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: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Scriptnotes. This is a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. How are you, Craig?

Craig: Feeling good, buddy, how about you?

John: Good. What did you write today?

Craig: Nothing. [laughs]

John: [laughs] I wrote a lot today.

Craig: Oh, well, screw you.

John: Well good for me. There are many days I don’t get stuff written, so I’m happy today. But I was writing action, and action is just so not fun most times. I actually tweeted about it last night because I tweeted something like, “I think about writing action sequences the same way a tailor must approach doing button holes.”

Craig: I saw that. Yup.

John: Because, you know, you absolutely need them, and it’s such fine detailed work, and no one is ever going to notice it.

Craig: Yeah, because the action itself on the screen is obviously so much more impactful than what you see on the page. And when you write it on the page it really does feel like technical writing, like writing an instruction manual or something.

I remember talking about this with Richard LaGravenese who is a spectacular screenwriter, and he and I both bonded over our shared hatred and boredom of writing out action.

John: Yeah. And you can’t really skip it. I mean, it’s crucial to provide a sense of what the reader is going to see if this were a movie. I mean, I always treat writing a screenplay as I’m sitting in the theater watching a movie up on the big screen, so I’m writing what I’m seeing, or writing what the experience is of watching the movie. And that includes action, so you have to get that in there; the challenge is to make that interesting for the reader in a way that they just don’t want to kill themselves, or that they’re going to skip over it, because that’s the temptation that they are going to be like, “Okay, this paragraph is too long, I’m going to skip over it and just read the next bit of dialogue; this makes my eyes feel happy.”

Craig: Yeah. It’s a chore.

John: And there are times where you can summarize a bit, where you can just give a taste of… — Sometimes if there’s like a football game you can get a sense of after a few plays we’re up by three, and you are getting sort of a lyrical sense of what is happening there, and it’s going to be left to the filmmakers to sort of show what that is. But there are also times where you need to be fairly specific because there’s comedy that’s happening because of what’s going on there. There are distinct moments in that action and you really do have to script them and choreograph them.

And that’s what I had to do for this. This was a sports thing, but there was comedy that needed to happen during it. And so it needed to be specific enough, and that’s where it just gets to be tough.

Craig: Yeah. And then eventually if the movie goes into production you will have to sit there… — And I remember sitting with Todd Phillips and the second unit director for The Hangover Part II. And sort of laying out exactly how the car chase would work. Every single bullet fired, because everybody has to know. Everybody needs to know, “Okay, where does the bullet hit, because we’re going to need a car that has a bullet hole, and da-da-da.”

And then you’re sitting after that meeting literally doing technical writing. I like to say this to screenwriters when they complain about how we have no power: Everybody is staring at it like it’s the Bible at that point. Every single word becomes incredibly informative.

John: What you were saying about that moment in The Hangover, I know exactly the sequence you’re describing. It becomes so important because there’s a change in state of the set that you’re in, which I guess is a car, so that joke can only happen at a certain time because you can’t take a moment from earlier in the scene later because you’ve changed the nature of the car. So you can’t move stuff around once you’re in there.

Versus a lot of times, if it’s just two people in a normal car that’s driving, you can change any of the lines around. Characters can adlib and do a whole bunch of different stuff because the car is staying exactly the same the whole time. If something is changing physically in the scene so that you can’t go back and forward in time, you’re locked in. And that can be really tough.

Craig: Right. And you have to choreograph it. And you are choreographing it just for the point of view of the production. Any kind of action becomes a very highly choreographed thing, to avoid accidents, and to avoid — and sadly there was an accident on that movie. That had nothing to do with our writing or anything. But, you are trying to make sure that everything is choreographed down to the slightest little movement.

And, so, yeah, when you’re talking about something that in a movie when you watch you think is a little nothing, like they shoot out the rear windshield — that’s a big deal. Because you’re right; every shot after that needs a missing windshield. So it just becomes, it’s a grind. I find writing action to be a grind for sure.

John: I was describing to somebody else that is working on a musical right now: Musicals are a lot like action movies in that every few minutes there’s a song being song rather than a big action set piece happening. And, working on several movie musicals, yes, everything has to be sort of carefully planned, but you have some flexibility, you can move stuff around.

Working on the stage show, it’s been really interesting that every day the script would change because we literally had moved one lyric in front of one line, or some character’s entrance was just a little bit later. And you had to accommodate all that stuff because it wasn’t just the script or the dancing, or the speaking; it was also the music department. Everything had to fit together in a way that was very, very tough.

And so you wanted to create as much room for the moment, for the acting, and for the possibility. But you’re on rails; you basically had to stay on this track or it wasn’t going to work.

Craig: In production, I honestly feel production of all kinds is so awful. I’ve never been on a movie where I didn’t look around at least once and think, “There’s got to be a better way.”

And I understand why directors, particularly very successful directors who reach a certain age and have done a certain amount of movies suddenly say, “You know what? Let’s just do this mo-cap then, you know. Let’s make Tintin on a green stage.” Because, it just takes away so much of the misery of production. It’s a very arduous task.

John: We should tell everybody that you’re on set for — our friends Derek Haas and Michael Brandt just had their show picked up, Chicago Fire.

Craig: Right.

John: And so you’re doing a little production rewrite there for them, helping them out, getting a few jokes in there.

Craig: Yeah. Chicago Fire is going to be the funniest show on TV. [laughs]

John: [laughs] It’s an NBC show.

Change in topics, this is a very exciting week because this is the week of Upfronts. So this is where all of the…

Craig: Exciting for you. [laughs]

John: Exciting for people who care about TV. Not exciting at all for Craig Mazin. This is where all the networks decide which shows are going to be on the fall season, and which shows are not coming back, and which ones they’re most excited about, which ones they’re nervous about, which ones they’re gonna stick in mid-season and cross their fingers and pray.

So we have several friends who have shows being picked up which is fantastic.

Craig: Yeah. A lot of them.

John: And we have friends whose shows didn’t get picked up and we’re sad for them. But what I’ve said before on the podcast is the amazing, wonderful thing about TV is that not getting your show picked up isn’t really considered a failure because most shows aren’t supposed to get picked up. Most pilots aren’t supposed to get picked up. So it’s not a big mark against you.

Craig: Right. If you got to pilot you have succeeded in some big way.

John: Yeah. I think I told you about this off-air last week, but I cheated on you. You know that?

Craig: Yeah.

John: I went and did another podcast. I recorded an episode of Jay Mohr’s podcast, Jay Mohr who I knew from Go, who I hadn’t seen for like 20 years or something so it was great to catch up. And so as I was driving over to Jay Mohr’s house to do his podcast, and he does one of those old school podcasts where they people actually look at each other…

Craig: Weird.

John: …unlike our podcast where I haven’t seen you in months.

Craig: Right.

John: Which is a blessing.

Craig: Yeah. It’s beautiful. [laughs]

John: [laughs] So one of the things in our mutual contract was that we couldn’t see each other.

Craig: Never see each other. Yeah. It was one of my demands.

John: So, as I was driving over to Jay’s house I listened to an episode of his show because I figured, you know that’s probably good preparation to listen to one episode of the guy’s show before you’re on his show. And so his guest that week was Ralph Garman who is a very, very funny radio personality on KROQ. He’s on the Kevin and Bean show. You don’t listen to the radio either, do you?

Craig: Actually I used to listen to whatever those — Kevin and Bean in the morning. And Ralph does the Hollywood…

John: He does the Hollywood Showbiz.

Craig: Yeah, I know. He’s a funny guy.

John: He’s a very funny guy. So, both he and Jay are impressionists; they do a lot of impersonations. So they got talking about that and it was really fascinating to hear people talk about their craft, and especially when they can do things that I can’t do at all.

And so Ralph Garman was talking about this one other guy he had met who could do a dead-on Jason Lee impression.

Craig: Okay.

John: And so Jason Lee, who’s the guy on My Name is Earl, he was in the Chipmunks movies, and Ralph was saying like he had no idea how to even begin a Jason Lee impression. His quote, I think, was, “I wouldn’t even know where to hang my hat on that,” which is that when you are doing an impersonation there has to be something that you can start and you can build out from.

So, if you are doing a Christopher Walken thing you have this weird phrasing and sort of how he falls back into it. With an Al Pacino you sort of have his physicality that becomes sort of his voice. And like how do you do a Jason Lee impersonation?

And it is amazing when you see somebody doing an impression or impersonation that you’ve never even considered before. Like I remember when Jay Pharoah joined Saturday Night Live, Jay Pharoah does this brilliant Denzel Washington.

Craig: Yeah.

John: He also does Will Smith and Jay-Z. But particularly the Denzel Washington, it’s like you never even thought there could be a Denzel Washington impression, and he just nails it. And there’s not always comedy to back it up, but it’s just uncanny that he’s able to do this Denzel Washington.

Craig: Yeah. I think his thing is like he went in on the “my man,” like that’s his thing, you know?

John: Mm-hmm. He found something very specific and he sort of built out from that thing. And there is a difference between sort of voice acting; there’s people who can double and what we think about impressions or impersonations is really kind of a caricature. It’s like they are taking that one thing and blowing it out to this crazy distortion.

I mean, Ralph Garman describes it as like when you go to visit the Santa Monica pier and there’s those guys who will draw cartoon caricatures of you. And so they will pick like one thing on your face and make your head huge, and then give you a skateboard for some reason. That’s what a lot of that comedy is. But you have to find that one little thing.

And their conversation about finding a character’s voice, finding an actor’s voice for an impression got me thinking about what a character’s voice is. And so I thought we might start talking about that.

Craig: Great.

John: Because to me, the mark of good writing is never really about structure, or where the beats are falling. I can tell if it’s a good writer or a bad writer mostly by whether they can handle a character’s voice. If they can convince me that the characters I’m reading on the page are distinct, and alive, and unique. I would happily read many scripts that are kind of a mess story wise, but you can tell someone’s a good writer because their characters have a voice.

Craig: Right. You can suggest ways to improve story structure. And you can always come up with ideas for interesting scenes. But what you can’t do is tell somebody to write characters convincingly. Either they can do it or they can’t.

John: Yeah. So this isn’t going to be a how-to-give-your-characters-a-voice thing, because I think it is one of those inherent skills; like you sort of have it or you don’t. You can work on it, and you can sort of notice when things are missing and apply yourself again. And, there are sometimes where… — There is a project that has been sitting on a shelf for awhile that a friend and I are going to take another look at. And looking through it again I realized that the biggest problem here is that our hero could sort of be anybody. We made him such an everyman that he kind of is every man. And because of that you don’t really care about him.

And so I thought of four questions, sort of four tests, to see whether character’s voices are working. So here are my four tests and maybe you can think of some more.

Craig: Okay.

John: First test — could you take the dialogue from one character in the script and have another character say it?

Craig: Yeah. That’s a common complaint that you’ll hear from producers or executives that the character voice is not unique, that the characters all sound the same. And that’s a common error — I don’t even say a common rookie error. I think people misuse the term rookie error. It’s really a common stinky writer error, because rookies who are good writers I think automatically know to not do this. And that they write the characters as them, so they’re speaking through cardboard cutouts. They’re speaking through policeman. They’re speaking through Lady on Street.

John: Or worse, they’re just talking as “cop.” They’re talking like a cop. And they’re not talking like a specific human being; they’re talking like, “this is what a cop would say.”

Craig: Right.

John: Well, that’s actually not especially helpful for your movie because this is not supposed to be any cop; it’s supposed to be a specific cop with a back story, and a name, and a role in your specific movie. And so if you’re making someone the generic version of that, that’s going to be a problem.

You already hit on my next thing which is is a character speaking for himself or is he speaking for the writer.

Craig: A-ha, I read your mind.

John: You did read my mind. And so that is the thing. Are you speaking really through your own voice? And some screenwriters are very, very funny. And so they have very funny voices themselves. But if every character in the movie has their same funny voice, that’s not going to be an especially successful outcome.

It may be an amusing read, but I doubt that the final product is going to be the best it could be.

Craig: Some people will say that there’re highly stylized writers who do a little bit of that, and I actually disagree. Like some people say, “Well in Mamet everybody sounds so hype literate and in Tarantino everybody sounds so deliberate, and quirky, and fascinated with pop culture, and thoughtful.” But the truth is, if you watch those movies you realize that he actually is crafting — yes, he has a style; yes, both of those brilliant writers have unique styles, but they do shade them for the different characters.

Sorkin is another one who… — It’s interesting. There’s a group of writers who have a very distinct style that exists through the movie. And yet the characters are distinct. That’s pretty advanced stuff to me.

John: Yeah. Diablo Cody often gets that knock. And she gets that knock off of her first movie, but then if you see Young Adult, those characters aren’t talking the same way.

Craig: I agree.

John: Those characters are very specific and very unique.

Craig: That’s a good example.

John: Sort of a corollary to that, maybe I should break it out to its own point — is the character saying what he wants to say, or what the movie needs him to say? And that is is the character expressing his or her own feeling in the moment, or is he expressing what needs to happen next so that we can get on to the next thing? And that’s the subtle line that the screenwriter works is that screenwriting is always about what’s next. And you as a screenwriter have to be in control of the scene and make sure that this scene is existing so that we can get to the next story point.

At the same time, you can really feel it when a character is just giving exposition or setting up the ball so another character can spike it. And those are not good things to have happen.

Craig: No. You don’t want to set up straw dummies. And you don’t’ want to put things in their mouth because the screenwriter needed people to hear it. And frankly, I think of all those things as great opportunities. We all run into moments where we need the audience to learn information, or we need another character to learn information. So then it’s a great opportunity to sort of sit there and think, “Well how can I do this in a crafty way? How can I do this in a surprising way?”

Sometimes the answer is to be completely contradictory and to have people say the opposite of what they think and then be clear through the writing that you’re using subtext or you’re relying on performance.

I mean, the other thing is bad characters, and maybe I’m cheating ahead again, bad characters tend to speak like they’re on radio. And their dialogue ignores the fact that their faces will speak louder than any words coming out of their mouth. Was that number four?

John: No, no. That’s good. Not radio. So I’m going to add Not Radio Voices.

Craig: No radio plays.

John: In situations, I don’t want to get too off track talking about exposition, but in situations where you need to have the audience understand something, or you need to make it clear that a character has been caught up with another character, like the characters split up and now they’re back together and you need to make sure the audience understands that they all have the same information. Characters in real life cut each other off a lot, and they are often ahead of each other. So there may be opportunities to literally have one character stop the other and tell what they already know so that we don’t have to sort of walk through all of those conversations again.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, there’s all sorts of ways to kind of recap. Simple rule of thumb is if the audience hears it once, don’t make them hear it twice. So, if you need to catch somebody up on what that bank robbery was like, and it was a crazy bank robbery, then the scene begins with the person who has been listening staring at the other person. They’re both silent. And then the person who was listening says, “Wow. That was insane.” “I know. You don’t have to tell me.”

The only important matter is that they they’re reacting to what they just heard, but certainly you don’t want to repeat anything ever.

John: Wherever possible, characters should speak in order to communicate their inner emotion and not to communicate just information.

Craig: Right.

John: This is what I would throw out. What would a joke sound like from that character? And this is actually from… — Jane Espenson was on a recent edition of the Nerdist Writers Panel; Jane Espenson, who is a TV writer who has done a lot of stuff and had a blog.

Craig: And a lovely woman.

John: And a lovely woman. During the strike our three blogs came together and we all picketed at Warner Bros. Lovely woman. And so smart about comedy, and especially TV. She was on the Nerdist Writers Panel talking about Once Upon A Time, which is what she’s writing on right now. And she’s talking about having the Snow White character tell a joke, and that it was tough because it’s not a very particularly funny character, but you needed to find specific moments that she could be funny. And in finding what kind of joke can she tell is where you really get a sense of like, “Okay, I know who this person is.”

And so even if you’re not writing a comedy, I think it’s worthwhile thinking about how can that character be funny. Because almost everybody is funny in some way, or at least tries to be funny in some way, so what is the nature of their humor? What is the nature of their comedy? And when you know that, then you will also have a sense of how they are going to respond in stressful situations. How they’re going to respond in sad situations. It gives you an insight into them.

Craig: Yeah. And I also like to think about power. I always think in terms of the power dynamic between any two or three characters or four, whatever you have in your scene. Who holds the gun? And how does that change the way they talk to the other person? Obviously the gun in this instance could be anything. It could be anything from information, to an actual gun, to “you’re in love with me, and I’m not in love with you.”

And then is there a way to change who holds the gun in the middle of the scene? And allow the character’s voice to adapt to what we would normally adapt to. I mean, think of how many times in life we have had conversations where we thought we were unassailable at the beginning and by the end we were getting our lunches handed to us? No, our lunches eaten, and our hats handed to us. [laughs]

John: [laughs]

Craig: And so use that. Scenes are all to me, they are all about variation, and they’re all about growth. So, allow the voices to respond to the dynamics of the moment.

John: Agreed. My last test, and we’ll think of some more after this — can you picture a given actor in the role? Or at least preclude certain actors from the role because it doesn’t feel like they would say those things?

And so my example here is Angelina Jolie. So let’s say you’re writing a woman’s role and she’s funny. It’s not going to be Angelina Jolie.

Craig: Yeah. Probably not.

John: Probably not. Angelina Jolie has done at least comedy I know, but you don’t think of Angelina Jolie as being funny.

Craig: Well, I mean, it depends. I guess, like Mr. & Mrs. Smith, I thought she was very funny, but it was…

John: But it’s not telling a joke funny.

Craig: No, it was sort of clipped and wry which is…

John: Perfect.

Craig: She has a great arched brow, so to me like, it’s funny — when you think about doing impressions, I guess in my head I’m always doing impressions of actors as I’m writing for them. And so I think, okay, what’s that thing where I would go, okay, I can see her sort of arching her brow. And I always think of Angelina Jolie as somebody that has power. So, she can be confident and cut you down with one or two words.

I mean, in writing ID Theft for Jason Bateman and Melissa McCarthy, I kept thinking about how Melissa was sort of, you know, she’s somebody who would ramble and Jason is somebody who would be very short. And it was an interesting thing because it goes counter to the normal thing which is the rambler is the weak one and the short talking person, the terse person is the strong one.

But in this case it’s the opposite. You have the terse person who is weak, interestingly, and the rambler is strong. And that was actually fun; that was a fun dynamic to play around with because it felt, it just made those scenes more interesting to me. And if you’re not thinking in those terms of how language, the quantity, the quality, the size of the words, how many pauses, the speed; I mean, language is music and you should be musical about it, I think.

John: The project I’m writing right now, one of the reasons I had struggled with it a bit is I was writing it with one very specific actor in mind, who is great and funny, but is a tough fit for what this story kind of needs. And so once I got past that that it has to be this, and I started thinking of the broader picture, I landed on the other actors — oh, that’s inherently funny; him in that premise is inherently funny.

Now, ultimately, will we cast either of these actors? Who knows? But it helped me figure out the voice because I could hear what it would sound like if this actor were saying it, and I could shape the lines so that it would be very, very funny coming from that person.

It doesn’t mean that that’s the only actor who can ever play it. Famously, Will Smith was not the original choice for Men in Black. And it’s hard to imagine that it was supposed to be Matthew Perry, but it was supposed to be Matthew Perry. So don’t think you have to be locked into a specific cast. But if you can’t think of someone who should play the role, that’s also probably a problem.

Craig: Yeah. Those things are sort of proof of concept, you know. If it’s funny with two particular actors, then at least you know it can be funny. If you can’t think of any two actors that it could be funny in combination, then screw it. It ain’t gonna work, for sure.

John: Any more on voice? We have a couple questions here.

Craig: Eh, let’s go to questions.

John: Let’s go to questions. James from Oregon. His question, I think, is about recycling, which, recycling is good. “My question regards ownership of your work during development. If I understand it correctly, once you sell a script to the studio they own it. Now say you have written a unique character or a specific funny gag and it is not used in the final film. Are you free to use that same gag or character in a new script? Or, does the studio own every word of every draft, and could they prevent you from incorporating that unused idea is another script?”

Craig: Yes and yes, kind of. I mean, for sure they own it. They are the copyright authors of that. You cannot use it in other scripts legally. In practice, however, we all will occasionally do this sort of thing where it’s like, “Look, you didn’t use it, you’re never gonna use it, I’m gonna steal it and stick it in this other thing because I wrote it really. And it has value to you.”

But you’ve got to be really careful about it, ’cause technically it is verboten.

John: Yeah. I had a couple thoughts here. First off, this is talking about the movie shot and they didn’t use it, and so that’s a very specific situation. So, like, that script that you wrote is never going to get made again because that already shot. Sometimes there’s things that just linger in development forever. Like I have this Shazam! project that, who knows if it’s ever going to happen over at Warner Bros. So, I would never feel safe taking anything out of that because, who knows, they could dust it off and shoot it.

Craig: Yeah.

John: But if something has already shot and you know that they didn’t use it, technically they own it. But are they going to come after you for doing something that was in there? Like for the first Charlie’s Angels there was a, I think I may have mentioned this on the podcast before; there was a sequence where the Angels had to, in the script, in there’s a sequence where the Angels had to rescue somebody, and it was on top of a mountain.

And they end up in a van going down a bobsled run. And it was actually a really fun sequence. And Amy Pascal came in on like a Friday at 5pm and says, “We’re cutting $5 million out of this movie. And we’re not leaving the room until we do it.” And so she picks up the script and she rips out those five pages. They’re gone.

And so that bobsled sequence I sort of felt like was fair game. And so if another alpine action movie came up in some case, I would feel pretty good using that same kind of beat again.

Craig: Maybe now, but… — The only thing to be aware of is sequels because they will occasionally go back and want to re-mine the stuff that was there from the first thing. if the movie comes out and it’s a bomb, which wasn’t the case in Charlie’s Angels, I think you’re pretty much on safe ground. But if it’s a hit, you’ve got to be careful.

John: But we were also talking about how dialogue is sort of musical, and I think a lesson that I’ve learned from people who write musicals is that you always think like, “Oh, we cut that song out of that show.” And so I asked, “Well the song is great, why don’t you use it in a different show?” And the truth is, songs are kind of written for certain shows. It’s kind of tough to sort of take all the ideas that were in there and really apply them to this new show.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And the same happens with most stuff that’s in your movie. We were talking about voices just a second ago. If a character has a very specific joke, and that joke works in his voice, it’s unlikely that it’s going to work as well in whatever thing you’re trying to shoehorn it into.

Craig: Yeah. That’s probably right.

John: There’s a script I wrote that actually I still own completely. And I considered going back through and like pulling out some of the action sequences I love in it for this other project, and the more I think about it the less likely I am to really do that, because it’s not… — Those worked really well in that movie because it was that movie. They’re not going to work at all in this one.

Craig: It was for that movie. Yeah. Look, you wrote one good scene, or one good line, or one good sequence before, you can do it again. Yeah. It’s better in general to be — I can’t think of any instances where I actually did lift something from an abandoned project.

John: Two things that came to mind, just as we were talking right now. When I was writing the novelization of Natural Born Killers a zillion years ago — it was one of the first paid things I ever did. I literally had three weeks to write an entire book. And I was also in the middle of finals in grad school, and I was working a full time job. It was a very crazy time.

And at a certain point I was like, “I just need more stuff.” And so I ended up going through my hard drive and going through like old short stories I’d written and other little things, and I found these moments that were interesting, and I did just sort of pull them in and use them. And it felt like — it was like I was making quilt out of all the little scraps I had.

And that’s okay. They’re yours. That’s fine. But you are not going to…

Craig: Not for something you care about.

John: Yeah. I did — it worked really well in the book because that book was so pastiche-y anyway. Here’s the other point I was going to make. Sometimes I will have something that I have always wanted to use, and I’ll be on a weekly. And this is nothing I used in any other project; it was something I had half developed for myself. I’ll totally use it in that weekly because I know, you know what, they are gonna probably shoot this. This idea I’ve had in my head can actually be shot and be used, and then I can stop thinking about it.

Craig: Yeah. That’s cool. I like that.

John: William asks, “When writing action where a group of characters are involved, do you need to list them all in each new scene? If not, how else could this be handled?”

That’s a reasonable question. A little rookie, but not too bad.

Craig: I’m not quite sure. What do you mean in each new scene?

John: So what he’s talking about, let’s talk about The Hangover. In the second Hangover you were cutting back and forth between two groups. And do you need to remind the reader who’s in which group when we cut back to them?

Craig: Yeah, but there’s sort of short hand ways to do it. You don’t want to keep saying, “Phil, Allen, and Stu are still in the car.” We assume — there are certain things we presume if we’re going back and forth. I do know that Todd and I are often, we often do sort of say, “Okay, we’ve started a new scene, the guys say, ‘All right, let’s get in the car. We’ve gotta go to this place.’ And then the next shot is them in the car. Do we need to say Phil, Stu, and Allen are in the car? We actually do. We just lay out who’s driving, who’s sitting in the front seat, who’s sitting in the back.”

But in a sequence, so a group of scenes that are connected by action as opposed to location, like a car chase, running through a casino, or moving through different rooms of a house, it’s okay to sort of elide over that, or shorthand things with “the guys” or “the policemen” or whatever kind of group name you can come up with.

It’s really all about just making sure that it’s clear for the reader without it being boring and repetitive.

John: The thing I’m working on right now, the action sequence that I was talking about, it’s a sports thing. And so I do need to be clear about which players are actually playing at that time, because there are some characters who are back on the bench. Bu there’s also times where I can just refer to “the team” and it’s helpful just to refer to the team. And if a character needs to do something that’s distinct, I see them talking, so I know that they’re there at the moment.

But that will come up sometimes as a conversation during preproduction is they will check to make sure that who exactly is in this scene. And as the writer, that’s part of your job is to make sure that they really do have everybody in that scene who needs to be in that scene.

Craig: Yeah. And I think it’s okay to leave out certain bits of information like that for the reader of the script, as long as you know. Because eventually somebody is going to ask you, and I do feel like it’s a wonderful thing to be able to immediately say to that person, “Here’s who’s playing, here’s who’s on the bench.”

Years ago I wrote a blog piece called You Can’t Just Walk Into a Building, which Josh Olson disagreed with — imagine that.

John: [laughs]

Craig: Dope. Anyway. In that piece I basically said, “Look, you can say your characters walk into a building in a script, and that’s fine, but down the line somebody may very well ask you what kind of building exactly are you talking about here? Are we talking skyscraper, this, that, whatever?” You should know. You should know your settings. You should have a sense of all of these things in your mind at the very least, because they will ask you.

On every movie I’ve ever done, I have sat down and been asked these questions by either the AD, the director, the costume people. Everybody. It’s amazing how many people actually do directly ask the screenwriter these questions. So know the answers.

John: Know the answers.

Luke from Poland asks, “I follow Derek Haas’s Popcorn Fiction site,” which is great, so we’ll provide a link for that, “which is all kinds of awesome. And I know that both of you wrote short stories for Derek’s site. Therefore writing prose is not completely alien to you. So I was wondering, have you ever considered writing a novel?”

Craig: Yeah.

John: “Is there a John August or Craig Mazin novel on the horizon?”

Craig: Those are two different questions. [laughs] Yes, and no. Yes I have. I have an idea for a novel. It’s really sad, and dark, and depressing, which I love. And I even have a couple of chapters of it. But I’m so fastidious about it. It’s funny, when we were talking last week about writer’s block and how you just have to keep moving. I don’t have writer’s block, but I am overly fastidious because I feel like, look, this is it. You write these sentences and they exist forever in that state, never to be amended.

So, I’m rather fastidious about it, and it’s very slow going. But I do kind of love it. I don’t know, maybe one day I’ll finish it and publish it. I don’t beat myself up over it.

John: How much is written?

Craig: I have two chapters, and they’re sizable chapters. But, I mean it’s probably one-fifteenth of what it should be, if that.

John: I have considered writing a novel. And it’s one of those things that loosely on the horizon, so I will talk to my agent or my lawyer about it once a year or so. And the thing I would want to write, it’s very much sort of in my wheelhouse. You could say, “Oh, what would John August write well?” John August — I adapt a lot of kid and young adult things and it would be one of those kind of projects.

So I’ve definitely considered it. I just know the amount of time it would take would pull me away from other things, and so it’s not my highest priority right now.

Craig: Yeah. That’s where I’m at.

John: But, I would love to do it. And I love books, and I love writing, and I love the sense of completion and finality that you have in a book that’s wonderful. And world building, is that so much of the time I am writing these screenplays and I’m creating the world, and creating the characters in the world, but it’s only for a very specific small purpose. And I like that when you write a novel or write a series of novels you can really expand and expound and create stuff beyond the borders of just a two-hour movie. And that’s an amazing thing.

Craig: Yeah. And also there’s an ability to express an inner world in a novel, to really go into the kind of hard to articulate consciousness that we all think we understand, which you cannot do in movies. Movies are entirely about what you see in here.

John: Yeah. The toolbox is much bigger in novels. And you can spend five pages on the feeling of the sheets, and you maybe shouldn’t do that, but you can. And there are amazing opportunities in novels that are great.

Craig: Yeah. I’m a big Conrad fan. I’ve always been a big fan of his. And I always loved how impressionistic his style was, that he would sort of describe things to you in a way where almost he as the author didn’t quite see them clearly until maybe a scene later when it suddenly became clear what had happened. And that’s something, again, that you can do as a novelist. You can be impressionistic. You can have people misunderstand what they see, but in movies it’s very difficult. If someone gets stabbed…

There’s a wonderful moment in Heart of Darkness where they’re on the boat, and one of the natives who are, I guess, part of the crew of the boat. I think in the novel it’s something like, “He grasps in his hands what appears to be a cane, and then falls down.” And then only afterwards do you realize, no, a spear was thrown from the banks of the river, and pierced him through the chest and killed him. But in that moment it was like Conrad was as confused as all of us about what was going on. Can’t do that in a movie. Spear through the chest is a spear through the chest.

John: Yeah. In a movie you would have to pay that off within about 10 seconds, or else we would have forgotten what happened there.

Craig: It’s also hard to even just pretend that it’s anything other than what it is. Because we can’t — the lens is objective. It is not clouded by anxiety, or tension, or squinting.

John: When you write prose, we may have talked about this before, I’ve enjoyed writing stuff for Derek’s site, and it was one of the first times I have written prose in quite a few years was writing those two short stories, Snake People and The Variant which you can both find on Amazon. I found dialogue to be really frustrating. I got better at it as I would sort of go through it, but like the first day or two of trying to write those short stories, it killed me writing when characters had to speak.

Because I find that the form of dialogue in American novels incredibly frustrating the way we do the comma, open quotes, I speak a line, closed quotes, and the “he said”s. It’s really weird. Because when you read it, here’s what the difference is, I think: In screenwriting every word counts except for, of course, the character cues above dialogue. Those are ignored, you never say those. But everywhere it otherwise counts.

In books the “he said”s are supposed to be invisible, like they are supposed to not really exist. And I just find our way of writing really artificial.

Craig: Well, it is. And it definitely took a little bit of adjustment, but on the other hand when I would read it back I realized that they were invisible to me as well. And also I noticed that, well, a couple things. One, it definitely drives your interest in dialogue down which I think is kind of a good thing, because I don’t really like dialogue heavy books.

And it also, I noticed that if you had kind of established if there was sort of a back and forth conversation, it was legal to leave out the “he said”s/”she said”s if there was a run.

John: Exactly. As long as the rhythm was established, like your characters were all trading lines, then you can go through quite a bit without having to do that.

So, Craig, do you have One Cool Thing this week?

Craig: I do have One Cool Thing this week.

John: Why don’t you go first.

Craig: My One Cool Thing this week is 1Password. I don’t know if you use 1Password.

John: I use 1Password. I like 1Password.

Craig: It’s the greatest thing ever. So, 1Password, it’s software that you can freely purchase for money, so it’s not free, online. Available for both Mac and PC.

John: And iOS.

Craig: And iOS, that’s correct. And 1Password is kind of brilliant. So, we all have a thousand accounts for a thousand different things and we tend to use one password or maybe two passwords because we can only memorize a certain amount of passwords. And those passwords tend to be fairly low security. Go ahead — there’s sites where you can test the security of your own password, and most people fail pretty miserably.

And then of course there are some websites that demand that you use a capital, and lower case. Some ask for a number. I mean, as we said in Hangover 1, my password used to be just “bologna,” but now they make you add numbers. [laughs]

So, hundreds of these passwords, and many of them are duplicates and many of them are unsecure. So, what 1Password does brilliantly is it says “No, no. Come up with one really secure password that’s a bunch of numbers and uppercases/lowercases, whatever you want to do, and we’ll help you come up with it. That’s the one you memorize.

“Then, when you go to a website, we’ll come up with a password for you that will be a huge gobbledygook 14 string combination of nonsense that no one could possibly remember, including you — you won’t have to.

“Then, if you go to that website and you want to get in, you just click on the 1Password icon which there is an extension for Safari, Chrome, and Explorer. Type in your master password, it then plugs in the password for that site and you are unlocked.” And it is spectacular. And, you don’t even need — you might think, “Well, what if I’m not at home on my computer that has all that stuff?” No problem, because if you have a Dropbox account, a free Dropbox account, you can use a web-based version of 1Password through Dropbox.

It’s spectacular. You should all get it. It’s the greatest thing ever.

John: See, I’ve had less success with it than you have. And so I have had situations where, especially the plug-ins weren’t working quite right. The browser plug-ins weren’t working quite right.

Craig: Really?

John: So then it would fill in the wrong thing. I may need to sort of reinstall and redo some stuff. What I have found it very useful for though is overall control of passwords, especially the things you kind of forgot about from a long time ago. And so my general password philosophy is I have a schema for sort of how passwords work that every password for every site is different, but if I stare at a site I can probably figure out what my password for it is.

Now, that may not be the most secure, because somebody else could figure out what my schema is, but I think it’s going to be challenging for them to figure out what my schema is.

Craig: Yeah. I don’t even like to wait or even do that much thinking about it. I just like knowing that I’ve got one thing. I don’t know my email password, for instance. I have no idea what it is. But I know 1Password.

John: Ah, that’s faith. You have a lot of faith in that 1Password.

Craig: Well, yeah. But the point is I am no more faith in that than I am in any password. I mean, you’re hoping that the password…

John: No, but you’re putting a lot of faith in that 1Password, the application, is not going to completely self-destruct.

Craig: Well, you can if you’re really wigged out about it use the 1Password app to print out all of them and stick them in a safe somewhere.

John: That’s a good idea.

Craig: Yeah.

John: I do find myself using 1Password for credit card information. And so my American Express card, I used to have it memorized for a long time, and then of course someone stole it at a certain point, and we had to get a new number, and I don’t remember my new number. So I just go to 1Password and have that plug it in.

Craig: Exactly. And it works out o 80% of the time. There are some sites where just the way they set up their fields, 1Password can’t figure out what the hell they are talking about. But usually it will be able to fill in your number, your security code, your expiration date, etc.

John: On the topic of passwords, an application that you probably don’t have to use, and you should thank god you don’t have to use, I’m just gonna bitch for one second about iTunes Connect. So, if you’re selling apps in the app store, Apple has an app for iOS called iTunes Connect which will let you know how many copies you’ve sold. So like we have Bronson Watermarker there, and FDX Reader; those are the two apps that we’re selling today.

And so we can see how many did we sell today. It asks you for your password every single time you launch it. And you can’t actually change anything. It’s not like a thing where someone could grab your phone and steal your money or anything. No, it just tells you how many you have sold. And the fact that it asks you for your password every time is infuriating. And there’s no good way to get around it so you have to type it in.

And, of course, you don’t want to have an easy password for it, so you have to have a difficult password that you are trying to type in and the dots are hiding what you’re typing.

Craig: Well, if the point is that there’s really no secure information on it, why not just do 123412341234?

John: That’s the problem, is that the password to get into it is your real master password for iTunes Connect.

Craig: Oh, that’s super annoying.

John: So it has to be your real solid fear of god password because there’s tens of thousands of dollars at stake there.

Craig: That’s annoying, yeah. Annoying. Well, I guess that’s why they do it.

John: So, my one cool thing is a guaranteed time waster. So, probably the worst thing I should ever share with screenwriters. But it’s an amazing game that I’ve been playing the whole week. I’ve been playing far too much the whole week called Ski Safari, which is not a great title by any means.

So here’s the thing in Ski Safari. You are this little guy who’s skiing down a hill…

Craig: Well first tell us what platform it’s on.

John: Oh, it’s for iPad.

Craig: Got it.

John: And so the good thing about it being for iPad is that you can’t play it on your phone, so that you’re not wasting all your time on your phone with it. And also because it’s on iPad I don’t need to play it at my computer, which is good. So, it’s not one of those things.

I’ve also set myself a rule that I will only play it while standing up because as writers we sit down way too much. So I can stand at the counter and play this. And when I get tired of standing I should just sit down. So, it’s an incredibly simple game. It’s very much like Tiny Wings if you have played Tiny Wings, and it’s an Endless Runner. So, basically you’re leaping, you’re sliding, you’re leaping, you’re sliding. But the character design and sort of the world of it is really, really nicely done. It’s incredibly smartly thought out and it feels to me like a perfect pop song. Like you know Kelly Clarkson’s Since U Been Gone…

Craig: Mm-hmm.

John: …is an amazing perfect pop song, this is sort of an amazing iOS game. It feels like it does exactly what it should be doing right at this moment and just knocks it out of the park.

Craig: I’m going to download it. Is it S-K-I Safari?

John: It is.

Craig: I’m gonna download it tonight.

John: Yeah. It’s cheap. And it’s one of those things where, I think it’s $0.99, everyone who plays it will love it and will become addicted to it, I suspect. And then at some point the game designers will probably make some little change, and everyone will be up in arms about how they ruined the game, and demand their money back, their $0.99, after they played it for probably 100 hours.

Craig: Or maybe Zynga jerks will just copy it.

John: The Zynga jerks — I’m sure the Zynga people already have their photocopiers ready.

Craig: Are the Zynga people just the worst?

John: Yeah. I don’t know. They might be.

Craig: I think they might be. I just feel like they really are bad.

John: I didn’t really begrudge them for Farmville, because like, oh, great, you found a new kind of crack. Okay. Or Mafia Wars. You and I played Mafia Wars way back in the day, didn’t we?

Craig: Yeah. They’ve stolen, I mean, I feel like there’s 100 lawsuits against these guys.

John: So here’s what pushed me over the edge, is that there’s this kind of cute little iPad game called Tiny Tower where you are running this little tower and you’re building new floors, and you’re running the elevator to get people to places.

And then I saw the Zynga knock-off, which was exactly the same. I mean, completely 100% the same thing. And that’s not cool.

Craig: I hate it. No, it’s not cool. I mean, everybody likes to go after EA because EA… — The big crime of Electronic Arts in the gaming community is that they tend to swallow up independent game publishers or raid independent game publishers of their staff, their key personnel. And so they have a general depressing effect on game innovation and the indie game scene.

And I get that. But on the other hand, everybody’s an adult. If you own an independent game company and you feel like selling it to EA, that’s your choice. And if you work at an independent game company and you feel like going to work for EA, that’s your choice, too.

But Zynga, it seems like they’re ripping these other people off, to me, as a lay person when I read these things. And that’s kind of gross.

John: Yeah. That shouldn’t happen.

Craig: That’s One Bad Thing.

John: One Bad Thing.

Craig: One Uncool Thing. Zynga.

John: Zynga. Craig!

Craig: John!

John: Thank you for another fun podcast.

Craig: Oh, and John.

John: Oh, there’s more.

Craig: One last little addendum. I just wanted to say congratulations to you and all of my gay, lesbian, transgendered friends, because the President of the United States for the first time ever in our history has come out in support of same sex marriage, and I think that’s fantastic.

John: I think that is really fantastic.

Craig: Yeah. It’s a good deal.

John: Yeah. I was happy it happened.

Craig: Yeah, me too.

John: Yay!

Craig: Me too.

John: All right, so I’ll pick appropriately triumphant end music.

Craig: Yeah, something good! But not, like no I Will Survive. No Gloria Gaynor.

John: No, it will be some good other anthem.

Craig: Yes.

John: My thinking cap is already running. And, in fact, it’s already playing under our talking right now.

Craig: Is it It’s Raining Men? [laughs] ‘Cause no Weather Girls will do. I can’t take it.

John: Thank you, Craig. Have a great week.

Craig: Thank you, too, John. Bye-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. How are you, Craig?

Craig: Doing all right today. I finished up a draft, so I actually have a little bit of a day off here. It’s quite nice.

John: That’s pretty amazing. You finished up — do you celebrate when you finish a draft? Is there a ritual for you or anything like that?

Craig: You know, there isn’t. And that probably speaks to my total lack of romanticism about what we do. [laughs] It’s just another day. I mean, it’s like, how many scripts have you finished at this point? How many drafts have you finished? We’ve gone through this, I think, what, like 50 or something a piece?

John: Oh, easily. A lot of times. I do remember when I was first starting out, when I finished a draft my big treat for myself was I would go to Panda Express at Century City, because I couldn’t really afford to go to Panda Express all that often. But, Panda Express was my big treat. And I would spend my $10 and get my three items and my Diet Pepsi, and that was a good afternoon.

Craig: I love that, (A), you couldn’t afford Panda Express normally. Panda Express is one of those restaurants that makes food for seemingly less than the cost of the ingredients of the food. Like, I never understood how Taco Bell got away with tacos. I think the idea is that they are loss leaders and then they make their money on the soda.

John: I don’t understand how the chow mein/rice ratio works. Because if you ask for white rice, they will get it for you special. But the white rice has to be much less expensive than their chow mein. The chow mein, I don’t know.

Craig: No, you’re right. It has to be.

John: Although anytime you have the noodle products, they are always surprisingly cheap. Top Ramen couldn’t possibly… — How could they sell it for 10 cents a pack? But they do.

Craig: My first apartment in Los Angeles was right after I graduated, and I shared a two-bedroom apartment on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Magnolia with my college buddy, Gene Yoon, who he had some relatives who lived in the area and they are Korean. And he would get these huge big boxes of this particular ramen that really only Korean people ate. So it wasn’t Top Ramen that was sort of watered down for whitey.

And I remember, it was called jajangmyeon. Jajangmyeon. And I think “jajang” was salt, or something like that. Anyway, the point, basically translated it was like “Oh My God, This is Salty.” And it was the best. And we would just eat it, and eat it, and eat it. It had to be super bad for you.

John: Would your ears start ringing after it from all the sodium?

Craig: No, but I think I would get very headachy and I would feel kind of ill. But it tasted really good. Jajangmyeon. So, hopefully we can find a link to some good jajangmyeon out there.

John: Absolutely, so everyone can purchase it up. Today I’m hoping that we can do some craft talk, but before we get to the get talk, I do want to talk one sort of businessy thing, which is I have been swimming in contracts all week. And contracts are one of these things, the necessary evils of the screenwriting profession.

And it came up originally because last Saturday I was on this panel at the WGA for new writers talking about contracts.

Craig: Oh, that sounds great. I wish I could have been there. [laughs]

John: I know. Next time maybe, Craig, you can come to one of these.

Craig: [laughs]

John: So I was just the token, just like the other writer who wasn’t the legal professional on this panel to talk about a writer’s perspective on it. And a few just bullet points I can hit just because screenwriters are going to have to think about these at some point.

Conversationally, you will hear talking about contracts and you have to separate the idea of the Big-C-contract, which is the minimum basic agreement that all screenwriters are employed under by the WGA auspices, and then your individual contract for a project.

And I remember being really confused by that at the start. As a member of the WGA there is a set of minimums: the least you are going to get paid for anything; certain things about how your employment has to work. And you can never negotiate for less than those terms.

But, on each individual project you will be signing a contract. And for TV writers it ends up being not especially important that the start, because like a staff writer deal is just really, really straightforward and kind of boilerplate. But anytime you are making a feature deal there is actually a 30-page contract this is going to be especially made for that project. And a lot of it is boilerplate, but you do actually have to look through that.

So, this workshop was talking through how to read that contract, what the writing periods, mean. We didn’t get into force majeure or anything crazy like that, but it was interesting.

So, the other reason why contracts have been so important for me this week is there is a project that may happen, may not happen, but that I need to figure out the underlying rights for. And the underlying rights are so complicated.

And so it is based on a preexisting thing, then it was a movie, then it was other things. And so I’m going through these old contracts from like 1954. And some of these things were only on microfilm, and so you are asking people in London to copy things.

Craig: Geez.

John: It was so fascinating because like I’m looking at this and, like, thank god someone held onto this. And then I’m realizing, do I have all the old contracts for Barbarella that I worked on 12 years ago? I know my lawyer does, but would I actually be able to find those? I’m not sure I would be. So, it has really reinforced how important it is to hold onto all of those pieces of paper that you are like, “I don’t care about those.” You do need to hold onto them.

Craig: Underlying rights — that’s a real job in and of itself. There is a book that Lindsay Doran brought to me and Scott Frank, called Three Bags Full. A really cool book that a German author — yes, she’s German. It was a novel, a detective story. A shepherd is murdered and his sheep decide to figure out who did it. And it was sort of like Babe meets noir; it was really cool.

And so Scott was going to produce with Lindsay and I was going to write it. And all we had to do was just get the rights. No big deal, right? And then it was insane. Like the German company had the rights for a German movie, but not American movie. But we couldn’t make the American movie until they decided about the German movie. And was it in development or not? And plus the German movie might be animated and da-da-da.

In the middle of all of it there was one guy who was going to make it all happen. And he died. [laughs] And at some point after two or three years of this stuff, all three of us just went, “Eh, screw it.”

John: Yeah. Too complicated. And maybe this is reached on this project. You never know that you are going to be able to actually untangle all these things. It’s detective work.

Craig: It is.

John: It’s easier than writing. And that’s sort of our topic for today is we want to talk about writer’s block…

Craig: [laughs] Writer’s block.

John: …which is one of those — I kind of hate to say the words “writer’s block” because it’s such a cliché. And I think it is used in ways… — It’s used to describe very different things as a sort of blanket catch-all.

Craig: John, you don’t think of yourself as this bottle full of wonderful creative energy and then there is this weird cork on top that is blocking it all in? You don’t think of yourself that way? [laughs]

John: Yeah. And what frustrates me is that most of our perceptions of writer’s block are media portrayals that came out of movies that someone had to write. But no one actually experiences what you see in movies as writer’s block, that thing where is like I am ripping the pages out the typewriter and crumpling them out. Or, like, “I don’t know what to write; I’m just going to sit here and stare at this typewriter.” That doesn’t actually happen.

Craig: Yeah. And neither does the opposite, which is when they finally kiss the girl do they sit down and write this brilliant thing all in a day. Neither of those. Again, romanticization of writing.

John: And I think it’s dangerous because aspiring writers who are listening to this podcast think, “Well that’s what a writer’s life should be,” and it’s like, well, that’s actually not what a writer’s life generally is, ever. Writing is difficult. Writing is frustrating. It is hard and you have a whole big bundle of fears to approach. But there is also procrastination which gets tied into there.

So, I would like to sort of separate out the threads of what we kind of mean by writer’s block. There’s the “I don’t really want to write today, or this minute, or this week.”

Craig: Right.

John: Which is a kind of writer’s block. And there’s the “I don’t know how to do this scene; I don’t know how to finish this thing up and I’m stuck on this moment.” And they can sometimes be the same issue, but often they aren’t the same issue at all. And it’s weird that we ascribe a certain kind of laziness as this big romantic idea.

We don’t romanticize the, “I don’t want to make this uncomfortable phone call to somebody.” But it’s often the same kind of dilemma.

Craig: We have to make a discrimination between the writing and the writer. Writing is special. The act is special. I think it’s a wonderful thing. And I think the result is special.

Writers are just people. We are just meat sacks like everybody else with the same issues. Yes, there are going to be days where you just don’t feel like writing because you’re tired or because frankly your brain might still be processing it on some other level. There are going to be days when you are afraid to write, and fear is obviously a huge part, because you have loaded up your mind with stuff that has nothing to do with what you are writing. Am I good enough? Is this as good as another thing I just read? Is this what they want? Will this pay the bills? Will it sell? Will they like it? Da-da da-da-da, and on, and on, and on. None of which has anything to do with the words on the page.

There’s another kind of thing that happens. I guess I would call it just fastidiousness, where suddenly we become obsessive and OCD about every single word, where we are crafting it as if it is being chiseled in stone. And that is a dangerous one, and that’s a very tough one to navigate for writers because we must exercise care. We must be intentional about the words we use.

On the other hand, if you become so over-intentional and so paralyzed by perfection, you are not going to make it past the first sentence. And, when you finally do, that sentence is going to be crap. It’s just going to be overworked crap.

John: I think we have identified three pillars, and maybe we will find a fourth pillar. So, here are the three pillars of writer’s block that I think we have identified. You were just talking about perfectionism which I think is very true. It’s that thing where like everything has to be exactly one way, and if it’s not exactly one way I can’t do anything. There is perfectionism of the words on the page. I also find there is perfectionism of habit. So, like, “Well, I can only write if I have this kind of pencil and the sun is coming through the window at exactly this angle.” That ritualization — that drives me crazy. So, perfectionism.

There’s laziness, which is just pure old like procrastination… — A normal person would say, “Well you are being a bum and you are just not doing anything.” Well, we sort of romanticize it, like, “Well I’m a writer, so I’m thinking, I’m mediating.” No you’re not. You are playing XBox.

Craig: Right.

John: And then there’s fear. There’s a unique kind of fear that kicks in with writing. It’s like, “Is this thing I’m writing right now going to be good enough? Am I good enough overall? Is this what they want? Will people love me if I write this? Am I writing the wrong thing?”

Half the time when I feel myself sort of stalling on a project it’s because I’m not sure it’s even the right thing I should be spending my time on.

Craig: Yeah. All of these choices will sabotage your moment. I look at writing as a moment. I don’t look at it as a 9 to 5 job. And it doesn’t matter to me; 9 to 5 is as arbitrary as anything. To me, writing is a moment. There is a moment in the day where writing happens. And I don’t care what time of day it is. Personally, I know other people really like to kind of dial it into a certain time of day.

But in that moment you are going to write. And the writing will happen, and then it’s done. And everything that can disrupt that moment needs to be examined for what it is. It is not a mystical barrier that is keeping you from your work. It’s just good old fashioned fear stuff. You have to face it head on. Have to.

John: Oh, one of the things, you are talking about writing being difficult — it’s about the choices you have to make. And anytime you have to make a choice, your brain has to do work. And your brain has to literally spend some calories and burn some glucose in order to make that choice. And so if you are choosing like, “Am I going to walk to that meeting, or am I going to drive my car to the meeting?” Well that’s a little choice. If you are choosing it, like, What do I want to order off this menu?” Well that’s a choice. And sometimes that choice can be taxing.

Well, writing is about a thousand choices per page, probably more than 1,000. You are looking at “What’s the next word?” “What’s the next sentence?” “How do I get from this moment to that moment?” Writing is a lot of hard mental work. And it’s harder mental work when you are starting out, and it’s a little bit easier mental work once you develop some skills.

But, there’s a reason why the days where I have had to kick out seven pages, I’m exhausted, just because it is literally…

Craig: Draining.

John: …calories being spent.

Craig: Yeah. And it’s really important for people to contextualize that properly. It doesn’t mean you’re blocked if you’ve gotten four pages and you suddenly feel empty. It just means you wrote. That’s all. That’s supposed to happen. There’s no such thing as runner’s block when you finally fall down at mile 30 and poop yourself. That’s just your body [laughs] stopping, you know.

It’s the same thing with writing. You will exhaust yourself. Although, I will say that there’s an interesting thing about…you know you mention all these choices that we have to make. And so there are these micro choices within the moment. There are the macro choices that help fit into the larger story. So, your brain is working on multiple levels. It’s playing Star Trek chess, and yet there is this phenomenon where starting makes the all ensuing decisions come a little easier.

It’s a little bit, like, you learn in physics there’s a certain amount of energy you have to put into water to raise it one degree. And you keep putting that amount of energy into water, it will go up a degree, it will go up a degree, it will go up a degree. Until it hits 212 Fahrenheit or 100 degrees Celsius, at which point suddenly it has put in a lot of energy and the temperature doesn’t move at all. It doesn’t move, it doesn’t move, it doesn’t move, it doesn’t move. And then kaboom, it’s boiling, and now it goes back degree, degree, degree, degree, degree.

And I think the same thing happens with writing. You will just — I think starting is like moving through a boiling point. And you just have to put an enormous amount of energy just to start. Sometimes putting my fingers on the keyboard is the hardest thing I do in the day. And then you just start. And then, I don’t know, there’s something about writing itself that makes the rest of the writing easier. Do you find that?

John: I do find that. In terms of the overall project, that’s why I tend to go away someplace and barricade myself in a hotel room for three or four days and just hand crank through pages, because I just have to get some speed, I have to get some momentum, and sort of break the back of it.

And once I have gotten, you know, if I have gotten 40 pages written by hand, I know I’m going to finish the script because I have some steam behind me. But I won’t get anything done until literally I arrive at the hotel room and then I start writing.

But in terms of the daily work, I do definitely find that I will do whatever I can to sort of avoid opening up the file. But once I finally open up the file I’m like, oh, yeah, it’s actually not so bad. There’s always stuff to do. And let’s talk about some techniques for just attacking sort of those three pillars — that perfectionism, that getting started, and the fear.

Craig: Good.

John: So let’s talk about just the getting started, literally making yourself do some work. To me, it’s helpful if I have a time a day or I have blocked off some time saying this is the time I am going to write, but what helps me more than anything else is just like literally setting a kitchen timer saying, “Okay, these next 20 minutes I’m going to write. It will be up on my screen and I will be doing some work on there.” And when the timer goes off I’m allowed to stop.

I don’t have to stop. I know there’s some writers who have this rule where they will work for 50 minutes, and then they will take a break for 10 minutes. And if you try to engage them, this is more like a TV writer kind of in a room thing, if you try to engage them about the story during the 10 minute break they will say, “No, no, respect the 10.”

Craig: That’s dumb.

John: I think it’s kind of amazing.

Craig: [laughs] That’s just stupid. “Respect the 10?” Shut up. Come on, really?

John: Well here’s what I like about “Respect the 10” is that you are giving yourself permission to stop thinking about it for 10 minutes, and you really are going to think about other things so that when you go back onto it, you really will go back onto it.

Craig: I get that.

John: Same thing with a diet and having a cheat day. The cheat day is tremendously helpful.

Craig: Yeah, but then don’t sit with other people who are trying to do work. Go to the bathroom, take a walk.

John: Well the idea is that everybody should get up and walk around and do other things and come back.

Craig: Oh, I don’t like anything where your work process is enforced by some sort of Soviet work clock. I really do feel like everybody has their own rhythm. I, personally, I’m a sprinter. My whole thing is, I don’t work and I just think and grind my teeth and worry and imagine the scene, and take a long shower, and think about the scene, and talk the scene through my head, and take a walk. And then when it’s time to write, I know exactly what I want to write. And then I write it. And I write in a straight blast. This is why I can’t be in a room full of other writers.

John: You are writing on a straight blast though on that scene. You are not trying to write past that section that you have already figured out.

Craig: No, I’ve decided, and this is where in terms of the strategies, this is why I think having a terrific outline is such a huge help. It’s not only something that helps you from a craft point of view of understanding the Gestalt of your story as you are writing inside of things, but it also helps you break your work down in manageable chunks.

So, it’s not an open-ended question. There is no — you know what the sequence is. You know what comes next. And you can make a decision about what portion of work you’re going to feel accountable to today. And in doing so, when you sit down to write you are not burdened by the notion that there’s this huge script that needs to be written. All you are burdened by is the notion that there’s three to five pages that need to be written. And that’s very helpful to me.

John: I would get more specific that you are not responsible for writing the movie today, you are responsible for writing this one scene. And it’s particularly times that you are responsible for writing how these characters are going to enter into this scene. And if you don’t get anything more than that done, well you at least got that done.

I will often, as we talked about before on the show, I write out of sequence a lot of times. And so I will have enough of an outline that if I just don’t want to write the next scene, or I don’t know how to write that next scene, I will skip ahead and do something else that I do feel like writing. Because there are days you want to write something funny. There’s days you want to write an action scene. And then there’s the days you want to write those people kind of walking through doors, those sort of necessary scenes that move the plot forward but aren’t really the most important moments in a script.

Work on those. And sometimes the reason why I am leaning towards those is because I’m afraid of some of the big moments. And so I will knock out some easy ones. And that’s okay.

Craig: And part of that is learning your own rhythm. For me, I can’t do that. I just can’t. I get so panicked at the thought that I’m writing something that is disconnected from the things that come before it. So, I always work in order. But I will allow myself a variable attention depending on what the scene is. If there is a car chase, I am pretty sure I can handle the car chase in five/six pages in a day.

If there is a moment of revelation, or if it is the first five pages of the script, I might take a week. I mean, I know my rhythms now. I know that I will take two weeks to write the first 25 pages, because I will write them, and rewrite them, and really love them and care about them. Because those will turn into the rest of the movie.

You know, the last 10 pages, sometimes you can sprint because things are sort of inexorable. They must happen.

John: Yeah. Here’s the danger though. I feel like people know that they can sort of sprint through those last 10 pages. And those last 10 pages of many people’s scripts are terrible.

Craig: Yeah, you can’t do that. You’ve got to really have a great ending.

John: So that’s why early in the process, like, I will try to get my first 20, 25 pages done quite early in the process, and then I will skip ahead and try to write the ending. Even though stuff may change in the ending, but if I can write those last 10 pages early in the process, first off I know that I am going to finish the finish the thing because I have already written how it ends. And I know that that last desperate sprinting will happen someplace in the middle of the script where it’s kind of not going to — not that it doesn’t matter, but if the beginning of the script is really good and the end of the script is really good, and the middle has a few places that could use some work, that’s okay.

Craig: Yeah. The reason I think the ending is sometimes easier is because, and again, I outline very thoroughly so I know what’s supposed to happen. I know the ending. I don’t start writing unless I really know the ending. But, by the time you get to the end, your decision path tree has been pruned down to a single trunk. You know everybody’s voice, what they sound like, what they have done, where they’ve gone. They have already had every random thing thrown at them, every conflict, every obstacle.

So now it really is about resolution. And that to me is easier to write because there’s just fewer choices to make. But see, you and I have come to understand ourselves and I want to say to people, if you are struggling, first of all accept the way you write. If you write the way John writes, that’s the way you write. If you write the way write, that’s the way you write.

Accept it. Love it. Don’t fight it. Don’t try other ways. Don’t feel like there’s somebody else’s shoes are going to fit better on your feet than your own. They are not.

And, either way, take our general advice which is to not feel that you are writing the movie that day, just love the scene that you are writing. Show it as much love as you can because that’s all you have to do on this day is that scene, or two scenes.

John: I have said this at conferences before, but I used to say that I have a lot of bad habits. And now I just say I have habits. I don’t label them. It’s just the way I write. And it’s not necessarily the most productive way that I could be writing, or some other writer would probably be more productive with better habits, different habits.

Craig: Yeah.

John: These are just my habits. And so I do tend to treat my life a little bit like midterms where I will kind of lounge around for a bit, and then I will have to really scramble to get stuff done in the last two weeks. And I may have some overnighters and stuff like that.

That still happens some, and it’s kind of okay. It’s just the way it’s going to work out.

Craig: Yeah. You just got to know yourself. I’m much more of a slow and steady kind of guy. I sort of look at the calendar and I think, okay, realistically I know I am going to do three to four pages a day. So, I’ve got 115 pages to write, and I’m writing 5 days a week, let’s plot it out. We start on Monday, we end in this week. And I usually get pretty close. Sometimes I beat it by a week, you know?

John: There are times where I will dangerously do that thing where like, “Well I was able to write 10 pages a day for that last project, for that last little sprint,” and that can be really dangerous where that starts to be like, “Well, I could do it in five days before, maybe I can do it in four days now.” And that does become dangerous.

Craig: My most hated writing feeling is not writer’s block, because I don’t get writer’s block, because I don’t believe it exists, the kind that we imagine. My worst feeling is knowing that I have a certain amount of writing to do and not enough time to do it the way I want.

Because I fear that more than anything, just literally my eyes are getting heavy and my brain isn’t working and I must write. Because I fear that more than anything, I don’t allow it to happen. That’s the thing I avoid.

John: Good. You should.

Craig: Thank you. [laughs]

John: No, I can’t defend situations where that has had to happen, but there have been times where I have had to write under less than ideal circumstances because I’m shooting a TV pilot, plus this other script is due. And so I will have to go from like the set back to my little trailer in Vancouver and write some new pages and go back.

And sometimes that has to happen. And sometimes it’s not going to be ideal. I would hope that my 80% is better than a lot of people’s 100%, and therefore it is going to move the project forward.

Craig: Well, there’s something about production writing that I find so adrenalizing. So, if I get a call at 11pm, or if I’m sitting on the set and I’m told, “You have 20 minutes,” sometimes there’s just this total adrenaline rush and you get all wired up and it’s actually kind of fun, and frankly, a little romantic.

John: Yeah. My happiest writing times have been the ones where for whatever reasons the stars lined up right and, “Well, this is the movie that they have asked you to do, these are the weeks that you have to do it.” And it’s just like, “Oh, this fits exactly in this little spot.”

And, so, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was that situation. Frankenweenie was that situation where it was literally like, “Oh, I could do it right now. I could give it to you in a couple of weeks.” And there’s the movie going off to shoot.

A lot of the times it’s the projects that you have been waiting on for too long, that suddenly it’s like, “Oh, now I am actually free to write that.”

Craig: Right.

John: And like, “Oh my god, the enthusiasm for starting to write this has evaporated.” That can be the real danger. Scott Frank has talked about that on other projects.

Craig: It’s true, where suddenly you come to it and you are like, “Oh, it’s just a dead thing to me. I feel like I’m going back over ground that I’ve already kind of been over, but I haven’t really been over.” You must be enthusiastic. You have to have great passion. That’s why I’m always amused when producers will say, “Would you please write this?” And you will say, “Eh, no, that’s not for me. Thank you, but no thank you; I’m going to pass.” And they say, “No, you have to. You have to.”

Why would you even want me to at this point? I don’t want to. If I don’t want to, it’s just not going to be good. It’s going to be even worse than it normally is. [laughs] Because writing has to come from some sort of enthusiasm. It must, or else you are dead.

John: Yeah. One of my worst writing moments was I had another guaranteed step left on a deal for this project, and clearly the project wasn’t going to move forward, and so I talked to the executive and said, “Listen, you don’t want me to do this, I don’t want to do this, let’s just figure this out.” He was like, “No, you’re going to do your next step, and you are going to do our notes.” And, like, “You are seriously going to hold me to these notes on this project that you don’t want? And you are going to pay me these X dollars?” I’m basically telling him, like, “I am going to be willing to settle for less than that if you just don’t make me write this thing.” “No, I’m going to make you write this thing.”

So I was kind of happy with the draft I wrote, but also like I’m sitting down at the computer every day knowing they are never going to shoot this. They are never going to make this. He is doing this out of sort of a dick move pride to, “Oh, okay, I’m going to make you do this.”

Craig: Yeah, it’s…

John: I haven’t worked there again, since then, so people can maybe figure out what that was. But it was a very weird, not healthy situation.

Craig: Yeah. That’s pretty bad. And it happens. There are times when, you know, you are essentially a porn start and you are being told to get on in there and do it again, and you just did it. You don’t want to do it again, or you don’t like what you are about to do.

John: Yeah. And there are situations where a piece of talent has come onboard. Like the director comes onboard for a project that you have been working on for awhile, you may disagree about this one thing you have to do, where you have to go into the 17th meeting with this actor who has these notes on thing. You are like, “Oh my god, I can’t believe we are back here again.” But because it is your movie you will do that, and that’s the reality of the collaborative medium.

I can always do that when it’s a couple days, I can survive anything for a couple days. But when I have to go off and do a full rewrite of something, it’s like, ooh, that’s where it gets really brutal.

Craig: I will say that I don’t really write with — I guess I don’t write with a goal in mind beyond write the best script I can write.

Even if you tell me, “We are never going to make this, but we are paying you to write a script, just so we can read it and throw it out,” I would still sort of approach it the same way I approach everything which is I just get excited. Because it’s hard enough to get these movies made. So, you have to reconcile yourself early on to the notion that you are going to be writing futilely on some things, and if you are starting out and you are sort of sitting there blocked up because you are thinking, “Is it going to sell?” “Who’s going to like it?” And so forth. All I can say to you is: Who cares? It’s irrelevant.

All that matters today, all that matters right now for you at your desk is what is the scene. What are they wearing? What are they looking at? What’s the purpose? What’s the point? What’s their intention? How do we get into it? What happens in the middle? How do we get out? What’s changed? Just do the writing.

John: You are getting the opportunity to perform your craft for people. And hopefully getting paid for it. These are good things, so you shouldn’t minimize those.

Craig: Yeah. And somebody might like it down the line, you know?

John: Someone just might like it. Someone might love it. Let’s talk about that someone might love it, because I find when I have guaranteed to somebody that they are going to read something is really the only guarantee I can make to myself that I will finish it. And so sometimes it is truly a deadline where you have to hand this into the producer, the executive, the director, at a certain time.

But more often what is helpful for me is I have promised a friend, like, I will give you that draft on Friday. And I will give them that draft on Friday. I am very true to my word on those kinds of things. And that is hugely helpful in structuring my attention and focusing in on what really needs to get done so that I can hand that draft in. And it can also, you know, we are talking about sort of laziness, but also the perfectionism is that sometimes people will just not stop writing. They won’t let you take it out of their hands. And you have to show it to people.

They aren’t private diaries that you are going to hold to your chest for the rest of your life. You have to let people read them and respond to them. And they may not like them. Or they may not like parts of it. And that’s the reality of it, too.

So, aiming for perfectionism, which is like there’s no typos, the commas are in the right places, it all makes sense. You are not changing how you are spelling a character’s name. That’s not the kind of perfectionism I am talking about. It’s the endless tinkering, and tinkering, and tinkering; because you can spend your whole life writing one script, and that is doing no one any good.

Craig: That’s right. That’s exactly right. Perfectionism isn’t really perfectionism. You are not perfecting anything. Perfectionism is protectionism. You are protecting yourself, or you are attempting to protect yourself from any sling shot or arrow. Tough. They are coming anyway. They are coming in an unfair way. It’s not fair. Somebody may read it and hate it even though it’s great.

Or, what may happen is they might read it and say, “Great. This is a pretty typical first draft. Liked part of it, didn’t like part of it. There’s some big problems.” Meanwhile you have been in the shower practicing your Oscar speech. That’s okay. But just understand that you are not actually perfecting things when you fall into the trap of “perfectionism.”

You are just shielding your script. You think you are shielding your script from the trauma that’s coming. And you’re not, so stop.

John: A related thing that happens is someone says, “Oh, I just need you to do one more rewrite.” And those endless rewrites are really just kind of moving commas around. You are so frozen in what the idea of this thing is that you are just revisiting the same things again and again. And sometimes that happens even when you are writing your first draft is that your process of writing the first draft is essentially you go back to page one and you read through the entire script and you get to page 106 and then you start to work on page 106. And that’s not going to be an especially productive way to go through your career’s work.

I mean, it’s important that you know what’s happening in your entire script, that each new scene feels like it’s building off the one before it, but so much I find they are not so much writing as they are reading what they have written, again, and again, and again.

Craig: Right. In a kind of fetishistic sort of protectionist way. It sort of feeds also into trouble down the line when people do read the script and give notes. The care gap is enormous. The care that a writer has for the words on the page compared to the care any reader has for the words on the page is separated by this massive chasm.

And so, on the other side, on the reader’s side they will say, “I just didn’t — I got really bored with this whole scene. I just don’t think we need it.” And all the way across the chasm where you are standing, that scene is the function and result of 1,000 decisions that are incredibly important, and were painful and difficult for you. And then there is this emotional reaction.

But the funny thing is, if you say to a writer, “Here, read this screenplay,” writers will read screenplays just the way everybody else does. That’s one of the reasons why arbitration is so fascinating to me because we read our scripts and we think, “Well look, I read my script and then I read his script, and his script is just like a version of mine.”

No, no, no. [laughs] Your script, you are not really reading your script. You wrote your script. You lived your script. You’re just reading that one. That one is just reading to you.

John: Yeah. Your reading of your own script is basically you recapturing the experience of having written the script. And so that is why that one line that is so incredibly meaningful to you is not meaningful to the other person who is reading your script because they didn’t spend 8 hours perfecting it.

Craig: That’s right. And they also only see little bits, like the tips of the iceberg sticking out of the water. Whereas you imagine this whole florid, beautiful, color-filled world of sounds, sights, and so forth. And you just have to kind of let that stuff — it’s part of writing, you need to do it, it’s incredibly important. But, on the other hand, don’t sit there chiseling away at tiny little branches thinking that that is what is going to save you when the read comes.

John: Yeah. The bigger issues are always going to be bigger issues. It’s never going to be about that one sentence.

Craig: Correct. I mean, listen, if all there is is an argument about one sentence, man, you nailed it.

John: So, let’s see if we can think of anymore tactics for people avoid writer’s block, whether it is the romantic writer’s block or just not getting their work done. So we have talked about timers. To me it’s just the discipline to force myself to sit down and actually stare at the computer sometimes is really necessary.

I find changing my environment is helpful, so that’s why I go off and barricade myself to start things. If I have been doing most of my stuff at one computer, I will pick up the other computer and work on it there. I will handwrite things if I need to. I will go through, and we have both talked about how much printing is helpful for proofreading; I find printing is helpful sort of along the way, too. That way I can get some work done.

So even if I can’t stand to stare at the screen anymore, you can still look at the printed version and make some changes on the printed version and get some stuff done. And typing up those changes will often get me started again working through the new scenes.

Craig: And printing stuff out is proof to you that you actually did something. I mean, you can only see one page at a time typically on your computer screen, so you often feel like you have been working for weeks and all you have is a page. [laughs] But when you print it out you start to realize that this is accruing. And you are writing, you’re on your way.

I guess my bit of advice is to do something that isn’t writing, so a walk or a long shower, or just lie on your bed, whatever you want to do, and just start imagining the scene. So it’s not writing, it’s just daydreaming. And just daydream the scene. And once you have daydreamed an interesting scene, the writing is almost academic. At that point you are literally just transcribing what you day dreamt.

John: Yeah. I call that looping. And so that is the process of envisioning the scene. You have kind of rough blocking that happens, and the characters start talking to each other, and you figure out how the information in the scene happens and what kind of stuff happens in it. And it just loops, and loops, and loops. It’s like, oh, okay, I get what that is.

And then I will do a scribble version which is like the quickest version of what that is. And so sometimes that’s into the computer, but more often it is literally just scribbled on a piece of paper, just so I have it down so I can remember what it was. And from there it’s pretty simple to write the actual scene. Then it’s just words.

Craig: I totally — I do the same thing. I will sort of daydream out a scene, and I will imagine an exchange, and just run it through my mind until it feels like it’s pithy and purposeful. And then sometimes when I, let’s say I’m on a walk, when I come back home I write it in an email to myself and I just write the dialogue down because I know the stuff that is going around it. And then the fun part is when you sit down to write it, you are actually free now to concentrate on other things. You have already figured out the ins, the outs, who’s in it, the why, the what are they saying, all the rest of it.

So you actually get to craft all those other little things around it in layers — what’s going on? How can the actual setting feed into what’s going on? Is there music? Is there sound effects? Is there what? You get to jazz it up a little bit, and so suddenly a scene isn’t just flat talking, there’s more going on.

John: Well great. Well these were some helpful ways to talk about avoiding writer’s block, which we should probably think if there is another term for writer’s block, because it’s a serious of syndromes.

Craig: Yes.

John: But we have two questions, so I thought we would maybe get to two last questions today.

Craig: Go for it.

John: Rick asks, “My partner and I just got an option deal at a company that wants to make our script. A director has been chosen. We got to attend the interview meeting, so we have met him and like him.”

Good, congratulations Rick.

Craig: Yeah.

John: “We’re having our first notes session with the producer and director at the company’s office. I’m wondering if it would be out of line for us to record the meeting? We don’t need to be secretive about it, but I wonder if it would turn them off even by asking. Is this considered unprofessional? I’m curious what you think.”

Craig: I mean, I know why you would want to do it. It’s not a good idea, I don’t think. I do feel like people need to feel free to talk in a way that isn’t going to come back and haunt them. They don’t want to have to have any disagreements or weird things preserved for posterity. I mean, can’t you just take notes like everybody else? That’s what I do.

John: I generally do take notes. I don’t pull out my iPhone and record it. But I will say that if it works for you, I don’t think it is necessarily a bad idea. I mean, the same way that our podcast has a transcript, you can send off that file and have it transcribed, and then you have all those notes and stuff.

And you look at the famous Lucas, and Spielberg, and what’s his face’s meeting about Raiders of the Lost Ark, and that’s amazing. And that exists because they recorded their meeting. So that’s what I would say.

Craig: Well then here is what I would suggest, because I agree with you on that regard — it is very useful to have a proper transcript of something. Suggest that maybe they do it. Because if they can control it I think they will be a little more at ease. I personally would feel uncomfortable about an employee recording my thoughts and then taking it with them. And ultimately that’s what we are and I think we have to just… — It’s not because I feel like we shouldn’t be allowed to. I’m just playing the psychological game of being the comfort giver. And I feel like that is our strongest move to protect our work.

And so maybe get them to do it. Make it their idea.

John: I would say if it is your own project, or this is an indie film and you are meeting with the director, and this is all under your control and your auspices, then sure. It’s whatever works for you. I think Craig makes a good point in terms of the studio of it all makes a lot of sense.

Philip from Pittsburg writes, “One of the scripts I’ve written seems to be dying by my own sensibleness. The script I wrote before this was a $200 million space-based fan fiction beast, so I designed a studio film with a limited budget.” So essentially he wrote a $200 million big expensive tent pole movie. And it was so big, everyone said, “This is so big,” and so he wrote something to be smaller. He says this is like a $30 million, limited special effects. It’s smaller. And now people are reading this one and saying it’s too small.

Craig: Okay.

John: “So, my question is this: does it make sense to write a $200 million spec which will get attention, knowing the industry will scale it back, or to write a $30 million version and hope that people will understand how sensible you have been?”

Craig: What do you want to write, Philip? Write what you want to write, because that’s the only script that is going to be good. They are going to come back at you and say it’s too big, it’s too small, it’s too black, it’s too white, it’s not international, blah, blah, blah. They have a thousand reasons of why they are just saying no.

If you write something great, that’s what they’ll talk about. They will say, “This was a great script. I wish we could make it. I wish we had $200 million to make it. I wish this, I wish that, but it’s a great script.” Write what you want to write. That’s my advice.

John: I would also say that the Goldilocks problem of like that’s too hot, it’s too cold, it’s too big, it’s too small — it will happen no matter what. And if you are a new writer, you are going to hear it a little more often. If you are a more experienced writer, then they will tell it to your agents more often, but it’s always going to be a situation. They always want a much bigger movie for much less money.

And right now we are in this weird environment where Warner Bros., for example, sort of got a rap for like they will only make $200 million movies. They are not making anything smaller. Other places are trying to make smaller movies and they won’t do anything big, they won’t take a gamble. It’s not your job to suss that out.

Craig: Yeah.

John: By the time you try to chase whatever that trend is, it’s already going to be past. So if you are a person who wants to write the most expensive movies ever made, then the script you are writing should be one of those most expensive movies ever made. If you feel like doing the smaller thing, do the smaller thing.

Craig: Yeah. You can’t write a size. There’s no such thing as writing as size. You write a story. You write characters, a story, a plot, theme. It’s invested with some kind of passion, your voice, your point of view, your intention. Don’t write size.

Put it out of your head; write what you want to write.

John: Okay. I’m going to disagree with Craig on one point here. I think you do have to have an understanding of size for… — You are going to make some choices; and if you are facing two choices between, like, “Does my movie go to Mars or not go to Mars?” That’s a pretty fundamental choice. And how you are going to do that and sort of who is going to read it is going to be affected by how you make that choice and sort of how you are selling that choice.

Sometimes you will have to understand what’s going to be incredibly expensive and what’s not going to be incredibly expensive. Take a movie like Ted for example, which is the animated Mark Wahlberg movie with the talking stuffed bear. You are going to have to make some choices about how you are going to have that bear interacting with the world, because that is going to influence whether this is a $5 million indie movie, or a $50 million Fox movie.

And so you would make some choices there, I think.

Craig: Yeah, but my point is you are making those choices anyway. Rather than make them in order to satisfy some unseen buyer, make them for what you want. It’s different — when you are hired to write something, when they come to you and say, “Listen, we have a project or an idea; we are looking to make this movie for this much money,” then you have to have an understanding of how to write to a size.

But when you are a new writer and you are writing specs, just write your spec. Because if I’m a producer and I get a brilliant script, but it’s going to cost $20 million more than I have, I’m going to buy that script and then I am going to have you write $20 million out of it. Or I’m going to have somebody else write $20 million out of it. Because the money isn’t what is making that great, and that one $20 million scene isn’t what’s making it great.

What’s making it great is you and the writing, and the passion, and the idea. So, I say write.

John: I agree with most of what you just said, especially the distinction between if they are bringing you in to write something they have a sense of what size movie they want it to be for. And as you get more experienced and have made more movies you get a good sense of what really costs money and what doesn’t really cost money. And you understand that the studios don’t really understand what that is, and you probably have a better sense of where the money is actually falling.

But I will say if you want to write this character drama about a murder on a space station, understand that that could be very, very expensive. And if they zero gravity space station of it all is not integral to your idea, you may find it more useful to write something that could be done in a different way.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, obviously you want the bigness to matter. But I would say to you, if you got a great story, like if you got a script and it was spectacular, just loved it, and it was, as you described, the character piece in a space station, and you really loved it. But you were running a studio where you had just a budget cap, $75 million, couldn’t go over. And this thing was like a super mega Jerry Bruckheimer kind of deal. Wouldn’t you at least then talk to that guy about maybe rewriting some other stuff that you thought he would be right for?

John: Yeah. I might talk to that guy. I might think that guy is great. I do want to argue for having some sense of what size and scale is going to be, even in the inception stage. Because, you look at Solaris. Some people loved Solaris, but that was an incredibly expensive tiny movie, and that’s all sorts of frustration down the road.

Craig: Well, it was an incredibly expensive tiny movie when it was Soderbergh and George Clooney. But it wasn’t an incredibly expensive tiny movie when it was first made. It was just a cheap tiny movie. And so I guess my point is there will be time for you to figure out size and all the rest of it, Philip. But for now, the worst thing in the world you could do is say, “Well, I wrote a script and they said it was too big, and so now I’m going to write a small movie.” That’s just a bad motivation. Don’t do that.

John: I would agree with you there. Craig, do you have One Cool Thing you want to talk about this week?

Craig: No. [laughs]

John: No? I’ll share my mine with you because you would enjoy it, too. A lot of people are talking about it this week because a lot of people have linked to it. I first heard about it from Tara Rubin who is a casting director we worked with who loved the site and turned me onto it. It’s Old Jews Telling Jokes.

Craig: [laughs]

John: And so what they do is they interview old Jewish comedians and have them tell a joke. And it’s great. It’s great because it’s funny, but it’s also great because if you are a screenwriter you really see what the construction of the jokes is because these tend to be the longer, there’s a lot of setup, and then it gets to a funny punch line. And so much of what is comedy these days isn’t that. So much of what is comedy today is I’m saying a funny line, you’re saying a funny line, you’re saying a funny line, there’s some information that we don’t have that’s making the situation funnier. But it’s very rarely does someone stand there and tell a joke. And this is pretty much stand there — these people are old, so they are mostly sitting down. They are sitting there and they are telling you a joke.

One of the examples I will link to in the show notes is a man telling a joke about a bull enema and you recognize, okay first off, there’s very funny stuff that’s built into that setup of a joke — a bull and an enema by itself, that’s very, very funny. There’s good comic potential there as it is.

But the work of the joke is the long setup. And it’s making sure that each little step along the way, the setup is funny and enjoyable and that you are really curious what’s going to happen next, and that it can get to a good surprising resolution and revelation at the end. That it didn’t go quite where you were expecting, but it went over and beyond where you were expecting it to go.

Craig: You know, in our next podcast we should each try a joke.

John: We could definitely try that.

Craig: Yeah, but I don’t know any clean ones.

John: I highly recommend Old Jews Telling Jokes.

Craig: Old Jews Telling Jokes.

Oh, you know what, I will leave you with one little cool thing, because I’m about to go to my son’s little league game where I keep score, and for those of you out there who are baseball fanatics like I am, and perhaps your kids play, or you like to go to games and keep score, keeping score in baseball is a very monastic sort of thing.

They give you this very strange looking thing and you have to kind of know the secret code of how to score. And there are so many different things that can happen. And it’s all quite beautiful, actually. like a scorecard is a beautiful thing.

But there’s this wonderful app called iScore that does it for you on the iPad. I love iScore so much. I swear, it’s the greatest app ever. So if you love baseball and you like scoring baseball. iScore. That’s my cool thing.

John: Cool. Craig, thank you very much.

Craig: Thank you, John. See next week.

John: Next week. Bye.