It sounds like something that Orcs would say, and I don’t like it.

John: Yeah. It has a very Germanic quality to it, but I have always loved eggnog to the degree that I remember once I came back from, like, a summer scouts meeting and it was, like, a hot day in August —

Craig: Oh god!

John: — And I was like, “Mom, I really want some eggnog.” And my mother, who is so generous, was just like, “Okay, I’ll make you some eggnog.” So, she literally made — like the skim milk in the fridge, and some eggs, and some sugar, and some vanilla, and some nutmeg, and she made in a blender some eggnog. And that’s why I love my mom.

Craig: You know, my grandmother used to tell the story about how when she was a child on a really, really hot day back in Russia she would drink iced cold buttermilk. [laughs] And, you know, that sounds pretty good because it’s butter, and it’s milk, and everybody loves butter, and everybody loves milk. But buttermilk is just rotten milk.

John: I would disagree. I would say buttermilk is soured milk. And it has a certain quality to it that makes it fantastic for biscuits, or for ice cream. Buttermilk ice cream.

Craig: You mean rotten quality? [laughs]

John: I think it’s delicious. But everyone has their own tastes. For example, do you like crème fraîche? Is that a taste you like?

Craig: It’s funny that you mention that because I was explaining to our video playback guy last week that I actually have a weird thing about white food in general. And crème fraîche is a great example of white food I do not eat. There’s something about white sauce type food — mayonnaise, crème fraîche, tartar sauce, there’s more I’m sure. Tahini. Even that’s something — I just can’t do it. I can’t go near it.

John: Yeah. There’s a puss-like quality to it that might turn some people off. Cottage cheese, I’m sure, falls into that.

Craig: No. I can do cottage cheese if I mix it with fruit.

John: That makes no sense at all, Craig.

Craig: If I mix it with fruit. That one is an exception. And I can do like certain yogurts and stuff like that. But there’s a lot of white food that just horrifies me. Mayonnaise is my number one, but crème fraîche, sour cream, because that’s what crème fraîche is, right? Isn’t it sour cream? Which is a lie…

John: It’s a special kind of sour cream, yeah. You’re just a food racist and we should probably move onto another topic.

Craig: Yeah. I don’t like white food.

John: So, you’re making a list at Christmastime. There is a famous person who makes a list around Christmastime, well, Santa, but even more important than Santa, Franklin Leonard makes a list around Christmastime.

Craig: Yes. Dreadlock Santa makes a list.

John: And Dreadlock Santa this year made a list called the Black List, as he does every year, in which he surveys the development executives to ask them what their most liked scripts are. He always wants to make it clear that this isn’t the “best of” list; it’s like the most liked screenplays that people have read this year.

And so that came out this last week, or actually two weeks ago for people who are listening on Christmas day. And there were a lot of great titles there. Some people that we know, mutual friends. Eric Heisserer, Story of Your Life, was one of the highly liked scripts.

Craig: Great to see.

John: Jonathan Stokes, who is one of my WGA advisees, his script Border Country was listed there.

Craig: Oh! Awesome. Yeah, good for him.

John: And a person who wrote into our site for the Three Page Challenge, Austin Reynolds, his script, From New York to Florida, was also on the Black List.

Craig: What script did he send in for us?

John: So, the three pages I think we read was something that you liked much more than I liked in the first three pages, where there’s a kid in class who is scribbling…

Craig: Oh, I remember that guy, yeah.

John: So, you apparently have great taste.

Craig: Well, see that? God, I know what I’m doing.

John: Yeah. So, maybe we’ll go back through and re-edit that so we sound really knowledgeable and that we should single that out as being highly praise-worthy. But congratulations to Austin Reynolds; that’s fantastic. I’m happy that these people had good outcomes.

Craig: Yeah.

John: As I was looking through the list, one of the things I was trying to look for — patterns — in addition to, like, names I recognize was: what are people writing about, and what are these spec scripts that people are working on? And one that really stuck out was by a writer named Young Il Kim called Rodham. And it’s the story of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s rise as a young lawyer, sort of rising in politics, and she falls in love with this guy Bill Clinton.

And I was like, that was a great idea for a spec. I have no idea — obviously the spec is pretty good because people like it, but people want to know like, “Oh, what kind of spec should I write?” That seems like a great idea for a spec. That’s public domain. It’s interesting. People are going to want to read that. Good choice. Good subject material.

Craig: Yeah. It is a good choice. And it’s accessible. And people can actually compare what you’ve written to their understanding of reality and see in evidence the drama that you have created. It’s a very smart way of approaching it.

John: So, today I thought we’d talk through some of our mail bag questions, but one of them was actually really relevant to what we’re doing right now which is an email we got from Brantley Aufill. And so it’s kind of long but I’ll read it because it’s nice. It’s happy. And so it’s a good thing for this time of year.

Craig: Great.

John: Brantley writes, “In September of 2011, I sent you an email about something you said on the podcast. Well, it’s like, ‘I mostly want to write period detective stories with monsters.'” I kind of remember saying that. So, talking about, like, what genre is your genre.

Brantley writes, “I remarked that I had just done exactly that having written a spec called The Hooverville Dead which found me my manager just a few months prior. Over the following months, I listen to Scriptnotes every week, and so many times it seems to be recorded just for me, as I was writing and rewriting, as the script started going out, as I began to get generals, as I began to do pitches, as I signed with my agents, as I tried to think over what to write next.

“The topics you and Craig were covering often coincided exactly with where I was navigating this crazy world as a new screenwriter. Flash forward to today. The Hooverville Dead has become my calling card and just made this year’s Black List.”

Craig: Great.

John: “I’m still doing generals. I have yet to make that first writer’s paycheck, but I have quite a few projects in ‘this might be the one’ column. I’m taking my next spec to a major studio with a producer already attached. I developed a TV show with a producer that we’re talking to networks about next month. I have different pitches at different studios, four of which I set up over a 26-hour period later this week.

“So, I’m reading book after book, writing up treatments, and pitching my take, and I’m on people’s minds as they think of a writer they want to work with. And I’ve been loving just about every minute of it. So, thanks to you and Craig for Scriptnotes; the last few months have been a bit of a whirlwind but I like to think the advice you two have been providing has helped me keep up just a little bit ahead of it. Thanks, Brantley Aufill.”

Craig: Wow. You know what? Thank you man. That’s really nice of you. I’m glad that you are obviously doing well, you know. I mean, the fact that you haven’t gotten that first writer’s paycheck is a quirk of the timeline. It sounds like you will be soon enough. And, you know, as we’ve been doing this and you and I interact more and more with people who are aspiring, and particularly people who are right on that bubble where it seems like all the pieces are in place, and people are noticing their writing and they actually have the facility to do this, they just haven’t quite gotten that first purchase yet.

What’s been salient to me more than anything is attitude. And it’s the people with the great attitude who strike me as the most likely to succeed. And that’s a terrific attitude to have. The attitude of the student, and it’s one that I think you and I both maintain to this very day.

So, good for you. I’m glad that we’ve been of help to you.

John: Yeah. I would also say in terms of attitude: acknowledging good fortune, and success, and people who have helped you along the way. Because so much of this business, and sort of getting started in any business, are going to be the frustrations and all the things that go wrong. But when things do go right, when someone helps you out with something, it’s great to acknowledge that. And the people who help you out along the way, just take a moment to thank them for that.

So, thank you for writing in.

Craig: It’s certainly no sign of weakness. We all need help desperately. I remember Scott Frank years ago saying to me, “I need more help than any writer I’ve ever met. When I’m figuring out who I should work with on something — producer, studio executive, agent, whomever — it’s entirely about who will satisfy my deep need for help.”

So, you’re dead on with that.

John: Cool. Let’s continue that thread with some other questions that people have written in with and maybe we can answer a few more things for other people and get them started on their way.

Craig: Cool.

John: So, this first one comes — a writer who had written into the site and it was in the backlog of questions, and then he reached out to you on Twitter. And so you flagged it and so now we’re following up.

It’s a guy named Christopher in London who writes, “Having written my first feature screenplay a year after moving to London I began to get as many people to read it as possible. By your normal chain of events — basically, through my girlfriend — the script found its way to a producer who had made one other feature, and a few shorts.

“He loved the script and wanted to make it, so we began a second draft with the promise that after typing the script he would send it to potential ‘financiers, directors, and cast.’ Fast forward two and a half years, after draft number 13 he still hasn’t shown the script to another soul. In the meantime, I’ve shopped the script out myself, and now that I’ve secured an actual production company interested in making the movie I want to move on from this producer.

“Now, after asking him to sign an agreement to state that the rights to this script reside with me, he has said he won’t sign it and is suggesting he has some claim to my script. What do I do?”

Craig: Okay. Well, he does not have a claim to your script. Legally speaking, in terms of copyright, you are the author of your script. You have written every word. He has not created any unique expression in fixed form. What he’s done is act as an editor, and just as editors in the book world don’t have copyright claims on Stephen King’s novels, nor does this person have a copyright claim on your screenplay.

What this person may have a claim for is the right to be associated as a producer with this film. That claim is not something that’s adjudicated against you. That is something that they would have to deal with with a new producer that comes onboard. And, frankly, it’s kind of not your problem to the extent that it’s not specifically your problem.

However, when you’re talking to these new people you have to say, “Look, here’s this person. I don’t want them to be involved. They didn’t write anything. They’ve been acting as a ‘producer.’ They’ve been nothing but a hindrance, frankly. You should be aware that they’re there and so that’s something you guys have to work out.” And most likely the actual producers, the new financing entity would reach out to this “producer” and say, “We want to settle you out.” Or, “We want to exchange this guarantee of an onscreen producing credit for your release of the material and disappearing.”

There are all sorts of ways to make people go away. But, the two prominent ways are money and credit.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That said, it’s hard for these people to actually claim anything, because when push comes to shove they don’t have a contract with you beyond a verbal and implied contract. And so it’s one of those deals where that would have to be hashed out if it actually got to a lawsuit. You want to avoid lawsuits.

So, my recommendation here is that you, in conjunction with your attorney and the new producer, go instruct them to handle this person and make them go away as need be.

John: I agree. I would also say just take a step back and imagine that the other person was writing this question. And he would probably phrase his question to us this way: “So, I’ve spent the last two and half years working with this writer, reading every draft, giving notes on every step. Today he shows up at my door saying that he wants me to sign this release that I have no involvement with the project whatsoever. What do I do? I feel like this kid is being incredibly ungracious for all the hours, and hours, and hours of work I’ve put in on this script. What do I do?”

And it’s easy to see his perspective on this, too. I would say he hasn’t done a terrific job of all the other things of producing. Maybe he actually gave you good notes? Maybe he really did help you get the script into good shape, but he hasn’t been able to sort of move the project forward. So, I don’t blame you for wanting to move forward on your own. But, you are going to need to figure out some way to have him taken care of in this process because it does sound like he was involved for quite a long time.

Where it gets really frustrating for me is when, like, literally something kind of passed over a person’s desk and they’re claiming producer credit on it.

Craig: Right.

John: And that happens far too often and it’s really maddening. And especially newer writers can find themselves in frustrating situations with that. And I wish I had a magic wand to sort of make that all go away and be better, but it does happen.

And there’s people whose names are on lots of movies who are just really stubborn and they get their names on movies, even if they weren’t involved in the actual making of the film.

Craig: This is certainly not something that’s unique to our business, although you see it all the time. Very annoying people often are rewarded for being annoying. And this may be one of those cases. I would point out — he’s in London and I’m not quite sure what the differences are because, you know, here in the United States we have work for hire. Frequently what you’ll see is an option agreement between a producer and a writer which does contractually codify the relationship and grant the producer certain exclusive rights to represent the screenplay as the producer.

That may not be the case in England, but if it is the absence of that agreement speaks volumes.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So, this is really where you would need to speak to a lawyer, or a barrister, as the case may be.

John: Find somebody with a nice white wig who seems to know something about the law.

Craig: Yes. Yes. Go speak to Rumpole of the Bailey.

But, I think the fact that you’re dealing already with the financing entity — they have their own attorneys. They should be able to handle this. This is one of those areas — I look for these all the time. This is something to always keep your eyes open for: Moments where your goals and your needs align with those of other people. And then use them, [laughs], so basically draft behind them. It is in their best interest to get rid of this guy, therefore you should line up with them and allow them to do it for you.

John: And it may only be a series of phone calls between these people that it just gets taken care of. And if this guy doesn’t have a lot of other credits then that may be the case.

Our next question comes from Will in Seattle who writes, “On your most recent podcast you and Craig were expressing disdain at the lack of description in some of the Three Page Challenge scripts, specifically the use of ‘INT. OFFICE — DAY.’

“Your criticism came from not knowing what kind of office we’re in. However, in some of the most professionals scripts I’ve read, like Sideways or Up in the Air, the respective writers had a very minimalist style and often do little to describe in more detail the settings. Is it simply your assumption that we’re not Alexander Payne or Jason Reitman? Does the fact that they’re already industry professionals give them license to leave out the little things?”

Craig: I think in those cases the fact that they’re directing the movie gives them the license to leave out those little things. And this is something that I brought up on the DoneDealPro board.

There’s a backwards thinking among a lot of new screenwriters that only if you are directing the movie are you allowed to be specific about camera motion, camera action, and be very specific about things that would theoretically fall under the purview of the director, like, you know, perfecting the location and so forth.

And in my mind it’s the opposite. When Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor write a movie together, they can write “INT. OFFICE” because they’ve already discussed what the office looks like. No one is coming in to rewrite them. And Alexander is going to go out and scout for the office he wants and he’s going to tell people the office he wants, so he can save some space and time on the page. He’s quite likely not writing the script to do anything other than service him as he makes the movie. Similarly for Jason Reitman.

But if you are a writing the screenplay to attract a director, and to attract financing, it is critical to me that you use your one and often only chance to express the entirety of your dramatic intention for what this film should be, look like, sound like, and ultimately how this film will impact the audience.

John: Yeah. I don’t want to tell Alexander Payne and Jason Reitman how to write, and they can use their minimalist INT. OFFICE — DAY; if that works for them, that’s awesome, great.

But I’ll say that even if you’re the director, throwing just the tiniest bit of description to that — sort of like, is it a strip mall office, is it a corporate glass monstrosity office — it does help. And it helps everybody else who needs to read the script to get a sense of what kind of world that you’re pitching this story for. So, everyone else who needs to read the script to sort of do their jobs would be a little bit serviced by having a little more description there.

Again, totally your choice and what you want to do.

Craig: Yeah. That’s how — Todd and I, I mean, no one is coming in to rewrite us. We’re writing a screenplay for him to direct, we still do that stuff. I mean, for that very reason: we want the army of people that are going to be working on the movie to have that many fewer questions.

John: When you’re first sitting down with the location manager, he or she is pulling out a bunch of folders, and he’s showing you things that are probably closer to what your vision is of the thing so they don’t have to first ask you, “Describe this office to me; what should I be looking for?” I think in that first meeting they’ll have some sense of what you might be looking for and what might be appropriate. That’s why you give that kind of stuff.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Chris from San Francisco Bay Area writes, “I’m trying to find a musical script writer. What is this person even called? A book writer? Scriptwriter? Probably not a screenwriter. Are there resources, networks, or hangouts where these people exist? I’m looking for both options of partnering or hiring somebody to write the book or reviewing books that people have already written.”

So, sort of in my wheel house here. “Book writer” is usually what you call the person who is writing all the stuff that happens in a musical, a stage musical, the stuff that isn’t sung. So, the book is all that stuff. So, for Big Fish I’m the book writer.

Stuff that happens for Broadway tends to be centered around New York. Dramatists Guild is the organization that sort of loosely represents the interests of people who write for the stage. It’s not a guild the way that the Writers Guild is a guild. It’s a looser sort of association. Doesn’t have like collective bargaining power.

The Dramatists Guild is where you probably first want to check out because their house magazine is actually really good and has good interviews with book writers, and musical writers, and playwrights who are working on all this stuff, and will get you started there.

In terms of reading books, you can find published versions of some of the musicals you would want to see. And that’s going to get you started. There’s not the same kind of script libraries that you’ll find for screenplays. But you’ll figure it out. And I figured it out. I didn’t have great firsthand examples to look at, but you sort of figure out like what gets said and sort of how it fits in with everything else.

Craig: Can you tell me what is the difference between a book writer and a dramaturge? Or is it dramaturgue?

John: I think you can probably say either one of those. And, again, I may be slightly wrong here, so if I speak incorrectly someone will write in and correct me. A dramaturge is a person who is responsible for working with the playwright, and eventually the director, on the dramatic engineering of a piece. And so if it’s an existing work it can be working with the director to figure out how to mine all of the goodness out of it. If it’s a new play, it’s someone who is working with the playwright to facilitate things.

So, it’s not a writer per se, but it’s in some ways like a creative producer I would say.

Craig: I see. Got it.

John: A person who’s helping out that way.

Craig: Got it. Okay, great.

John: Cool. Our next question comes from Hamish who writes, “In podcast 67 you and Craig talked about how hacky it is to establish a character’s backstory via magazine covers. The same day I read the shooting script of Frankenweenie and spotted the following…”

Craig: [laughs] I love it already.

John: “Burgemeister unfolds the newspaper to read the front page. INSERT NEWSPAPER: The headline reads MAYOR BURGERMEISTER TO KICK OFF DUTCH DAYS. A photo shows Mayor Burgemeister complete with sash and hat.”

Craig: That’s totally different.

John: “Burgemeister is pleased with the photo.”

Craig: That’s totally — how do you not see that that’s totally different?

John: I think it’s similar enough that it’s a valid criticism.

Craig: I don’t think so. Here’s the deal. The difference is expositing — am I allowed to say “expositing,” by the way?

John: Absolutely. Totally. It’s your podcast.

Craig: Yeah. I’m going to invent it if it’s not actually a word.

It is creating the exposition for an event or fact as opposed to creating exposition for a character’s essence or quality. That’s the difference to me. I don’t want — and I would presume this isn’t the opening of the movie of Halloweenie. [laughs] I’m going to call it that forever.

You know, when you’re meeting a character in the beginning of a movie it is super hacky to give us key bits of information on a magazine cover about them. It is all too common to use every day news delivery sources in a film to deliver actual news. That’s fine.

John: Yeah. So, I think sliding back towards the hacky column, it is in his first reveal. So, you’ve revealed that you actually haven’t seen Frankenweenie, but I’ll tell you that the paper arrives, you see that he’s meticulous with his lawn, he picks up the newspaper and we see his face in the photo and it’s also revealed that that is his face as well. So, it’s meant to be the joke that it’s exactly the same shot as we’re seeing is the photo that’s on there. But, it is hacky backstory in the sense of, like, that’s how we are establishing that he is the mayor.

Craig: Well, you know what I like though is that you took something that has the potential for hackiness and you put some spin on it so that there was more than just the information. You made a joke out of it.

John: Yeah. So, there’s a little bit of a spin. But I don’t want to run away from the criticism that it is a little bit hacky to do it. And I feel that in Frankenweenie the nature of our world and sort of how it all works, it’s less awful than it could be in other situations.

The truth behind why I did it in Frankenweenie is that there’s so few frames and minutes and seconds in that movie to get crucial information out, it was the only time that we were going to be able to establish that he was the mayor of the town.

Craig: Well, I’m going to stand in stronger defense of your work than you have here.

John: Thank you very much.

Craig: You’re welcome.

John: Mike in Los Angeles writes, “Let’s say hypothetically I have 12 weeks to write a script from idea to finished first draft, like my thesis script for example. How do you or Craig break down your work into daily goals to make sure you hit that deadline? I understand once I get into the writing that I can divide it out in a daily page count, but I’m more interested in how you do it prior to the writing. How are you breaking story, working with characters? How do you do it?”

Craig: Well, for me I am, because I outline very thoroughly, I am less concerned about how much time I’m taking during that process. I sort of feel like if I get that right then I look at what I’ve got left. Presumably it will be at least half of the remaining time. And the process of then dividing pages by 5 days a week to give myself a couple days off isn’t going to leave me with some crushing burden.

Sometimes I will sort of work backwards. I’ll say, “Okay, I have 12 weeks. I know I don’t like writing more than four pages a day. I feel like that hurts. That’s 20 pages a week. Presume that the screenplay is 120 pages and then I’ll narrow it down a bit, so we’re talking about six weeks. So, I have six weeks to break this outline out.”

And then I take a nice breath and I feel like I have lots of time, but I don’t do that so I’ll waste it — don’t waste any time. I start right away. And I begin — we talked about this before — everybody has different ways in. I like to begin with some big basics, the premise of the movie, a protagonist who is appropriate for that premise, a theme that is appropriate for that character and that premise, and instigating a beginning that is appropriate for that person, that matches to the end that is appropriate for that person.

And then sort of laying out the second act as a proven ground for that individual to go from where they are in the beginning to that very different character place at the end. And then what happens in between is writing. Even if you’re not actually writing, if you’re just doing cards or scene ideas or thoughts, that is truly where half of — 70%, 80% of what matters goes.

So, that’s my method.

John: In the question he’s saying, “from idea to finished draft,” but I honestly feel like the ideas phase can be a very long, amorphous period. So like for the ABC thing I just wrote, the idea phase was, you know, there was the idea, and then it was talking to Josh about it, and going to pitch it. And so by the time I was actually writing an outline everything was really, really fleshed out. So, at a certain point we had it up on the board and I had act breakouts and then I had to write up this outline. So, it’s really hard to say sort of when the clock started ticking on it.

But that was a case where TV — a lovely thing about TV is because there are act breaks I can say, like, “I’m going to write an act today,” and then it’s just done. And that was really simple and it’s very quick to write a TV script for those reasons. And actually the last acts are really short, so it goes even faster than that.

For a feature project I try to give myself daily page counts. Once the clock is really ticking and there are 12 weeks to turn this thing in, I will give myself daily page counts. And if I do set myself to five pages a day you get done really early. And so some days you won’t actually hit that, but other days you will hit that and it will all get finished.

What I will tend to do is a little carrot and a stick. And so I’ll make some deal with myself at the start of the week saying that if I write five pages every day then I get to buy myself something that I really want. And if I don’t actually hit those five pages a day then I don’t get that thing.

Other times I’ve had to sort of punish myself where if I don’t hit — any day that I don’t hit my pages I will have to make an anonymous donation to an organization that I despise.

Craig: Ha!

John: So, I try to sort of get the work done and feeling good, and feeling great, but sometimes it is just a matter of like cranking through the pages so you can get something finished.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Yeah. So, our last question is from Adam Pineless. Pineless, like a treeless mountain. He writes, “I’ve heard some films have 10 to 15 other writers come in and punch up a script. What’s up with that? What actually happens?”

So, punching up is a thing that happens largely on comedy scripts, before they go into production. Craig and I have both been part of comedy punch-ups. Are they a good thing, Craig?

Craig: I do think they’re good things. But it depends on what kind of punch up session you’re describing or punch up employment you’re describing. Very often on true comedies that are very joke driven, there will be one day where eight or nine comedy guys will be invited to sit in a room with the screenwriter, and the director, and the producer, and typically a studio representative, and you’ll go through the script.

Sometimes you go through the script and just talk about the script itself and kind of get the collective wisdom of people who have written comedy scripts before who can give you advice on character, plot, theme, things that don’t work, things that do work. And sometimes it’s literally just a page-by-page, “Any ideas for some jokes here?”

And we do this for each other. Typically the pay is somewhere between — it used to be $5,000. It has dwindled as low as $1,000 at times. Sometimes it’s $2,500. And we tend to do this for each other. I go to a lot of these things. And I have a little roster of people that I rely on when I want to do one for something I’ve written.

So, that’s fine. And I should point out that those writers are never eligible for credit. It is accepted from the credit process as not considered writing; it’s just “stuff” really. It’s just thinking, group thinking.

John: Yeah, because none of the writers in the room are actually writing anything down on paper. There is no literary material being created. There is just a discussion happening.

Craig: That’s exactly right. Sometimes I’m hired to punch up a script where I’m given a screenplay. It’s almost always very close to production. And I’m asked to go through and fix some dramatic things, fix some character things, and add some comedy here and there. And they usually give you a cheat sheet of where they believe the hot spots are and what they feel needs help. And this is typically done on a weekly basis, one week, or two weeks, sometimes three.

That is where movies can be greatly helped by the right person, but if the studio is chasing subsequent writers and there is a succession of people coming in and doing these things the script becomes a sort of flavorless mush. This is all separate and apart from a general parade of rewriting which can occur in development where people simply don’t know what the movie is supposed to be. It hasn’t been green lit yet and they just keep hiring writers to try different versions of the same idea.

And it’s quite rare that films like that work out well. There is one movie in particular I was asked to write, and I chose not to, and it had been around — this was a couple years ago — and it had been around and in development for so long that the friend of mine who had actually done work on it at one point, the draft that he did work on had the World Trade Center as a major plot point. [laughs]

So, it had been well over ten years in endless rewrite hell. And the movie that resulted was not a particularly good film. It’s just one of those things. At some point studios can’t stop chasing something and they should just stop. But, you know, these punch up groups, these occasional roundtables are actually quite useful, I think, and I always say if you get two really good jokes out of five hours of nine writers pitching jokes, it’s a victory. You got two great jokes.

John: I agree. So, the sessions that we’re describing, I hear them called “punch-ups,” I hear them called “roundtables.” Sometimes they’ll be preceded with a reading, so they’ll either bring in the real cast or just funny actors to read through things so everyone can hear it together and see sort of what’s working and also hear what’s not really working.

They mostly happen in comedy because that’s where a day’s work can actually achieve something. It’s finding some jokes. Because if you get two great jokes, and one of them makes it to the trailer, that was money really well spent and time really well spent.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So, that can be really gratifying. And just sometimes it’s not even like a brand new joke, but just like a slightly better version of a joke can help. A character saying a funny thing can be really useful.

So, I think they’re useful for comedies. You don’t see them very much in dramas. Craig’s point about a long parade of writers over the course of time, I worked on Tarzan which is at Warner Bros. So, recently they announced a new version that they’re trying to do at Warner Bros. And god bless them, you know, maybe there are 15 writers who’ve tried to do Tarzan there.

So, if that movie were to get made at a certain point I’m probably still on the chain of title for that, that long history going back, but I don’t know if a single thing I’ve written resembles what’s in Tarzan right now. And that’s an example of like, well, of course you’re going to keep trying to make that because that’s a great property, that’s a great brand. It’s just a really hard movie to make.

Craig: Yeah. And, you know, studios experience internal turnover as well. People who control the development of properties are fired, they’re hired. Producers lose their deals. They come and go. Things go in and out of style. There are movies that are written of a certain kind that are seen as outdated or out of step with what people want, and then suddenly another movie comes along that makes it instep and in line with what people want.

And so these things happen in fits and starts. Personally, if I were running a studio, and I looked down at my development slate and saw a few of these things that had been kind of lumbering along, soaking up development dollars year, after year, after year, I’d kill them. Or, I would hire a writer-director, or a writer-director team to develop it because ultimately the conventional process is just simply not working for this project.

John: Yeah. One of the projects — we may have both worked on this. Did you ever work on Scared Guys over at Sony?

Craig: I remember reading it at one point. I don’t think I — no.

John: So, it’s a project that was at Sony for — it probably still is at Sony, probably someone is writing it right now. Probably it’s like literally on somebody’s screen right now.

It’s a pretty good premise, and when I was brought in to do a rewrite on it it was Kevin James and Ray Romano as two incredibly agoraphobic guys who have to go on this adventure. I don’t even really remember the premise that knocked them out of their agoraphobic little happy niche, but they had to go on a road trip. So, it was two agoraphobes on a road trip.

And it was fine and I enjoyed writing it. It was like a true comedy comedy, which I don’t do very often, but I was just writer 14 out of 29 on it at this point. And it will be fascinating to see if that movie ever gets made.

Craig: Did you ever work on Stretch Armstrong?

John: I did not. But that’s another legend, isn’t it?

Craig: I don’t know how you even have a WGA card if you haven’t worked on that movie. [laughs]

John: [laughs]

Craig: That movie has had… — I worked on that very early in my career. I think I was the four millionth writer. I believe they’ve hit a billion. I believe they are officially in the billions. And the movie moved from studio to studio to studio. I mean, at some point someone — either someone is going to blow everybody away by figuring it out, or everyone will suddenly realize you can’t make a movie out of Stretch Armstrong. It’s boring.

John: The thing is Stretch Armstrong is like two-thirds of a good idea, but it’s that missing third that’s going to be really hard to ever reach. Because it’s sort of a good trailer, but I don’t know that we’re going to want to see that as a movie.

Craig: Yeah. The version that I wrote back with my partner, and this was sort of I would say 1997-ish, was a Tim Allen comedy, so there you go, it’s 1997. [laughs]

John: [laughs]

Craig: And it was Tim Allen in basically a family comedy where he’s a single dad raising a couple of kids and he gets stretchy powers. And it was very broad and goofy, but it was really about family and stuff like that, you know. And it wasn’t at all — it was so minimally about being a hero because, you know, at least then… I would say now I don’t acknowledge that stretching is a heroic property. [laughs] It’s simply odd.

John: There’s a reason Mr. Fantastic isn’t really that fantastic.

Craig: No. No. Not at all. It’s such an inappropriately named character. He’s Mr. Vaguely Interesting.

John: Ha! Yeah.

Craig: So that was that one. And that still hasn’t been made.

John: The other example you gave which is where during production there is a series of writers that come through is usually a giant disaster. And the exception would be the first Charlie’s Angels famously had, like a bunch of people came in during production. I was off shooting DC, my doomed television show, and they went into production. And all sort of the A-list kind of people came in and did a week. And they were like, “What is this movie? It’s going to be a disaster. This is going to be the worst thing ever.”

But, god bless them, everyone, like, did the best they could. So Zak Penn was on, and I don’t know if Simon was on the first movie, but everyone — people you couldn’t believe helped out for a week and god bless them.

And the movie was a wreck, but it all kind of pulled together in a way. And it was the weird kind of movie that can actually support the like 15 different tones all happening at once. And then I came back in and sat in the editing room for a long time and we reshot and it worked. So, sometimes it does work, but it’s a brutal way to make a movie.

That’s why you shouldn’t go into production without feeling pretty darn good about how your script is, unless you want to kill yourself.

Craig: Yeah, no question. Charlie’s Angels is one of those movies that almost its charm is almost in its strange, funky nature. You know? That because the title implied a very kind of drudging remake of what was basically a very bad TV show — I’m sorry, you know, just a goofy ’70s era procedural, very cheese ball show. To kind of come at it from such a wild angle really made it fresh and was cool, you know. Charlie’s Angels was a cool movie. McG did an awesome job on it.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And you did, as well, of course. And I guess Zak. I’ve got to give Zak credit. You know I hate that.

John: Oh, god, the worst.

Craig: The worst! I love him.

John: Just the worst.

Craig: I mean, I love giving him crap. And I love him also.

John: Yeah. I think he listens to the show, so right now he’s…

Craig: Hey Zak!

John: …he’s enraged.

Craig: He’s enraged. How can you tell? [laughs]

John: [laughs] How can you tell when Zak Penn is enraged?

Craig: I know.

John: That’s a good sort of a Zen question.

So, that’s the end of our questions from listeners this week. There’s actually a ton more but this is all we have time for today. But you and both had like cool new things come out this last week.

Craig: Yeah!

John: I just saw your trailer for Identity Thief, like the longer trailer for Identity Thief, and I loved it.

Craig: Oh! Awesome! Great.

John: And so I love Melissa McCarthy. And I love Jason Bateman, so these are good things. And I can stand you. But I was just really, really happy with it. I’m so happy for Melissa and that you gave her good stuff to do. And a lot of physical violence takes place against Melissa McCarthy. She gets hit by cars, and things are thrown at her, and…

Craig: Yeah. We put her through the ringer. I mean, I didn’t love the first trailer that came out, only because as a teaser it really was just about, like, “Here’s a couple of kooky jokes and here’s a basic idea for a movie.” And this longer trailer gives you a better sense of the fact that there’s a cohesive story and that there’s something happening and a bit of a journey.

What the trailer — and I love it, actually, too. I mean, I’m really happy with the trailer. And I don’t mean that in a braggy way because I didn’t make the trailer. Trailers are different things; they live apart from movies. And so I think the marketing guys did a really great job with it. And they are — as they should — they are selling the comedy because it is a comedy and there’s a lot of really funny stuff.

What the trailer won’t impart at all, and I don’t think any TV commercials will, so I’ll just sort of impart it, is that the movie actually has a lot of really touching stuff in it. And Melissa McCarthy, she makes you cry. I mean, there’s a couple of spots where she gets you.

And so I like sort of selling big comedy, which we have, and then kind of surprising people with something that’s quite human. So, I’m looking forward to it, but I’m glad you liked it. I liked the trailer, too, and naturally you will include a link.

John: Oh my god, of course.

Craig: And the movie is coming out February 8. You’ll be hearing about it consistently until then.

John: I didn’t realize it was coming out that soon.

Craig: Uh-huh.

John: Wow, that is really quick. So, that’s why you’ve been so busy getting that picture all finished up.

Craig: Oh, yeah, yeah, scrambling. Sitting with Seth Gordon, our terrific director today, and Scott Stuber, our awesome producer, and it’s been a real family on this movie. Everyone has gotten along and just… — It’s a funny thing, when people like a movie then your romantic notion of how everyone should work together is real. Everybody starts to feel like a family that’s raising a kid together, and everybody is looking out for the kid, and everybody is watching each other’s backs, and respecting each other and what they bring.

And, you know, when it’s not that way, that’s when things can sometimes go completely awry. But in this case everybody’s been just dedicated to it. Melissa and Jason have been just dedicated to it. And on the one hand I’m a little sad that I stole Melissa from you. On the other hand I’m full of glee.

John: Yeah. I can always get her back.

Craig: Try! You try. [laughs]

John: It’s not like she’s not busy at all. She doesn’t have a TV show…

Craig: I’m like — I’ve got a death grip on that lady.

John: Yeah. She’s just great.

So, people have to wait till February 8 to see the movie though, right?

Craig: They will have to wait until February 8 to see the movie.

John: Now, what they could do right now is my new thing, which by the time people are listening to this podcast is available on the App Store, which is — finally — Karateka, which I just sent you the download code so you can get an early sneak peek of Karateka.

Craig: Yes I did. And even though I know the name is Karateka I will always call it what I called it when I when I was a kid which is “Kerotica,” as in erotica.

John: That’s how I called it when I was a kid, too.

Craig: That’s what I used to say.

John: When Jordan Mechner and I first started talking about making it, one of the first questions I had for him was like, “So, how am I actually supposed to say it?” Because I just remember the box that I got when we bought it, you know, it was a summer gift for ourselves, and I said “Kerotica,” because I didn’t even know what erotica was, but that’s just how you would pronounce.

Craig: Right.

John: But Jordan says Karateka. His official word is that you can actually pronounce it however you’d like to pronounce it. He will gladly take any pronunciations.

Craig: Fantastic.

John: So, we’ve been out on Xbox, and Steam, and PS3, but now the iOS version is out and done and I’m so happy because this is the one I’ve spent the most time myself doing, because while I play Xbox and PS3 they’re not my sort of native things. And I’m very much iPad. And so this is the one I sort of got to sink my teeth into and figure out how we’re going to translate all of the stuff that would happen with controllers, how we could do it in a touch way, and sort of how we could figure out how to make this game feel right and playable when you’re just on an iPad.

So, if you have unwrapped your iPad that you got for Christmas, your iPad mini, and you’re sitting by your tree and you’re listening to this podcast, and you feel like downloading it, go to the App Store right now. Because it’s only $2.99, which is a bargain. And we don’t have sponsors on the show per se, but if you felt like, “Wow, I wish I could give John and Craig a little bit of money to help pay for the costs of the show,” that’s one way you could.

Craig: Yeah. And it’s a good game. The things I like about it: One, I mean, just the nostalgia factor; being able to say I’m playing Kerotica again is really cool. And I don’t play Karateka but I do play Kerotica.

John: Yeah.

Craig: The iOS games that are not puzzle-oriented sometimes suffer from clumsy controls. I don’t like playing shooters on iOS. I just find it really annoying. But the controls here are elegant, and simple, and transparent to you while you play, which is great.

John: Cool. One of the things we had to figure out is the interface for — it is sound-based, so as you’re playing the game you can sort of hear the rhythm of like sort of how they’re going to attack. You can figure out your blocks based on the music that’s playing. The problem with the iPhone, or the iPad, too, is like, what if you’re on the subway and you’re playing and you don’t have your headphones on? You don’t want to be annoying around other people.

So, we had to figure out an interface for how to show you, give you symbols that would show you what’s coming up, even if you have the sound turned off. And so that was the stuff that took like the extra months. People kept asking, “Hey, when is it coming out on iOS?” It was figuring out that stuff.

Craig: Well, time well spent. And the other thing I like is the — and you talked about this before — a rather unique approach to handling death in a video game, because usually you get unlimited lives and death comes with either no penalty or kind of a setback penalty where you have to go back to a checkpoint.

And here your lives change who you are and your character and the possibility of success. There are levels of success, and if you can manage to play through the whole game without dying you achieve the true success of the game. But if you don’t, your character actually becomes sort of different. And in that way you have also kind of created a very novel approach to difficulty management because the typical scheme is that you start a game with a setting — easy, medium, hard.

In this game there is a setting and as you fail the game gets easier, but in doing so rewards you less should you succeed in the end.

John: Exactly. The reward of the game is completing the story with your true love, and that’s the ultimate mission. So, you’re going to be able to keep fighting and keep going, but as a slightly more powerful but slightly less desirable guy. And it was Jordan’s idea, god bless him. And the next thing about a screenwriter, like Jordan, figuring out how to tell game stories is like he really thought about like, “Well, what is the story consequence of dying?” Well, the story consequence is that she doesn’t get to marry her true love. She gets to marry the next guy who comes along who’s not… — but it’s not love.

So, it’s been fun to see that play out and people really respond to that.

Craig: Very cool.

John: Cool. Craig, it’s time for One Cool Thing.

Craig: One Cool Thing!

John: Me first or you first?

Craig: I don’t know. I actually have one, so that’s already a shocking thing. But you decide who goes first.

John: Let me go first. So, my One Cool Thing is a book that everyone can buy. And so, again, if you have your iPad in your hand, the first thing you should do is download Karateka for $2.99 on the App Store. Second thing you might want to do is go over to Amazon, or your bookseller of choice, iBooks, whatever. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, by Robin Sloan, which is really great and fun and a great Christmas time read.

It’s sort of big nerd adventure story, so adventure story in the sense of like it’s Da Vinci Code or like a Raiders of the Lost Ark, but very, very nerdy in the best possible way. And it involves fonts, and fantasy novels, and Google Books scanners, and it’s just really terrifically well done. And so I think people who are interested in things that screenwriters are interested in, who are listening to this podcast, would probably dig it.

Craig: Very cool. I still, in the back of my mind, you’ve told me that I haven’t done this before, and in the back of my mind I feel like I have. But I’m sure one of our intrepid listeners will call me out if I’m duplicating.

But, you and I both attended a party thrown in John Gatins’ honor last night. John Gatins is the screenwriter of Flight, which is getting a lot of attention this awards season, as well it should. John is a terrific guy. And at that party I met a gentleman who used to sing on Broadway. In fact, he played Marius in Les Mis on Broadway.

And I’m a big musical fan. Obviously you are, you’re making a musical. And for awhile now I’ve been listening to SiriusXM on Broadway in my car with satellite radio. And SiriusXM on Broadway has this fantastic — it’s not fair to call him a DJ because he — I don’t know how you would describe him.

John: Host. He’s a host.

Craig: He’s kind of a host. I guess he’s sort of a host of huge, long, four-hour blocks of programming. And his name is Seth Rudetsky. And Seth is an accomplished musician and he works on Broadway, typically as an accompanist and a musical guy. And he’s been around for a really long time in the Broadway world and he’s amazing. He’s just a really smart, smart guy.

And what I love about Seth Rudetsky is that he combines these things that mean something to me only in combination. He has an excellent grasp of music theory, dramatic theory, and the theory of musicals if we can posit that such a thing exists, so a very good sort of intellectual theoretical understanding of that stuff. He also has amazing practical experience. He’s actually done it. He knows what it means to start a show from start to finish, succeed — he knows what it means to succeed, he knows what it means to fail. He knows how the sausage is made.

And lastly he is incredibly good at actually conveying those insights that he has to the average listener and the lay person. So, when you combine all three of those things you learn so much from him, sometimes in these little short bursts. And it got me thinking that that’s really, I think, what you and I aspire to when we talk about screenwriting are those three things in combination. And Seth Rudetsky is the Scriptnotes of Broadway.

And I am a big fan of his. I’ve never met him. You have met him?

John: I feel like I met him. In the travels I’ve encountered him in someplace, and so I think I shook his hand. But I listen to his show as well and I think he’s terrific. And, again, I would aspire that our show could do a little bit more of that. And as we start doing more interviews in 2013, I think that’s a good place for us to be in is to have people talking about the craft in an enjoyable way.

And we can interview people as they talk about their experiences the way he interviews them talking about how they made their shows.

Craig: Yeah. And you know what he does that I love? Sometimes before he plays a song he’ll talk about a tiny little moment in the song that you would never notice. But he’ll talk about why it’s good. And he has such a passion for it. And so he’ll say, “Just listen for that moment and here’s why it’s important because of this.”

And then you hear it and you go, “Oooh!” Like, for instance, there’s a song You Can’t Get a Man with a Gun. And it was written for a belter. And he was talking about how when you write songs for belters like Ethel Merman who originated the performance of that song, that you want to find those moments in a song that allow the belter to belt.

And he says, listen, you know, in the chorus, [sings] “You can’t get a man with a gun. With a g-uUN.” And that whole like “g-uUN.”

That whole thing is really designed to let Ethel Merman just be Ethel Merman.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And I’d never really thought about that before. And then he plays the song and you’re like, “Whoa, he’s right.” [laughs] “There it is! Brilliant.”

John: I second your recommendation. He’s terrific. And that’s on XM. And XM is actually kind of wonderful.

I never had XM until we got this new car and it came with three free months of XM and you quickly become addicted. And so, of course, then you start paying the monthly subscription.

Craig: Well worth it, for Seth Rudetsky alone.

John: Great. So, those are our Christmas presents for you. We have Mr. Penumbra. We have Seth Rudetsky. We have Karateka. We have Identity Thief. Hopefully some answers to questions people had. If you want more information or links to any of these things you can look at johnaugust.com/podcast where we’ll have the show notes for each and every episode of the show.

And, Craig, Merry Christmas. Happy Early New Year.

Craig: Yeah. And I guess we’ll see everybody in 2013.

John: That’s awesome.

Craig: Unless those Mayans get us.

John: By the time this podcast airs won’t the Mayan Apocalypse have already happened?

Craig: So this podcast won’t air?

John: Yeah, oh my god. We just wasted a lot of time didn’t we?

Craig: A lot of our last remaining minutes. Brutal!

John: I should have spent it with my family but instead I spent it with you.

Craig: Yeah. I like that. Feels right.

John: Thanks Craig. Take care.

Craig: Bye.

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today we have a very special guest.

Craig: Very special. To me.

John: To you?

Craig: Yes.

John: And why is she special to you, Craig?

Craig: Well, should she say hello first and then I’ll tell you why?

John: She can say hello. We haven’t even introduced her by name yet.

Craig: That’s true. Well, say hello, and then let’s see if they can guess.

Lindsay Doran: Hello.

Craig: Yeah, no way they would guess.

John: No, no.

Craig: It’s Lindsay Doran, producer extraordinaire. Former head of studio, among other things. And she is special to me because — well, I mean without getting too weird about it, because I don’t want it to get mushy, but — Lindsay is really, really good at her job. She is one of the few producers out there who really understands what producing is, and sadly that’s a shrinking, dying breed.

John: And particularly the story aspect of producing.

Craig: For sure. And she knows writers, and she knows good writers, and I really respect her. And she’s one of the few people I’ve met in Hollywood who know quality and who knows talent and who like me. I don’t know how else to put it.

John: [laughs]

Lindsay: [laughs]

Craig: She’s very validating to me, the fact that Lindsay likes me is really validating to me. And she’s a terrific person and really smart. And I think a terrific role model for all producers and a good person for writers to know.

John: And some extra context here. I’m reading out of the Austin Film Festival, the little bio pamphlet here, but it’s helpful if you don’t know who Lindsay Doran is. “As an executive she supervised movies like This is Spinal Tap, Ghost, five John Hughes films, two James Bond films. As a producer her credits include Dead Again, Sense and Sensibility, Nanny McPhee, and Stranger than Fiction.” Those are some great movies.

Craig: Pretty stellar stuff?

Lindsay: Huh?

Craig: Pretty stellar stuff.

Lindsay: Pretty stellar stuff. Okay.

John: So welcome. And my first time meeting you was I had written a treatment for a little movie called The Nines, which was not the movie The Nines I ended up shooting many, many years later. I ended up rewriting it as a short story many years later for Derek Haas’s Popcorn Fiction site. But you were one of the few people I sat down with who was like really excited about, and sort of like talked through the potential of the movie. And so I was like, “Oh, that’s a smart person I hope to cross paths with again.”

Lindsay: When was that?

John: You were at UA and you, god, maybe it was…’99?

Lindsay: Yeah. Sounds right.

John: Yes. Go had come out, or Go had at least shot. Maybe it didn’t come out. And it was another thing I was thinking about writing to make.

Lindsay: And I read Go, hadn’t I? Because I remember that.

John: Yeah. Most people had read Go. That was a thing that had gone around and, yeah, it was nice.

Lindsay: Cool.

John: Welcome. And so let’s talk some.

Lindsay: Thanks.

John: What’s a good thing we should start talking about, Craig?

Craig: Well, you know, the traditional thing would be how did you start, and da-da-da, but I like to go out of order, so we’re going to get to how you started but I want to ask you a question that’s sort of teeing off of something I hinted at earlier. Because a lot of what we do with this podcast is try and do whatever we can to make screenwriters better, including ourselves.

Because I think you’re a very good producer and because I’m sure you are full of thoughts about your fellow producers…

Lindsay: Can they hear me blushing?

Craig: [laughs] Yes.

Lindsay: Okay, good. It’s audible.

Craig: It’s a really sensitive mic. Am I right, is there a paucity of — that’s a correct word, right?

John: Paucity?

Craig: Paucity. Is there a paucity of good producers out there? Are producers — Is the current generation of producers not quite where they used to be? And if so, what do we need to do about this, for us, and for you?

Lindsay: Well, to me, the most obvious thing is that studios used to support producers. It used to be that if you had any kind of traction at all as a producer, somebody would give you a deal. They would give you an office on the lot. They would give you an assistant. They might even give you money to live on. And they might even give you a little bit of money to develop scripts with. And consequently you could focus on what your job is supposed to be, which is getting a really good script right, even if it takes a long time.

You weren’t focused on — at least, you didn’t have to be focused on the start date, because as it is right now producers don’t get a dime until the movie starts. And therefore what they have to be most interested in — for completely sympathetic reasons like putting food on the table and keeping their kids in a good school and all the things that we want to have money for — they have to be focused on getting the movie made.

And I remember one of my very first experiences when I was at AVCO Embassy Pictures, I was the juniorest possible executive at AVCO Embassy, and I worked on a script there with a producer that we were both very proud of. And he went off to Canada to make the movie. And the next thing I heard was that the actor who had been cast in it wanted to rewrite the script. When the director refused he wanted to fire the director. And then I heard that the producer was backing the actor.

And I had so many horrible things to say about that. “How dare he sell his script down the river that way?” The movie was made with another director. They fired the director. They brought in somebody else who listened to the actor. The script was ruined. The movie was never released.

And when I saw him the next time, all full of the kind of high judgment that you have when you’re at the very bottom of your career, he said, “How dare you.” He said, “I was in the middle of a divorce. I had three daughters. My wife, who seemed great when I married her, turned out to be completely crazy, and I was trying to do what fathers hardly ever get to do, which is have sole custody of those three children. The only way I was going to get any kind of custody at all was to have money in the bank. The only way I was going to have money in the bank was to have that movie start shooting. The only way I was going to have that movie start shooting was with that actor. And the only way we’d have that actor was to back him, fire the director, sell out the movie.”

And I went, “Oh my gosh, I wonder if this has ever happened before?” And now I just see it all the time. When I was running United Artists, the first thing I began to notice was producers would say, “The script is coming in on Friday morning so we’ll send it out to agents on Friday afternoon.” And I’d say, “Why would you do that? You haven’t read it yet.” And they would say, “What are you talking about?” It was about the rush.

And then somebody would say, “You’re not going to believe this. I just got a call from CAA and they’re saying that such-and-such big movie start might be interested in this part.” And I would say, “Well yeah, except they’re completely wrong for the part, right?” And they would say, “What?!” And they would say, “But you don’t understand. They’re saying that they’ll get it to this actor for the weekend.”

Craig: “I said big movie star. What did you forget?”

Lindsay: And I would say, “But…” and then I’d finally say, “Well, aren’t we having this conversation backwards? Aren’t I supposed to be the jerk studio head who’s trying to ram the big movie star down your throat and you’re supposed to be the one standing up for the integrity of the screenplay and say, ‘But he’s not right for the part!'”

It was completely backwards. And I totally understood because they were trying to get to that start date and they thought with a big movie star of course they would get there.

The other thing is that producers, they don’t tell you if there’s a problem. The director could be completely on drugs and they will never tell you because they’ve got to get to the start date. There’s so many things that you rely on producers to do as a studio head. And they are absolutely disincentivized to do any…

Craig: By the system itself.

Lindsay: …by the system itself. And, of course, they are totally disincentivized from spending a long time developing a screenplay. The most — I usually spend like four years developing a screenplay. And that’s really hard.

Craig: Although what’s happened is that in some ways the development process has just shifted — they’ve shifted the burden onto the writer because a lot of producers now will just have the writer work for free over, and over, and over, and over, and over, because they only get one shot. And they feel like, “Well, if I turn it in and it’s not perfect then it won’t get made.”

But that wasn’t always the case. You used to get the second step, you know? [laughs]

Lindsay: You used to have the second. I tried, frankly, to never hand anything into a studio until I thought it was really shootable, because I didn’t want it to go into studio development. I wanted it to go right into… — So, I would always meet with writers and say, “Here’s the work I think we should do. It’s completely up to you. If you need the money, if you think it’s fine the way it is, if you think these notes are bad…”

It hardly ever happened that anybody ever said, “No, you’re right, let’s ignore those notes and just hand it in.” But it was always their choice. But now it’s a whole other thing and really it is terrifying. Do you think it’s the strike? Because people keep saying it’s the fault of the strike.

John: I don’t think it was the strike at all. I think it’s structural changes in the industry overall. To me it feels like as giant corporations took over all the studios, and all the studios are now aspects of giant corporations, they have reporting structures, and they’ll show like, “This is what we’re doing, this is what’s going through, and we have to be able to justify the money we’re spending because it’s coming out as this.”

So, development is just research and development, and it’s hard for them to show that the money they spent on scripts they didn’t shoot was money well spent. And it’s hard to justify like, “Well, we now have a relationship with this person after this.” That doesn’t show up on spreadsheets. And risk-taking is not generally rewarded. Risk-taking is rewarded if it’s a giant movie that just sort of should take all the boxes, so then they’ll spend $300 million. But it’s become incredibly hard to make the smaller movie that should be able to work, but if it’s too much of a risk.

Everyone’s afraid of risking their reputation and their time on the smaller thing.

Lindsay: Yeah. And failure. It’s a real thing. You know, I think, again, I think like a lot of people I used to think of people who ran studios as being totally focused on the bottom line and all that kind of stuff. But when I went to UA, and I was partnering, you know, MGM was its own studio and UA was its own studio, all within the same company. And MGM had a couple of movies in a row that didn’t work. And a lot of people got fired. Like 80 people lost their jobs. So, you suddenly realized, “Oh, it’s isn’t about me money-grubbing about my bonus; it’s about people literally coming to your office and saying, ‘Well, we’ve got to fire a bunch of people. Who do you want to fire, because that movie didn’t work?'” It’s the real stuff.

And usually they lose their job and you don’t lose your job, even if you green-lit the movie. So, the fear is not an un-admirable fear.

Craig: It’s not all impersonal and fat cat business stuff.

Lindsay: Not at all. With me it is, but I mean, with all other people…

Craig: Well, of course, you’ve always been a terror.

Lindsay: [laughs]

Craig: But it is — everyone is scared. You can feel the fear. And I don’t think, the strike was a bit of an accelerant on a fire that was already burning, but the real to me…

Lindsay: You’ve used the word “accelerant” and “paucity” and how long has this been going on? Like 15 minutes?

Craig: Well, Aline McKenna used “delectable” this morning, so she’s way ahead of me.

Lindsay: I like “ineluctable.” That’s my favorite.

Craig: Yes. Yes. “Ineluctable” and “electable.” Yes. Now we’ve got both.

Lindsay: Yeah, we’ll get to them.

Craig: I’m going to get to “unelectable.”

Lindsay: [laughs] And “electable.”

Craig: Like “Ron Paul is unelectable.”

But I think what’s happened to producers, the squeeze on them is that movie studios slash the output. It’s just they don’t make… — The Writers Guild collects statistics on how many feature films they do the credit arbitrations for, which are all of them, really, all the major ones. Even if there’s not an actual fight it still counts as a thing.

And they would always land around somewhere between 293 and 310 final credits a year. And then suddenly it went down, around the strike to be fair, it went down to 200 and it hasn’t come back. So, that’s a third gone. And it seems like the third, not only have they reduced the amount of movies they make but they also have lowered the ratio of developed-to-make as you were saying, so now you have fewer and fewer producers — they have no leverage over the studios anymore. The age of the big producer is over.

And from my perspective, and I guess this is sort of a follow up to the initial question is under the lens of all that, and under the pressure of all that on producers, do you feel that the action — were producers ever good at developing material? And are they now — Were they good and are they now much worse, or were they always bad? Because there are so few producers that frankly really do know how to work with a screenwriter, talk to a screenwriter, care about the work, and approach it from the script forward.

Lindsay: It’s hard to know because a writer might actually know the answer to that question better than I would. I’m a producer. I’m not sure that I know how other producers do their job. I hear about it from writers but I don’t really know.

Craig: I guess that’s true. You never have a chance to be unimpressed by them. [laughs]

Lindsay: I know for example when Sydney Pollack was talking to me about running his company, he talked to a lot of people. And he told me later, after he’d hired me, he said, “Every single one of those people I talked to said, ‘But what I’m really good at is development,’ every one of them, no matter what kind of background. They all thought they were the best at that.”

But, a few years ago, actually I guess while I was still at UA, so it’s more than a few years ago, UCLA started a producer’s program, and they decided to have a board that was going to consist of studio heads and big producers, and the studio heads were either former producers or about to be producers, maybe sooner than they thought. So, here was this big room full of really well-known people.

And the head of the program said, “Maybe one of the things we can do today is define what a producer is, because it’s one of the hardest things to define in the movie business.” So, she said that towards the beginning. And then later in her talk she said, “And of course one of the things we tell our producing students is that the most important thing they’re going to learn here is how to work with a writer.”

And somebody said, “Why would you tell them that?” And what we began to realize was that the room split right down the middle between people who completely agreed with that statement and said that is the basis of a producer’s job, and the other half of the room who said you can delegate that — “You can get some girl to do that,” you know, and made big long things about, “ou better know a lot of movie stars’ home phone numbers.” “You better know a lot about foreign distribution.” “You better know a lot about raising money.” “You better know a lot about talking to a marketing guy.”

And they’re not wrong, but the idea that development can be delegated and that they’re there for the big stuff… — And in the midst of that discussion I said something like, “I consider myself on the set to be the,” I’m trying to think what the phrase was I used, because I heard it back from a lot of people who said, “What was that hilarious thing you said?”

Craig: [laughs]

Lindsay: Oh, “– the guardian of the intentions of the screenplay.”

John: Yeah.

Lindsay: That’s what I said. That’s what I’m there for. If somebody starts changing a script on the set I want to be there to say, “Let me tell you why this is the way it was.” “Let me tell you why this line was here.” Or, “Let me tell you why it was set in a big room and not a small room.” “Let me tell you why this was an interior instead of an exterior.” “Let me tell you why she was supposed to be above the bridge instead of below the bridge.”

There’s a reason for that. Then if the director says, “No, I like it better this way,” and we’ve had the fight, then that’s the scene we’re going to shoot. But somebody should be there to say, “If you cut that line it’s really going to hurt you in the third act. Maybe you didn’t realize you were even cutting.” Oh my gosh, a lot of the time they’ll go, “Oh yeah, you’re absolutely right.”

So, I think that’s… — And I cannot tell you how people laughed at that.

Craig: Laughed derisively I hear?

Lindsay: Derisively at that.

Craig: Really?

Lindsay: Yeah. I like laughter, but not that kind.

Craig: Right. Bad laughter.

Lindsay: And later people would literally run into me saying, “Oh, what was that hilarious thing you said? The guardian, or the what, or the what? And we’re still laughing about that!”

Craig: Wow.

Lindsay: So, for some people it’s the sacred duty of the producer and the other one it’s like, “How silly is that? That’s the least important thing that we do.”

Craig: “Where’s Chinese financing?” I don’t have time for that.

Lindsay: But they’re not wrong about Chinese financing.

Craig: They probably don’t also know the intention of the script, so they wouldn’t know what to guard anyway, even if they took it seriously.

John: Well, what it comes down to, is it realistic to expect all of those functions to fall on one person? Is it realistic that the creative producer who is the guardian of the script, or sort of the quality control to some degree of the creative vision of the script, is it realistic to assume that that person is also going to be excellent in all the other functions, which are really valid functions of a producer which is how to sort of browbeat people into getting the movie started, and how to talk the people out of their trailer, and to sort of yell at the marketing department.

Those are different functions. I often describe that most movies, even if the person isn’t called a producer, just different kind of roles you would perform. And there’s like the one person who sits at the monitor and sort of watches, makes sure that this actually the movie we’re trying to make. There is the peacemaker, the one who actually can sort of deal with all the stuff. And peacemaker is also sort of combined with a bodyguard, like the person who, like Dick Zanuck who recently passed away who I loved, his best function for Tim Burton was he would throw himself in front of any bullet aimed at Tim Burton to protect him from studio craziness.

So, that’s a crucial function.

Lindsay: A literal guardian.

John: Yeah, literally.

Lindsay: The hell with the intention to the screenplay.

John: Yeah. Wiry and strong. And the third person is you need sort of like the maniac. And sometimes you need the person who like, “You see this ball, you see this ball? Go get this ball.” And will knock down all the buildings in the way.

Lindsay: [laughs]

John: And I first encountered this, the first movie I got shot was Go. And we luckily had — those three people were actually all producers. And sometimes one of them is a line producer, one is this, but you know, Paul Rosenberg was the “go get this ball.” And amazing things could just happen because he would have no shame and would just knock everything down and we could lose all our financing and get all of our financing back the next day because he would call everyone to do that.

It may not be realistic that one person is always going to be able to do all those roles.

Lindsay: Yeah. I think that’s true. I mean, I’ve mostly been able to work on things where there was a sort of straight line. But, again, I was able to take the time to make sure that straight line existed.

I mean, Sense and Sensibility is the easiest one to talk about because that was my favorite book. I looked for ten years for the right writer. When I met Emma Thompson she’d never written a screenplay before. But I saw some television skits she’d written in England and there was the voice that I’d been looking for all that time. It was really funny, it was emotional, the period language stuff was fantastic and really accessible.

And we spent years doing that. Now, Sydney Pollack, I was running his company at the time. He was incredibly great at looking at the script and telling us the American point of view and all that kind of stuff. He’d never read Jane Austen, which was really, really useful.

But, when we got, you know, Amy Pascal was somebody that I knew and I knew that she actually cared about Jane Austen. So, setting it up there as a total straight development deal, there was nothing indie about that movie at all. It was a Columbia development deal. And of course she left, but Gareth Wigan, who was somebody else who really got it —

John: A gentleman, yeah.

Lindsay: And so eventually we got to the point where everybody loved the script, and then by the time Lisa Henson was running the company and she said, “Look, go get a director. Here’s all I ask for: An interesting announcement. That’s all I want. I don’t want you to come back with some English director who sounds you’re going to go right back into…”

And that’s exactly what I wanted because I didn’t want — we had spent all these years trying to make Sense and Sensibility kind of galloping entertainment that was really fun, and full-blooded, and hilarious, and really made people cry. And the last thing I wanted was to turn it back into a little English movie.

So, I started meeting with a lot of people and I kept meeting people who didn’t know what movie we were making. They’d never mentioned it was funny. You know, I would say, “What about the humor?” and they’d go, “What humor?”

It would go on, and on, and on, or they were talking about a completely different movie, and some of them were big, and some of them were little. And then I met Ang Lee, who was the weirdest choice in the world, but who talked immediately about how funny it was, and then said, “I want this movie to break people’s hearts so badly they’ll still be recovering from it three weeks later.”

Craig: [laughs]

John: [laughs]

Lindsay: That’s a direct quote. And I went, “Okay, this is it. This is the guy who wants to make the full…” — So, there was this straight line, even though it was a weird line as it was, it was the right line. So, we had the right studio, the right director, for the right script. I was very involved in the casting. You know what I mean?

And then the marketing people came up with a campaign that had nothing to do with the movie that we were talking about. “From the mind of Jane Austen.” It was like, “No, we’ve spent all these years getting out of the mind of Jane Austen. Why are you doing this?” And they went, “Oh, you know,” and saying “We want it to feel really, really fun and really entertaining.” It was like, “Oh, okay.”

So, it was that same sensibility — for lack of a better word — all the way through. But it was about choosing the right people to begin with so there wasn’t really that much of a need for the hammer and the ball thrower, and the yeller, and all of that stuff, because everybody was trying to do the same thing.

Craig: But then in that regard so much of good producing is matchmaking, you know?

Lindsay: Yeah.

Craig: I mean, I feel — And I haven’t worked with many producers. I’ve been doing it for a long time, but for whatever reason I’ve spent a lot of time working with studios directly. And I can’t quite figure out why.

Lindsay: Producers won’t work with you.

Craig: They literally will not sit in a room with me. [laughs]

Lindsay: We should talk about that later when the tape machine is off.

Craig: Yeah. Can you explain why?

Lindsay: Yeah. Do I need to? [laughs]

Craig: But on Identity Thief, Scott Stuber, match made. It was a lovely thing. He called me up and he said, “Here’s Jason Bateman, I’d like you to meet him. And here’s Melissa McCarthy. And the three of you get together.” And that really, that’s the biggest of all the stuff I’m sure he’s done on the movie, I mean, because I’m not there watching him do a lot of the stuff that he does, but that was the biggest thing was his matchmaking and picking the right people.

But even then I feel like producers — that agency has been taken away from them a little bit. That a lot of times now producers feel a little bit like the way we feel when you just get an assignment. “Here it is.” You know, sometimes we’re called and they’ll say, “It’s these two people in this movie starting now, two weeks. Fixed third act.”

Lindsay: Right.

Craig: And you go, “Oh, okay. Fine.”

John: Yeah.

Craig: “Got it. I mean, you’ve taken away all my choices, so this is a very simple thing. I’m now like a horse on a trail.” And I feel like that’s happening to producers, too. They don’t even have a chance to match make.

Lindsay: Yeah. It really is true. You want ideally to be able to have the time and the blessing to do that. But, and one of the things I notice right away, and you tell me if this is still true: When I had my deal at MGM after, you know, when I became a producer again. You know, agents call you up and they say, “Okay, we’re going out with this spec this week. And we’re going to send it to you for MGM and eight other people for all the other studios.” And you hand it in, mostly without reading it, is what you’re supposed to do. Everybody was, like, stunned. It was like, “What, you’re going to read it first and you might say no? Nobody’s ever done that before!”

And I would say, “But why would you want me producing your client’s script if I haven’t even read it, and loved it, and understood it? And, actually, shouldn’t I be meeting the writer?”

“No, that’s not how this works.” So, there would be an auction. The script would sell. And then you’d meet the producer who’s producing your movie and it could be someone who’s never…

Craig: That’s the worst possible.

Lindsay: And yet, I do understand. When I tried to do it a different way, when I was developing something with a writer and I said, “You know, I think we should hand pick our studio. We shouldn’t just do one of those auction things. We should say, ‘This is a Columbia Pictures — Amy Pascal will love this,'” or whoever it would be.

The hard thing was if you only give it to one studio, nobody will read it. There’s no competition. “I don’t get to screw somebody over the weekend,” and that’s a lot of it.

Once I understood agents saying, you know, “Producers call me on Monday whenever they’ve bought something and say, ‘Who did I screw this weekend?'” It’s like “What did I get…” — But that’s part of the fun; that competition really does fuel so much of it that only when things went out to a million places, or if they got hold of it, that’s when stuff started to happen.

So, it’s a feeding frenzy but it seems to me insane to be a writer, to meet the producer after it’s sold. That’s just nuts.

Craig: Crazy. It’s a shotgun wedding.

John: Yeah.

Lindsay: It’s a complete shotgun wedding. And, I don’t know. I don’t know.

John: A question: Now, you described the Sense and Sensibility development process, and if you wanted to do that now how would you do it? Here’s another book that you love, that you want to see made. As a producer what would you do now in 2012 to try to get it going?

Lindsay: I wouldn’t do anything differently than what I did then. I mean, that was a public domain book and it was at a moment when nobody had made a Jane Austen movie in 50 years. So, it wasn’t like anybody was hammering, “Where’s that Jane Austen project of yours?!”

I was able to spend all those years looking for the writer with the right…

John: My question though is: so you would have found the right writer, but who would you have gotten to pay them? Because you couldn’t go to a Columbia right now to try to do Sense and Sensibility.

Lindsay: I don’t know. I’m not really sure.

John: I mean, there’s still like the Fox 2000s. There are still little small slices…

Lindsay: Yeah. There’s Fox 2000. And I suppose I could go to Focus Features. And, I mean, the idea of doing that as a development deal at a major studio seems less likely, but Amy’s still there. And she does make movies every single year that are very, very close to her heart. So, I don’t think that it would necessarily be impossible.

But, yeah, I would probably be more focused on Focus.

John: But you described it as Sense and Sensibility was a mainstream Columbia Pictures release. And so it wasn’t like everyone has to take a pay cut to go do it. And I feel like now to try to do anything that’s not Transformers 9, they talk like, “Well, everyone’s going to have to take a little pay cut because it’s not a big movie, it’s a tiny movie.”

I feel like it’s very hard to do that — this is a movie for grownups in any way along. It’s hard to get the green light, but it’s hard to get even the start.

Lindsay: Yeah, it’s true. It really is true.

But, the thing is, I think what people don’t understand is that people are people. They love movies. You know what I mean? We love to go to the movies. I’ve really liked the last five movies in a row that I saw. That’s pretty great when you think about it.

And they all got made. And they’re all pretty grownup-y. And, you know, some of them are more youth-oriented than others, but I thought they were all good. And everybody felt that they were trying to make a quality movie all the way along. You don’t want to feel like you’re beating off people to try to hang on to your quality.

But, I think there are people at every studio who want to make quality movies. And they want to make sure that they’re going to have the right package to do that.

John: How do we fix things? How do we make things better? What are some options? Are we going to get back to those producers who can do that stuff? Do producers have to get their own money so they can develop things themselves?

Lindsay: Well, I don’t know. I wondered for awhile if there was a way, because I do understand. It does seem to be the case, or it did seem to be the case, when producers had deals at studios that you would inevitably make your biggest hit movies and the movies that won the most awards for a studio other than the one where you had your deal.

It was some sort of God’s joke on Hollywood, but it had partly to do with that competition thing. You know, I remember when I was working at Paramount for Dawn Steel and a producer on the lot would hand something in and weeks would go before she would read it. And finally she said to me one day, “I don’t have to read that. I own that.” [laughs] “What I have to read are the things that I’m competing with the whole town for. That can wait.”

And so somebody said, “Buying something from a producer on your own lot is like kissing your sister.” It’s like, where’s the excitement in that?

— I guess that means a guy kissing his sister. I guess there would be more excitement if it was a girl kissing her sister.

Craig: See, this is why you’re a good producer. You get that.

Lindsay: [laughs] I get that. I really do get that.

Craig: You just know in your bones that that’s better.

Lindsay: So, that lack of competition actually weirdly ends up that, I mean, when I was at Universal, that’s when I decided I wanted to hire Emma to do that. And the head of the studio at the time, I was in his office for something else and he was turning us down because he said, “Really what I need right now are just straight out commercial movies. I don’t need things like this.”

So, as I was leaving the office I said, “So, I guess you don’t like a Jane Austen project, ha-ha.” I got back to the office and he called and he said, “Do you really have a Jane Austen project?” And I said yeah. He said, “Jane Austen is my favorite author of all time.” I said I would never have known that. He said, “What do you have?”

And I told him and I said, “Have you ever heard of Emma Thompson?” And he said, “No,” because nobody had at that point. And I said, “Well, she’s got five lines in Henry V.” And he said, “You know, she’s going to want to be in it.”

John: [laughs]

Craig: [laughs]

Lindsay: That’s the problem, you know. It’s like, “We’re going to do this whole thing, and then she’s going to want to star in it.” So, cut to by the time we hand it in…

John: She’s a movie star.

Lindsay: …it’s like, “We’re only making this movie if Emma Thompson plays the lead.” She’s, you know, 35 and the character is 19 or whatever it was, but even Emma by that point realized that she’d written it for her own voice. But she said all the way along this is totally up to the director. “If the director wants me, I’ll do it. If the director doesn’t want me, I won’t do it.” And Ang said, “Only if it’s Emma Thompson. That’s the only way I’ll do it.”

So, what was the question?

John: We were talking about, is there a way to fix this? Is there a way to go back?

Lindsay: Okay. So there’s that problem. Where I have a deal at Universal and it gets made at Columbia and it wins an Academy Award for Best Screenplay and all that kind of stuff. And it happened all the time with Sydney’s movies and we had a deal at Universal, making The Firm at Paramount, then we moved to Paramount and he makes…

So, I was wondering at one point if there could be a revolving fund, where every studio puts so much money into a fund. That you could get young producers, middle level producers, older producers, and let them have an office, and an assistant, and a little bit of money, and then teach people how to develop screenplays. There’s none of that going on.

Craig: Who’s going to teach them?

Lindsay: I would. I would be happy to do that. And I bet other people would be happy to do that. They come all the way to Austin. Don’t you think they’d go to North Hollywood to do that?

John: There was some conversation about: could the Writers Guild and Producers Guild get together and set up sort of a certificate program for young development executives saying, “This is what development is,” and sort of best practices and these are things you can focus on — like how to talk to writers?

I worry that people move up so fast or they sort of come into a culture that’s already so toxic that they never learn how things could be, how things used to be. How, you know, you could actually not screw people over in one-step situations. There might be some good way to tweak it to motivate the young generation going through to get a little stamp in their book saying they went through this program and got it.

Craig: I have to say that one of the things that works against all of this, works against hope, you know, because I like to work against hope —

Lindsay: That’s nice. That’s touching.

Craig: What I’m always concerned about is that Hollywood is very much about popularity and heat and competition, which all of that is homogenizing. And what I’ve always loved about you is that even in the beginning when you would say things like, “But I’m the guardian of the intention of the script…”

Lindsay: [laughs]

Craig: — and then everyone laughed at you, but you didn’t change your mind. It’s very rare. I’ve always felt alone. [laughs] You know what I mean? And maybe, I don’t know if you understand this, but I’ve always felt alone.

There have been so many times in my career where I thought, “Either I’m crazy or all of these people around me are wrong. Either way, I’m not changing. Right? I’m just going to stay doing this. And I’m going to keep thinking this way because I just feel like that’s the way, that’s important. This is what I value. And I don’t value all of the other things that people are telling me I should value.”

Lindsay: God. You’re like the hero of How to Train Your Dragon.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Always. I’ve always felt that.

Lindsay: It’s completely based on you.

Craig: [laughs] Yeah. Exactly. Well, also, I do have a fairly lucrative dragon-raising business on the side. It’s not technically legal.

But, I do feel like that’s what we’re always struggling against, that people coming in as development executives… — And I read this great article once where a guy was sort of wondering, “Why are car salesmen so gross? Why do car salesmen dress that way? Why do car salesmen smell that way with that cologne and have those ties and the ridiculous hair? What is that?”

So, he decided to go undercover and actually get a job as a car salesman. And he said — and this is it — in any group you’re in, after three weeks you just want to fit in.

John: Yeah.

Craig: That’s it. “And suddenly I kind of wanted to wear a wide tie and have that cologne on because everybody did. And it was just like they were looking at me like I’m the weirdo.”

Lindsay: Yeah.

Craig: And I worry that now in development everybody is just homogenizing down, too, you know.

Lindsay: Well, I had lunch with two agents awhile ago. It was right after, it was in January. And both of them had gone skiing over the holidays, a man and a woman. And they were talking about skiing and I don’t ski, so I was just listening.

And then one of them said, or the woman said, “You know, I’m so bummed because I’m going to Sundance next week and I hear that the powder is perfect and I’m not going to get to go skiing.” And the guy said, “Why not?” And she said, “Because I’m going to Sundance.” And he said, “So what?”

And she said, “I’m going to the film festival. I’m going to be seeing films all day.” And he said, “That’s funny. When I got to Sundance I go up to the top of the slopes in the morning. I meet a lot of people. I ski all day. I come down at night. I find somebody like you. I say, ‘What’s good?’ You tell me. I say, ‘Who made it?’ You tell me. I go to the party. I meet him. You know, I find him, I meet him, I schmooze him. I sign him. And then the next day I’m at the top of the mountain again.”

And I went, “Oh my gosh, there are two Hollywoods.” There are these distinct Hollywoods. There are the worker bees and the extractor bees. And really you can’t crossover, and you don’t really want to crossover. Those guys don’t want to be in all the screenings and reading the script three times. And she didn’t want to be that guy who was only kind of pretending to have seen the work and signing the people. “I can’t do what that guy does, and he can’t do what I do.”

And I think at a certain point people will fall into one camp or the other. And I think Hollywood does need both camps, but I do think that for people who are sort of natural worker bees, the ones who actually are going to do the work, it seems to me there should be a way to say to them, “All right. Let’s teach you how to do the work better.”

Craig: And that it’s okay to want to do the work.

Lindsay: That it’s okay to want to do the work.

Craig: That it’s okay to be a script nerd.

Lindsay: Yeah. Well, because, somebody has to call somebody and say, “What is the…”

I worked for one studio head once who before any meeting would say, “Um, tell me what we don’t like about this script again?” You know. [laughs] And that’s what I was there for was to say, “This, this, this, this, and this.” Right. And then they’d be brilliant in the meeting. You’d swear they’d been up all night coming up with those notes.

Craig: Well, it’s Broadcast News, right?

John: Yeah.

Lindsay: But it really is. And it was like, “I couldn’t do what that person was doing. That person is, you know, and has no — it isn’t even that they have no shame. That’s what they do. They don’t have any time.”

Craig: It’s Hollywood.

Lindsay: “It isn’t even about shame. They don’t have time to do what I’m doing.”

Craig: And then add the layer on that all of us are really working together to make a script that really beautiful people can read. [laughs]

John: [laughs]

Lindsay: [laughs]

Craig: You know? I mean, there are so many layers of this, and they’re spectacular and fascinating.

Lindsay: I know. It’s really, really true.

John: One of Craig’s solutions to this, or at least a possible way to make some things better would be for studios to look for, “These are writers we really want to work with, these are directors we really want to work with. Let’s get them together and say like, ‘You guys, we’re going to make our deal with you Writer A and Director A. You come to us with a movie you want to make. And if we say ‘no,’ we’ll say ‘no,’ and you have to come back to us with another one up to a certain number of tries.'”

But just to start the process with, you know, “Here are people who want to make a movie, have a vision for a what a movie is,” rather than sort of everything having to be based on the book that went out that week, or the spec script, or the new toy that can be licensed out to things.

But that equation didn’t include a producer, and a producer actually feels like an important part.

Craig: Oh, for sure. I mean, you need an adult in the room. I think that writers and directors, we are the filmmakers. I think of us combined as the filmmakers. And the producer is the producer — they’re producing it.

John: It’s like the CEO of the company and the product of that company is this one movie.

Craig: If you have those three people working like a team I just feel… — You know, my whole beef is that the way things work typically is that a producer and writer work together for a really long time, get it just the way they want. The studio says, “Great. Go get a director.” They get a director and now it’s the producer and the director doing another thing. And then the writer is just sort of done.

Lindsay: Yeah, no, I don’t like that.

Craig: And for instance when you say, “I’m on set as the caretaker of the intention,” it would be nice if the screenwriter were also on set as the caretaker of the…

Lindsay: Yeah. And sometimes they are. That’s the good thing about when you work with a writer-star, then they are definitely there.

Craig: Right. They’re definitely there.

Lindsay: But I always try to have the writer on set. I mean, Scott Frank was on the set of Dead Again every single day. And so, yeah, that is good.

But sometimes the writer is just becoming a director and they’re off someplace else.

Craig: I’m a huge, huge, huge advocate of being on set. I would much rather skip a job and just stay on set and be there every day. And even if I say one thing in a week that impacts what happens, that’s a week well-earned to me. The movie lives forever.

Lindsay: Yeah. I completely agree. And also writing, I remember somebody was saying they were working on something and there was a graveyard. What are we supposed to call it now? Cemetery.

Craig: You can still call it graveyard.

John: There’s no PC problem there.

Lindsay: And the production designer came to the director and said, “What do you want on these graves?” And she said, “Call the writer.” That’s writing. You know? And I went, “Yeah, that’s exactly right.” You want somebody who understands that any words is writing.

And actually a lot of production design is writing. What would be in this guy’s room is part of who that character is.

Craig: You know, it’s so funny you say that. Everybody feels an ownership of the screenplay when they make a movie, but the funny thing is sometimes there are those little things like, “Oh, we need a sign that guides people to the meeting in the movie.” And actually no one can write it. [laughs] Just simply writing a sentence is a very specific thing.

Lindsay: Yeah. Well, also, something that I really didn’t understand until I worked on Stranger than Fiction, finally somebody said this to me out loud, which is people whose background is in production design, and art direction, and props usually do not have a good grasp of the English language. That’s just actually not something they do.

Craig: It’s not their gig.

Lindsay: It’s not their gig. So, things are continually misspelled, mispunctuated, and, you know, when you have a movie like Stranger than Fiction that’s all about language, and you have a fake book in it that somebody has to read, and somebody has to start turning pages of this big manuscript, or you have a notebook that somebody is carrying around that’s got — if the conversation goes this way it’s tragedy, and if it goes this…

If there were “tragedies” misspelled in the close-ups, it really matters in that kind of a movie.

John: It does matter.

Craig: Kind of a bummer. Yeah, that’s not going to work.

Lindsay: It might matter in all of the movies. But it’s like it took me the longest time to understand that I had to look at every single thing. Or, even the readability of, you know, there’s a bunch of trucks and we know that our guy is in this truck. And the way we’re going to know that is it says Ace Tomatoes on the side. And you get the trucks and the sign is this big and you can’t possibly see from a helicopter shot.

That’s an awful lot of what you do as a producer is run around and say, “You know the whole point of this is that the handkerchief has to have initials on it because it’s going to start out in this person’s hands, but it’s going to end up in this person’s hands an hour from now and we’ve got to recognize it. And if you make the initials — well, first of all, you didn’t make the initials at all? Okay. So, we’re going to do something else now. Go make the initials,” and they come back and they’re this big. “No. Because the way the shot is going to be…”

It’s like, who is translating all of that? And sometimes a director is doing it. But it’s much nicer to be able to just hand the director a situation without even having to think about stuff like that.

John: Yeah. The director is focused on the day’s work, as he or she should be. But there’s a much bigger story that has to be told. And knowing that 80 pages down the road you have to do that, that’s the time where I’ve been really helpful on the set as a writer because if there’s not you, if there’s not a creative producer who actually really knows what’s there, it can be really damning.

I remember on Go there was one night we were shooting and script supervisor — it’s a thankless job, and some of them are fantastic — but there’s one thing she hadn’t caught that in doing the close-ups, one of the characters had changed the tense on a verb, and so as we went around to do the other actor’s close-up, like it wasn’t going to cut together. He was answering a question in a way you couldn’t actually answer the question — you couldn’t actually cut those shots together anymore.

So, I’m hearing on my — and like running back to set, like you know, “No! Don’t turn around because — that doesn’t actually — that won’t make sense anymore. You can’t actually cut that in.”

Craig: And then you feel embarrassed, like I have a tense, and they’re like, “Oh, the writer with his tense problems. It’s just words, man.”

John: Yeah. Exactly. Like I’m constraining you. It’s like, “Well, I’m constraining you so it can actually make sense. Do you want to sit in the editing room and see how this doesn’t work?”

Craig: We are the story experts. And it’s a sad thing in features that so often we just aren’t there. And we put clues and things into the script and they — you know, it’s good that you care. I mean, it really is good that you care.

I wrote a script, they were making this movie, and there was a scene where somebody shoots a hole through a door, and the characters inside see them through the hole in the door and run. And they don’t exchange any words. And then later on in the movie they encounter each other again in a public space and it’s tense because you’re the guy that shot a hole through my door.

And I got a call from the production. The director is like, “We got a real problem. You know, I realize there’s a huge hole in the script.” And I’m like, “Oh no, what?” “Well, when they see each other, they’ve never seen each other in that moment. How does he even know?” “Because he sees him when he shoots a hole in the door.” “No.” “Yeah.”

John: So, he didn’t shoot it that way.

Craig: Didn’t shoot it that way. And I’m like, “But it’s there.” He goes, “Really?” And now I’m a little panicked. So, I go back and I look. There it is. “They meet eyes through the hole in the door.” But, you know, on the day that’s just sides.

Lindsay: Yeah.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And if you don’t have somebody there…

Lindsay: Absolutely. Or even, you know, and this is actually something I was very aware of working for Sydney. In The Firm, for example, there’s a whole sequence that Tom Cruise and Jeanne Tripplehorn break up, man and wife, and they break up. And you sort of see them separately. — Oh, no, they don’t break up, but she knows that he’s cheated on her but they’re still trying to hold their marriage together.

And there’s a little dinner party or something. And the costume people brought Jeanne Tripplehorn out and she looked adorable with this cute little hat and this cute little…and Sydney went, “She’s trying to hold her marriage together with every muscle in her body. You really think she got up that morning and thought, ‘That’s the cutest little hat I’ve ever even seen.'” And they went, “But this is the only scene we can put her in that cute little hat.” She’s trying to hold her marriage together, don’t you understand?!

And then there’s a scene later when, I don’t know, something where it’s even worse what’s going on with the marriage, and they put her in this cute little pin, you know what I mean.

Craig: She took the time to put the pin on.

Lindsay: And they kind of came to me and they said, “Do you think he’s going to be mad? Because this pin was made for her by the kids who are playing her kids at school, you know, the ones she teaches. And they made this for Jeanne Tripplehorn and she promised she’d wear it in the movie. And the only scene she can wear it is this one.”

Craig: Oh boy.

Lindsay: I said, “Do you really want to hear what he’s going to say to you if you put her in that little…?”

John: Those kids can’t see the movie anyway. It’s The Firm.

Craig: Yeah, it’s rated R.

John: It will be years before they’re allowed to see that movie.

Lindsay: There’s always that kind of stuff. But, I mean, that’s story. That’s the whole thing. The pin is story. The hat is story. It’s all story.

Craig: Todd Phillips the other day, he said, it was a great definition of directing. It’s perfect — I want to crochet it on…well, if I knew how to crochet.

John: I can teach you.

Craig: How did I know? He said, “Here’s what directing is: You wake up, you have 38 fights, you go to sleep.”

John: [laughs]

Lindsay: [laughs]

Craig: And it’s true. Because you feel like all the people that are there, an army of people there to help you make a movie are, through no bad intentions, absolutely undermining you ever single moment. You turn around and it’s just something is absolutely wrong.

Lindsay: I remember Sydney said, “Why can’t they just read my mind? Why can’t they? Why can’t they just, every one of them, know what’s in my head 24 hours a day? Why is that so hard?”

Craig: But then if they did you wouldn’t need Sydney Pollack. You would just get one of them.

Lindsay: [laughs] But he would say, “It’s so clear on the page.” You know, just that kind of thing…

Craig: To him.

Lindsay: …the cute little hat. How could they not understand about the cute little hat?

Craig: Well, every department sees the movie through their lens. That’s it. The costume department sees moving — clothing moves through frame while there’s possibly sound. It’s remarkable. You see it all the time.

Lindsay: [laughs] Exactly. Art director, director of cinematography.

John: The best department heads I’ve worked with, though, they really do have a sense of, like, “This is what you’re trying to do in those moments.” The challenge is they had that idea and that instinct when they first started the project. But then, as in the case of wardrobe, everyone came in for the fittings and they have to deal with all of the politics and body issues and everything else that comes up when you have to actually try and put actors in clothes.

And so the Jeanne Tripplehorn situation comes up where like, well, that’s an adorable cute hat. Of course she wants to wear that outfit.

Craig: And she wants to look beautiful.

John: She wants to look beautiful.

Lindsay: She wants to look beautiful. And everybody when we were looking at the costume parade, everybody went, “Aw, that’s such a killer.” And then they realized that was the only place they could put it in. And then it’s not going to be in the movie because of some stupid story thing! But you see movies like that all the time where you just go, “That person didn’t get up that morning and put that on. Not in that frame of mind.” You just feel it.

And you may not be conscious of it, but it contributes to the whole thing. So, thinking about story on that deep a level, I think, is really important for a movie to work.

John: One thing I want to stress to listeners is that even if you’re writing and directing your own movie, sometimes the creative producer’s function is even sort of more vital because you want an extra set of eyes to remind you of the intention. This is what the scene is.

Lindsay: That’s exactly right.

John: And on The Nines I was lucky to have producers who could do that for me, because you just get so wrapped up in the thing you’re trying to shoot. That they can come up and whisper in your ear like, “Okay, I’m not trying to change what you’re trying to do. I just want to remind you that this is what I think we’re trying to do here and maybe this isn’t making sense the way…”

Lindsay: And somebody said to me, he said, “Here’s what I want. I want after nine takes, and we really do need to do another scene, I want somebody I can turn to and say, ‘Do I have it?'”

Craig: Exactly.

Lindsay: And you know that if they say, “You had it at take five, get going,” that you believe them. But you also know they’re going to say, “No, let me go move the schedule around. Let me see what I can do so we can do that shot at the end of the day tomorrow. Because this is this scene. You want to get this scene wrong?”

And I’ve never heard a better definition of that, of what somebody wants in a producer is somebody who knows the material as well as they do, that they really do trust their opinion. And at a moment like that, when they’re exhausted…

Craig: And afraid.

Lindsay: …and they just don’t — and afraid — and they want somebody who isn’t going to say, “What do you mean you don’t know? You’re the director. You call yourself the director and you don’t know if you have it yet?” You want somebody who is going to be there like the father —

John: Yeah. You also only have one set of eyes. And so if I’m looking at a shot, or I’m watching, I’m watching this very specific performance here, I have a really hard time with background action and sort of seeing what that is. So I can say like, “Please pay attention and if anything is crazy in the frame tell me, because I’m not going to see it. I’m only going to see these people’s mouths moving and saying these things.”

Lindsay: Yeah, absolutely. It’s funny, because Sydney was a pilot. And he was a left seat pilot. He was like the guy flying the plane. There were the guys who flew for TWA for 25 years who were in the right seat, like he was the copilot. But a lot of the time Sydney would say, “Come up into the cockpit and look around, because you never know when a plane is going to hit us.” And I loved flying up there, but he was quite serious.

It’s like, it’s never a bad idea to have somebody around no matter who’s down there, and what their job is, I’d like somebody sitting here looking around going, “Ah, there’s a plane heading right towards us.” And it’s exactly what it was like. I had seen him act out all these because he was the greatest actor in the world, so I’d seen him act out all of these scenes.

And there was a scene, a tiny little scene where Tom Cruise is getting new clothes, and Gene Hackman is there as the older statesman of the business. And I had seen Sydney act this out in his office and there was this kind of proud papa look on his face that wasn’t there when we were — and I said, “You know, I remember how you did it. Does anyone…”

“Oh my gosh, I was looking at Tom. I wasn’t thinking.” And so he was able to make that correction. And it was the same thing. Being in that cockpit and being there was exactly the same. And he rarely needed it. It was once in a great while.

Craig: Everybody has a moment. Because people don’t understand, when you’re a director you’re watching, there’s two actors, oftentimes you’re shooting two cameras at once, so there’s two sizes or two angles, and then there’s background. And then, frankly, there’s the camera itself. “Is the camera moving? Is it moving too fast? Too slow? Is it in focus/out of focus? Are you on the right thing? Are you supposed to go down with the guy when he drops something?”

There are so many layers. And, frankly, the attention game starts to fail you. You will miss things for sure. And having somebody trust there next to you…

Lindsay: I remember, I think it was on, it was some movie that I was working on and it was about a working class family. And the first day of dailies came in and the director went, “Look at those sheets. They’re pristine. They’re like out of a luxury hotel. Who are these people who iron their pillow case?”

Craig: And that’s the thing that you never think about.

Lindsay: And all he was looking at was the actors, and why not, and everything else — and it was like, “Isn’t there some way I can go back and do it again and have different pillowcases?”

Craig: That’s a great lesson, because no one ever thinks to look at the sheets.

Lindsay: Yeah.

John: Yeah.

Craig: But, you know, this is why. The funny thing is — hair. Hair.

Lindsay: I mean, really. How many movies have been ruined just by hair? It’s just extraordinary.

Craig: There’s a director I know — I won’t say what and I won’t say what the film is, but I saw his movie and I said, “I think you did a great job. I have to say it, because it was a romantic comedy, her hair…”

And he said, “You know, every movie there are fights you have that you think to yourself, ‘Okay, I only can go to war this many times with this many things. I’m going to let some of these go.’ I should not have let that fight go. That was one — I took a fall and I shouldn’t have, because the hair is there in every scene.”

Lindsay: Yeah. And it’s there in the trailer.

John: Oh yeah.

Lindsay: That’s what people don’t understand. It’s in the TV spots.

Craig: It’s in everything.

Lindsay: And it dominates the TV spots. You can’t look at anything else.

Craig: Absolutely. Bad hair will kill a movie.

Lindsay: Bad hair will kill a movie faster than anything else alive.

Craig: Amazing, right?

Lindsay: And it’s amazing. But also, even knowing that I still make that mistake, you know what I mean?

Craig: Of course.

Lindsay: You can’t see it. There’s some anesthesia of the intellect, somebody called it, where you just — it all goes away.

Craig: It seems so inconsequential. You parted your hair all the time.

John: Part of it is accommodation. You become accustomed to it. So like, “Oh, well, you’ve seen that hair for three days so it doesn’t strike you as strange anymore.”

Lindsay: That’s where that Blink thing really matters. When I read Blink, I remember thinking, I remember when I saw that actor’s hair, where they sent me a photograph before we started shooting and my first Blink moment was, “This is all wrong.” But I thought, “It’s a period movie, this is what their hair looked like then, when am I supposed to do about that?” And it really affected the way that movie did because it was not how — you know, it was a good looking guy who had been a big star in another movie where he looked great. And now the hair had been changed and those very same girls who loved him weren’t interested at all because his hair looked weird.

And we probably lost $100 million on that movie just because of the wig.

Craig: The hair.

Lindsay: The hair.

Craig: I think we’ve actually really dug down. I mean, we peeled the onion down so many layers and finally at the heart of producing is hair!

John: It’s the hair.

Lindsay: It’s so true.

Craig: And, I mean, you guys can’t see Lindsay here, although we’re going to put a picture up, won’t we?

John: Oh, we have to.

Craig: I mean, Lindsay has the best hair. So it’s actually like it’s the greatest — it’s perfect that it should finally come down to hair.

Lindsay: [laughs] And yet it’s the opposite of that, too. Working on Ghost, for example, when I was at Paramount. Demi Moore just walked in with that hair cut. How much money did that add to the grosses of that movie? It was the most beautiful hair cut in the whole world.

Craig: That was one of those hair cuts that I just remember suddenly everyone looked like the person. It was like when Jennifer Aniston had the Friends hair.

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: Demi Moore had the Ghost hair. It was a thing. There hasn’t been one of those recently.

John: Yeah, what was the most recent hair sensation? I’m trying to think what that is.

Craig: I don’t think there has been, not like the Jennifer Aniston one and the Demi Moore one.

Lindsay: Yeah. And the Meg Ryan one. That one was one for awhile. She had a certain kind of shag that everybody wanted.

Craig: Oh, I remember that.

Lindsay: Again, we’re talking a pretty long time ago.

Craig: That was a long time ago. We need new hair.

Lindsay: It’s not quite the same thing.

Craig: We need somebody to really get out there and hair it up.

Lindsay: And do that kind of stuff.

John: Cool. Well, this has been a good podcast.

Lindsay: When do we start?

John: We solved Hollywood.

Lindsay: Totally.

John: We figured out what’s wrong with producing.

Lindsay: Exactly. Not wrong with producing, we figured out what’s…

John: Yeah. We talked a little bit about hair.

Craig: Just a touch.

Lindsay: Mostly about hair.

Craig: Just a touch. And I feel like we did make the world better. I think that the great thing about you is — really, and I hope that producers listen to this — you set a great example. You know, just for us as writers, what we want from producers frankly. When you say what a director wants, they want to be able to turn and say…

What we want, really, is for somebody to make us better.

Lindsay: Yeah. Absolutely.

Craig. We don’t want somebody to say, “Great job. Good for you. A+. Ship it along.” And we don’t want somebody to rip it apart fruitlessly or cynically.

Lindsay: Or brutally. Yeah, I don’t want to be brutal.

Craig: I don’t mind brutal if it’s in the direction of quality. What I think we look for the most from producers is to care about what we care about. Because a lot of producers say, “Here’s the thing: I really like the script. I feel like we need to change this character to be African American to appeal to this audience. And I want this one to be a woman. And I also think we should set it in Brazil because of the foreign audience.”

And you think, “But now I’m not writing a movie anymore. I’m writing a plan.” And we want producers like you who actually do care about our intention.

Lindsay: Yeah. I think it’s important.

Craig: And hair.

Lindsay: And the idea is make it so good that nobody wants to change it. That’s the point. So, that’s what the goal of the writer-producer relationship is. That it just sings so beautifully on the page that nobody would even think to say something like that.

Craig: See, and when she says stuff like that you think, “That’s the way a producer should talk. Now that’s a producer.”

Lindsay: [laughs]

Craig: Lindsay Doran.

John: So, we need to find somebody, like a really, really rich person to give you a big fund to just develop movies. That would get some stuff.

Lindsay: Okay.

Craig: Is that cool with you?

Lindsay: Okay.

Craig: But you can’t have any of it. We’re going to need it for our movies.

Lindsay: [laughs] That’s worse than bad hair. You have it, it’s right there. It’s always right there but you can’t…

Craig: And the movie was always great but THE HAIR!

Lindsay: Oh, the hair. Oh, it’s so…

Craig: Thank you, Lindsay. That was fun.

John: Thank you very much, Lindsay. This was fun.

Lindsay: Thank you guys. This was really fun. Great.