Archives for 2013

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/talking-to-actors).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 107 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, I think you’ll be excited by this, but I went to my first Rosh Hashanah service this last week.

**Craig:** Ooh! And how boring was that?

**John:** It was actually not boring at all…

**Craig:** What?!

**John:** …because it was conducted at the Neil Simon Theater…

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** …by Andrew Lippa who is now an ordained interfaith minister.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** So, it was kind of awesome, but also really strange, because I realized as I’ve been around Jewish culture a lot since moving to Los Angeles but I’d never actually seen even on film a portrayal of what the Rosh Hashanah service was like. And it’s a little bit odd.

**Craig:** It’s a lot a bit odd. Did they blow the Shofar?

**John:** They did. The Shofar being the sort of curved horn thing, which you tweet, actually tweet is the wrong word for it. Really, it’s like you —

**Craig:** Oh John. “A curved horn thing that you tweet.” You are so Christian.

**John:** Oh, yes, [laughs]. So, what is the Shofar meant to represent? It’s not a horn. What would you call it?

**Craig:** It is. In fact it is a ram’s horn.

**John:** So therefore I’m correct and it is curved.

**Craig:** It’s just the way you said it. “It’s a curved horn.” It was just very goyisha.

**John:** All right. That’s fine. So, anyway, it’s a thing that you are meant to…

**Craig:** Blow.

**John:** …blow. But tweet is actually sort of the right word. It implies it’s a high sound. It’s not a high sound at all. It’s sort of a horn blowing sound, kind of.

**Craig:** Fancy that. [laughs]

**John:** But it is a very specific rhythm for this part of the thing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And then that part of the thing.

**Craig:** Tekiah. Teruah. Yeah. There are I think three different ones. There’s [imitates horn sounds].

**John:** And it’s supposed to be nine, but you really can’t count.

**Craig:** And then there’s one that goes [horn sound again]. Basically goes until the old men run out of breath. And it’s like a competition to see who can last the longest.

**John:** Yeah. I found the whole thing just absolutely fascinating.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s silly.

**John:** But wonderful. And, of course, it was an abbreviated thing because we were literally doing this in the upstairs lobby at the Neil Simon Theater, just like an hour before they had to completely clear everything out so we could have our opening night. So, it was a really busy, jam-packed day. But it was a great way to start a jam-packed day.

**Craig:** Now, do you have people that are going to be observing Yom Kippur which is sort of the important part of the holiday?

**John:** Yes, we do. So, it’s going to be a… — We’re smack dab in the middle of the Jewish holidays for Big Fish, which is traditionally like not the time you would want to do this, but it actually worked out very well for us because we’re the only show trying to open now.

**Craig:** Oh, good. All right, competition.

**John:** Let’s talk about the show that we’re actually recording right now, which is Scriptnotes, which is mostly a conversation about screenwriting.

**Craig:** And things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**John:** And so maybe that’s a Broadway show. But, and you, Craig Mazin, you stepped up today because two of our three topics are Craig Mazin topics.

**Craig:** I can do it. I just need — I just need someone to believe in me. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] And we all believe in you, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** So, the topic that I would like to propose today is the difference between intention and motivation. And words that are often sort of combined but are actually probably more useful if we can keep them apart and really think of them as two separate things.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And the topics that you brought to us today are?

**Craig:** Today I want to talk about sort of a screenwriter’s guide to working with actors, because no matter what level you are working at you need to work with actors. And then just a sort of a techie thing, I thought it might be fun to talk about your “onset rig.” What you need as a screenwriter on set in terms of just stuff to be able to do your job effectively.

**John:** Those are good topics. I feel like we’re going to have a good, strong podcast today.

So, I wanted to do just a little bit of housekeeping first. You are coming to New York City yourself for the live Scriptnotes show.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And we’re very excited to have you there. I kind of thought it was sold out, but they actually released the very back rows of the theater, so now we actually have — as we’re recording this podcast — possibly 40 seats. So, if you are still interested in coming to the October, sorry, September 23 recording of Scriptnotes Live in New York City, you should try to come. And you should try to get a ticket.

**Craig:** I just think it’s amazing that you can sell this — you, I mean we, I suppose — sell these things out. How many people are in this — how many seats are available?

**John:** This will be significantly bigger than the LA version. So, this is 300?

**Craig:** Oh, boy! Well we better have something to talk about.

**John:** We will. So, we’ll have you and me and Craig Mazin, uh, you’re Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** That’s me. That’s also me.

**John:** It’s very late. It’s late recording. There will be you, and me, and Andrew Lippa.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And a piano.

And so we will be talking about writing with somebody and sort of that writing partner process, specifically writing musicals and that whole shared process, the nine-year journey of Big Fish. But there will also be some singing of songs. Andrew Lippa is actually — that’s what he does for a living. But I will do this because I made a bet that I would do this. And you will do this because you have a song you want to sing.

**Craig:** Is he going to be able to play my song?

**John:** Yeah, he can play anything, Craig.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** That’s not going to be an issue.

**Craig:** Is he good at the piano? [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. The guy who wrote the Broadway show, is he good at the piano?

**Craig:** Does he know how to work a piano?

**John:** Yeah. He’s competent at that.

**Craig:** He’s no Seth Rudetsky. That’s all I can tell you.

**John:** Oh, no. No one is Seth Rudetsky.

**Craig:** No one!

**John:** Second bit of housekeeping, there will be another opportunity to see me and Craig doing Scriptnotes Live at the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** The Austin Film Festival is at the end of October. We don’t know the exact dates of when our different events are going to be, but there’s two — at least two Scriptnotes things happening there. We are doing a live episode of the podcast. It will be you, and me, and Rian Johnson, which will be kind of great.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And they’ve promised us a big space this year, not a small space.

**Craig:** And not at nine in the morning. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. Last time was at nine in the morning. That’s too early for our listeners. So, it should be a great fun prime time. So, if you’re coming to Austin and you’re coming to the film festival, come see us there.

We’re also talking about doing a second panel workshop thing that would be focused on the Three Page Challenges. If you have a Three Page Challenge that you would like us to look at and you are going to be attending the Austin Film Festival it would be great for you to put that in the email to Stuart saying, “Here’s my Three Page Challenge and I will be at the Austin Film Festival,” because we would love to be able to bring those people up on stage with us and talk with them about the three pages they have submitted.

**Craig:** Yes. That sounds like a lot of stuff in our immediate future.

**John:** Yes. A lot of live speaking. So, the topic I want to talk about today is the difference between intention and motivation. And I sometimes hear them used as the same term, which is fine. I’m not going to be prescriptive. You don’t have to use exactly the words I like to use. But I think they’re actually somewhat different concepts and I want to talk about how you as a writer might use these words to best effect.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** When you talk about a character’s motivation I tend to think of that as the big general who is this person in their world, in their life, and how is who they are in their world and their life and what their aims are reflected in your movie, or in your story.

So, a motivation might be attempting to make peace with his father. A motivation might be greed. It could be something like simple thematic kind of motivation, but it’s an overarching this is what they’re aiming for.

A lot of times in screenwriting we talk about what is the character’s want versus the character’s need. Motivation, you can think of it being the general umbrella category of what is the character going for. What is the character’s overall aim? Generally it is a character, but specifically in a story.

Do you use that term the same way?

**Craig:** I don’t at all.

**John:** Great. [Crosstalk]

**Craig:** I think of it as being a clear line. The way I like to think of that is motivation is why a character is doing something. Intention is what they want to achieve by doing something.

**John:** Oh, so we’re using these terms differently. I think it’s great that we’re having this conversation.

**Craig:** I think of characters, like for instance, I’m motivated by jealousy. My intention is to make you feel bad. Do you see what I mean? That’s sort of how I do it.

**John:** So, I use intention in a different way. And I use intention as a very granular what is a character attempting to achieve in this specific moment. So, intention to me is a thing that can happen in a scene or a sequence, but intention is a very specific “in this moment.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And so what is this character’s intention as the scene is opening and how has the intention changed based on what has happened in the scene?

At any moment I think in a scene you should be able to freeze/pause, and look at each character in the scene and figure out what their intention is. And, if you can’t do that then maybe you need to rethink how the scene is working, because if a character is just there because they’re just there something is not ideal.

**Craig:** Yeah. I like to think about this weird line between why I’m doing something and what I want to achieve, because it’s a way to make characters interesting if you can — if the audience understands why they’re doing something and also can see how when it translates into “and therefore I want to achieve this,” something has gone wrong.

It’s interesting to watch characters be motivated by things and then have these strange intentions because of it.

**John:** Well, I would say another distinction I would try to make is motivations tend to be a little bit less concrete. They are bigger picture things and they’re not necessarily actionable. And intention should be more actionable.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And intention should be something you can see that they’re literally trying to achieve. And you can actually see did they achieve their intention or not achieve their intention.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** There’s a test to it. Like are they doing what they’re trying to do? Even if their intention is like “I’m trying to relax and read my book on the couch,” that’s an intention. And if they’re being prevented in that intention they have reason to be upset.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, even if it seems like a passive intention it’s a thing that they’re trying to do as the scene unfolds.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Do you use a different term for what I’m talking about for like what they’re doing in a scene?

**Craig:** No, because I tend to think that these things can be looked at in a macro way and in a micro way, so within a scene there’s a motivation and there’s an intention. And within a movie there’s a motivation and an intention.

If you look at a character in a very big global sense, you can see plenty of movies where the intention doesn’t change at all, or changes multiple times throughout the movie — what it is the character is trying to achieve changes.

But, it is a rare movie where the motivation never changes and it is a rare movie where the motivation changes more than once or twice, because what motivates somebody is fundamental. And because it’s fundamental, we like to see what’s motivating somebody change. That’s part of what’s built into the arc, the so-called arc of the character is the why they’re doing things changes. “I used to do this for money, but now I’m doing it for love,” in a very big, broad way, right?

But, because it’s such a big deal to fundamentally change your point of view, to change it two, or three, or four times starts to water the character down to mush.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, I like to think of characters as their big internal motivations changing at least once but not more than once, so once, right? I think that’s what I mean. Changing once.

But intentions can change a lot or not at all. And sometimes it’s interesting to watch a character whose intention remains exactly the same throughout the movie but the motivation changes for it. That’s interesting.

**John:** Yes. I would also say that a lot of times you think about this with like sort of very classic hero’s journey kind of stories, but Erin Brockovich is a movie that somehow leapt to my mind as we were talking through this is that Erin Brockovich, you know, if you watch her general motivation in that film, as my recollection of it, is she wanted to achieve — so she wanted to achieve something. She wanted to sort of rebuild and restructure her life. She had these things — she wanted to be a different kind of person than she was and be perceived as a different kind of person than she really was.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But her intentions moment by moment are often very much about the case.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And about like getting these people on this porch to trust her and to let her into their lives. And so it was a good example of writing that you can see the overall arc of what she was trying to do, and the actual detailed plot of what’s happening moment, by moment, by moment doesn’t feel like it’s actually hitting that thing, but it always is sort of hitting that thing. What she’s trying to do, literally getting into that door, or getting this next person to take her seriously is reflected in the bigger goal of hers, to be a different person.

**Craig:** Yeah. I totally agree with that. And that’s where I think you want intentions to constantly be changing in relation to the sort of micro intention should constantly be changing. Watching characters shift tactics is a change in intention. Okay, my intention is to intimidate you. Okay, now my intention is to appeal to your better nature. Okay, now my intention is to make a deal with you. So, these exchanges make human interactions interesting.

But my motivation in that scene probably doesn’t change at all. My motivation is because I need this.

**John:** Yes. Your motivation will change as a result of many scenes or many encounters that have nudged you in that way.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So, and again, it’s so tempting to think about, oh, intention is something that the hero has, or the main character has, but I really would stress that it’s something that you should be able to pause and look at everybody in that scene and understand what their intention is. Even like to some degree that guy who’s in the background past, sort of the extra who is going from this way to that way, well why is he doing that?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And sometimes you’re just really trying to — really you’re just trying to make the frame not be so empty, but when you can possibly have a reason for why that background pass is happening, the world feels more real.

**Craig:** Agreed. Everything should be motivated. And you can tell sometimes in movies things aren’t motivated for what we call organic reasons that are reasons that are true to the story and the world around it. They’re motivated by external reasons like wouldn’t it be cool if…

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** …car went kaboom. And sometimes it is cool. But, better to see if you can’t make it cool and also motivated.

**John:** Yes. I’ll also say intention is one of those terms you’ll hear actors say a lot, because if you look at what an actor needs to do it’s trying to create the reality, moment by moment, of what the character is trying to achieve in this specific moment.

It’s like an actor in a scene can’t be responsible for the overall arc of the character and all that other stuff. That’s the responsibility of the script. What the actor can be responsible for is, “Is the way I’m interacting with people around me believable for this character? And believable for what this character is trying to have happen right at this moment?”

**Craig:** Well, that’s a good segue I suppose into discussing actors because you do hear that famous, “What’s my motivation?” or “What’s my intention?” all the time. And I think that writers are either scared of talking to actors, particularly when they’re famous and well-established, or they’re just clueless about how to talk to actors. And they don’t understand what actors do.

And, so they blow it all the time. I’ve witnessed it over and over. So, I figured we could talk today about how you and I go about talking to actors and helping them do their jobs better and maybe also, hopefully, they’re helping us do our jobs better.

**John:** I think it’s a terrific conversation. So, do you want to frame this in the context of you are the writer but not the director on the project?

**Craig:** Yeah. I think so. And it’s not that directors don’t have to deal with this all the time, too. They do. But there’s something interesting — there’s an interesting thing between writers and actors just as there is between writers and directors. There is an awkwardness that is around the fact that the writer has seen the movie, has created the movie, has done a thing that has brought everybody together to make the movie, and everybody is a little concerned about it, because there’s a lot of power in that act. And everybody understands that they now have to go and perform it and capture it.

And in doing so, things are going to happen. Even if everybody really wants to stick very, very closely to the script, things are still going to happen. And everyone, I think, initially is wary of a writer who is going to stifle or attempt to quash what could be some happy accidents. And so much about performance in particular is about being in the moment and natural which requires the opposite of a screenplay. It’s a very difficult thing to do — take something that is static and fixed and present it as dynamic and of a moment and extemporaneous. Very hard to do.

So, the first bit of advice that I have for writers when they’re talking to actors is something to think about before they talk to actors, before they walk up to an actor or before they even consider it. And that is to appreciate what these people have. You may not like the way they talk about your script. You may think that they don’t understand the script at all. You might be right. That happens sometimes.

But you also have to acknowledge that if it were you, the movie would be awful, and not because you’re not a big star that people didn’t know, but because you’re not a good actor, and because your face doesn’t belong on film. There are faces that belong in movies and there are faces that don’t. It’s not even a question of beauty. There are some remarkably odd looking faces that have had amazing characters. But there is a magic that is both internal and external to being a movie star.

So, stop for a moment and say, “Let me give this person the respect they deserve for having something unique that I do not have. And let me then also ask myself is it possible that maybe there’s a little bit of magic there that is not just the result of a roll of the dice but some craft, because it is craft. So, start from a place of respect.

**John:** Yes. My general advice that I’ve been using the last couple of months is assume good intention. And so whenever someday says something that’s like kind of offensive to me, I stop for a second and think, “Well, you know what? They probably meant that not at all the way I heard that and they actually meant that in a positive way.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I find a lot of conversations with actors can be like that way because they’ll say like, “This doesn’t make sense, or my character would never do this.” And, they’re wrong, because the character — I know the character really well. I was all the characters before they were those characters.

But, they’re saying that because they are feeling that they cannot actually achieve this thing here, or they can’t get from point A to point B in a way that is going to make sense for them on film. And if it’s not going to make sense for them on film, it’s not going to make sense in the finished product.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So, they’re asking you for help. They’re just asking you for help in a frustrating way.

**Craig:** They are. And sometimes you may find yourself feeling like, “Well, why am I always the one that has to sort of not throw a tantrum?” You can throw a tantrum if you want. It’s not going to get you very far in the world.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** And I don’t really think of these people as throwing tantrums. I think that when an actor says, “Well, my character wouldn’t do that,” they mean my character, meaning me playing this character wouldn’t do that. And they’re right. Their character wouldn’t do it. You wrote a character that wasn’t their character, it was your character, and now it’s their character. And it has to go through their brain, their mind, their memories, their abilities, their character wouldn’t do that.

There are two great fears that I remind myself I think all actors have all the time. One is that they don’t understand how they’re supposed to play something, which is terrifying the way that it’s terrifying for us when we don’t know how to write something. And the other great fear they have is of being embarrassed. And the embarrassment that you suffer as an actor is so much more profound, public, and visible than the embarrassment we suffer as writers.

So, when an actor, this is great — I’m glad you brought that up. Because when an actor says, “My character wouldn’t do this,” take it seriously. And then explain as best you can what you were going for without shackling them to what’s there. And just say, “Well, forget what’s there. Here’s what I was going for and here’s what my reasoning was. And let’s just have a discussion.”

A lot of times just by talking it through it comes around to the smallest thing. The smallest thing. And you walk away thinking, “That was all about that?!” Yeah, okay. So it was, but they needed that. And god knows we have enough of our own foibles that we can’t really afford to point fingers at others.

**John:** The other thing I would stress is remember that you’re talking to — you’re usually talking to them about specific moments and specific scenes. And your answer as the writer can never be, “Because we need this to happen here or to do this.” You can never talk in terms of the story, because the story is not interesting to the actor. The actor is trying to focus on what they do in this moment.

So, generally, you’re going to be focusing on what is the journey of this character in this moment, to the next moment, to the next moment, and it has to seem like the character is in control of all these things and that the character is not doing something because the movie needs him to do it.

**Craig:** And that’s bad writing anyway if that’s what you — you know, that’s embarrassing for you to say, “Well, I know it doesn’t make any — really, it’s not necessarily connected to character. We just need to because we need that thing/explosion to happen, or we just need you to say that so we can be able to walk through the door there. It’s bad writing.

**John:** Well, yeah, but no, it’s not necessarily bad writing. Because, to be fair, there are times where we are cutting out of scene on a specific moment because that cut was going to give us power to get to the next thing, but the actor doesn’t feel that because the actor sees like, “But I would say this, and I would say this, and I would say this.” And you’re like, yes, you would, but the scene has already cut by that point.

**Craig:** Oh, I’ve never really had an experience where that was going on. Sometimes when actors ask to go a little longer in the scene, I think it’s perfectly fine to say great, do it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If you know you’re getting the scissors in earlier, go nuts. [laughs] You know, to me, also, being a good editor and being able to edit in your mind will save you some battles that you don’t need to fight.

**John:** Yeah. But that’s honestly, that’s the luxury of being the empowered writer who is allowed to sort of say that, “Oh, you can keep going on.” So, if you’re saying like, oh, you’re going to keep improving after this point, but if the writer is now being expected to make a scene go longer than it would ever possibly be, and to have to defend that longer scene to the director, to the producers, to everybody else.

**Craig:** Oh, no, no, no. That’s where you go to the director and you’re just like, “Look, they want to just keep talking. You want me to just write this to make them feel good and we’ll just shoot a little bit of it?” Which, you can do.

I mean, I have to say, I’ve actually never had this come up. That’s never come up. I mean, usually because a responsible actor has read the script, knows what’s coming next, understands things. And that’s really also the director at that point should be stepping in to sort of defend his cut, because ultimately that’s what we’re talking about is transitions and cuts.

**John:** In general I found one of the most helpful processes to this part of getting the movie ready to with you have the script, you have the actors, is to get everyone in a room and read the script aloud at least once.

**Craig:** For sure.

**John:** Because that way you know that every actor at that table has at least heard the whole movie once. Because otherwise actors will focus on the scenes that they’re in and really won’t have a good sense of what the rest of the movie is. And so not only will that make them understand why those scenes are those scenes, but they’ll also know like who everybody else in the movie actually is in a way that’s very, very helpful

**Craig:** Right. I do agree with that. I think every movie should have that read through, even if you just do — I think on Identity Thief we just did a read through really with Melissa and Jason. And that was fine.

**John:** That’s fine.

**Craig:** We didn’t need to do like all the side parts. As long as those two understood everything and that I was able to hear it and then go, by the way, the other thing is you have to, when you start to hear your actors, they’re now the cast. They will be those characters forever. Forever.

So, you have to listen now and you have to go back and you have to adjust to fit the way they are doing it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And don’t be tight about that. Be okay with that. The intentions, the motivations as we discussed, don’t have to change. Your structure, all of the dramatic import is there. It’s just the expression of it, because ultimately — you know, there’s this really funny audio clip on the internet of William Shatner berating some poor director that he’s recording some voiceover for.

And so he’s doing this voiceover. It sounds like it’s for a museum or something about exploring the galaxy or something. And the guy says, “Well, I was kind of hoping you’d do it a little more like this, more like that.” And William Shatner goes, “Well, how would you like me to do it? How do you hear it?” And the guy makes the terrible mistake of doing it.

**John:** Oh, no, never a good idea.

**Craig:** And Shatner is, “Oh, is that what you want? Okay.” And then Shatner does an amazing impression of that guy doing it and it’s awful. And while Shatner is a terrible person for doing that, [laughs], he does have a point which is, “Hey, I get that it’s not the way you heard it in your head. I’m not in your head. I’m not you. I’m me. I’m the movie star. Maybe there might be value in the way I’m doing it. So, perhaps you can help adjust the way I’m doing it, but still make it the way I do it, because I’m me.” And I think there’s wisdom in that.

**John:** There is. One of the things that has been most interesting about Big Fish is that unlike movies or a TV show where obviously you’re going to film it once and that actor is that character, it’s all the same, ideally in a Broadway show the Broadway show should be the same Broadway show no matter who is actually playing those parts. And that’s been a fascinating thing is that we’ve had moments where an understudy has to go in, or someone else has to go in, or we just have to fill in for whatever reason. So, it’s that balance between tailoring it for one specific person’s voice and making it something that can be played by a range of people.

**Craig:** Well, it’s funny, my son and I have been listening to Fiddler on the Roof lately a lot. And so, you know, I started with the original Broadway recording, which for me is the superior recording with Zero Mostel. And then we started listening to the Topol version, which was the London cast, which I hate. But I know a lot of people like Topol. I do not.

And it is remarkable how you can see that the part was very difficult for somebody who wasn’t a — for lack of a better word — a New York Yiddish theater troupe kind of actor to do. The jokes are very kind of old school Yiddish jokes. And Topol is Israeli and just doesn’t get them. He doesn’t get the jokes, you know? It is interesting to see how that translates so oddly.

I mean, the other thing is I was watching — I finally got around to watching the movie version of Les Miserables. And there are just so many choices where I went, whoa, that was weird.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, forget the directorial choices, just the actors the way they performed it, the way they chose to inflect things and approach things. It was just like, “That was weird.” But, you know, when you sort of think about it, do you think, well, the idea here is this is my A cast, and eventually they will go away one day, if the show is a hit, and it goes on and on. Eventually they will go away and a second refreshed cast will come in like they have for instance for Mormon.

And the idea is that that second cast coming in should be essentially copying the first cast?

**John:** That is a very interesting question and sometimes you would love to have copying, where essentially one person sets the template and the next cast, person cast in that role, does the same thing and sort of hits the same beats and inflects things the same way and it’s just like you’ve slotted in the clone for somebody.

But other times that’s not the right choice and a different energy is a fascinating great energy.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, two recent things I can say about this is I saw Wicked when it first opened ten years ago, it was still in previews ten years ago. And then we took our daughter to see it last week and I loved it both times. The first time I saw it with Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, and this last time it was with new actors, and the Elphaba was a very different characterization than I remember from when I first saw it, when I first saw Idina Menzel do it. But I really dug what she did. She made some really strange sort of nerdy choices that were kind of great for it.

And the woman playing Glinda, she was terrific also, but I could not see that without seeing Kristin Chenoweth. I felt like Kristin Chenoweth and that Glinda role were fused in a way that is very hard to separate. And I’m sure you could do a Glinda that didn’t do any of Kristin Chenoweth’s stuff, but it feels like it would be really hard to.

**Craig:** Well, I wonder if maybe for musicals it’s a question of time as well. You know, like Mormon, this is the second cast. They’re still in their kind of — it feels like the first run of it, still. So, it’s kind of like, here, we’re letting those guys off the hook but we still have a few people that are in it like Nikki, oh geez, I’m blanking on her last name. I apologize. But she’s still there from the original cast, so it’s still kind of like the original show. So it just copied those guys.

But if it comes back, or if it keeps going, if it’s eight years down the road let’s just change it up because it’s going to get stale. And, of course, if you revive something, change it up just to be interesting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, anyway, that will be a good problem for you to worry about.

**John:** These would be luxury problems that we have to think about how we’re going to — what we’re going to do as we recast.

**Craig:** Luxury problems.

**John:** And, honestly, it is a thing that comes up because right now we have Norbert Leo Butz playing the lead, and he’s phenomenal. And he’s a terrific actor, and a terrific dancer, and a terrific singer, and to find somebody who could do all those things as well as he does is going to be terrifically challenging. But that’s, again, luxury problems.

**Craig:** Doogie Howser. That’s my vote.

**John:** So, let’s segue to our third topic here which is sort of on the set writing and sort of what that kit is because that’s all I’ve been doing the last two months is making those changes day by day and creating those pages for what’s actually happening. So, I’m curious when you’re doing the Hangover movies, what is your setup — ?

**Craig:** I got it so I got a real system there, because the Hangover movies take us to some strange places obviously, whether it’s hot and muggy and traffic-y Bangkok, or I’m in the middle of the desert somewhere. And the truth is the writing never stops, so there’s a couple of things that I think about. One is, what’s my equipment that I need, and two, what’s my process, so that I can be as efficient as all the people around me.

So, first, let’s just talk about stuff, because — this is probably less important for theater because you’re inside and it’s theoretically air-conditioning, but for movies you could be on rocks, you could be on water, you could be anywhere.

You want to have a very rugged laptop case, something that can take a little bit of a beating. You don’t need one of those Alienware moon laptops. A regular laptop is fine. But you do need some stuff. You probably want an internet connection. It would behoove you to have one. A lot of movie productions now have WiFi bases that they broadcast from the generator truck and elsewhere so you can hook into that. The signal is iffy a lot.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, the other option is to get one of those little Verizon USB thingies that pick up a cell signal. And hopefully you can have one or the other. You definitely want a couple of USB thumb drives. Those become super important when you can’t necessarily email stuff back and forth. You want a good portable printer. There are a bunch out there that are lightweight. You want to be able to print either wirelessly or back it up to print via a USB cable. And you’ll need some paper, of course. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy there, just some paper.

The printer should be small and it doesn’t need to be super fast because you’re never going to be printing out lots of pages. The most pages that will be printing out at a time? Probably three, because that’s about how many pages you’re shooting on a day, unless you’re shooting in India and then it’s seven, so it’s not that big of a deal. Right? It’s portable better than huge.

When you — if you are going to be an onset writer, then what you want to do is find your First AD pretty early on before the movie starts and say, look, we’re going to be doing some writing day by day. I don’t need much. All I need is this. I need a cart that I can put my laptop on. Obviously I need a chair from props. They make those little foldy chairs. I need in the morning just as a matter of routine I need the electricians to hook up power to the cart and I need a power strip duct-taped to the cart. So, it’s just a cart, a seat, and a functioning power strip. That’s all I need. I’ll take care of the rest. [laughs]

And they can do that. They can do that anywhere you go. Once you have your cart, your power strip, you can do whatever you need to do.

**John:** So, do you leave your portable printer on the cart?

**Craig:** I do. You can leave stuff on the cart and they’ll just pack it up on the truck and then bring it back the next day and they will appreciate the fact that it’s not this massive laser printer, but an eight pound piece of plastic that fits on the bottom of the cart.

All of your charging cables and all the rest of that you put back in your laptop bag. Your laptop you take with you. All that stuff you take with you. I usually leave — on the cart I leave the printer and the paper, the ream of paper. That’s it. Everything else goes.

The cart is usually the domain of the video playback guy, so be very nice to him and be good friends with him. Usually the cart is part and parcel with the producer area or a secondary thing. If you’re not going to be part and parcel with the producer area then you just need a secondary cart. That’s it. And you get one.

**John:** That’s awesome. Craig, I’ve actually learned a lot from that because I’ve never had to do that kind of stuff. And so the times that I’ve been writing on set I’ve generally been back in the trailer, because I’ve not been on the kind of things where I’m going to be generating a new page literally five feet away from where that thing is filming.

I’ve always been able to go back to my trailer to do stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah, I find that when you go away, just be going away you open the door to other people solving problems, and some of them aren’t people you want solving problems.

**John:** I hear you.

**Craig:** The fact that you’re there, present, typing — everybody lets you do it. [laughs] Then you print it out. Now, the other thing that I find very useful for film production is, and I would do this on the Hangover movies, before each day, when I would get in in the morning, you know, somebody hands you sides which is just your little miniature page printed up version of that day’s work. So, let’s say you’re doing scene 120 today and it’s three pages, so here’s three little mini pages.

And I watch as the director and the actors talk about blocking and all the rest and if there are any questions for me, I’m there if that should happen. Once that’s over, there’s usually at least an hour where they’re in hair and makeup and the crew is lighting the set, or the location. That’s when I go back to my cart, open up my laptop, and then I go into my document and I pull out the day’s work. And I make a new document that’s just Day This for that day, and that thing.

Because, I don’t have these little sides-y things in my computer. And I don’t necessarily want to be making constant changes in the master script, because a lot of this stuff you’re not issuing as official, “official pages.” So, I’ll do it just as a side document. And then at the end of the day I take the side document that was finalized and I paste it back into the master. And eventually I get to a point where I’m like, okay, if you want we can issue a whole bunch of changed pages or not. It depends on how that production works.

**John:** So, on scenarios like this when you are making some changes to this little document, is it mostly in consultation with the director before the actors come back to set, or is it once they’ve come back and they’ve started kind of playing around in the scene and you figure out who’s actually going to say what, when, and how you’re going to move stuff around?

**Craig:** Kind of a crapshoot depending on the day’s work. So, on some days they would come back in and it wouldn’t feel right and we’d take a break and Todd and I would sit and work on something. Some days Todd and I would work on things while they were in that hair and makeup session and get it dialed in. Sometimes we would just come up with some alt lines when we were doing coverage and so we would work on those.

So, you just stay flexible within the day’s work. And you’re always there to do what you need to do. And just be flexible. So, the last thing you want is to have anything getting in the way of you being able to deliver work to wherever you are, whether it’s on a boat, or on the top of a building. I’ve been on both of those, or, you know, in a field, or in a desert. I’ve been in those. You want your rig so you can do your work.

**John:** Now, I want to make sure that listeners understand that what Craig is describing isn’t actually typical for a lot of screenwriters in that I’ve never had to do that and I’ve had a lot of movies made. And I’ve been the writer on set on those movies to the degree that there was a set to be a writer on. But at most I would sort of like answer a question or talk about the next day’s shooting work. But was very rarely involved in any rewrites on what was actually happening that day.

**Craig:** You’re hearing of it more and more. I’ve been doing it like this for a long time. I don’t know why, it’s just for whatever reason this is how my life and my career has gone. But, for instance, I know that Chris McQuarrie did it on World War Z. And, I’m trying to think of somebody else who I know was in the trenches on a movie. I know Chris Morgan does it on the Fast & Furious movies.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** So, people are doing it more and more. And I wasn’t able to do it on Identity Thief. I would have liked to have been able to do it. But for that what happened is I would usually get calls about, okay, tomorrow’s work, or next week’s work. And so then I would send those so there would be kind of a — all right, well, when you wake up in the morning the elves will have made you pages. That kind of thing.

**John:** That’s usually the case of what I’m facing is that as something comes up in the schedule that’s about to shoot and there are issues about it, then I’ll have those conversations and do whatever needs to get done. But, for a movie like Go I was there for every frame shot, but it was literally like, “You’re going to shoot what I wrote.” And that sometimes works out very nicely, too.

**Craig:** For sure. I mean, the thing about the Hangover movies is they weren’t my movies. I was a Johnny Come Lately in the trilogy anyway. And I wrote them with Todd. So, really, it was about being a co-writer and a partner to him. And since he’s the director, he can rewrite anything he wants. [laughs] And he’s a writer. So, then it was just about sometimes the two of us.

And, you know, sometimes it was really hard and sometimes it was great. Sometimes it was fun. I remember one scene, I just remember the two of us sitting on like a piece of scenery on a soundstage with a laptop and it was one of those moment where you’re like, look at us, we’re like movie guys. And there was another day where we were struggling with something and we got in the golf cart and drove around Warner Bros. until we figured it out. And that was another, look at us, this is like right out of a movie about how they make movies.

Most of the time it was just me at my cart, with a cup of bad craft service coffee, banging away.

**John:** Yup. To give a quick version of what the theater equivalent of that is, so we go through two stages. Obviously we are writing, just me and Andrew Lippa, doing all our stuff and performing for the producers for a long time, but once we’re sort of — our equivalent of being onset is in the rehearsal hall which is where we sort of go through and we stage the whole thing just with temporary props and rehearsal clothes and not the real anything, and in that, you’re trying to get what you wrote to actually make sense on the stage, but there’s constant adjustments based on what’s actually going to be possible or when you can get somebody on or off.

For that, I have my little MacBook Air. There’s a printer down at the edge where I can print to and I will generate new pages. Usually we’ll put out pages at the end of the day, and so we’ll reflect what we have done that changed today, and what we want to change — the stuff that’s going to effect tomorrow — and so I will print out those pages. Director Susan Stroman and I will go through and we’ll agree that these are the real pages and that changes the master script. And that’s a big difference from everything that we do really in film and in television where because that’s now the template for how we’re going to make the show from here on out…

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** …everything has to be reflected in the script or else it just doesn’t actually happen. And it’s not just like the actors need to know their lines. That script is also what all the cues are called off of. And so if one line has changed, that could affect the music department, the lighting department, projections, everybody else.

**Craig:** It’s so different, yeah. Because in movies and in TV when you finish your day it’s like you’ve eaten food. It’s gone. It’s eaten. It’s not coming back. You’re not doing that again. It’s onto the next. And when you make changes in a show like this that’s meant to be performed over and over, it’s never eaten. It’s always there. Like an embalmed body, it’s always there.

I have a question for you. Do you ever feel this inner pull? Sometimes I feel it and I always shut it down because I think it’s bad news. But this little voice that goes, “Don’t you just want to be done?”

**John:** Absolutely. It’s the inherent unfinishability of theater that is both terrific and really maddening. Is that there’s no post-production because you’re never actually finished. And so we will open the show on October 6, and that will be the end of probably writing for this version that’s on the stage right now.

But then there will be immediate conversations about all of the other versions we have to do. So, god-willing, we wanted to stage this somewhere else, we’d have to be able to figure out how we’re going to do that. And every department will have challenges about how we’re going to do that. Are we going to be able to have this large of a cast? Are we going to be able to have this kind of set? If we don’t have this kind of set, what would make sense?

We have a giant USO number in the show. And will that make sense in Europe? Probably not. So, there may be some real fundamental changes that I’ll be making on the show and I’ll probably be writing some version of it the rest of my life. And that’s maddening to some degree, not just because, oh, I love this project, but having to continue to rewrite this project keeps me from writing the next thing.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. Yeah. And even just on a small basis, even on things that are finishable, there’s that feeling sometimes of let’s just do — let’s stop trying to do things to it. And, you know, there is such a thing as over-writing and there is such a thing as getting bored with your own work and hurting it by working on it too much. But more often than not the more willing you are to entertain even the craziest suggestion, the better off you are.

You just have to be willing to not look at that pain as pain.

**John:** Yes. I mean, the luxury we have is that we have a test screening every night. So, we get to know every night how is it working.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so you can polish and refine it in ways that are very difficult to do in a movie. In a movie you can do your test screenings, and maybe you can do some reshooting, but like you’re not going to vastly change things.

We have vastly changed the first act from Chicago to here and it’s a much better show for it. And we could do that because we could do that, because we had the resources, we had the time, we had the stamina to actually like rip things apart and put them back together in a better way. So, that’s a great luxury.

So, I, too, am a fan of cheap printers. It’s really remarkable how cheap printers have become. The ink jet ones, the printer is essentially disposable because the ink cartridges cost more than the actual printer does.

**Craig:** I know, it’s sick.

**John:** But Nima Yousefi who now works for me found on Amazon this really amazing Brother HL printer that’s $70. It’s like a laser printer that’s actually surprisingly fast. So, I have that in my apartment here in New York and that’s the printer I use here as I’m generating stuff, so like we’re putting out new pages tomorrow so that’s been my test printer for that.

**Craig:** I can’t recommend the printer I was using on The Hangover because I hated it. I hated it. It was a Canon. It was crap.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I was angry at it all the time.

**John:** But there’s something lovely about putting something on paper once just to make sure it’s looking right. But most of what you’re going to end up doing is going to be emails and Dropbox. And that’s why an internet connection is so important.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a big help. I mean, if you, for instance, need to quickly — sometimes they’re waiting — sometimes what happens is you watch the scene, everybody works on the scene together, me, the director, the actors, we all come up with a version. And what I’m doing while we’re doing it is I’m writing it on the sides in pen. And then we get it, and we’re happy, and we’re good.

Now, okay, they’re all going to do five minute touch-ups, and then we’ve got to shoot. I’ve got to go type that so that they have it, so they can read it, because no one can read my scrawl and it’s only on one little thing.

So, now I type it up really quickly, I get it right. Now, how do I make, okay, it’s a scene with six people. It’s three pages. I’ve got to print out 18 pages. How quickly can I get that done, you know? So, sometimes it’s easier to just email it to the production trailer and have them run it over.

**John:** Yeah. The thing I found very useful about theater is that index cards are heavily used. And so on an index card if I change a line I will write it in pen on an index card and hand it to the actor directly if it’s something where we’re literally changing the line in front of the actor, or I’ll hand it to Stroman, the director, for like this is what the new line is so that before there’s a new page there’s at least a card that reflects what that new line is.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Index cards are sort of one of the main forms of documentation in this part of the business.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** So, Craig, I think it’s time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And my One Cool Thing is, again, I feel like I’ve cheated on you a little bit because I did another broadcast. But I just did KCRW’s The Business, which is a great podcast. I know you don’t listen to other podcasts, but it’s a radio show and a podcast hosted by Kim Masters.

**Craig:** I’ve done that before.

**John:** Ah, in that case you’ve been in that little crazy basement at Santa Monica College?

**Craig:** No, I did it by phone. I phoned it in. Literally phoned it in.

**John:** You literally phoned it in. Dan Jinks and I went and did an interview with her about the business of making Big Fish and sort of like the whole process and how that all works. And I was reminded that I never actually I think hyped that podcast or that show on the air. And it really is a terrific look at sort of mostly how Hollywood functions. And she takes one or two topics each week and really sort of drills in with interviews.

She does this sort of news recap with John Horn of the LA Times. And then Darby Maloney who is the producer and editor of it just does a terrific job distilling stuff down.

You and I when we talk, it’s just this sort of raw, unfiltered, people blathering, but this is a much more carefully crafted thing. I would highly recommend it.

**Craig:** But our raw, unfiltered blathering is remarkably well organized. Do you ever read the transcripts of our podcasts?

**John:** Sometimes it really does seem like we were, you know, we planned it.

**Craig:** That we were reading off of sheets of paper. We’re really good at this, John. We’re really good at this.

**John:** Oh, we’re incredibly good.

**Craig:** So good.

**John:** Although, one listener did email in this last week pointing out that my elocution, my diction has taken a nosedive.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And it’s honestly true. And I hear it myself even as I’m doing this now. I am so tired, Craig. I am zombie tired. And today was supposed to be — we’re recording this on a Sunday — was supposed to be my day off, but then we had six hours of meetings.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So, it has not been a day off.

**Craig:** Well, I think it’s terrific that you are using the euphemism six hours of meetings to describe your obvious alcoholism.

**John:** [laughs] That’s really what it is. It’s all a desperate cry for help.

**Craig:** I had a six hour meeting with this bottle of rye. Uh, you’re a drunk. There’s no other possible explanation for “inneresting.”

**John:** Yeah, I’m drunk at —

**Craig:** All moment. Constantly drunk.

**John:** Either drunk or I’m from Colorado. Those are the two choices.

**Craig:** Is there a difference?

**John:** It’s attitude.

**Craig:** It’s altitude sickness. Well, I have a Cool Thing this week that was, as are so many of my Cool Things, recommend by a Twitter follower. But this one really has the potential to be awesome. It’s almost there. It’s not quite there yet, but they’re working on it. It’s called writerduet.com. It is free. And the idea of writerduet.com is to provide functionality that already exists in Final Draft and Movie Magic.

Well, what would be so cool about that, you ask. Well, the functionality in Final Draft and Movie Magic, that is to say the ability to write and collaborate with another writer via an online connection is offered but it doesn’t work in either software. It has never worked. It is insane. The way they’ve set it up and what they require is ridiculous. It will never work.

So, what one of those companies should have done but failed to do years ago was to setup a server and make it web-based and allow people to upload a script, an existing script, to that, or to begin to write an existing script in that service. And to do it collaboratively a la Google Docs.

And that’s what writerduet.com has done. They do accept PDF and FDX imports. I’m not sure how they’re converting the PDF to text. Perhaps they’re using some form of your Highland. I don’t know.

**John:** Perhaps.

**Craig:** Ripping you off. I’m sure you’re immediately hitting —

**John:** No, it’s absolutely fair. I think, I kind of believe they may actually be using Fountain as their underlying, because I have heard of the service. I will Google them after.

**Craig:** And it works. So, I tested it with my assistant and the two of us worked and it worked. And it was good. It’s a little slow, a little kludgy here and there. There’s some things that they’ve got to work out. And when I uploaded a full Final Draft script, a full 115 page script, my browser got really slow, to the point of just not being usable.

So, I mentioned that to the developer and he said, “Okay, got it. I’m going to work on that.” And I find that these guys do work on these things and they do make them better.

So, I think if you’re interested in something like this and you at least want to poke around at it, it’s the future, I think. I think this is where things are going to go. Writerduet.com.

**John:** Fantastic. I will point out that several writers I know do use Google Docs for exactly this purpose. And they just use Fountain. They use the plain text markup language in Fountain to do it. And that works great for them, too. So, it’s nice that there are multiple places trying to do the same things and try to do them a bit more smartly than the big behemoth apps.

**Craig:** Yeah. Agreed.

**John:** Cool. Craig, thank you for getting me through another podcast.

**Craig:** You did it. You did it, buddy. Hang in there. I’ll be there soon. And, [sirens in background], oh, and look, the sirens are here. That means it’s time to sign off and say goodnight.

**John:** All right, Craig, thank you.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. Bye.

**John:** Goodnight.

Links:

* [Shofars](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shofar) on Wikipedia
* [Submit your Three Pages now](http://johnaugust.com/threepage) and let us know you’ll be at the [2013 Austin Film Festival](http://www.austinfilmfestival.com/)
* [The William Shatner recording session](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfDHIqmUUMs)
* [Brother HL2230 Laser Printer](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004H1PB9I/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* John and Dan Jinks on [KCRW’s The Business](http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/tb/tb130909john_august_and_dan_)
* [Writerduet.com](https://writerduet.com/) lets you collaborate in real-time
* Outro by Scriptnotes listener Kurt Kuenne

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/two-entjs-walk-into-a-bar-and-fix-it).

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

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

****John:**** And this is Episode 106 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, I lived your fantasy last week. I got to go in and be on the air on SiriusXM On Broadway.

**Craig:** You’ve beaten me to the punch. My turn is going to be in a month, but I’m very excited. And you were interviewed by Julie James.

**John:** By Julie James who is a super fan of Broadway.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, sometimes you have those people who are like remarkable interviewers and you have deep insights on things, but it’s also great to have people who are just like ridiculous fans of a thing. And she’s a ridiculous fan of Broadway, so it was very fun to be interviewed with her and Andrew Lippa for a good 45 minutes. So perhaps as you are driving around this long Labor Day Weekend you had a chance to hear us.

We’re recording this before the Labor Day Weekend, so of course you didn’t hear it, but —

**Craig:** I haven’t heard it yet.

**John:** But if you can travel through time and imagine you may hear us talking about Big Fish.

**Craig:** Right. Julie James is the sort of person that could probably interview, I don’t know, the guy who mugged her and still seem pretty supportive.

**John:** She would be very up about it all.

**Craig:** Yeah. She’s great.

**John:** You and I record our podcast ourselves separately with our own computers and our own little microphones and it’s a very stripped down operation. So, it was fascinating to actually go into a place that does this for a living and has a whole machine to do this stuff. Because I’ve done the NPR interviews and NPR is in the basement of a college and it’s professional but it’s also sort of downscale.

This is like in the fancy McGraw-Hill building There are these glass booths and basically there’s a window and then there’s a foot of air and then there’s another giant piece of glass, so like everything is just deeply soundproof. You could easily be murdered in one of these things and no one would ever hear you.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But it was just so fascinating to see. It’s essentially the same thing that we’re doing, just ramped to a much higher scale.

**Craig:** Yeah. And really what it comes down to is that the amount of money and effort that is required to take something from say 85% good to 100% good is a lot.

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** That’s where all the, you know, in our little things of like my air conditioning coming on, or the bus outside, or we were just talking about little mic bumps and things, all that goes away. But, yeah, it’s very expensive to do it truly properly.

**John:** Yeah, but lovely. One thing I did notice is the same sort of across the board is they have the same headphones that I believe you and I both do have which is the — I’m going to look up the name of it — the Sony MDR-7506.

**Craig:** Yes. That’s what I’m wearing right now.

**John:** For the professional cans. I have to say, I mean, it could be a One Cool Thing, I guess, but if you want a good pair of headphones, just get these. They’re really good. And they’ll always sound really good.

Today on the podcast we are going to talk about a wide range of topics. We’re going to talk about these comments that Kevin Spacey made at the Edinburgh Television Festival. Because really when I think of television I think of Edinburgh, Scotland.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** He made comments about the present and future of television, which I think are worth discussing.

LA’s Mayor, Eric Garcetti, had comments about runaway production and what that means to Los Angeles and how it can be fought. So we’ll talk about that.

We need to talk about the upcoming WGA election.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s not even upcoming, it’s the currently upon us WGA election.

**Craig:** Yes, the imminent election.

**John:** Yes. And we’ve talked about this on every incarnation of the podcast, but this time you will really lead the conversation because I know nothing.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** But first we have some follow-up. So, last week on the podcast, it was Three Page Challenges we did. And so one of them was by this guy Keith Eiler. This was the one that was set in space and had something with Oblivion in the title. And so he tweeted us to say like, “Hey guys, thank you so much for looking at my script on the show,” but he gave us references for what the title meant and for also what this one dialogue reference meant.

So, this is how his title came to be. It’s this Marcel Proust quote. And I’m going to start to read it and then we’re going to have a little discussion. This is a quote from Marcel Proust:

“What best remind us of a person is precisely what we had forgotten (because it was of no importance, and we therefore left it in full possession of its strength). That is why the better part of our memories exist outside us, in a blatter of rain, in the smell of an unaired room or of the first crackling brushwood fire in a cold grate: wherever, in short, we happen upon what our mind, having no use for it, had rejected, the last treasure that the past has in store, the richest, that which, when all our flow of tears seems to have dried at the source, can make us weep again.”

Wow. So, a couple things about that. First off, the underlying idea behind this longer quote — I just sort of gave you half of it — is that it’s those things you don’t kind of remember remembering are what are sort of most significant, and sort of like really capture that emotional memory of things, and that’s a really nice idea. And I think it’s a nice idea to have in a script. I think it’s a nice idea for someone to in easier ways say in a script. And it’s a nice thematic idea. I really like that as a thematic idea.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** I found that quote to be impenetrable though.

**Craig:** Well, it’s difficult. You know, you’re translating it from French. And when we look at writers who wrote in English at Proust’s time, they tended to be impenetrable, too. There was a very purple prosy thing that was going on for awhile there. I’m glad it’s sort of gone. [laughs] It was almost like your quote needed to be really complicated in order to be any good. That’s one of the reasons why I was always I guess attracted to Nietzsche’s writing because even translated from German by the great Walter Kaufmann, there’s just a clarity to it.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s honestly why all high school students love reading Hemingway because they’re, “Oh, short sentences.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s the same semester you always have to read Hemingway and Faulkner and you’re like, “Oh my god, please just let me read two Hemingway’s and not have to go through a Faulkner.” Because Faulkner does that same thing which we just saw in Proust’s quote which is it’s a bunch of clauses strung together by commas. And by the time you’re in the fourth or fifth deep one of these it’s like, wait, what was the subject of this sentence? I can’t actually follow the thread because we’re just not used to having to dig that deep into sentences.

**Craig:** Right. And then people sometimes claim a certain merit in understanding these hard to untangle paragraphs. But, I’m not really sure that that’s meritorious. I mean, the sentiments though are great. And Proust, I guess, is most famous for his notion of sense memory, his Madeleine cookie and all that.

**John:** What I would also say in general, if this quote is an important part of the idea of your movie — Keith, awesome that you did not try to put that in the first page. Because I’ve seen so many terrible scripts where the first page would be that impenetrable quote, and when I get to that first impenetrable quote I’m like, “Oh my god, I don’t want to read another word, because it’s going to be all like this. It’s all going to be about that thing.”

So, let’s say if you have this idea of the things you don’t remember are the memories that actually carry emotional weight, and I may be butchering what the actual intent of that paragraph was, but that’s what we got out of it, is you’re going to need to find ways to thread that through your script in ways that characters can state them, that characters can, you know, once they come to realize. But a character can express that idea, embody that idea. You need to be able to find moments that can make that actually come to life. And space would seem to be a really difficult place to do that. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but that would be an extra challenge I would see if that is thematically the idea you want to get to.

Space is going to probably make it more challenging than less challenging.

**Craig:** It could, yeah. And I think also you just have to give yourself up to a certain amount of let’s call it non-linearity and irrationality. Because the purpose of the quote is essentially that our conscious rational, logical mind isn’t really processing the memories that matter. That this is going on in the zany or uncoordinated part of our minds.

So, it seems that the movie would probably have to end up being a bit more lyrical and a bit more poetic and non-linear than a traditional narrative. But, you know, just because you don’t want to sort of — it’s difficult to relay a sense of subconscious thought through a very conscious, ordered, intentional plot.

**John:** Exactly. I would agree with you. And since movies are about images and sounds, it’s not going to be as rewarding just to have a character say the modern English version of that. In a play, however, I bet you could have a character give a monologues that is essentially that point, or gets you to that point, which is incredibly powerful and moving, but that’s a play.

**Craig:** And you’re there with the person in the room.

**John:** Absolutely. And you’re watching them experience that thing at the same time.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, let’s get to today’s work and today’s discussions. First off, let’s start with this Kevin Spacey video. You can see the video. You can see the transcript of it.

Essentially Kevin Spacey was speaking at the Edinburgh Television Festival and he is known for House of Cards, his most recent season, which is one of the acclaimed Netflix shows that sort of broke the model of how a television show is supposed to work in that the Netflix shows, including House of Cards, including Orange is the New Black — which I finally started watching — do not work under the normal pilot season. They’re not shot with pilots and then they go to series. They are just fully formed things that exist all at once and that you don’t have to watch them week by week. They simply exist in their entire 13 episode wholeness the moment they debut.

So, his arguments summarized is that this is how — this isn’t just the future of television but this is actually the current present of television and that if television does not adapt to it, if broadcast networks don’t adapt to it they will quickly be extinct. And I liked it because it was similar to points that you and I have made on the show before is that stuff is changing. If you don’t acknowledge that it’s changing you’re the dinosaurs who are going to become completely extinct.

**Craig:** Yeah. He makes, I think, a bunch of great points and then takes it one step too far.

**John:** Oh, Kevin Spacey!

**Craig:** Oh Kevin Spacey! So, the points that I think everybody makes in general that the notion of having an entire season on demand instantly for people who are subscribing to the service makes complete sense. We know that for sure. Even though —

**John:** Although we didn’t know that when it first happened though.

**Craig:** No. We didn’t know, but we now know it for sure.

**John:** The Arrested Development model.

**Craig:** Right. And that’s not particularly news because we know it. I mean, he’s involved in one of the shows that sort of proved it. But, we know it to an extent. In other words we know that people will do it, but they’re not doing it, and this will tie back to my bridge too far, they’re not doing it anywhere near the way that they watch the models of programming that Kevin Spacey sort of is saying are already outmoded. They’re not. [laughs] Not even close.

But we know, okay, it can work, at least on some level that can work. The best point he made, the most important point he made was the one about the stupidity of pilots and pilot season. And the argument is that the necessity of a pilot causes certain creative decisions to be made which are not ideal. They demand that the writers pack a whole bunch of stuff into one hour, or if you’re a sitcom, 22 minutes, including who the characters are, what their deals are, what their problems are, what the situation is, da-dada-dada. Right?

Everything is all there in the pilot. That’s why pilots suck more than anything. They are an unnatural demand on the writers. And his point was we didn’t want to write a pilot because we actually wanted the luxury of being able to reveal things as we chose, as we decided. And I thought that was a great point. And he connects it back to the insane inefficiency of the pilot system, which is remarkable.

**John:** So, two points. I would agree with you that his best point is that the existence of pilots forces creative decisions that are not good for television series. And that having written several pilots and having been through that development process, you are forced to wedge in so much that you would choose not to put in there.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** This last thing I did for ABC, Chosen, I definitely felt that where essentially like, “Okay, that stuff you have for episode two, let’s cram that into episode one.” It’s like, oh my god, there’s no room to breathe in this show anymore because they keep trying to pack in more plot and more “this is what the show is, this is what the show is,” because the pilot has become this marketing document for the network essentially saying like please pick up our show because this is how exciting it’s going to be. The pilot is completely atypical of what the actual series might be week to week, which is a huge problem.

What I would say though, an observation about the inefficiency of the pilot system, it’s probably hugely beneficial to the employment of writers. I think because we overshoot the number of pilots we make, I think a lot more people end up being employed writing pilots and getting the chance to make pilots than otherwise would be if we actually went to a full, okay, we’re just going to make series.

**Craig:** Yes. And no. Yes, in the sense that you’re right, strictly they are employed. No, in the sense that whatever you make to write that one pilot isn’t that much, and worse, by creating a system that is particularly inefficient for scripted narrative programming the networks find it much, much easier, I think, to punt and just put in stuff that’s much easier to develop, like reality, which you can make a pilot for cheaply and remake, and remake, and remake.

And it’s unfortunate because the real money for writers is when the show is a hit and on. And we’ve lost ground to non-scripted stuff I think in part because the pilot system is just so absurd.

**John:** I agree that the pilot system is absurd but I would still push back on some of these points. The inefficiencies is essentially research and development. Television does research and development the way that movies never do is that we say like, “Well, what if we made this show?” And so you get to see, well, what would that show be like?

The pilots are a very imperfect version of what that show would be like, but I think it gives us a lot of new and medium writers a chance to actually make their own thing, that would be much less likely if we went to a full “we’re just going to make 13 episodes of a series” situations. Because the people who get to make 13 episodes of a series of their own creation are the Jenji Kohans, are the people who have the power, and history, and clout to do that.

So, it’s going to be harder and harder for me, when I was doing my first TV show, to be doing my first TV show because it’s a bigger gamble to say we’re going to do 13 episodes of a show versus a pilot.

**Craig:** I agree with that. I think the answer is probably somewhere in the middle. Maybe not demanding that pilots do the work beyond what a good first episode of a series ought to be doing. Where I think that Kevin Spacey takes the unnecessary leap, and you see this sometimes — people get really excited when something new comes along. They get so excited that they over swing.

Here’s the truth: House of Cards, while a success for Netflix, is a success question mark. No one really knows, I don’t think, how many people actually watch the show. More importantly, we do know this — a tiny fraction of say — A House of Cards audience is a tiny fraction of say Modern Family’s audience.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The truth is that the network model that Kevin Spacey seems to think his show has already made obsolete is so vastly more profitable and more watched than the Netflix model. We don’t need to engage in these things where it has to be this or that. The truth is the network model still works in a fascinatingly successful way.

Similarly, people — while he points out is it still a film if you watch it on TV at home? Yeah, sure, it’s a movie, but people still go to the theater. So, while we open ourselves to change, and open ourselves to adapt to the technology that’s available to us and what the audience is telling us, we shouldn’t over-correct and just decide that everything that exists and is incredibly successful is now obsolete.

**John:** I would argue about whether you can blanket statement say that broadcast television is more profitable than Netflix or those situations because they’re actually very difficult to compare. The Netflix model is really very much like what HBO does. And when you talk to HBO and they talk about sort of how they make their money, they will tell you quite honestly, “Our research has found that if there’s one show that people want to watch on HBO they will keep subscribing to HBO.”

So, they don’t necessarily need to have a bunch of eyeballs as long as they have one show that each of their current subscribers or each of their hopeful subscribers really wants to watch and will therefore pay for HBO to watch.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so it’s a remarkable luxury to be able to say, “We don’t have to appeal to a broad cross-section of Americans as long as we can get this number of people to be watching HBO because this show exists.”

**Craig:** That’s right. It is apples to oranges. But, just as it’s apples and oranges to compare the amount of money that, I don’t know, the paperclip industry makes to the computer industry, I think it’s fair to say the computer industry probably makes more money.

When you talk about big hit network shows that are rerun and go into syndication and are purchased on DVD and are watched by, I don’t know, 15 million people on a given night, and the ads that are sold, the amount of money is astonishing. Granted, it’s not what it used to be, but it’s astonishing. Netflix was a company that was nearly out of business two years ago. So, hard to say — it’s hard to say. All I think I can say for sure is that stories of network television’s demise are — how does the phrase go?

**John:** Greatly exaggerated?

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Yes. I would thoroughly agree with you on that point.

So, let’s go to a topic that you can lead the discussion on because I’m just ignorant — the WGA elections are happening right now.

**Craig:** Right now.

**John:** And so people should have a packet in their mailbox of candidate statements and ballots and things that they should be looking at. So, if you’re a WGA member, what kinds of things would you encourage them to be looking at?

**Craig:** Well, it’s an interesting year. This is, every two years there is an officer election. So, there is a board of 16 members and then there are three officers. On I guess even years it’s just eight members of the board are up for reelection. On odd years it’s the other eight members of the board, plus the three officers. The WGA West has an interesting constitutional clause that says that we can’t do what’s called white ballot voting. And white ballot voting is one candidate to vote for. The framers of the union felt strongly that there should always be some sort of competition. And there always has been, until this year.

So, this year we have Christopher Keyser, our incumbent president, running unopposed. And we have Howard Rodman, our incumbent vice president, also running unopposed. How is this possible? It’s possible because basically the people that were nominated to run against them declined. Essentially they turned it down. And at that point the Guild felt it had done its duty.

And so it goes. It’s a little strange. I mean, look, the truth is Chris and Howard were going to win anyway.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, a lot of times what happens is they just put a straw dummy candidate up just to fulfill the constitutional. So, obviously you’re voting for Chris Keyser. You have no choice. I would urge you to anyway. And you’re voting for Howard Rodman, you have no choice. I would urge you to anyway.

Where things have gotten a little interesting is in the Secretary-Treasurer race between Dan Wilcox and Carl Gottlieb. Carl Gottlieb is a legend. He wrote — talk about two wildly different movies — Carl Gottlieb wrote Jaws…

**John:** I’ve heard of Jaws.

**Craig:** Carl Gottlieb wrote The Jerk. [laughs] Now, how is this possible that you could somehow figure out a way to write two of the most amazing movies of the ’70s in two wildly different genres? Well, Carl did it. And I am very proud to say that I served with Carl and that he is not only a gentleman and a brilliant writer and a legend, but Carl has probably the most institutional wisdom of any of the people that currently serve the Guild. He’s been involved forever.

He’s running against Dan Wilcox who I don’t think wrote Jaws or The Jerk. Dan has sort of lobbed this bizarre, I don’t know what is going on here, so Dan Wilcox wrote this statement basically saying the Guild doesn’t have enough meetings and the meetings don’t go long enough. Well, let me tell you something. Having served on the Guild, the best news of all would be that maybe they got rid of a few meetings, that the meetings weren’t 12 hours long.

These meetings were atrocious. When you get, you know, you’re talking about 19 people in a room, plus staff, slowly belaboring nonsense. It’s the worst. I think the fact that meetings are running more efficiently is wonderful.

He was also complaining apparently that some people weren’t showing up, but then he goes ahead and he supports Thania St. John who is running for reelection who has missed more meetings than anyone. I have no idea what Dan is talking about. I’ll be honest with you: he’s a nice man but I found him to be an unimpressive board member when I was on the board. He doesn’t particularly propose anything or change anything or do anything. He’s just kind of — he reminds me of the way I think Guild politics used to be but isn’t any longer.

I strongly support Carl. And, by the way, so do Chris Keyser and so does Howard Rodman. And Chris and Howard, by the way, are from either side of the Guild political spectrum and they get along great and they both support Carl. I think that that one is a slam dunk.

**John:** Now, let’s talk about what this elected board will be facing and addressing, because how close are we getting to contract negotiations, other issues that are going to be pressing on us in this next term?

**Craig:** One of the favorite rhetorical tricks that candidates will use is to say things like, “Don’t think that when you’re voting here you’re voting to say what the negotiations are going to be, the contract, because the negotiations are on this date and the contract is this date,” and blah, blah, blah.

You’re always voting for that. Because the truth is once you elect somebody chances are the incumbents will be reelected. Beyond that, while a particular board member may not be around for a particular negotiation, they’re there when the negotiating committee is appointed. There’s an enormous influence that you have. You’re always voting for negotiations. Never let anybody tell you you’re not. You always are. I hate that. It’s the worst lie. That’s the one that drives me the craziest.

So, yeah, this is entirely about negotiations. And, of course, given that we’re going to have the same president and vice president combo, I think we can expect a certain amount of continuity. There are certain candidates that I think would be terrific to continue or be new to the board considering that we are heading towards negotiations.

So, Billy Ray has been, I think he’s chaired the negotiating committee now twice. He’s essential. We have to reelect Billy. Billy is important. And, by the way, not every — there are 16 directors on the board and about three of them usually matter and the rest of them are just sort of voting along with the other three. Billy Ray is one of the important ones. Have to, have to reelect him.

I’m a big fan of this kid Ari Rubin. He’s a kid. I mean, I say kid because now I’m getting older and he’s probably thirty-something. He’s famed screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin’s son. And he’s just very enthusiastic and very much wants to kind of present a positive, I guess, energy from the Guild to the membership. You know, a lot of these people just get grumpy after awhile. He’s not yet grumpy. And I think he’s very reasonable. He looks at both sides of the issue, so I like Ari Rubin.

And Lee Aronsohn, I think, is well worth electing. Lee Aronsohn was Chuck Lorre’s right hand guy. I think he is sort of retired now, but he really understands the boots on the ground in TV today. And it’s just so important that we have people — and we have a lot of people on the board that frankly just aren’t really connected on a day-to-day basis to the way the business really works. Lee certainly would be.

And then I recommend strongly the reelection of David Goyer, again, who understands both screenwriter issues, and we have precious few screenwriters on the board, and television issues, and the business as it is currently.

And how could I not mention that Patric Verrone is running again.

**John:** There’s some institutional knowledge of a different kind…

**Craig:** Yes. [laughs]

**John:** …of Patric Verrone, who was the president of the WGA through — president or chairman of the board? I guess president.

**Craig:** He was president.

**John:** President, during the most recent strike.

**Craig:** Yes. Patric just apparently can’t get enough.

**John:** Yeah. A person I know personally who is running is Jonathan Fernandez who was actually in my picketing group.

**Craig:** Oh yeah, I like Jonathan.

**John:** My picketing group at Paramount. And he’s fantastic, and smart, and considerate. And walks that sort of smart middle ground in that he was very involved during the strike but also very interested in having the strike be over. I know he came to you for counsel as well about…

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** …sort of the issues that would be facing the board during these next two years.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think Jonathan Fernandez is terrific. Yes. So, I’m going to say my personal I’m voting for them: Chris Keyser, Howard Rodman, Carl Gottlieb, Ari Rubin, Jonathan Fernandez, Billy Ray, Lee Aronsohn, David Goyer. I am fans of all them.

And, by the way, when it comes to voting for the board, you can vote for eight people. You don’t have to vote for eight people.

**John:** It’s that classic thing where voting for fewer people in a weird way makes your votes count a little bit more because you’re not diluting your vote.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I would say my general criteria as looking for people to vote is trying to find people who sort of proxy my views on how things should be, but who also bring a diversity of experience and opinion to how to do things. And so as you say institutional knowledge for Carl Gottlieb is fantastic. Enthusiasm and new perspective is great for some of these younger members.

But, the WGA is also a collection of film people and television people. And we need to have both in there. And classically screenwriters have been underrepresented in board affairs.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So that’s why I’m excited to have screenwriters as candidates.

**Craig:** Not many of them, but yes.

**John:** But Goyer and Fernandez both count as that, which is fantastic.

**Craig:** Goyer, Fernandez, and Billy Ray for sure.

**John:** Yeah, yeah. Let us go to a small intermezzo, a small — what do you call those little palate cleanser…?

**Craig:** A sorbet?

**John:** Sort of a midway sorbet. We got a question from Hillary Dixon Rust who is a gentleman. He asks, “Ever taken the Myers-Briggs test? If so, would you share your types?”

**Craig:** Yeah, I have. Have you?

**John:** Of course. I knew you had. Of course I have, too. So, the most recent time I took it I am an ENTJ. What are you?

**Craig:** [laughs] ENTJ.

**John:** Yeah. That doesn’t surprise me at all.

**Craig:** Look at us. Shouldn’t we be fighting or, I don’t know what it even means. Sometimes I’m an ENTP.

**John:** Yeah. I think I occasionally turn out to be a P.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But I would say when I first took the test in college I was definitely an I. And that is one of the things, extroversion, really any of these scales, you can slide a bit on them and it’s going to be fungible. But it was a very deliberate choice to sort of force myself to be more extroverted.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**John:** And so the person I am now is not the person I was in college.

**Craig:** You know what’s so interesting about what you just said? I could have said and can say the exact same thing. It’s so weird to me. I was also, and I remember doing it in college and I was an I. And just so people understand the I/E thing, so Introvert/Extrovert, the specific way they’re talking about it is what energizes you, being around people or being on your own? And it did change for me. It really changed for me.

I am in the exact same boat. We’re the same thing and we’ve followed the same progression. How weird.

**John:** Yeah. And so things like when we hosted the live 100th episode of Scriptnotes or when we did the big thing at the Academy, that would have just absolutely terrified me and it would have caused panic. And instead it gets me really amped up and adrenalized and I love it. So, it’s a very different thing.

**Craig:** My introversion manifested itself differently. I just would have been angry and dismissive. [laughs]

**John:** You were surly, you’re saying?

**Craig:** Incredibly! But I’ve become so much more happy. Out of curiosity, do you know what Mike is?

**John:** Mike, I don’t know what his full thing is but he’s definitely on the introvert side — my husband Mike. And your wife, Melissa?

**Craig:** Melissa is, I think, an opposite of me in every — no, no, she’s an E also, but I think she’s like ESFP. I mean, she’s just completely opposite.

**John:** Completely opposite, yeah. She’s the other side of your Velcro?

**Craig:** Totally. Totally.

**John:** Yeah, it’s interesting. And so it’s great to have some balance in your relationship and the ability to do different things. And it’s also important I think for people to realize that those aren’t like, it’s not fate. It’s not destiny that because you’ve scored a certain way on this little test you took that this is how you must behave in life. It just sort of shows your general patterns on how you’re going to behave in situations.

**Craig:** And god forbid that you should take this test and then decide you have to act like the way the test tells you to act. That would be the worst possible outcome.

**John:** Yeah, please don’t do that.

**Craig:** Don’t do that.

**John:** So, back in college you were introverted but you also had a famous roommate. I don’t know if you want to get into your famous roommate now. It’s probably too long of a topic.

**Craig:** [laughs] No, I can do a very short version. My freshman year roommate, so the roommate that was assigned to me by Princeton University was Ted Cruz who is currently a United States Senator from Texas and putative presidential candidate. And I hated him. And I talked about it —

**John:** But now he’s one of your best friends on earth, right?

**Craig:** [laughs] No, I still hate him. And I talked about it with a reporter and it was awesome. I was called… — There are some corners of the internet where people just get wild. And politically I’m very much in the middle. I pick and choose from right and left depending on the topic. I’m not a — far from a leftish, far from a rightist. But I was accused of being a leftist, a Marxist, gay, bisexual. I like that it was both gay and bisexual.

**John:** That’s perfect. Well, they see your wife and your kid and say, “Okay, maybe once.” [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] They didn’t really know about that.

**John:** Oh, you have two kids, I’m sorry. Twice.

**Craig:** Yes, twice. I was a Marxist and a whole bunch of other stuff. It was pretty wild. People are nuts! Anyway, I thought it was fun in a weird way because I have been inoculated to a certain extent from the pain of public criticism, but these people are just cuckoo. I mean, it was actually funny.

But, Ted Cruz was my roommate. I did not like him at all in college. I actually asked that they give me a different roommate. I made it as far as November and I couldn’t take it anymore. And the university declined my offer, my request. So, I was stuck with him for an entire year. And then I haven’t said a word to him since.

**John:** Uh-huh.

**Craig:** Bad guy. Don’t like him.

**John:** Let’s transition from a discussion of national politics to more local politics which is the LA Mayor Eric Garcetti made comments, Variety picked up the story but other people picked up the story as well saying that it is a priority of the city government to stop runaway production or to try to keep more production of Hollywood features and television shows shooting actually in Hollywood where the film industry began.

This is obviously an evergreen thing that comes up. It’s an evergreen problem. I think the only thing I saw which was a little bit more specific from his comments was that we’re going to focus on the things we can actually hopefully win which is things like one-hour drama pilots and trying to keep them in town.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m deeply torn and conflicted about this because whenever I see the political solutions being proffered for runaway productions it’s always like, “Well, we need more tax incentives.” Well, that’s just an arms race and it’s an arms race that everybody loses because if California creates these giant tax incentives well, okay, first off, why are we doing it for this industry rather than other industries. But, you can look at sort of the tax incentives that local governments offer for retailers saying like, “Hey Walmart, please build a new Walmart here.” And so they build this great Walmart here and they close the other Walmart which becomes this wasteland. And it’s not good for everybody.

**Craig:** This is intractable. It is. And this article bummed me out because I got excited at first. And then I kept reading going, okay, it was like a kid opening up a gift and it’s just nothing but tissue paper. And then finally you hit the bottom of the box and you’re like, “Oh, god, there’s nothing in here but tissue paper.” There is no answer in this article.

**John:** [laughs] Yeah. There’s like a receipt for something that is not actually in —

**Craig:** Yeah, gift receipts for a sweater that at this point you actually would want and you didn’t even get. So, the idea of these tax incentives is that a state basically says if you shoot a movie here then what we’ll do is we’ll collect a bunch of tax from all the people that work on the movie and then we’ll give it back to you, the production, so that employees work, essentially.

“We want our people working here in the state. And our feeling is if they work and they get paid, even if we give you back our state revenue from that stuff, that they will then go and buy stuff and that will just be better for our economy.” That’s the theory. And frankly I’m not sure that there is enough evidence one way or another to show that it works or doesn’t work. There are enough places doing it that makes me think it does work.

But, the problem is that there are so many places doing it that it becomes insolvable for California. First of all, California is the most poorly run state in the country. I really do believe that. Sacramento is horrible. I mean, I’m really involved in school funding issues and public school funding issues and California is ridiculous. It will continue to be ridiculous.

On this issue, I think this is a — stand in line, by the way, of how many things California bungles, including the fact that we’re saddled with this cuckoo nuts referendum system so now we have this multibillion dollar ridiculous high speed bullet train that nobody wants that is too expensive. I mean, it’s just we’re a dumb state and we’re getting dumber. And we’re also enormous and unwieldy. So, much like turning the Titanic, it takes us a really long time after we see the iceberg to figure out what to do.

You have all these other states that seem to be more nimble. And also, frankly, aren’t as worker friendly. So, when we say, “Oh look, let’s go shoot everything in Atlanta,” the way that so many movies are right now, it’s not just because Georgia is saying we’ll give you a bunch of money back. Georgia is saying we can give you a bunch of money back because frankly all these people that are working are working lower rates, not a lot of union stuff, right to work states where you don’t have to be in the union. It is a race to the bottom.

It’s a race to the bottom for the states and it’s a race to the bottom for the workers. The only people who are enjoying this and laughing about it are the studios. And they couldn’t give a damn.

**John:** I think you’re sadly kind of right. So, let’s talk about this from the writer’s perspective because in a weird way the writer seems to be the most insulated from this because, well, we can write anywhere. And a lot of us write in Los Angeles, or we write wherever, and it kind of doesn’t matter so much to us, except, it sometimes really matters for the project. So, I’m going to fictionalize certain aspects of this meeting so that people don’t figure out what I’m actually talking about.

But, a couple of weeks ago I went in to meet on this project, an adaptation that I really liked that I do hope to do at some point. And the original project is set in a specific location. And there are good creative reasons why the place where it is set should maybe not be the place where you would want to set the movie version of it. And in a general sense, there are reasons why you may want to move it just for good creative reasons.

One of the producers said, so we started to talk about good creative places to put, like rather than there you could set it on the east coast, it could be this, it could be a Bostony kind of thing. That could be really interesting. Yeah, that totally works. And one of the producers said, “Well, no, we should put it in Louisiana so it’s cheaper.”

And I nodded but didn’t sort of say yes or no. But that was a case where the suggestion came to make a fundamental creative choice, and really a terrible creative choice for this project based on where he perceived we could shoot the movie for less money. And that is exactly what you don’t want.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** As a writer, or as a filmmaker, as anyone, a producer, anyone who cares about making the best movie, the best TV show, you should choose the location you shoot it in for what it actually makes sense to — for the project you’re trying to do. And so if you’re trying to do a New York set thing, great, shoot New York, and it’s lovely that there are tax credits here. But if you’re set in Los Angeles, or you’re set in California, or like it doesn’t matter where you’re set, don’t just go to Atlanta or Louisiana or that other place just for those tax reasons because it kind of hurts you on some levels.

**Craig:** They don’t care. I went through this on Identity Thief. It was —

**John:** So, Identity Thief was Georgia, correct?

**Craig:** Identity Thief was shot in Atlanta.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** The movie was obviously always meant to be a road trip. And I sat and I remember talking about it at length with Jason and with Seth Gordon about the kind of road trip we wanted to do. And the one that we wanted to tell, because it’s important, I mean, everything is intentional. And we sort of wanted to show a cross country road trip that we hadn’t really seen.

You know, for instance Due Date had just done a really good one from Atlanta to LA and they kind of cut through that southern swath and through the Grand Canyon. It was such a great look. And they got near the Mexican border. But what I hadn’t seen was a trip that I had actually done when I was younger, which is kind of a Boston to Portland kind of feel, that cutting across the top of the country, through the rust belt, and through dairy country, and then out through kind of big sky and all the rest of it.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And ending up in the Pacific Northwest. And so much of what the characters look like and dress like and how they live, plus Boston is such a great town in terms of look.

**John:** Oh, it’s great.

**Craig:** And Portland is really interesting. And Portland is also interesting because of the communities that are just off it that are actually kind of trashy and depressed.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I was screamed at. [laughs] I’m not joking. I’m not going to tell you who screamed at me. Screamed at. And when I tell you screamed at, I mean over the phone I was screamed at and I was told the movie has to be shot in Atlanta or it’s not happening. And the road trip, given that the whole thing had to be shot in Atlanta, the physical production people were quite convinced that we could fool the audiences by making a road trip from Miami to Atlanta. [laughs]

And I was like, that’s a day. First of all, everything looks the same. That’s the whole point. So, how will you know you got anywhere? Forget what it does to the characters and all the rest of it. And it was an enormous fight and in the end the best I could do was get to, okay, it’s a drive from Miami to Denver, but not really Denver, Atlanta. And then pay for a second unit to sort of fake our way through St. Louis.

It was depressing, because frankly what ended up happening was the Denver scenes were just generic because frankly Denver and Atlanta are kind of generic looking cities.

**John:** They really are.

**Craig:** So, that stuff was just sort of generic. The Florida stuff was generic. And the road trip was boring. You know, you didn’t get a sense of scope or feel or the bigness of what it means to be out on the road in the middle of nowhere, just big, big…it just killed me.

**John:** The only sort of big wide moments you had were some of those giant tree-lined highways. And you used those for like the times when they’re walking around a bit.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But that’s as much sort of scale —

**Craig:** It’s generic, you know?

**John:** So, I was pretty sure that Identity Thief went to Denver. And what was so weird is that We’re the Millers also goes to Denver. And it’s like why are there two R-rated comedies that are about road trips to Denver?

**Craig:** Because they shot We’re the Miller in Atlanta and they knew that Identity Thief had successfully confused enough Americans to think that Denver was Atlanta. Because most people don’t know what Denver looks like and most people don’t know what Atlanta looks like.

**John:** Oh, poor Denver.

**Craig:** I know! But, look, it’s ridiculous.

**John:** So, We’re the Millers at least did shoot some in New Mexico because there is a little bit of scenery at some places in We’re the Millers.

**Craig:** Right, because the story actually takes them into Mexico and you can’t fake that in Atlanta. But this is the thing, it just bums me out. It bums me out. And it’s not like we were saying we have to shoot the movie in Los Angeles. And it’s not like we’re saying we can’t shoot a big chunk of it somewhere where there are tax breaks. Nor are we saying, “Okay, the movie that costs $32 million, if we do it the way we want to would cost $52 million.” It wouldn’t. It would have probably cost $37 million.

**John:** It would have been just fine.

**Craig:** It would have been just fine. But they just…they kill…anyway, they screamed at me. [laughs] And I screamed back. It was fun.

**John:** So, one of the interesting things that comes up is that the half-hours never get that pressure to shoot — or almost never get that pressure to shoot somewhere else. So, Ugly Betty famously did move from Los Angeles to New York, but it was also set in New York, so I was willing to cut it some slack there. But New Girl, no one is telling New Girl, “Oh, you need to shoot in Atlanta.” That’s because comedies rely on having their writers right there. Because comedy is about sort of all that stuff you do on the set to try different things, to get things to be funny.

It’s a much more live process than the one-hours are. And so I guess we could make a whole bunch more half-hours and then suddenly we would have more production happening in town. It wouldn’t be the worst thing.

**Craig:** Also, those half-hours are set based, so they’re stage based. And there is an economics behind the stage rentals, too. I mean, companies don’t want to give away the stage space that they own for free, nor do they want them sitting empty. So…

**John:** So they want to lease it to their own productions and so they’re paying themselves.

**Craig:** They lease it to their own. They lease it to other. I mean, it’s kind of crazy how some of these shows end up where they end up. But, yeah.

**John:** They end up in a certain studio, on certain stages because that’s what was available when they shot the pilot. And suddenly like 12 years later they’re at this weird place.

**Craig:** Yeah. Like I remember Seinfeld was shot at CBS Radford.

**John:** But you look at Shonda Rhimes’s shows, and they could — most of them could shoot anywhere, but they’re better for shooting in Los Angeles because she and the creative team have the ability to impact the show because they’re locally —

**Craig:** Well, the other thing is when you’re talking about a long-term television show there are costs that begin to accrue when you’re dealing with an out of town production: putting everybody up and feeding everybody and flying everybody back and forth, and every guest start and every actor and all the rest of it. At some point it outweighs the benefits. But a movie, a one-shot deal, oh my god, they just can’t help it.

And the way they jam you on these locations — you want to know why comedies all look like crap, it’s not the directors or the DPs. It’s the locations. And Atlanta is a beautiful place the first time, or the fifth time, but not the 50th time.

I remember I was standing with — I went out to Atlanta. I’m standing where they were shooting the car chase for Identity Thief. And it was literally the same intersection where they had done a car accident scene in Due Date just a year earlier.

**John:** Oh my.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s just like, ugh, god.

**John:** Hmm.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** Well, we didn’t solve that problem.

**Craig:** No. And it’s not going to get solved.

**John:** It’s not going to get solved. I think my only bit of suggestion and hope is that maybe rather than focusing on tax incentives or sort of getting our A-list people to say, “We need more tax incentives,” is to get our A-list people to say, “No, screw it, I’m not going to shoot this thing over there. I’m going to shoot this here.” And maybe with more powerful TV showrunners and writer-directors, some of that will happen. It’s certainly not a guarantee.

**Craig:** It does happen for people who are powerful and for budgets that are larger. But, for so many it doesn’t happen.

**John:** It does not happen.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Let’s do our One Cool Things.

Craig, mine is actually a collection of One Cool Things. This was a listener suggestion as well. You and I have been doing One Cool Things since quite early on in the podcast. I think episode 10 or so we started doing them. And a listener wrote in and said, “Hey, why don’t you put together a page of all your One Cool Things in one place so we can see them all?”

**Craig:** Neat.

**John:** I was like, that’s a really good idea. So, Stuart and Ryan did that. if you go to johnaugust.com there will be a link to a little sidebar page that shows all the One Cool Things from the beginning of the show up till now. And we will be continuously updating it so you’ll see what I recommended and what Craig recommended.

**Craig:** Excellent.

**John:** If there’s a link that works for something you can buy, we’ll try to do that. If it’s something you can buy on Amazon it will be to that. And those things you click through for Amazon we get like a small percentage so you’re helping pay for the show while you’re getting cool things. So, that’s this week’s One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** That is a cool thing. My Cool Thing this week is something that you might have seen already. It’s been sort of making its way around the internet. Have you heard of or scene Slow Ass Jolene?

**John:** I am obsessed with Slow Ass Jolene to the degree that I actually took two of the tracks from Big Fish and did the same technique on them.

**Craig:** So, Slow Ass Jolene, someone took Jolene by Dolly Parton and slowed it down I think 25%. And it’s amazing. And it’s amazing for so many reasons. First of all, let’s give Dolly Parton credit for being one of the greatest singer-songwriters ever.

**John:** No question.

**Craig:** And Jolene is a heartbreaking song. It’s just heartbreaking. It is about as tragic a song as I can imagine. Maybe more so because it’s so understated. It’s not like, you know, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald is really trying to be tragic. This song is just a quiet, simple woman asking — no, begging — another woman not to take her man. And it’s so understated.

And the interesting thing about Dolly Parton if you were to say to me what is the weakest part of Dolly Parton, as a package, obviously not the songwriting, and not her pitch. Her pitch is outstanding. The quality of her voice, which is just the quality of her voice, is a little tinny. It’s a little shrilly/tinny, and it’s very country. And it’s very pleasant. But, for instance, it’s why Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You turned the world around whereas Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You didn’t. Not just tempo and tone, but it’s the timbre of her voice.

But when you take her performance of Jolene and you slow it down 25%, first of all the true tragedy of the song really starts to blossom, and because her voice has been knocked down to like a male tenor, what you hear is how good of a singer she is. How good she is! She’s so good. And, of course, it goes without saying long before the era of the noxious auto tune and all that. It’s a beautiful song and whoever did Slow Ass Jolene is kind of a genius because it’s sort of this wonderful serendipitous representation of something that was pretty terrific to begin with.

**John:** I agree. And so we will link to Slow Ass Jolene. I’ll also link to on Kottke they had a post that did the same technique to a bunch of other songs you’ve heard of, including like a Prince song that became an awesome slow jam. And Mazzy Star’s Fade Into You, which is sort of bizarrely hypnotic when you actually take it down a notch. And if I’m brave I may even put a link into Fight the Dragons which is one of the title songs, sort of main songs in Big Fish.

I happen to on my hard drive have a recording of Andrew Lippa, our composer, singing the song to the full track, full orchestral track, and you do that, it’s a 12.242 reduction. It pulls it down two semi-tones, and it’s kind of great.

And so I sent it to Andrew saying, “My friend Leon did a cover of our song,” and I sent it to Andrew so he could listen to it, and he’s like, “Who is Leon? I don’t get this?” And he was fascinated. I was like, “No, no, that’s you.”

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s you!

**John:** He did recognize his own voice.

**Craig:** No, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t.

**John:** No. It’s great.

**Craig:** Yeah, so Slow Ass Jolene.

**John:** Hooray. So, if you would like to listen to Slow Ass Jolene or any of the things we talked about on the podcast this week, links are always at johnaugust.com/podcast.

If you are listening to this show on iTunes and you happen to want to leave us a comment, or review, that’s awesome, so why don’t you go do that. I am @johnaugust on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. And we’re here every week. So, we will see you guys next week.

**Craig:** Bye!

**John:** Bye, thanks.

Links:

* Listen to John and Andrew on [SiriusXM On Broadway](http://www.siriusxm.com/onbroadway) with Julie James
* [Marcel Proust Within a Budding Grove, Part two](http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/496922-what-best-remind-us-of-a-person-is-precisely-what)
* The (http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/aug/22/kevin-spacey-tv-golden-age) and [transcript](http://www.theguardian.com/media/interactive/2013/aug/22/kevin-spacey-mactaggart-lecture-full-text) of Kevin Spacey’s speech at the 2013 Guardian Edinburgh International Television Festival
* [WGAW Announces Candidates for 2013 Officers and Board of Directors Election](http://www.wga.org/content/default.aspx?id=5259)
* [Myers-Briggs personality types](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator) on Wikipedia
* [L.A. Mayor Declares State of ‘Emergency’ As Movie, TV Production Flees Hollywood](http://variety.com/2013/biz/news/l-a-mayor-declares-state-of-emergency-as-movie-tv-production-flees-hollywood-1200589182/), from Variety
* [One Cool Things](http://johnaugust.com/onecoolthings) from Scriptnotes
* The New Yorker on [Slow Ass Jolene](http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/08/slowed-down-dolly-parton.html)
* Kottke on [How to make your own slow jams](http://kottke.org/13/08/how-to-make-your-own-slow-jams)
* Outro by Scriptnotes listener Latif Ullah