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The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/the-mystery-of-the-disappearing-articles).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 159 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, how is the writing going?

**Craig:** It’s going well. I’m on page 30.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** And are you achieving your goals? Are you hitting things you wanted to hit in your outline? How is the process?

**Craig:** The process is going well. I’m doing this in a different way than I’ve written anything else in that as I write I give pages to Lindsay and then what we do is — you would hate this because it’s the extreme opposite of what you do. So, you do this kind of one draft all the way through kind of squirreled away in solitude and you don’t go back over the work, you just forward, forward, forward, forward, forward, and then you stop and you take stock of what you have.

In this, I’ll write some pages and I’ll send them to her and we’ll start on page one and go through it. And then I move the ball forward, I send all those pages, we start on page one, and we go forward. But it’s been great. She’s been terrific and the pages are coming out really well so far. I deviated from the outline as I always do, but in ways that make sense.

**John:** Yes?

**Craig:** I find that deviations from the outline are purposeful, though they are deviations, because they are reacting in response to the roadmap as opposed to just guess work.

**John:** Yes. You’re dealing with a situation on the ground. You’re not just the general who is like moving pieces around on the board. Now you’re actually on the ground and you’re seeing what the terrain is and what you need to do on the terrain.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And you begin to feel where you ought to be. You begin to feel that some things need to be compressed into one. Some things need to be expanded into two. There was a phrase that I used the other day; I’d never used it but now that I think about it it’s kind of a useful screenwriting concept. And it was owing a debt.

I felt that on page 25 or so that the script owed a debt to a concept that was going to become important later on. And the debt needed to be paid before it was time, you know. And I accrued this debt and I needed to kind of go back and say, okay, we actually need to pay that debt earlier here on page 15 and now again on page 25 because that’s going to just make everything feel better later on.

**John:** Now, I’ve been in your situation where I’ve been handing pages sort of as they’re written to people, and the wonderful thing about it is — we talked earlier about Good Boy syndrome. It makes you feel like a good boy. Like, look, I’m doing my work. Teacher, look at my work. My work is so good. And Lindsay Doran is the most lovely teacher you could possible give, because she’s so wonderful and yet she’s really smart. And if there are problems she’s going to point out what the problems are.

**Craig:** That’s right. And so you’re putting your finger on something that’s of the essence here. And that is if you’re going to work this way you have to trust this person completely. You have to understand beforehand that their taste is good, that they have an experience doing this kind of work and running this kind of relationship with a writer. And that they are going to have a conversation with you. That’s there is nothing imperious about any of this. And it’s been terrific. I’ve just been having a ball and so far so good.

Here’s the other interesting thing. When you do it this way, in particular with somebody like Lindsay who is a principled person, when you’re done you have a great ally. You have somebody that understands and has thought about every word the way you have. And that’s really powerful, because usually you don’t have that.

**John:** It’s interesting you bring up trust because I did a long blog post this last week about trust because that’s the central thematic issue of my script. And I was wrestling with what trust means. And the concept of trust and really the word trust, because it’s a strange word in English that we don’t have an exact synonym for it. We have words that are kind of cousins to it, like believe or hope or duty. There are words that sort of encapsulate similar ideas, but trust is actually a really fascinating concept because I decided that it’s inner motivation about an external person or something else.

And so I broke it down and my definition of it was trust is confidence in the reliability of someone or something.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And that’s a really strange thing because we think of trust as being a two-way contract, but really it’s not necessarily that. You can trust somebody who doesn’t necessarily trust you. And you can place your trust in things and yet when that trust is questioned — when they do something that breaks that trust, it’s not necessarily that they can themselves break it. They may not even have sort of known that bond was there. But what’s really shattered is that inner thing that you had about that person.

Like love, it’s a similar kind of thing. You can love somebody who doesn’t love you back. You can trust somebody who doesn’t trust you back.

**Craig:** How true. Unrequited trust is a little less painful than unrequited love. And sometimes unrequited trust is perfectly fine, because you don’t need somebody to trust you. You just need to be able to trust them. My kids don’t need me to trust them. I want to. In fact, one thing that parents are constantly saying to their children is “I’m trusting you now.” And as I recall as s child I thought, why?

**John:** [laughs] I’m not trustworthy at all!

**Craig:** If you want to. But if I break it, eh, what are you going to do? But as a child you must be able to trust your parents, which is where so many childhoods go south is when children can’t trust their parents. And I think your definition is great. It’s a confidence in the reliability of somebody to do something specific, so we don’t trust everybody and everything, but that feeling is the same feeling that I like to impart to people with whom I work, when you talk about working with studio executives or actors or directors, I want to inspire their trust. It doesn’t mean that I’m obedient or non-critical, quite the opposite. What it means is they can rely on me to do the best I can on the movie as opposed to letting other things get in the way.

**John:** That they can place a set of expectations on you and you will fulfill those expectations. And that’s honestly why people get paid above scale is that we think you’re a good writer but we also think you’re going to be able to deliver this thing and we can sleep better at night that you are doing this thing because we trust you.

And in some ways I think even this podcast there’s some degree of like trust contract happening here that we’re not going to suddenly spring horrible bad advice upon people and that we’re not going to sort of betray confidences and do things that are not in the best interest of our listenership.

**Craig:** And that’s where things go wrong. I mean, basically if we started doing that then people would leave.

**John:** Well, if you look at Twitter, I mean, Twitter has had these little flashpoint moments where they’ll change something and everyone is like, well, I can’t trust Twitter anymore. Like I can’t trust that the things in my timeline are the things I want to be in my timeline. And, well, yeah, that’s the nature of that sort of one-sided relationship. And you could go somewhere else, but could you really go somewhere else?

**Craig:** Well, right, and same thing with Facebook. They’ve had those moments. And it’s interesting to watch when people react to companies or corporations and they get really emotional about it, sometimes it strikes one as odd, but then you do realize it is about trust.

**John:** Well, I also think it’s because we take these corporations, like Twitter, like Facebook, like Google, and we are applying — in my post I say like you can’t trust a chair. You can sort of have expectations of that chair, but you can’t really trust a chair. You can only sort of trust things you things you think are capable of making independent decisions. You can’t really trust a baby. That’s sort of crazy to talk about trusting a baby.

**Craig:** I trust babies.

**John:** I trust babies all the time. I trust them to be adorable and I scratch their heads and smell them. They’re so good. But I think when we’re talking about trusting Google or trusting Google Maps, you’re really sort of personifying them. I think you are thinking about them as a person and therefore you’re applying all of your trust principles to that person, which is crazy because you shouldn’t really do that, because they’re not a consistent entity. They are this conglomeration. They’re this swarm of little desires. And they’re not a thing you can really trust, in my opinion.

**Craig:** I totally agree. And this is where I often find myself isolated from my fellow man and woman because I have an instinctive — it’s not a paranoid position towards institutions, but rather just simply a constitutional lack of trust. Not a presence of mistrust or distrust. Just a lack of trust. I don’t trust religions. I don’t trust unions. I don’t trust corporations. I don’t trust groups of people. I don’t trust them. Why should I? I trust individuals.

**John:** Yeah. That seems like a reasonable choice.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Today on the podcast we are going to hopefully instill some trust in our listeners as we discuss four different Three Page Challenges. These people were —

**Craig:** Four!

**John:** Four! These people were brave enough to send in their three page samples and trust us to read them and provide our honest feedback which won’t always be kind feedback, but will always be hopefully respectful feedback, helpful feedback.

**Craig:** I think helpful is always a good thing.

**John:** Helpful is always a good aim, on their three pages. But before we get to that, I want to do a little bit of follow up. I think I talked about this on the last show. On October 8 Craig and I are doing something in a public way that’s not a live Scriptnotes, but it’s something like a live Scriptnotes. As we’re recording this it’s not actually announced, so I don’t want to risk spoiling it, but just keep October 8 open on your calendar if you’re in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** What time of day?

**John:** I believe it is an evening.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Yes. And evening Los Angeles, October 8, and it should be cool.

Secondly, a bit of follow up, Nick wrote in. We had talked about NRG last week and he says, “NRG is now known as Nielson for maybe the past ten years or so.” And so I always like it when someone writes in to sort of give us a correction or a suggestion. But really I will say that everyone in the industry that I talk to still calls them NRG.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, when I saw this in the notes for the show I kind of giggled because I’m like, oh, is that what people have been calling it for the last ten years? No. [laughs] Everyone calls it NRG. Everyone.

**John:** Yeah. And so I would say any filmmaker you talk to, they’ll say like, “Oh, I had an NRG screening.” They’re not going to say I had a Nielson screening, even though it’s technically Nielson/NRG is the company. We call it NRG.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, I don’t know if this is one of those deals where this guy works at Nielsen, is kind bummed because people keep calling it NRG or what. But, yeah, it’s NRG. That’s what we call it.

**John:** That’s what we call it. [laughs] We call it the right thing this entire time, but that’s just what we call it.

**Craig:** That’s what we call it. I mean, you can say that it’s technically that, but you can’t say, “It’s been known as this for 10 years.” By the people at Nielsen maybe, but not by us

**John:** And I think Nick actually works for another company, like a rival company. I’m not sure.

**Craig:** Oh, well, in that case I’m sure this is far more on his radar than it is on ours. I actually did one test screening with a different company. Once.

**John:** And how was it?

**Craig:** It was fine. It’s weird, I was just like, wait, oh, you have Pepsi? Okay.

**John:** It’s basically the same.

**Craig:** It’s close enough. Yeah. You know. I mean, in the end it’s like, oh, whatever, they’re all adding up numbers.

**John:** Yeah. The last bit of follow up is Less IMDb is this plug-in we made for Safari and for Chrome. We made it four years ago. And, Craig, do you have it installed? Do you even know what I’m talking about?

**Craig:** I do. I think I had it installed once.

**John:** And so what Less IMDb does is if you go to IMDb and you’re looking at a page for a movie, or an actor, or writer or whatever sometimes there’s just a lot of ads and other junk on the page and all you really want to see is the credits. So, what this plug-in does is remove all the stuff that’s not the interesting stuff that you want to see, like the credits, and move stuff around the page. So, it’s been working great for four years, and then less month it broke and we fixed it. So, if you’re interested in Less IMDb, you can go to quoteunquoteapps/LessIMDb, but you can also find it in the show notes. And so it’s all fixed up now.

**Craig:** May ask is it, because I do use Ad Blocker. Is it different than that, or is it — ?

**John:** It’s better than that because it’s really fine tuned for exactly IMDb. So, it knows what the stuff is on the page and rearranges it in way that’s helpful and pretty.

**Craig:** All right. Installing.

**John:** Installing.

**Craig:** Installing. Installing.

**John:** Nice. Let’s get to our work for the day, which are the Three Page Challenges. So, if you are new to the podcast, you may not have encountered Three Page Challenges before. What we do is we invite people to send in their first three pages of their script. It can be a pilot, it can be a feature screenplay, it can be kind of whatever. If you would like to follow along, go to johnaugust.com/scriptnotes and look for this episode and we’ll have the PDFs up there so you can read along with us.

You can also find them in Weekend Read on the iPhone if you have that app. There’s a whole category for Three Page Challenges. And you can find them in there. So, let’s take a look at the four that got sent in this week. The first one is by Joseph Bodner.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And it is called…

**Craig:** Joan.

**John:** Joan. Do you want to set up Joan for us?

**Craig:** Sure. Yeah. So, the show is called Joan and this is a three pages of a pilot. And the title of the pilot episode is Savior. So, we begin on black and we hear whispering. A girl is whispering these numbers six, 15, 46 over and over and over. And then we reveal that she’s in a warehouse. She’s 19 years old. Looks a little bit like a young Liza Minnelli from Cabaret, short black hair, androgynous. She’s naked, her body covered in tattoos, and she just keeps saying a bunch of numbers over and over.

She’s got a Mickey Mouse lunchbox filled with drug paraphernalia and some drugs. A couple of guys are with her and they are freaking out. They think something is wrong with her.

We now are in a hospital. We flat jump over to an emergency room. She is on a gurney. She keeps saying these numbers over and over but oddly enough she seems like, as this says, she seems like a drug overdose, like she should be comatose, but she keeps saying these numbers. Her heart rate is going crazy.

She’s now in the operating room. They are hitting her with a defibrillator because her heart has apparently stopped but she’s still saying these numbers. Then she kind of contorts her body into this crazy backwards arched position and then her body collapses. She stops saying the numbers. She is dead. She is pronounced dead.

We then see that she is in the morgue with a bunch of dead bodies. And she wakes up and pukes. And then realizes that she’s alive, confused, looks down at her abdomen to one tattoo in particular, a series of horizontal and vertical lines. They mean something to her. The lines shift like puzzle pieces rearranging and they turn into the show title, J-O-A-N. Joan. The screen goes white. And those are our first three pages.

**John:** So, on the whole I liked it as a teaser. I could definitely see this as a teaser for a one-hour show. A one-hour show that is about this supernatural person who has been sent back for some reason, who has some special ability. So, this could be the teaser for a Heroes kind of show. There’s something like maybe Darren Aronofsky’s Pi and made that into a show. It feels like that kind of thing. But I think I was more a fan of the kinds of things that were happening then sort of how it was written on the page.

**Craig:** I agree with you that it does everything a teaser is supposed to do. It gives you a very confusing, mysterious set of circumstances that interests you. I’m interested in her and why she’s saying these numbers. I’ll tell you, where I got caught up, there were frankly two things essentially that sort of stopped me here. One was that the hospital sequence felt like it was just, that somebody hit a macro on a keyboard and came up with patient in emergency room having heart problems. “Clear. We’ve lost her. Time of death.” You know, all that stuff that was all done very, very — in a very hackneyed style.

But my bigger hang up was that this is a woman doing something extraordinary. She’s repeating, verbally repeating numbers and yet her heart is stopped. That alone should get some sort of reaction and shock from these doctors. And when her body contorts like that and then collapses, the doctors don’t seem to have any interest in the fact that a dead person with a dead heart was talking, then did this crazy thing. They’re just like, eh, well, I guess that’s it. Lunch time.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, those two things really kind of stopped me in my tracks here.

**John:** So, if you look at the beats in this teaser, I think it reads really strongly as like the one sentence version. So, Joan has overdosed, in hospital, she has seizures, keeps speaking numbers, she dies, she wakes up in the morgue and her tattoos have changed. Those are good little three beats in that teaser.

I think what you’re focusing on in the hospital is the key crucial beat that sort of — it’s the signature cinematic moment which is like her arching her back and that stuff could be really cool. Where I thought it kind of worked is in page two we sort of start to shift into her perspective. As the doctors are moving in and around her, “We HEAR the familiar, ‘CLEAR’ — jolt — ‘CLEAR’ — . But our focus remains on — JOAN. Still reciting those numbers. Her small frame convulsing up and down.”

I think it’s interesting to perceive this sort of clichÈd situation of like, you know, the defibrillator cart from the perspective of the person who is actually having it done to them.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And to the degree that this show is titularly it’s the Joan show, I think it’s interesting to have it all be about her. And the degree to which the doctors can be kind of walla walla walla, that may be fine because it’s really about the spectacle of what it feels like to be here.

I thought we gave some short shrift to the numbers themselves. If we’re going to have her be talking numbers this whole time, give us a few more numbers. I thought the dialogue glosses were a little bit short and I didn’t have a good sense of whether she was repeating the same numbers or just random numbers each time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It didn’t help me that in her first dialogue block is “Six. Fifteen. Fourty Six,” all spelled out, which is good, except forty is not spelled that way.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** And should have hyphens in it.

**Craig:** Hyphen.

**John:** So, again, not urgent, but the first line of action, real line of action says, “TEASER. OVER BLACK. Whispers. Quick. Fast. A GIRL. And she’s whispering — ”

**Craig:** And she’s whispering. [laughs] And then Joan — he should have just added in parentheses (whispering) just in case. You got to triple up on that whisper.

**John:** So, yeah, I think we need to remove that last whispers. But up until we got to that last little bit of that first sentence it’s like, oh, that’s okay. Snappy. Little quick things. But then you don’t need to say “numbers” after it. I sort of get like, oh, they’re numbers. Yeah, those are all numbers, aren’t they?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It felt a little first drafty I would say overall. I think it’s the right kinds of beats for a teaser. It definitely sets the hook , which is what the goal of a teaser should be. It makes us interested about sort of what this world is going to be and sort of what is going on. These are wonderful good things.

I don’t know a lot about Joan, but that’s okay.

**Craig:** Yeah, we’ll find out.

**John:** We’ll find out. I could love a little bit more specific interesting bits about her little drug culture life, because the guys she’s with, “SHAW (25, shaved head, shirt off), and RUSS (20, skinny, in his underwear),” they’re just people with names. And so I don’t have any sense of whether I should be invested in them coming back into the form or if they’re just disposable.

**Craig:** Well that’s a tough one in three because, you know, maybe on page six she shows up at her apartment and they’re both there again and then we get to know them, you know?

**John:** Yeah. It’s entirely possible. I’m not sure I would want to have a longer beat before she has the overdose.

**Craig:** Well, their dialogue isn’t doing Joseph any favors here. “What’s she doing? Why is she — ?” “Can you hear us? Joan! Goddamnit!” “Cut it out! Quit messing with us. Joan? What the — ”

That’s not very good. I’m a little concerned here because, all right, so Joseph, some good news. You right action very well. I love the way you spread things out on the page. You give stuff that’s appropriate white space. It’s a compelling style of writing. I’m a little worried because all of the actual spoken dialogue feels clunky. So, this may be an area for you to look at. It all feels a little wooden. But the scenario and the way you’re describing the scenario is pretty good. I like that part.

I think you definitely need to ask this question about what the doctors, how the doctors are reacting to this extraordinary thing that this woman is doing. The only other thing I would say to you is while I know what you mean by Liza Minnelli in Cabaret because, you know, I love musicals, that’s tonally totally off for what you’re going for her.

When you say “think Liza Minnelli in Cabaret” I’m like, [sings] “I used to know this girl named Elsie.” I’m not thinking about this.

**John:** Describe it as like an anime heroine, then I get that.

**Craig:** Or even just short black hair, androgynous look.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** For now, I think that will work. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Another point is on page two we introduce Dr. Osborne. So, this is how we get to know Dr. Osborne. Joan is talking and “She can’t stop, DOCTOR OSBORNE at her side, wheeling her in.” Dr. Osborne has dialogue. “Blood pressure 140 over…” So, Dr. Osborne is given a name, and sort of established, but we don’t know anything about her, him or her. Osborne could be a man, could be a woman. And we keep calling this Dr. Osborne but it doesn’t sort of matter.

So, again, if this is going to be a character we’re going to see again, like maybe as Joan is leaving the hospital that same doctor sees her or something, then it is important to give that person a name. But if you’re going to give that person a name, give us something about who that person is.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You can’t just throw a character name there without some information about the person.

**Craig:** Yeah. The bare minimum as we all know is gender and age. And we have neither here. This is total cipher to us. Not helped either by the name which is about as generic as it gets.

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** And just to really think about how sophisticated audiences are now, when a patient is having some kind of, okay, so here she’s got tacky cardio and her heart rate is accelerating, they’re not — they see this 20 times a day. They’re not like, “Heart rate 190. 200! Bah.” No, they’re not.

This is what happens, [laughs], you know. They’re doctors. It’s an emergency room.

**John:** Yes. So, on the whole again I would wrap this up by saying I think it’s a really interesting teaser. I think it’s doing its job in terms of story point wise getting me interested to see what’s going to happen next. I just think the writing itself can be sharper. So there should be no reason to sort of quibble with it and sort of doubt that it’s going to be working well.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** Honestly, again, it does sort of come to trust. So this aspect of are you going to make it worth my 45 minutes to read your pilot, well the more typos we see, the more little sort of nagging things the less we are going to be trusting that you are going to get us to a good place. And so cleaning up those mistakes on those first couple pages are really important.

**Craig:** I agree. That’s why I singled out the bit where the doctors weren’t reacting to the fact that this woman who is dying is screaming clearly and shouting numbers because it violates my trust in the tone and the world and what I know about reality. So, those things need to be looked at carefully. Definitely do a dialogue pass here. Let’s be sophisticated. A little less melodramatic and wooden.

But encouraging overall, Joseph. I think you can do this. There’s a certain inviting style here. And good descriptions and it’s an interesting concept. I mean, what little we know about it is interesting to me.

**John:** Yeah. I agree.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** All right. Our next one is called The End of Things and it’s by Lisa [Mecham] Mek-am, or Mech-am.

**Craig:** I’m going to go with Meach-am.

**John:** Oh, see, there are many choices for her name pronunciation.

**Craig:** Right. All three of those may be wrong.

**John:** It could be Meh-cum.

**Craig:** Meh-cum. [laughs] That’s horrible.

**John:** Let us open on a Midwestern suburban street. And this is the Knoll’s house where Dr. Sarah Knoll, she’s dressed in business slacks and a blouse and she’s on a ten-speed bike. She’s adjusting her helmet as she heads down this suburban street. She passes Laurie Miller on her front lawn who is picking up her newspaper.

We follow Sarah as she pedals past, a series of vignettes going through the business district: the shoulder a four-lane expressway; a blighted industrial area. And when she finally gets to the place where she’s at we are at a vehicle impound office. And she’s talking to the young police officer, he’s 21, and he’s not agreeing to release her car. So, she doesn’t have the right paperwork, so her car has been impounded.

She says she absolutely needs to get her car. She has to get her son to school, “We have no other car.” The officer says that these are the rules, this is procedure. She finally convinces him to maybe let her get the car out with license and registration.

And when he sees the license he says, in a low voice, “You’re the lady who killed her baby.”

Back at the Knoll housemaster bedroom we see Peter Knoll, her husband, he’s 32. Ethan Knoll, their five-year-old son bursts in. He’s wearing dinosaur pajamas and tennis shoes. Wakes up his dad. He plops down, shows that he’s able to tie his shoe, poorly, all by himself. And that is the end of our three pages.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Where to begin? Well, I suppose I should start with the general and then maybe move to the specific. Although, no, I’ll start with a specific because it was the first thing that struck me. I feel — this is Lisa — I feel like someone told Lisa that you’re not allowed to use the words A or The. Because we have the strangest way of doing things. “The gray dawn light casts pallor on THE KNOLL’S HOUSE. ” That would be casts a pallor.

“Garage door GROANS open on a car-less garage” oddly, and then “she pushes off down driveway, onto street.”

“Next-door neighbor LAURIE MILLER…clutching bathrobe.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** “Laurie eagerly scanning front page.”

**John:** You know, I didn’t notice that. Something was tracking weird, but I didn’t notice the lack of articles.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a lack of articles and it’s so pronounced that I honestly feel like somebody told her screenwriters just don’t use articles. But that’s not true. We do. They’re an essential part of our toolkit.

**John:** Yeah. That’s so interesting. So, as we started the thing, before she gets to the impound lot, it felt like an opening credit sequence. And then we get to END CREDITS near the bottom of page one it’s like, oh, well, let’s START CREDITS. I’m a big fan of like if you’re going to show credits just tell us that we’re starting credits because then the series of vignettes has a point.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** As credits begin we start a series of vignettes and then those bullet points are actually nicely done. They do the job. It’s not the most exciting way to start something, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

We’re all leading up to this moment on page three, halfway down page three where the young officer says, “You’re the lady who killed her baby.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And then it’s like, okay, something very fascinated just happened. Yet, to cut away at that moment felt like maybe not the best choice. What is her reaction to someone saying that? That is overwhelming and yet we’re cutting to a happy suburban moment next. I don’t know that that’s going to best serve the story.

**Craig:** It’s not. It will not best serve the story. I mean, first of all there’s a strange thing here. She’s a doctor. Now, the audience may not know this, but we know it. And she is dressed in her business slacks and blouse, one presumes going to work. She’s riding a ten-speed bicycle which the script tells us is her husband’s, although we probably won’t know that unless we know the difference between male bikes and female bikes, which has something to do with the bar around the —

**John:** But let’s think about what visual cues could we give that would tell us that it’s her husband’s bike?

**Craig:** If you want us to know that it’s definitely not her bike, that she’s borrowing a bike here, yes, we need some sort of clue like it’s just too big for her or something.

**John:** Or let’s start with we see her adjust the seat down a lot.

**Craig:** There you go. Like clearly this isn’t her bike. Perfect. She then does this very long bike ride. Why she’s on the shoulder of expressway on a bike, really, I was like, wait, what? You can’t ride a bike on the expressway. You’re not allowed to do that. So, that stopped me sort of dead in my tracks. But —

**John:** See, I actually bought it because if you look at that whole sentence, “Shoulder of a four-lane expressway. Sarah has pulled over to check directions on a cell phone as cars, trucks roar by. All are blinded by fierce, rising sun.”

**Craig:** By A fierce rising sun.

**John:** That’s true. Where’s the The?

**Craig:** Oh, there’s so many of them. “Dismounts at closed metal gate for…” She does not write A or The, ever.

**John:** It’s fascinating.

**Craig:** It’s amazing.

**John:** But I took it as she is following sort of the driving directions on how to get there and isn’t thinking about like, oh, I’m actually on a bike.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, but she’s a scenting human being who would know that you really don’t drive our bike on a freeway. You’re going to get killed. There’s nowhere to drive. I mean, have you ever in your life seen someone on a bike on the shoulder of a freeway?

**John:** No, but here’s the opportunity. If you’re going to do that, maybe hang a lantern on that and let somebody acknowledge that like, lady, you’re not supposed to be on the freeway.

**Craig:** [laughs] I guess. Although now I’m questioning where she got her medical degree. But regardless, the bigger issue is this: where she ends up is the vehicle impound. And so, okay, she was riding her bike because her car has been impounded. Hey, take a cab? I feel like this whole thing has been rigged. I don’t buy it.

**John:** I get it. Yeah, if they have enough money to have a suburban house —

**Craig:** A house. I mean, you can’t — nobody rides their bike to the vehicle — unless you’re truly dirt poor. But she’s not, so that was puzzling to me.

This conversation with the, so this was a young officer. Now, I’m not sure that vehicle impound offices are manned by actual police officers.

**John:** I would agree.

**Craig:** So this is an area where one must do and talk about like a stickler for research. You can’t slip anything by Lindsay Doran. Like I was on Twitter asking people this question because there’s a character who is the Vicar of the Church of England church.

**John:** Is he naughty.

**Craig:** He’s not a naughty vicar, no. Well, eh, well actually. We’ll see, won’t we?

**John:** I think your movie has sheep in it, that’s the only reason I ask.

**Craig:** He’s done some naughty things. I can’t give away who did the naughtiest thing of all. But do you call him reverend, the reverend. We had a whole research thing on this. Okay, so do your research. I don’t think police officers man these things. Young officer is kind of a tough one to keep looking at over and over. Let’s give him a name if he’s going to be talking for a whole page.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And she says, “I’m not leaving without the car.” That should be my car. I mean, that just seems natural to me. I’m not leaving without my car.

“My commanding officer will be here around ten.” I mean, unless martial law has been imposed, this seems very odd for a policeman.

**John:** It feels a little forced.

**Craig:** Really forced. But this is my biggest problem, and so this one, Lisa, this is the line I want you to look at and really think about. The young officer says, “Lady, I’m coming off the overnight shift and I’m real tired.” And Sarah says, “I have to get things back on track. My son has to go to school. We have no other car.”

“I have to get things back on track” is the definition of what we call on the nose dialogue.

**John:** Yeah, you’re speaking your subtext.

**Craig:** It is never something that you would share with this guy in this way. You could certainly — what we try and do instead is, “My son has to go to school. We have no other car,” and then just suddenly tears are welling up like the emotions underneath are mismatching the circumstances, you know, something there. But we really want to avoid stuff like that. And I completely agree with you — worst cut ever. “You’re the lady who killed…”

I don’t even know if he’s saying it to her, or murmuring it to himself. You know what I mean?

**John:** I do know what you mean. So, let’s take a look at the top of page two. So, or like we’ve just gotten into the vehicle impound office. So, let’s say we figure out whether that person is an officer or whatever the employee is that she’s dealing with.

What if we cut the first sentence he speaks. He says, “This isn’t the official paperwork we need to release the car.” For the first thing he speaks, “It should look like this yellow copy here.” We get the context, we get the conversation is already — we just jumped ten seconds into this conversation and it’s helped us. Cut down to, “I’m not leaving without the car.” Cut all the dialogue down to, “My son has to go to school. We have no other car.”

Give him a new line. Then get to the police. Just like get to it quicker. And then you’re going to get to the reward of the, “You’re the lady who killed her son,” or killed her kid. And then let that moment — be in that moment. It’s so incredibly awkward and uncomfortable. That’s drama. Just let’s be in that drama.

**Craig:** Correct. Now, there is another possibility here which is, and we don’t know where these pages go. But the other thing to think about, simple question, would this really happen? Constantly ask yourself this? Would this really happen? So, this guy looks in a folder, sees her name, connects it to the news story he just read which we presume is the same one Sarah’s neighbor has read. And then looks back at her, either says it to himself, which is bizarre, or looks at her and says, “You’re the lady who killed her baby.”

No one says that. Because it’s so awkward and weird. You could certainly look at her and go, “You’re…” and then she just walks out and gives up on the car. Or, realizes her name and has a moment and then she recognizes that he recognizes the name, so there’s a mystery there. But it’s so odd for somebody to just turn around and go, “I know who you are. You are the lady who killed her baby.”

**John:** If he were to say something it would be something like, “What you did is unforgivable,” or something like, you know, if he steals the courage to actually say that. The other opportunity is like is there a second clerk, is there someone else he can talk to or like someone else has to come over. Basically if he can’t do it himself but someone else has to come over and it’s that second person who is like, it’s between them, it’s like, “Oh, that’s the lady who killed her baby.” Then that’s a moment that can actually play.

**Craig:** Yes. Yeah, we’ve seen that moment in movies where the guy walks back into the office to get, you know, a waiver on the form and the guy looks at it and then he recognizes something and then he picks up his newspaper and then he shows it to the guy. And they both look up at her and squirrels on out of there.

But this one is tough to just have a guy announce this like this.

**John:** Yeah. The last little thing I’ll point out here is on page three, this is the thing that happens, just people need to look out for it. Ethan’s dialogue, “Look! I did it all by myself.” If you look at the margins on that, it actually fell into parenthetical. So, I’m sure she’s in Final Draft or something like Final Draft and she had it as a parenthetical but without the parentheses and so that’s why the margins are all messed up.

**Craig:** Correct. Also, minor thing. “The air is stagnant.” And this, by the way, this paragraph she went back to using, she introduced The which was nice. “The air is stagnant, the only movement from floating dust mites until…” You don’t want the word dust mites there. Dust mites are microscopic. I think you’re looking for floating dust motes or floating dust would work.

**John:** Wow. I learned something today. Motes and mites.

**Craig:** Yes. Mites are the microscopic bugs that feed off of dust. And they live on us. They don’t float in the air.

**John:** Fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Let’s get on to our next script by Patrick McGinley. Do you want to do this one?

**Craig:** Sure. Destination: Earth. That’s Destination: Earth, written by Patrick McGinley.

So, we begin, oh, we’re on black again. Title on black. So, we open with just — I guess it’s a white title.

**John:** I would always bet on black.

**Craig:** Always bet on black. “Aeons from now,” and I’m wondering if Patrick is English because he spelled eons with an A in the front which those of us who do crossword puzzles are always on the lookout for.

**John:** But he didn’t do it with the conjoined AE.

**Craig:** Probably because he didn’t hit the option thing before it. You know, he just spelled it out. But, anyway, I always like to see aeons spelled old school like that. Aeons from now. And now a voice over, over black. The voice over says, “We’re losing this war. Mankind, I mean. We’re not going to last long.”

We then smash cut to a human face, frozen in agony, dead. We reveal that this face belongs to a dead body in space floating away. And we now reveal the aftermath of this huge battle. Three spaceships have been cracked open. We lost some kind of war. The narrator, his name is Spin by the way, is telling us that there’s been this endless war with these creatures that we call the Gray. And we see one of their dead bodies float by, too.

And the Gray have been fighting with humans over possession of the habitable planets. They are ruthless and smart and they’re taking their worlds away. And the scope of the battlefield is there are 40 million inhabitant worlds, but the Gray are slowly taking them all and this guy is saying we’re outnumbered, we’re outgunned, and we’re doomed.

And then says, “Well, I better shut up now. They’re about to find me,” which is interesting. And then we cut to the inside of a space freighter on the bridge. We have two characters, Gears, 30s and overweight, and an officer with red hair who will be known as Red Hair.

And what they see on their — so they’re basically scavenging this battlefield looking for bits of metal to reclaim when they see a blip of a life form. Gears takes a shuttle over, finds this escape pod, gets inside and discovers this little boy. He’s about five year old hiding with a dog tag around his neck. And the dog tag is some name, but the only letters visible of the first name are S-P-I-N, hence Spin. And the boy is very scared.

**John:** Yes. So, before we get into the actual substance here, I want to point out a little thing about form. This is written in Courier Prime. And it just looks a little bit better. So, Courier Prime is the typeface that we make and it’s free to download. So, Courier Prime, I like Courier Prime —

**Craig:** [laughs] I love that you know.

**John:** And it does look — you will admit, Craig, it does look nice on the page.

**Craig:** It does. I use it. And you know me, it’s not like I use every one of your products.

**John:** No, it’s true. But he likes the Courier Prime.

**Craig:** I love Courier Prime.

**John:** So, Courier Prime is quite nice. The pages look really good. I didn’t fully engage with these pages and part of it was the voice over, but part of it was just things just felt very familiar in these pages, which is ultimately we are finding a kid on an abandoned ship and that kid will ultimately become our narrator. We don’t know that in the three pages. The audience wouldn’t know that in three pages. We know it just because we’re seeing the name of the guy who is giving the voice over.

There’s the instinct to have — voice over can be lovely. And I have no general qualms about voice over. If voice over is giving us perspective and tone that is surprising and interesting. So, in this case the voice over from Spin Braddock is described as “world-weary, dry, cynical – yet a sly sense of humor shines through. The owner of this voice would tell a killer campfire story.” Okay, but I didn’t really feel that in the actual dialogue that followed.

I couldn’t hear that voice that is being described saying these words. Instead I got some really confusing information that made me think too much about numbers. So, here’s his first bit of dialogue about numbers, “You’d figure, a galaxy of 400 billion stars is big enough for two sentient races. But these guys don’t think so,” which setting that up.

Later it’s like, “Grays breed like moon roaches and they are equally hard to kill. But unlike moon roaches, they’re smart. Ruthless. One by one, they are taking our worlds.” Well, who is our? Is it human world? Is this earth? Where are we? I just got confused.

And then later on there’s numbers: “That’s the problem when your battlefield is 40 Million inhabited worlds. Even if you’re losing, it’s going to take a helluva long time until you’re finally defeated.” I’m just having a hard time picturing the timeline of this war and where we’re at in it. Where is this voice over happening. I just — I was having a hard time getting seated in the movie.

**Craig:** I’m with you all the way here. Courier Prime is not magic. So, here’s what’s going on. You cannot — John, you and I have said many times we’re not of the school of voice over is terrible. The reason that, I think we talked about this in our last podcast, the reason that you constantly hear this admonition against voice over is because people who read screenplays are often reading bad voice over.

This unfortunately, Patrick, is bad voice over and I’m going to tell you why. It’s not even because it’s expository, although it is aggressively expository. Because if you look at the opening voice over that Cate Blanchett does in the first Lord of the Rings film, it couldn’t be more expository, but it’s beautiful, it’s lyrical, it’s dramatic, it’s creepy. And this is none of that.

So, the mistake here is that you’ve done some very expository VO but you’re doing it in a kind of almost snarky tone. And you’re telling us he had a “sly sense of humor shines through.” Well, now it just sounds like a folksy guy talking about this kooky war. And I don’t care. I do not care.

And if I had any little bit of caring, it was obliterated when you told me, “That’s the problem when your battlefield is 40 Million inhabited worlds. Even if you’re losing, it’s going to take a helluva long time until you’re finally defeated.” You know what else is going to take a helluva long time? Me caring. Because it’s too big. 40 million? Is this movie going to be a thousand hours long? It’s too much.

**John:** You’ve sort of told us not to care. In some ways you have like taken away a ticking clock, you’ve taken away stakes because it’s like, well, okay, so it’s not going to resolve in this. You’ve set expectations kind of so low for the movie that we don’t kind of engage.

**Craig:** Yes. I think we talked about the problem of the endless bigifying of stakes, you know, so it used to be a person, and then it was a family, and then a town, and now it’s full cities. And now we’re at the world. And soon it will be the galaxy. But this guy, he’s like, oh, I’ll show you. [laughs] The stakes are 40 million planets. Well, the stakes are so big that they are simply not stakes anymore. He has over-bigified them.

The description of the villains here, let me say this. And, Patrick, I don’t mean to beat you up, but honestly I have to tell you there is not one original idea in these three pages. The aliens, the Gray, I’ve seen it. The floating dead body in space. I’ve seen it. Humanity fighting a race that is best analogized to insects. Seen it.

Wait a second, there’s a life form. What? I’ve seen it. The cracking into what might be an abandoned lifeless spaceship with a flashlight and it’s all creepy. And then you find a little child in it. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen all of this. I think I’ve seen all of it multiple times. And that is not good.

**John:** No, it’s not going to help you there. It’s not going to get the reader to read page four, and five, and six, because we feel like, well, we’ve kind of seen this movie before and we’re not eager to keep pushing forward.

Some little small things that could be helpful in the rewrite and for other people who are reading through these pages. In general, you should spell out numbers in dialogue. It’s just a good idea to make sure that people are saying what you actually want them to say. So, forty million, four-hundred billion. But honestly, take away those numbers because those aren’t good numbers.

Another example of places where your red pen is going to help your dialogue be better, if we’re keeping this, but there’s a life form. “I’ll take the shuttle and check it out. Maybe it’s a survivor.” “What if it’s theirs?” Gears takes a blaster from the rack on the wall and checks the charge. “I’ll kill it.” Well, you just said that by taking the blaster. So, it’s an example of many times the right answer to a question is an action rather than actually saying something.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Many times the right answer to a question is another scene. Because if you can leave a scene with a spin of energy, then hooray, you’re into your next thing. And that’s the right thing. So, someone asks the question, “Where’s Tom?” And you cut to Tom someplace. That’s the answer to your question. Where if you said, “Tom’s in Denver,” and then you cut to Tom in Denver, you’ve lost energy.

**Craig:** Totally agree. I totally agree. Sorry man. Look, you have to do better than this. This in and of itself, I don’t want you to be discouraged by this, because sometimes like I was saying in the beginning it’s what you react against that gets you where you need to go. You don’t want to write stuff that feels like it’s aping things you’ve already seen. Because other people are doing that. And as we mentioned before, by the time you see the movie it’s already been — a lot of quality has been boiled out of it just through process. So, you have to start better to get to that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You start at that, you’re going to get to something worse.

**John:** I would agree. Craig, did you end up seeing Guardians of the Galaxy?

**Craig:** I haven’t yet, but we’re going to have Nicole Perlman on the show —

**John:** I’m excited to have her on the show.

**Craig:** And so obviously I will be getting to the theater to see said film before we entertain her.

**John:** That would be great.

All right, our next and final script for this episode is the Legendary Knights of Yore by Todd Bosley. So, I will do the summary here. We fade in on a battlefield at dusk. Corpses of soldiers as far as the eye can see. Various sections of the field smolder. The battle is over.

We’re at a impenetrable fortress of stone. Rows of archers, a drawbridge, a moat of fire. Some charging, “To the last man!” Archers ready their bows. Soldiers are yelling, “Down with the king!” There’s a whole drama with the drawbridge that comes down. They’re trying to jump up onto the drawbridge. They fall, plunge to their fiery death. The main title card: Legendary Knights of Yore.

Next we cut to a dungeon at night where a torch-carrying guard drags a prisoner, a 20-year-old prisoner by a chain. They walk across several grates on the floor. Opens a pitch dark hole and shoves him down into the pit.

In the pit, the prisoner holds his head in pain and we meet Dicky, 50s, a scrappy — sorry, a craggy, filthy, emaciated, bearded man who hobbles towards him. He’s saying, “Lord be praised, I have a roommate! I was afraid I was going to die alone in sorrow and agony down here.” Dicky is a talkative sort. The soldier doesn’t really respond to him very much but gives him his name. His name is John.

Dicky says that John is a really common name. Summons the guard over. The guard’s name is also John. Dicky is talking about the different jobs that the guards have, including like removing the bodies and sort of stuff like this. The guard’s job is just to take the buckets of shit out of the jail.

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**John:** And there we’re at the end of our three pages.

**Craig:** End scene.

So, this is, from the very start what I liked about this was that it told me exactly what it was. Right? I mean, there’s a brief moment of misdirection where we see this medieval battlefield with dead bodies and then one soldier — one — who has been left alive apparently is running towards this enormous fortress. And he is all full of confidence that he is going to take this fortress down himself, despite the fact that every other person in his army is dead. And he is so super confident that he jumps to try and reach the right raising drawbridge and ends up plummeting into this fiery moat. And I’m like, okay, so we’re kind of in Life of Brian/Holy Grail territory.

And the Legendary Knights of Yore is a very funny title for something like that. I like the seriousness of it. And this discussion in the pit was funny. Dicky is a funny guy. And the guard is a funny guy. And in general, I mean, who knows where this goes, but it starts well. I kind of felt like I was — at least I felt like Todd knew exactly the kind of story he wanted to tell, the kind of tone he wanted to employ, and he stuck to it.

So, so far so good.

**John:** It’s so fascinating that the tone worked for you, because I actually wrote on page three like, “Tone?” Because I didn’t catch that tone on the first page. And so I had a little hard time getting into it because as we start, “FADE IN: On a desolate — BATTLEFIELD — DUSK. Corpses of soldiers as far as the eye can see. Various sections of the field smolder. This battle is over. Then, in the distance, a SOLDIER runs toward — A massive, seemingly impenetrable FORTRESS of stone. The soldier, still tiny in the distance screams out a rather unthreatening battle cry as he unsheathes his SWORD.”

**Craig:** [laughs] I’m already laughing at that.

**John:** But the challenge is I got, you know, many lines into it before I realized that we were in medieval times at all. So everything that I was reading up to that point is like a soldier. I thought we were in Fallujah. I thought we were in like, I was seeing modern day.

**Craig:** Good point. That’s a good point.

**John:** You could say like Medieval Battlefield. Dusk. Then I know, okay, we’re in swords and horseback territory.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, this soldier, I like it as an idea, but let me know that I’m reading it right. And so give me just a little bit more saying like “Despite the hopeless situation, this one guy just won’t say no.” Give me one of those action lines that let me know how I’m supposed to read it.

**Craig:** I don’t know. I have to disagree with you on that. Because I think part of what makes — if this is going to work it has to work with confidence. It just has to sort of put itself out there like neither the script nor this character are willing to acknowledge that this character is absurd.

**John:** Did you take this soldier as being the same guy, the prisoner that we’re seeing in the — ?

**Craig:** No, he’s dead. That guy is dead. Oh, for sure. No, because the moat is made of fire. [laughs] He jumped into the moat of fire. I just like that he kept saying, “To the last man!” like he wasn’t the last man. There’s just a lot — the only actually joke-wise, Todd, the only thing I would suggest is I wasn’t, in terms of the structure of what you were doing here comedically I didn’t love the archer because the archer was taking him seriously by readying the arrow. And I kind of want just the archer to be looking at this guy like, “Uh, what?”

And he’s got his arrow sort of loosely in the thing and then maybe the archer starts with the tense and then kind of just un-tensions it, because this guy is never going to even get to the bridge, much less get into the castle, much less kill any of them. And then he dies. And then I think where you have the archer stands down his bow, I think the archer can sort of shrug and, you know, just shrug. And then, boom, Legendary Knights of Yore. I like that title.

**John:** Yeah. I like the title a lot, too. So, what you just described in terms of the archer tension can be really funny and I can totally picture that, but I wasn’t picturing it in reading that first page. I was reading that first page serious. And so something needed to change there because it didn’t click for me and I suspect it wouldn’t click for many readers that it’s what that comedic tension is.

**Craig:** I agree. I think you make a great point that we need to definitely establish from the top this is middle ages, middle age battlefield, swords and horses and lances and so forth.

I sense that true to any sword and horse movie that this is in England, so everything is funnier when you say it with an English accent. Dicky is funnier because he’s speaking in English. So, the overeducated, disgusting prisoner is, you know, it’s a funny thing, even if I’ve seen it. But I did like the guard saying, “I hope one day I’ll move up to corpse dumping.” [laughs] That made me laugh.

**John:** So, did you read Dicky’s dialogue as sort of good medieval English, because I didn’t.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** Yeah, so it was interesting. Let me try to do it. [English accent] “Lord be praised, I have a roommate! I was afraid I was going to die alone in sorrow and agony down here. It’s a relief to know that now…” Yeah, maybe so.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, to me it’s like Eric Idle or Terry Jones. I liked “I was afraid I was going to die alone in sorrow and agony down here. It’s a relief to know that now I’ll die in sorrow and agony and solidarity with a friend. Unless, of course, you die first. In that case I suppose I’ll eat you. I’m Dicky.” [laughs] It just made me laugh. I liked his name, and I don’t know, I thought that this “Shut your mouth, you diseased rat. I’ve got shit buckets to clean out.” That, to me, is very Monty Python. The whole thing feels very Monty Python.

So, it was working for me and it was making me laugh. These are hard movies to write. Very hard movies to write because you don’t — you really struggle to find how to care about people because it’s so absurd. But if this were to sort of go in The Princess Bride direction where it was very arch and absurd, but then there was a romance or a hero story that we could connect to in kind of a serious way, that would be terrific. Or, it’s just got to be insanely hysterical in an almost sketch style in the way Monty Python did it.

**John:** Yeah. Or the Robin Hood: Men in Tights, where you’re throwing all the gags you can at it, but it doesn’t feel like he’s trying to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. This isn’t a parody. It’s not playing like a Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker or a Mel Brooks parody. This is playing more like a Monty Python comedy of the absurd.

**John:** Yeah. So, any time you’re doing a movie that’s in a genre, so this is both meant to be period and sort of the fantasy comedy kind of genre, you have to deal with all of the expectations that come with that. And so you get a lot of things for free, like you get a lot of stuff about horses and dungeons and all that stuff. The challenge is then you have to use those things in ways that are interesting. And find new ways to sort of show us how to do this stuff that is going to make it rewarding for us to see it.

I would also say the same thing about the space movie. If you’re going to do a space movie where there’s an intergalactic war, you get all this stuff for free about space travel and warp engines, but you have to find some new way to tell us that so it’s not feeling like the same movie again, and again, and again.

**Craig:** Totally. And if there’s one little tip that keeps cropping up as we read these pages, it is this: if you are writing a screenplay that takes place in some simulation of the real world as we know it, not a pushed thing like our medieval till, you have to constantly ask this question of yourself, particularly if you’re a new writer and you’re growing your muscles. Would somebody say this in the situation really? Would somebody do this in the situation really? Would somebody react like this in this situation really? Because if we can sniff fake on the page you can’t imagine what it’s like on screen.

**John:** Yeah. If you look at the challenges we had with Lisa’s script about the baby-killing doctor, we know what the real world feels like. And so therefore we are going to look at it with those critical eyes. But in these other ones that have these more pushed — or actually the same with the doctor — we sort of know how doctors would react in that ER. And so if they’re not acting that way we’re going to call bullshit on that.

In these pushed worlds, you know, you have to ask would this character behave this way in this world that I’m creating? Because if the character reacts in a way that we don’t expect, then we are forced to sort of change our expectations about what the world is and maybe that’s not what you want either. And so the good thing about setting things in the real world is like at least you get the real world kind of for free. If setting it in these pushed worlds, any choice the character makes or anything the character does or says might change that world in ways that you don’t necessarily want it to change.

**Craig:** That’s right. And if you’re creating a world where people are going to behave in ways that you know are intentionally foreign to what we expect, you have to teach us.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** You have to teach us through normal behavior, rather I should say the behavior that is normal to that world before you start showing them behaving extraordinarily. We need to see just average behavior that is strange behavior to us and we will learn.

**John:** My instinct is that in this movie, this sort of pushed Monty Python-ish medieval movie, the straight man’s character is going to be incredibly important. The ordinary guy is going to be incredibly important because the world itself is so askew. And so while Dicky may be incredibly enjoyable, I bet the movie doesn’t hang very much on him.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Because it has to hang on this other guy. And I feel like we maybe have done some short shrift just in setting up this other guy and at least what’s interesting about him. We don’t even give him a name for awhile. I think we should probably start with that.

**Craig:** I do agree, because I’m with you there’s no way that our twenty-something, that is to say hero-aged prisoner isn’t the hero here. We should have a name for him. I know that there is this bit where we reveal that his name is John, but frankly you can just call him John and have the guy call him John and then have him say, “How do you know my name?” That’s fine.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s no need to hide that from us.

**John:** Yeah, it is interesting because on page two, “The guard drags along a prisoner, 20s, but a chain.” We’re given nothing about the prisoner. So, if that prisoner is important, who I suspect he is important, let’s give a little bit more service to him.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** Agreed. So, if you — we need to thank our four people who sent in these Three Page Challenges. It’s always so brave. And thank you for doing it.

If you have three pages that you want to send through to us, the URL you want for that is johnaugust.com/threepage. It’s all spelled out in three page. And you’ll see there’s a little form and you say, yes, yes, yes, you can talk about it on the air. And then you attach your PDF and it magically goes into a little box that Stuart checks. So, if you are interested in doing that, please send in your pages.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** Yes!

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** It’s time for One Cool Things. Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** I do. I have a One Cool Thing and I’d like to thank everybody on Twitter that’s always lobbying potential One Cool Things at me. It’s very nice of you guys to take care of me because as you know I struggle with that. Today, I got a suggestion from Austin Bonang – Bonang — who is @abone114 on Twitter. And he suggested, he just put a link, Sugru.com. Sugru. So, I clicked on it and lo and behold it was awesome and I spent some money today.

So, let me tell you about Sugru. The stuff is amazing. This woman, she is a chemist of some sort, and she invented this stuff and it basically looks like — a little bit like Play-Doh, remember that, what did they call it, Fun Tack?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, when we were kids, or like a Plasticine modeling clay. But it’s not. It’s only that for about 30 minutes. So you can take this stuff and blog it around and stretch it and make it any shape you want for about 30 minutes. At that point it begins to cure and I guess what it’s doing is reacting to moisture in the air. And give it a day, about 24 hours, and it becomes a tough, flexible silicone. So, it is now permanently formed and shaped. It adheres, forms a strong bond to aluminum, steel, ceramics, glass, wood, and other materials like plastics, and ABS, and rubbers.

So, it becomes this incredible, it’s like you basically have your own plastic factory, your own rubber silicone factory in your house and you can pretty much patch stuff and put cool grips on things. You can do anything you want with this. It’s awesome.

So, I bought some.

**John:** And you haven’t gotten it yet, so, is this again a One Cool Thing where you’ve seen the video of it and now you’ve ordered it and eventually you can tell us whether it actually works?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes. So, I clicked through the website while you were talking about it and I have seen write-ups of this. There’s a link I’ll put in the show notes for Cool Tools, which Craig you would love. Kevin Kelly who created Wired has this newsfeed called Cool Tools and every day or every week, a couple times a week, they put out Cool Tools. And they had mentioned this stuff because it’s really good for grips on like gardening tools and handles and that kind of stuff. People love it.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, it looks awesome. And you get a whole — oh, like my favorite thing that they, because this happens all the time in my house. We have these little ceramic jars where we put our sugar and salt and flour. And inevitably somebody pulls one of the lids off and then drops the lid and that knob at the top of the lid just cracks off. Well, you can mold yourself a new knob, stick it on there, and then it’s awesome. It’s so cool!

**John:** It does look good. My One Cool Thing is a TV show. It’s a show called, you would actually really enjoy this, Craig, called Please Like Me. It’s an Australian show created by Josh Thomas who also stars in it. And most of the write-ups about it have compared it to Girls, which is kind of fair because it’s the same situation as like Lena Dunham created and stars in Girls. Josh created and stars in Please Like Me.

There are six episodes of the first season. They’re running the second season right now. You can find them all on iTunes. It’s also on this TV channel called Pivot which you probably have but you don’t you know that you have it. It’s a really good little comedy. It’s a half hour and it’s Josh, this 20-year-old gay guy and his housemates and his family, his parents, his bipolar mother who is spectacular. And it’s really, really well done. And so I would say it’s probably more of a comedy-comedy than Girls is, but really smartly done and put together. And definitely something that people who are interested in writing should check out.

**Craig:** I will check that out. I find that Australians are very funny people. I tend to be impressed by their output as a nation. They have such an interesting — they find an interesting tone. I mean, Chris Lilley, he just did that incredible work. But even like Baz Luhrmann, sometimes I watch Baz Luhrmann’s stuff and I just think where — how did his mind function here to… — My daughter watched Strictly Ballroom the other day, because she’s really into dancing now, and I hadn’t seen it in a few years. I do love it. And I was just sitting there like how did he — why did he put the camera there? How did he know that that would be awesome? It’s so weird. So cool.

**John:** At lunch we were talking about Australian shows and Canadian shows. And the challenge that Canada has, because Canada has its own homegrown stuff and some of it can be really good, but Canada gets all of the North American stuff sort of in real-time and so culturally they’re always sort of being force fed US programs as well. Whereas Australia, they are isolated, and so they get our stuff but they can really have their own thing.

And so this show is set in Melbourne which is even not in Sydney. So, it really is its own unique little microcosm, but it’s completely recognizable to our experience. They just talk about university in very different ways than we would.

**Craig:** Please Like Me.

**John:** Please Like Me.

**Craig:** Like me. Please like me.

**John:** It’s really the Craig Mazin story. That is our show for this week. So, Scriptnotes is edited by Matthew Chilelli and is produced by Stuart Friedel.

Our outro this week is by Matthew, but if you would like to send your own outro music, we would love to hear it and play it on the show. So, you can send those to our general email address which is ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a great place to send longer questions.

If you have a short question for me or Craig, or a suggestion for Craig’s One Cool Thing, Craig is @clmazin on Twitter. I am @johnaugust.

If you are on iTunes, click subscribe for Scriptnotes. Or just search for Scriptnotes and click subscribe so we get you as a subscription. Leave a comment if you like. We love those comments. They’re lovely.

**Craig:** Love ’em.

**John:** Also in iTunes you can download the Scriptnotes App which gives you access to all of the back episodes. So, this is 159. There are 158 back episodes that you can listen to. It’s $1.99 a month for the premium subscriptions. A bargain.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, honestly, you could buy so much Sugru, but you can’t buy any Sugru for what it costs to just have all those podcasts. You’d get like a tiny little blip of Sugru.

**John:** Yeah. It’s completely a different experience.

**Craig:** It’s a different experience. [laughs] And by the way, our podcast never cures. It’s always malleable.

**John:** It’s always malleable. Interestingly, I’m looking at the Sugru site right now and one of the things they recommend doing with it is actually very smart. You know how sometimes cables will fray at the point where it connects.

**Craig:** Yes! I saw that.

**John:** You wrap it around that and get a little extra insulation. I can see that being very useful for some people.

**Craig:** Yeah, and by the way, it is electrically insulating as well.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, this lady, honestly lady, it’s funny, I can’t find her name on here. I was looking for it. But madam, you are smart. You’re my hero. You really are.

**John:** Of course, we’re going to find out in like two years it’s actually cancer-causing and it’s made of death.

**Craig:** Good. Good.

**John:** In the meantime your grips will be nice and springy.

**Craig:** I won’t stop using it, even if that — I don’t care.

**John:** Craig is that stubborn.

**Craig:** They’ll take my Sugru from my cold, dead hand.

**John:** All right. Craig, thank you, and I’ll talk to you again next week.

**Craig:** See you next week, John.

**John:** All right, bye.

Links:

* John’s blog post [on trust](http://johnaugust.com/2014/on-trust-drama-and-corporations)
* [Less IMDb](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/less-imdb) is working again
* [Submit your Three Pages](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* Read this week’s pages on [Weekend Read](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/)
* Three Pages by [Joseph Bodner](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/JosephBodner.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Lisa Mecham](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/LisaMecham.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Patrick McGinley](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/PatrickMcGinley.pdf)
* [Handling numbers in dialogue](http://screenwriting.io/how-should-you-handle-numbers-or-confusing-jargon-in-dialogue/) on screenwriting.io
* Three Pages by [Todd Bosley](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/ToddBosley.pdf)
* [@abone114](https://twitter.com/clmazin/status/502894592862060544) recommends [Sugru](http://sugru.com/) for fixing that thing
* Sugru on [Cool Tools](http://kk.org/cooltools/archives/4671)
* Please Like Me on [ABC](http://www.abc.net.au/tv/pleaselikeme/), [Pivot](http://www.pivot.tv/shows/please-like-me), and [iTunes](https://itunes.apple.com/us/tv-season/please-like-me-season-1/id671267950)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/putting-a-price-on-it).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Here, man, my name is Craig Mazin. Right?

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

Craig, we are trying to record this episode live. It’s nearly a week before this episode will come out, so it’s probably one of the most in advance episodes we’ve ever done.

**Craig:** Well, and also we’re doing this, so we’ve got these people listening along with us on Mixlr.com. So, they’re cheating basically. They’re hearing this early. Plus, they get to hear all the nonsense that we cut out, which I should say most of which is you saying things like, “Blah, blah, blah, that was terrible.” [laughs]

**John:** You’ll see all the false starts and the do-overs. But in many ways the 25 people who are in the chat room, they’re living slightly in the future, because they get to experience the Scriptnotes episode before anyone else on the planet gets to experience it.

**Craig:** That is exactly right. This is fun. I’m reading along with the things they’re saying. This is great. I’m going to have to stop because it’s going to be distracting.

**John:** You’re going to have to stop. It’s going to be very distracting.

**Craig:** It’s going to be very distracting. So, I’m leaving the chat room, but I’m excited that people are listening along with us as we do this live and not live at the same time.

**John:** So, today we talked about our topics and it’s going to be about the price of things. It’s going to be about Amazon versus Hachette, Amazon versus Disney. They’re all wrestling over what things should cost and what price people should pay. We’re going to look at the Weinstein Brothers putting a price on a free internship.

**Craig:** Yeah, man, there’s going to be a price for it, all right?

**John:** We’re going to look at animation studios who are trying to hold down the prices that they’re paying to their workers. And finally we’re going to try to answer some questions from the people who are sitting around in the chat room very patiently waiting while we figure out how we’re actually recording this episode.

**Craig:** So much. So much.

**John:** But first off we should start with some follow up and really some corrections. I always love in newspapers when they talk about the mistakes they’ve made and regretting the error. Well, in our last podcast we got to kind of do that because there were some significant errors at the end of the podcast last week.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I’ll blame it on jetlag, but anyway we need to sort of address them. So, you were talking about a Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And the actor in that is Jefferson Mays.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But I said Jefferson Davis.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Who, of course, was the role played by Sherman Hemsley in Norman Lear’s comedy The Jeffersonians.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So, completely confused that.

**Craig:** Great 1990s era sitcom.

**John:** And Jefferson Davis, of course, was the president of the Confederacy, or you sad that it was Jefferson, he was the president of the Confederacy. But that’s not right at all. That was Robert E. Lee Daniels who was the director of films like Precious, Based on the Novel Push by Lyle Waggoner.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, we really messed up a lot of stuff there, but we regret the error. And we try to fix our mistakes when we see those mistakes.

**Craig:** Well, the good news is that we do. I mean, we take the time to get it right. We may not get it right the first time, but the second time around we’re very good.

**John:** We’re really good. We aim for clarity and just perfection.

**Craig:** I would actually say we’re the best.

**John:** We are the best. Yet, another mistake we made is that we said that we’re going to both be at the Austin Film Festival October 23 to the 26. That’s not actually accurate, is it Craig?

**Craig:** It’s half true. I’m sorry, guys. I can’t go this time because one of my best friends in the whole world is getting married that weekend and it’s a small wedding and I and my wife will be in attendance. It’s on that Saturday.

And I thought about trying to squeeze in, like maybe if I just fly out Thursday night and I leave Friday afternoon or Friday night, but it was turning into a disaster and I couldn’t figure out how to make it work. So, unfortunately this Austin — it will be the first one I’ve missed in a number of years, but I’ll be back next year for sure, no matter what.

**John:** But we already promised them a Scriptnotes episode. So, we talked about sort of who would be the perfect person to take Craig’s place if Craig could not be there.

**Craig:** But that person was not available so you got…[laughs]

**John:** We got Kelly Marcel.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** And so I’m so excited that Kelly Marcel will be co-hosting the live Scriptnotes that we’ll do in Austin.

**Craig:** Yes, it’s good. You guys are a great team together and it’s always good to — she’s very good at the podcasting thing. Not everybody is, by the way. Although we’ve never actually had a bad guest, I don’t think. Even Richard Kelly, it’s a little tough with Richard Kelly sometimes because he’s Richard Kelly, but that’s the way Richard Kelly is. You know when you get Richard Kelly that that’s what you’re going to get. You’re going to get Richard Kelly. So, that was actually great. But we’ve never had a bad guest.

But she’ll be very good and very funny and you guys will be — you’ll do well together.

**John:** While we’re talking about podcast guests, is there anything you want to tell me, Craig?

**Craig:** Okay, so listen, you’ve done this to me and I didn’t say a word. Okay, not a word. Am I proud of what I did? No. [laughs] But I think that I deserve at the very least the forgiveness that I gave you when you whored yourself out there like a trollop to The Nerdist podcast and to god knows what else. I mean, I think you’ve done 12 podcasts.

**John:** I’ve done a few podcasts.

**Craig:** So, I strayed and I happened to do one. I was in New York and I did Brian Koppelman’s podcast. By the way, so Brian Koppelman’s podcast is called The Moment. And I knew that, but I had never thought twice about it. I just thought, okay, well Brian Koppelman has a podcast called The Moment. And he asked me to come on to The Moment and I said, great, I’ll do The Moment. And I showed up for The Moment and we started talking and he was asking me questions and he kept asking questions like, “So was that the moment do you think when…”

And then I realized, “Ooh, oh The Moment is actually about a moment.” That’s the point of this whole thing is that he’s talking about a moment. But I had no idea because, of course, I don’t listen to any podcasts. So, I found out what The Moment was during The Moment.

**John:** So, I would have guessed that his podcast was six seconds long based on his Vine videos. But apparently it was 90 minutes.

**Craig:** It’s lengthy. And I don’t know how he worked this out. I think it’s because The Moment, which sounds vaguely, I don’t know, there’s something intestinal about it, but whatever, like I’m having a moment.

**John:** I was thinking it was sort of more like a moment of orgasm: a moment of just like clarity and sweat and light.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s exactly what happens to me when I have an orgasm. First comes the clarity. Then the sweat. And then the light. The light is the weirdest part.

His podcast, The Moment — clarity, sweat, light — is associated with ESPN and Grantland. And because it’s ESPN and ESPN is part of the Disney family, we recorded this thing in a proper recording studio at the ABC building in Manhattan. So he’s got like a pretty professional setup, or so I thought. But here’s what happens. You’ll love this.

So this guy brings you in and you have to get your identification and sign in and go through the thing, and go up the stairs, and a man meets you in a lobby that’s essentially a man-trap frankly, because you can’t get down and you can’t get out.

And then an engineer meets you and he says, “Hi, how are you doing, my name is so-and-so.” Great. And he takes you into this proper control both and you go into a proper recording room and you have real microphones and headphones and all the rest. And the guy hits some buttons and then he leaves. He leaves.

So, really what they’ve done with Brian is they’re like, “Here you go buddy. We’re going to hit record and then we’re out of here. And then you just hit stop.” So, it’s kind of professional but also kind of like, “Somebody hit record for Brian, and then we go home, get a beer.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. But it was fun. I enjoyed it. And once I learned what The Moment was about — the moment — then I had a nice moment.

**John:** [laughs] Well, it’s very good. Brian Koppelman is a talented screenwriter and certainly a person who has the best interest of screenwriters at heart. So, if you’re going to cheat on the Scriptnotes Podcast with anyone, Brian Koppelman is the right person to do it with.

**Craig:** Yeah. I feel like we both have hall passes for Brian Koppelman.

**John:** Next bit of follow up, a couple of weeks ago I talked about Goodnight Moon and a terrific piece written about Goodnight Moon and sort of how it’s really very smartly written. Listener Randy Mack pointed me to a McSweeney’s piece by Sean Walsh which I thought was fantastic called A Sparknotes Guide to Goodnight Moon, which is one of those sort of classic study guides to Goodnight Moon, which is of course much longer than the actual book of Goodnight Moon. So, I’m going to put that in the show notes.

But this was a quote from that that I thought was terrific:

The moon in this piece acts as a traditionally feminine sign. Here, the bunny’s final “goodnight moon” demonstrates his completion of his rite of passage and his development into a full man bunny. The moon, which visually appears on every page, grows larger and more pronounced is a chanting feminine voice, haunting and disturbing his world. Just as he must overcome his sexual desire for the woman who says “hush,” the bunny must resist the impending femininity outside of his safe confines.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s exactly what my kid said to me when I read the book to him. He’s like, “Daddy. Daddy, I have to overcome my sexual desire for the woman who says ‘hush.'”

Uh-huh.

**John:** Uh-huh.

**Craig:** Uh-huh. That was very funny.

**John:** What I love about that writing is it reminds me so much of those papers I wrote in college where like I got to keep filling up pages and so you try to dry a meaning out of things that are just completely meaningless.

**Craig:** I have to say, just as a side note, it just kills me to witness the death of clear writing in academia. It wasn’t always like this, but it certainly was like this when you and I were in college. And I think it’s just become calcified into something that’s permanent in a dreadful way. And I don’t know who to blame, other than academics themselves, for buying into this nonsense.

But very famously there were some guys that wrote a computer program that essentially assembled an essay that was grammatically correct in some strict sense, but full of nothing but argle-bargle nonsense academia words. And it was accepted for publication by a number of very fancy academic journals. It’s just embarrassing. It’s embarrassing. And this would be, if I were in charge, I would be a benevolent dictator, but not with this. With this there would be some kind of terrible purge by fire.

**John:** Yeah. When I was in college I was split between my English major, which was writing those argle-bargle papers, and like my post-modernism class, and I was a journalism major. So you had to write incredible clear things for journalism. And that was much better training, I thought.

**Craig:** That is far better training. Far better. There’s really no function. There’s no purpose, function, or value in that kind of over dense fruitcake writing. I don’t mean fruitcake in the la-di-da. I mean fruitcake like something that has too much mass for its shape. [laughs] It’s just — it’s just too much. It’s too much.

**John:** Yeah. It’s too much candy, fruit, and nuts and not actual substance.

**Craig:** It is. You could make a list of words, I mean, semiotic — semiotic means something. That is to say it used to mean something and now in an ironic way it is a signifier but it actually means nothing. It means nothing anymore.

**John:** Yeah. It means that you can stop paying attention.

**Craig:** That’s right. You can turn your brain off. Yup.

**John:** Our last bit of follow up is a question from Mario who writes, “In the excellent…”

**Craig:** Mario!

**John:** Mario.

**Craig:** Mario!

**John:** “In the Rocky Shoals episode during the discussion on the topic of tone, Aline brings up,” Aline Brosh McKenna, the best, “she brings up that she will sometimes write things characters might be thinking but are not saying in order to help make the tone clear.”

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** “How do you go about properly formatting this kind of thing? Do you put it in parenthesis? Quotation marks? Do you italicize it? Or is the fact that it’s written in a block of action and not in dialogue enough for readers to understand what it means?”

**Craig:** That’s a good question. I do this, too. And it depends on the moment and how I’ll do it. I won’t put it in quotation marks or italicize it, but I will choose typically between either a line of action or in parenthesis. For instance, this very day I wrote an exchange where someone says, “I’m from London.” And a woman and a man are listening. And the woman says, “Oh?” But in parenthesis it says (Ooh!). And the man says, “Huh?” And in parenthesis it says (I hate you). So, that will give the actors plenty of context. Certainly it will give the reader plenty of context as to what’s going on there. But you could also do this is action, too.

You could write something like, “John is disgusted. John, ‘Well that’s just terrific.” You know, sure, no problem.

**John:** Yeah. So a parenthetical is perfect if you’re trying to color the delivery of a line. And so if what they’re saying may not be obvious based on the word choices, because they’re trying to express them and that’s not how they’re actually feeling. But that intermediary line of action is a great place to express what’s sort of really going on.

Because if you’re watching the movie you would see that he’s disgusted. You would see that he’s like, you know, shooting eye daggers. That’s all a valid choice.

So, rarely do you have to format anything special.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Craig, a question for you, though. This is something I just ran into in the thing that I’m writing. I needed to sort of ellipses a line of dialogue but I needed to make clear what it was that they were going to say.

**Craig:** Ah.

**John:** Have you ever done that? Where you put that in brackets afterwards, like the part that got cut off at the end of the sentence?

**Craig:** I’ve actually never done that.

**John:** It was the first time I’d ever done it.

**Craig:** But I’ve seen it. And I can see in certain situations where it would be of value. But I always feel like, well, it’s hard to act that. You know, I always think about the actors and I can understand how to act putting in parentheses (I hate you) and then the line is “Oh, that’s interesting.” But I don’t know how to act “I’m not sure if I…” and then in brackets [can marry you].

I think in part it should be somewhat evident from the first part of it. But I can imagine a specific situation where you’re kind of jammed into where it’s like, yes, actually, this is appropriate. The actor would understand why I put that there, etc.

**John:** So, the exact situation I was in is there is a police officer, there is a woman who has come on the scene, and there is an hysterical woman. And our hero character is saying to the police officer, “Can you get rid of this woman.” And so it’s just, “Can you…” but in brackets [take care of her].

**Craig:** Get rid of this woman. My instinct, what I would do, and what you did there is absolutely fine. I think what I would probably have done is say, “Can you…” and then a line of action “He signals his partner to get rid of her.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But it’s the same. And, frankly, you know, it’s all about just how to get things to.. — The only thing I would advise is if you’re going to do it in an action block, it’s good for it to kind of be descriptive as the third person omniscient.

If you’re doing it in parentheses or in brackets then it is good to do it as unspoken dialogue, dialogue that they’re thinking in their heads like “I hate you” as opposed to “He hates him.” That kind of thing, you know.

**John:** All right, let’s get to our topics of the day. So, Amazon is having an interesting week, or a couple weeks. They seem to be having disagreements with several of the people who are supplying them things.

First off is Hachette, a big publisher. And this has been an ongoing fight where they are disagreeing about the price of eBooks. So, Amazon has tried to price books, eBooks, at $9.99, because that’s what they want to sell things for on Kindle. And they have stopped selling certain Hachette, a big publisher’s titles, because they cannot come to an agreement on price.

And so we’ll have a couple links to different articles about this in the show notes. But, Craig, I’m curious what your first thought is when you see this dispute between Hachette and Amazon.

**Craig:** I have grown increasingly wary of Silicon Valley’s disdain for content. They are so unconcerned with anything that isn’t about an increasingly efficient capital machine, something that generates profits for them. And I don’t begrudge them that. That’s what businesses do. But they are ruthless and ruthless almost in a self-destructive way. They’re kind of devouring the very basis of the things that supply them.

And this is an example. I understand why they want to do this, but look, the fact of the matter is Hachette is also a business. They’re allowed to make money. Their authors, more importantly, are allowed to make royalties. And just because Amazon wants to sell something at a price doesn’t mean it gets to.

**John:** I agree with you. So, I generally approach this from the perspective of like, well, that’s business. And so Hachette and Amazon have probably been negotiating and arguing about this for a long time. But I get annoyed when it spills out into the public and they try to fight in public.

And I got annoyed the same way with Comcast and CBS, or was it Time Warner and CBS? Anyway, the cable company that was fighting CBS in New York City, where they tried to make it a big public battle rather than sort of the private negotiation that business actually is.

Business is about you have certain costs of making something. And you are going to look at those costs as part of your price and you are going to charge a certain price to people. That price may be a price that a retailer is willing to accept. It may be a price that a retailer is not willing to accept. Amazon totally has the right not to sell Hachette books. Hachette has the right not to sell Amazon its books for the price Amazon wants.

But this whole public campaign, Amazon went off with this Readers United website.

**Craig:** Oh please.

**John:** And they’ve quoted Orwell and sort of misquoted Orwell. And they’re trying to make the case that books, eBooks, should cost $9.99 because they have so much lower cost than a hardback book would be, or even a paperback book would be. But it’s interesting because to me you never really comment on the costs of things unless you’re saying that things should cost less.

**Craig:** That’s right. They’re not making an argument of value.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** They’re looking — what they’re doing is they’re looking at books as widgets and they’re saying, listen, uh, yeah, somebody sprinkles magic fairy dust on wood pulp and glue and I suppose that’s what makes words that people are interested in. But really what we’re talking about is wood pulp and glue. And you guys have eliminated the wood, pulp, and glue, so you should charge us less to run these books on our website and retail these books.

And the answer is no. No, that’s not what gives the book value. Frankly, one could argue that books have been undervalued for a long time and that this is a way to return value to them. The value is in the content. It’s not in the card stock or any of that.

God forbid the price, the real price — not the adjusted for inflation price — but the real price of content should go up. God forbid. God forbid that creators should make more money. That’s like — that’s literally something that never enters the algorithm of these people. But it’s true.

And, you know, if Amazon feels so strongly that books should be $9.99, they should sell them for $9.99 and make no money off of them.

**John:** Well, that’s honestly what’s been happening though is Amazon has been buying them and selling them at a loss to try to establish a price in people’s heads that $9.99 is the right price for them.

**Craig:** Well, they made their bed. That’s it. They made their bed. By the way, Amazon does this all the time. There was a really interesting — I read an article about a guy that decided he was going to sell diapers online. It was actually a pretty interesting business of selling diapers online. It was just something people weren’t buying online and he figured out a way to do it. And Amazon basically offered him a bunch of money to buy his company. He said no. We really like our model and we’re doing very well.

So, then Amazon decided to compete with him and to destroy him. They began selling diapers at a loss because it was more important for them to carve out competition and create another monopolistic beachhead than it was to actually make a profit.

And, frankly, Amazon struggles with profits from what I understand because they seem more interested in just selling everything and eliminating competition than they actually are interested in making money. So, they’ll do things like this. They’ll sell books for $9.99 because they imagine some world where eventually everybody will have to sell them for less to Amazon, right. But that’s not the way it works. And I hope, honestly, that Hachette and all of the authors they represent stick it to Amazon on this one.

I’m so tired of Amazon. By the way, I buy stuff from Amazon every day. So, I’m the worst. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, I want to talk about the hypocrisy of that because —

**Craig:** The worst. I am such a hypocrite.

**John:** No, I would argue that there’s hypocrisy but there’s also reality. And so I buy stuff off of Amazon and so I had a tweet last week about my frustration with this Readers United thing and said like, you know what, I’m not going to be buying any Kindle books for awhile until this gets settled out, because that part of the business is frustrating to me.

And yet at the same time there is Amazon links on my website.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I bought some composition books for my daughter on Amazon. I don’t fully disagree with all that. Lord, I had a meeting at Amazon this last week. I had a meeting at Amazon on Monday. So, I think there’s parts of the business that are fine and good.

Another blogger made the point that basically there are no good airlines either. Like no matter what you’re going to have a bad experience with an airline. So, if you sort of refuse to go on American Airlines, eventually you’re going to run out of airlines, because you’re going to have a bad problem on every airline. It’s the same kind of thing with Amazon. Eventually you are going to probably want to buy something and Amazon may be the best choice for it.

**Craig:** Amazon, I just wonder if one of these days Amazon doesn’t find itself in the situation that Microsoft found itself in. Which ironically in the prologue to the era of Microsoft’s waning, they were nabbed for antitrust. And they went through a very long, difficult antitrust litigation with the United States government, more severely with European nations.

And the whole time they were like, wait a second, you don’t understand. We’re not a monopoly. We’re doing this stuff because we have to survive and we’re going to die. And everyone was like, shut up, you’re Microsoft. And it turns out actually, yeah, they really were kind of in a little bit of trouble.

I think Amazon is going to run into the same thing. I’m not sure that this whole price thing — somewhere, something in the back of my head says that there’s something funky about this, that deciding you’re not going to — you’re going to sell some people’s products for this price but not other people’s products because you don’t like them or something. I don’t know. I don’t know if that’s — we’ll have to ask some antitrust lawyer what he thinks. Or she.

**John:** Luckily because we have people in the chat room, the blogger I mentioned is actually Marco Arment. So, I knew there was someone, so the point I was making about you can run out of airlines to fly, that was Marco Arment whose post I read.

**Craig:** Good job, Marco.

**John:** Good job, Marco.

The more recent and sort of more directly affecting screenwriters aspect of this is Amazon’s disagreement with Disney about pricing of DVDs and Blu-rays. So, this comes to Captain America, a big hit movie. And Million Dollar Arm. And Muppets Most Wanted. All the Disney movies they have disagreements about what price they want to sell those movies at.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** So, it’s worth talking about what a list price is, because the list price is not the wholesale price. Amazon is paying a certain amount for those discs. And Amazon as a retailer can negotiate what price they’re paying for it. If they don’t like the price they’re paying for it, they can choose not to sell it. And, again, I think that’s fine. There’s no requirement that they need to sell it. But it gets frustrating when it gets public that they’re not doing it, or when they pull the buy buttons off and make it seem like a movie is not coming out, that’s a challenge.

And it’s a challenge because they’ve become so dominant in the home video industry. If you’re not selling your movies through Amazon, that’s going to be a problem. It’s going to cost you.

**Craig:** That’s right. And, again, acting like a bully and that’s part of the nature of capitalism and competition is. It’s hard to blame them for this. It’s also hard to blame Disney for taking a hard line on this. I think the trick with these situations is that the retailer giant, so in the case of say walk in and buy, that would be a Walmart, and online it’s Amazon. The retail giant is one entity. There is a group of people, publishers, or movie studios that are creating a product and they really can’t combine forces the way that Amazon can be consolidated with one policy.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Because that’s antitrust.

**John:** That was exactly what happened in the publishers with Apple. It was decided that they were colluding in making their deal with Apple and they all had to pay fines.

**Craig:** That’s right. Now, what we’ll see in another topic we’re about to approach is that frankly there is a lot of squidgety dealing going on between what ought to be free and clear competitors in the entertainment business. And I suspect that that’s probably the case here, too. I mean, look, Warner Bros got into it with Amazon. Now Disney gets into it with Amazon. I would be shocked if they hadn’t shared some information. Frankly, the guy that used to run Warner Bros is now running Disney. [laughs] I imagine Alan Horn knows a little something about what happened to Warner Bros. So, anyway, it’ll be interesting to see.

Obviously I root for the studios in this case because the more they get paid for a DVD, the more that you and I get paid for residuals.

**John:** It will also be interesting to see what’s the landscape five years from now. Because if you noticed, Disney has their iPad app now. So, your kid can watch all the Disney movies through the iPad app. And that’s a way for Disney to get around having to deal with retailers. They can be their own retailer.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. Amazon won’t be here forever. That much I know. But things will change. Sears once roamed the earthy like the mighty dinosaur. But, you know, they’re not going to be here forever. And they certainly can’t survive forever as this kind of monopolistic pressuring giant because eventually people just get so angry. And they begin to turn to other things. And as other things become easier and easier to access, they’re going to run into trouble. Plus, they have to make money somehow, right?

I mean, you can’t just keep undercutting everybody.

**John:** Well, but there’s also the aspect that they can just keep growing. And sometimes it’s just being able to keep growing in new directions in new areas is a substitute for actual profits.

**Craig:** That’s right. And, by the way, that’s exactly what they’ve done. I mean, they have been cancerous in their growth, which like cancer, cancer is a very impressive cell. You know, a cancer cell will just go and go and go. But eventually it unfortunately kills the person that it’s growing in. And I’m just kind of curious to see, at some point they’re going to run out of this growth space. These kinds of practices are going to start to alienate the people that support their pipelines of products and content.

I don’t know. I mean, look, they’re going to be around for awhile. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not sitting here saying Amazon is going to be falling apart any day. But they’re starting to act like jerks in a way that companies act about five or ten years before things start getting bad.

**John:** Speaking thematically, I wonder if the truism, the dramatic question and irony that power corrupts ultimately can be played about a corporation. And so the way corporations are people, classically in literature you see someone who rises up and he’s a good noble hero and then there’s a corruption in the third act. You see that in Game of Thrones. You see that in classic mythologies.

I admire Amazon. And I admired Amazon’s arrival Jeff Bezos I think is really, really smart. I admired Google’s beginning. I admire sort of what they were able to achieve. And yet I look at both Amazon and Google and I have concerns about what happens down the road with them.

**Craig:** I think that’s a good point. I mean, when these companies begin they begin as antitheses to what is the standard. They exist in opposition to something and struggle with something. They are in defiance of something. And they grow in that principled way. And they attract people because they’re principled and because they’re saying not “we’re great,” they’re saying “we’re better.”

Right? Everything that you’re used to, these big slow-turning Titanic like giants. We’re better because we’re smarter and we’re new and we’ve figured it out. But eventually they become the big giant. It’s inevitable. And their stance becomes defensive and they’re entirely about stifling what is new because their business model is tied to the infrastructure that they have intertwined with, you know?

**John:** In the Readers United piece they cite George Orwell. And you usually think of 1984 with George Orwell. And in fact Amazon famously a couple years ago pulled 1984 off people’s Kindles because they didn’t actually have the rights to it. And that was a huge brouhaha where like they had literally reached into Kindles and pulled that book back.

But maybe the better analogy is George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Because if you look at the end of Animal Farm, the animals had this revolution and they had all these great ideals and they published their ideas on the barn wall. But ultimately they end up sort of betraying their ideals. And I’ll be curious whether five years, ten years from now we are applying those same lessons to these companies, or companies that I admire like Apple right now. I wonder if we’re going to be seeing that same kind of thing happen.

**Craig:** It’s interesting. Apple for whatever reason, I mean, listen, there’s plenty about Apple to be concerned about and to not like, but there’s a certain rebellious nature to them in some way. Amazon and Google feel — this is all feeling — but they feel like the man right now. They feel like the man. And they feel like the man in part because they’re doing stuff like this.

Apple has always stood apart from all these other businesses because they have made their own software and their own hardware that are meant to work together and that’s it. Right? Microsoft was always about jamming together 4,000 companies worth of tiny bits of plastic to sell to you at a lower price. And, if it works it works. And Apple has always been kind of pure about that sort of thing. Granted, you know, I’m not saying they’re perfect. They are —

**John:** I’m not saying they’re perfect either.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Another company that has strong ideals is the Weinstein Company.

**Craig:** “Yeah, oh wow man. Thank you. Here. I’m really glad to hear you say that, all right.”

**John:** So, a friend sent a link to this thing which I thought was terrific. So, Charity Buzz is a site that — I would actually encourage everyone to go to Charity Buzz. There are auctions on Charity Buzz and you can win these auctions and sometimes they’re really great experiences. Classically Tim Cook was a person you could have a 30-minute meeting with Tim Cook as a Charity Buzz auction that went for a tremendous amount of money. But even like local schools, like my daughter’s school will have Charity Buzz auctions for things.

We Charity Buzz auctioned backstage at Big Fish.

**Craig:** Cool.

**John:** Well, the Weinstein Company for some charity did a charity auction of an internship, an internship with the Weinstein Company. And you can bid on your chance to become an intern for the Weinsteins.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** Craig, how much would you pay to be an intern with the Weinsteins.

**Craig:** Oh my god, I suppose I would pay up to negative $100,000. [laughs] I mean, I guess down to negative $100,000.

This is unreal.

**John:** So, the estimated value according to Charity Buzz is $50,000.

**Craig:** Hold on a second.

**John:** Let me read you what actually happened.

**Craig:** Who comes up with that number, by the way?

**John:** It’s the person who is supplying it.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** So here is what you’re getting. “Bid now on a special three-month internship at the Weinstein Company in New York City or Los Angeles.”

**Craig:** “Either city. You can go either New York or Los Angeles. Whatever one you want, man.”

**John:** “And in the department of your choice and learn all the ins and outs of the movie business.” So, a three-month internship with them.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s it. All of them. All the ins and outs of the movie business, all of them, three months.

**John:** So, this is an unpaid internship.

**Craig:** Yeah. Unpaid.

**John:** Student must be enrolled in college. Intern can receive college credit. Travel accommodations are not included. Start date is TBD and based on a mutually agreed upon time. It’s valid for one semester for US residents only. Cannot be resold or re-auctioned, transferred, and travel accommodations are not included twice.

Troubling, I think, because we’ve talked before on the podcast I think about the challenge of internships. And that unpaid internships tend to favor the wealthy, honestly, or kids who don’t need to work because they can afford not to work.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But this is sort of a rare case where like you have to pay to have this internship.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a little sick. I mean, look, it goes to charity and anything something goes to charity everybody kind of goes, ah, you know, it’s for charity. So, some rich guy wants to set his kid up at the Weinstein Company for three months because he thinks that’s going to help him in the movie business or something. And he wants to pay, I mean, currently at time of recording the current bid is $13,000 after six bids. But we’ll see where it goes.

Okay, fine, you’re going to give a bunch of money to — this supports the American Repertory Theater. Fine. Where’s the harm? Where’s the harm?

Well, you know, here’s the harm. It’s not really harm, it’s just a lack of good. I wish honestly that the Weinstein Company would have said, hey, you’re not going to enjoy a three-month internship. You can enjoy a three-month, I don’t know what you’d call it, like an insider’s look where you can participate or you can sit in on — some promise of doing something other than making copies all day and getting lunches and coffees because your dad paid $40,000. You know what I mean? There has to be… — Look, I did an internship that was when I was a junior in college, that summer after my junior year I did an internship through the Television Academy.

And it was a competition. There wasn’t obviously money involved or anything. It was a competition. And to their credit, they gave you a stipend of $600 a month for two months which was enough to pay my rent. And they placed you with interesting people. And, for instance, I was placed at Fox Broadcasting at the network. And while I often did do things like copy stuff and so on and so forth, I also got to go to the big meeting with Barry Diller and Peter Chernin and Jamie Kellner and watch as these people debated and argued over how they should craft their slate and what the ratings were and all the rest of it. And that was fascinating. And access to that was kind of unimaginable for a 19-year-old kid to have.

This is not going to be that. [laughs] This is not going to be that at all. I mean, look, god bless them for giving this money, but I just think they could have offered something a little better than an internship. First of all, enjoy a three-month internship at the Weinstein Company is like, [laughs], you know, enjoy your nine-month stay here in Abu Ghraib. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, it feels wrong to me. I think internships are, and we talked about this on the show before. I think internships can be very valuable for the interns. I think they can be valuable for the companies, probably to a lesser degree, but valuable. I think they can be valuable overall for the industry because it’s a chance for people who think they may want to work in the industry to see what the industry is actually like.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And the people who discover that they love it, hooray, they love it. And they are going to be motivated to work in the industry and the people who discover that they don’t really want it, they can go off and do other things. So, I think it’s a really — internship overall is a really good thing for the industry and for the people involved.

But paying for access to it feels not especially great.

**Craig:** Creepy. Also, look, if you’re a studio and you really are interested in giving people — giving young people a taste of what Hollywood is like and how the business works, don’t do it for people that do this. Do it for, you know, I would have been much happier to see somebody say, hey, you know we’re going to donate money and we’re going to send some kid that doesn’t have access to this kind of thing, who isn’t, whose dad or mom isn’t wealthy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Because, I mean, look, the internship thing is out of control. And this leads lovely to our — lovely into our next topic. Loverly.

**John:** Yes. Which is something you had highlighted for this episode which was this revelations that in the bigger Silicon Valley wage suppression lawsuits there was actually stuff that came out about people working in animation.

**Craig:** Right. So, there’s a real problem here. We know that animation, feature animation, is not union. It’s not WGA. I don’t even know if it’s SAG to that extent. There’s a small amount of animation that’s covered by the WGA. That would be some primetime animation like The Simpsons and Family Guy and so forth.

But there’s this case now. They’re calling it the “Techtopus” — as an octopus — Techtopus wage-fixing cartel scandal. And they thought that they had come up with a settlement for this thing and the judge had kind of thrown the settlement out implying this isn’t good enough. And essentially what they’re talking about is the revelation that there has been what these businesses have called a no poaching agreement between the major animation companies. So, we’re talking about DreamWorks, Disney, Pixar, very specifically I think between DreamWorks and Pixar. That was kind of the big one.

And the idea of the no poaching thing wasn’t just, hey, don’t steal our people. It was, hey, don’t offer our people more than we’re offering them, because that’s going to start an arms race where we’re going to offer your people more than you’re offering them. And suddenly, oh my goodness, we’re paying these people according to the principles of competition which of course they love unless it applies to their workers.

And this is not cool. That is not allowable. That’s an illegal cartel. That’s why we have laws about things like that. And this wasn’t even something they were hiding, frankly. They were emailing each other back and forth quite openly and then when Sony started making animated films, and they weren’t aware of this, everybody called them up and they were like, hey Sony, did you not know how this works? We don’t do this, all right?

**John:** [laughs] Yeah, that’s a nice animation studio you got.

**Craig:** Yeah, shame if anything should happen to it. You know, Zemeckis starts up Image Movers and everybody is like, you know, he hires some guy. And pays him a little bit more. And then Ed Catmull at Pixar emails Dick Cook at Disney and goes, ooh, we got a problem with Zemeckis. He don’t get it. [laughs] And it’s just wrong. It’s wrong.

**John:** It is wrong. And so this is talking about animation and classically WGA writers aren’t covered in animation, so it’s been very hard for us to get any sort of leverage in terms of our prices being up. But when you’re talking about specialists who are doing very specific computer animation things, they are really valuable. They can do really amazing things, but their value is not — there’s no free market for them because if there’s only four shops that could pay them and they’ve all agreed not to pay any of them more, then that’s suppressing wages.

**Craig:** No question. And if you think about what we do, how terrible would it be — I mean, this was essentially the system that we as screenwriters got away from in the ’50s and ’60s with what they called the old studio system where you were owned by a studio. And some other studio wanted to hire you and there was kind of a gentleman’s agreement that you wouldn’t do that, or that you would put an actor out on loan as they said. But the idea being that you kind of capped the competition for wages by limiting the opportunity of the people that earned the wages. So, here’s an exchange in his deposition, Ed Catmull of Pixar says the following.

They’re asking him, the plaintiff’s attorneys are saying what do you mean by all these emails where you keep on talking about not hiring other people because of wages. And finally Catmull says, “Well, them hiring a lot of people at much higher salaries would have a negative effect in the long term.”

And the attorney says, “On pay structure?”

And he says, “Well, I’m just saying that if they… — I don’t know what you mean by pay structure. The, for me I just, it means the pay, all right? If the pay goes way up in an industry where the margins are practically nonexistent it will have a negative effect.”

And my favorite thing then is Ed, he finishes saying this and his attorney says the following, “This might be a good time for a break.”

And I can imagine that this woman, his counsel, drags him outside and beats him within an inch of his life for saying this, because it’s basically handing them the truth. But I really want to zero in on this: of course they’re trying to suppress wages, but what I love is this nonsense. “If the pay goes way up in an industry where the margins are practically nonexistent…”

Dude, come on! Come on! That is — why is it that Hollywood gets away with that nonsense more than any other industry. “Oh, we’re not making any money over here. Everything loses money.” Get out of her. Oh, yeah, Frozen, how much did they lose on that? Oh, yeah, Pixar, boy what a string of duds. I mean, come on!

**John:** Yeah. They can barely keep the lights on at Pixar.

**Craig:** Barely. The margins are practically nonexistent. After all of the movies, after all the Toy Stories and the Cars and the merchandising and the Bug’s Life and Up and yada yada, we’ve added it all up and what we’ve made so far here at Pixar is $5.

**John:** Yeah. Pixar apparently in their cereal bar they had to start going to like generic cereals. They can’t afford the brand names anymore.

**Craig:** Oh the humanity. [laughs] I mean, get out of here.

**John:** Craig, this is a very specialized world of the animation films, but I’m wondering to what degree the same kind of thing is happening in our world and it’s sort of the normal future in the television world. Because we are covered by the union, so we have scale. And scale is the minimum people can pay you for things.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** And lord knows I was on the negotiating committee. Scale is important and we want to make sure we can protect scale. But I do wonder if these same kinds of conversations are happening that are limiting over-scale opportunities for people in film and in television. It’s the way that you, in television you keep people from moving up from staff writer, to story editor, to producer. Where you just sort of have this tacit agreement like, yeah, yeah, please don’t hire them as something more than their previous thing because we don’t want to give them that bump.

**Craig:** Yeah, no question. They will always, just as water will try an seep through any crack available, the companies will always try and play whatever game they can to reduce their costs, reduce the wages that they pay. They will often do so by wriggling around inside of the rules. Sometimes they bend the rules to the point of stretching them to meaninglessness.

One trick is they’ll hire two writers for television staff but tell them we’re making you a “paper team.” You’re not a writing team, even though you don’t know each other, and you’re not writing together, we’re making you a paper team so that we can pay each of you half what you should be paid, because in a writing team the team gets paid what one writer gets and they have to split it.

Well, I mean, so there’s an example of cheating. What we have to prevent this kind of thing from happening that’s apparently rampant in the animation business, we have the union, and perhaps more importantly we have agents. So, there is this other industry that the studios hate, the talent agencies. And the talent agencies are motivated entirely by creating competition for wages, an upward pressure on wages because that’s how they make their money.

If I were a very talented person working — by the way, I’ve truly put myself on the “will never be hired” list at Pixar now, but okay — if I were a talented animator, storyboard artist/animator, etc, I would start trying to figure out a way to organize and to create a union. They desperately need a union. And then from the union I think the agents would then start to swoop in. Agents need a union. The union makes it so that the writers, the creators, the artists are earning enough to be attractive to agents. Then the agents come in and push it all upward, right, upward.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So right now they’re being pushed downward without any protection. It’s terrible.

**John:** It’s a frustrating situation. Paper teaming is a real issue that happens in television. And I was just talking with a young writer who got the call saying congratulations you’ve been hired on this one-hour drama, we’re so excited. And then half an hour later he got a call saying like, oh, and we’re going to team you up with this other writer who is also a brand new writer who is great.

And he, to his credit, had the balls to say, “No. That’s not going to happen.”

**Craig:** Good for him. Good for him. And, by the way, you have to. You have to say no.

**John:** Yeah. And so on some level, well, they called his bluff and they gave him the job just for himself. That other writer didn’t get a job, but on the whole I think it’s better for everyone that he stood up and said like, “Listen, I’m not a team. You can’t do that.”

**Craig:** Absolutely. I don’t want a business where they spend the same amount of money but spread it among five times as many people. That’s not the goal.

**John:** Not good for anyone.

**Craig:** No, it’s not good for anyone. Exactly.

**John:** Because you’ve created an unsurvivable job.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** If no one can make a living doing this task, then you’ve made it worse for everyone.

**Craig:** And, boy, I’ll tell you, they are getting dangerously close to that place right now. They really are. Especially in features, it is — don’t get me started.

So, the people in the forum now that are listening to us can ask question live.

**John:** Yes. CD Donovan writes, “Hi John, hi Craig, love the podcast very much. Appreciate what you guys do every week. I just moved here to LA, the third day in Los Angeles now. Here for grad school.”

**Craig:** Welcome, great.

**John:** “Screenwriting at UCLA. Any advice for surviving in LA and making the most of these next two years?”

**Craig:** Oh, that’s good. Well, you know, everyone is different. Everyone’s survival tactics and strategies are different. I can only share with you what mine were. You’re at UCLA, wonderful school, wonderful campus, great part of town in Westwood. Study, obviously study hard. See movies. Get to know people that are in your program. Gravitate towards the people that seem like they are substantive rather than the people who seem popular.

Popular people eventually go on to be like the third guy in charge of development at some company and the substantial people end up being multimillionaires. And the other thing I would recommend is to drink way less than everybody else is and get high way less than everybody else is because it’s just not going to help you.

**John:** You’re here in a graduate screenwriting program, so write. And you should look at these next two years as your writing years. And you’re never going to have another opportunity to write so much, be able to share it with the people in your little group to get feedback, to get going. So, write.

Try to take advantage of the fact that you’re around a bunch of film people to make some movies, because if you are just writing scenes you may not actually get the experience of shooting things and film school is about shooting things. You can crew on some things. You will learn so much from it.

**Craig:** That’s true. Well, we’ve got another question here from Ian Workheiser who says, “What movie or two would you say delivers the best lessons to screenwriters to read the script and watch?” So, I think he means to simultaneously read and watch or watch and then read, etc. What do you think, John?

**John:** I’ve said it many times on the podcast. The first script that I read along with the movie was Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape. And that was — it’s a good movie. It’s a good script. They both work well together.

But I keep coming back to Aliens which was so important and seminal to me where I really could see the movie on the page. And then you watch the movie and it’s like, wow, you did what you promised you would do on the page. So, those are two examples for me.

**Craig:** That’s great. I think I may have mentioned this before. I am a big fan of Jerry Maguire. I think it’s a great example, I think, because Cameron Crowe wrote it and then Cameron Crowe directed it. So, you know that there is a purity of intention from the page to the movie and it’s beautifully done, just beautifully done. And, also, entertaining.

There are movies that are brave, there are movies that are subversive, that shake up the traditional storytelling and they’re wonderful, but when you’re starting out sometimes going down that path is a little bit like just being the punk band in high school that only knows two chords, but hey, it’s punk. Yeah, but also you suck, you know.

But Jerry Maguire is how to do a traditional narrative brilliantly and artistically and impressively. Such a good script. Such a good read. Really well done. So, that’s the one I would recommend.

**John:** Great. Josh Ernstrom writes, “Are there still paper scripts going around, or is it all digital?” It’s almost all digital.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, I would say the only times I’ve gotten paper scripts have been something that’s really locked down and so they have it printed on — you cannot photocopy this — it has watermarks. It’s on red pages. But even those are much rarer.

The most extreme example I got was a rewrite on something and they sent it over on a locked down iPad, so it was actually impossible to sort of get it off of the iPad. But it’s essentially all digital now. And I kind of miss, Craig, I don’t know if you miss this, but there used to be a number of years where you would call and say like, “Hey, send a messenger,” and then you would print your script and then inevitably you would like find a typo and you’d be scrambling to fix, get the new page in there before the messenger got there.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** But there was something actually really refreshing about sort of like you have the script there, it’s sitting on your doorstep, you see the messenger come, and then you’re free. It’s no longer in your possession. And the email just isn’t the same.

**Craig:** Unfortunately the nice things about paper, they are no longer with us. You felt like you had achieved something when you printed your script out for the first time. You could hold it. It looked like a thing that other scripts looked like. There was weight.

But, yeah, the only time you’ll see physical scripts now are at roundtables, as far as I can tell, when people have to sit there and actually — you know, nobody has brought 12 iPads to a table. And for table readings when you’re about to shoot and you have your actors come in and read the script. Other than that, it’s all digital.

**John:** Yeah. Dee Mower writes, “I am close to landing an agent at UTA to rep my screenplay. Assuming he can place, how likely is it that I could get my agent to help me land an assignment based on a pitch? Are such assignments rare?”

**Craig:** An assignment based on a pitch? Or you mean sell a pitch? Oh, I see, he means like — or does he mean an assignment where you’re coming in and pitching on their assignment?

**John:** I think that’s what he means.

**Craig:** Okay. How likely is it that you can get your agent to help you do that? Well, if they’re your agent that’s kind of their job.

**John:** I wonder if he’s talking about the agent is sort of representing the script but hasn’t really agreed to represent him.

**Craig:** Oh I see.

**John:** But there’s a hip pocketing kind of thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. Then probably a long shot there because you can assume that that agent has plenty of other clients who are asking the same thing. Many of whom even have credits. I mean, we’ve talked about this before, but the contraction of both the amount of movies that are made and then the tremendous contraction of the ratio of development to production, which is approaching one-to-one has made it so that there is enormous competition for these rewrite jobs. And a lot of times, frankly, there is no competition. It’s just we want to rewrite this and we want this person to do it.

**John:** But I think he’s really talking more about the open writing assignment. So, how likely is it that they would send him out on an open writing assignment?

**Craig:** It’s not likely, I don’t think.

**John:** I think it’s likely if they really — if they’re really representing you and you are the right kind of person for that job, they totally will.

**Craig:** But if it’s —

**John:** If it’s just a hip pocket, then no.

**Craig:** No. I don’t think so. Yeah. All right, so we’ve got, let’s see. “Hi John and Craig. Can you talk about various writing teachers and gurus hating on VO.”

**John:** Yeah that voiceover problem. So, here’s the thing about voiceover. Voiceover is often terrible. Here’s what it is. Terrible movies often have voiceover. And because terrible movies often have voiceover, you start to believe that, well, voiceover is what made it bad.

No, voiceover was probably a patch applied very late to try to save a bad movie. But voiceover itself is not necessarily a bad thing. There’s many great movies that have voiceover.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** So, teachers do it because they don’t want to read voiceover in their student’s scripts, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea of voiceover.

**Craig:** Let me be slightly less charitable, John. Writing teachers and gurus say this because they’re dumb. And they’re dumb and lazy. Okay, they’re dumb because they’re confusing — John is exactly right. Voiceover is a tool like any other. It happens to be the kind of tool that magnifies bad writing. Because there’s something about the narrator’s voice that demands a certain quality of writing. If you’re going to tell me that I’m supposed to listen to a disembodied voice, that disembodied voice better be pretty impressive. It should be good, right?

So, even a movie, like a broad comedy like Ted opens with voiceover. Patrick Stewart is doing the voiceover and it’s wonderful voiceover. It’s spectacular. And it ends with a great joke that honestly makes the movie work, right? But as a tool if you don’t write well, your voiceover will really stick out as awful.

So, on the one hand I think the writing teachers and gurus are dumb because they’re confusing voiceover with bad voiceover, but I think they’re lazy also because what they don’t want to do is then explain to you how to write good voiceover. And they can’t do that because they don’t know how. That’s the truth. They just don’t know how.

I think voiceover can be awesome — awesome! — if done awesomely. What a shock. What a shock. Eh.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** There I go. There I go.

**John:** If this were a podcast about cinematography and one of the things like teachers said like you should never use lenses below a 15 because it’s distorting, well that’s just crazy talk.

**Craig:** It’s crazy.

**John:** Because obviously there are times where you want to use a really wide lens.

**Craig:** Right. You want a fish shot. Yeah.

**John:** It’s a very long lens.

**Craig:** You want to do a fisheye lens. They’re instruments. And, yes, it’s true that there are things that people know can be overdone, of course. And if you overuse slow-mo you’re going to look silly. And if you overuse dialogue, long speeches of dialogue. But, you know, voiceover is such a — here’s the deal. These people are always looking for rules to give you because that’s what gives them the aura of knowledge. They are able to deliver something to you in exchange for money. That’s the real problem here. You’re paying them and they need to give you something.

If you pay me, here’s what I’m going to give you. You shouldn’t have paid me, because the truth is you can do this or you can’t do this. I can give you some help here or there, right? But really you don’t need to pay me. But they need to give you something, right, because they’re ripping you off. So, what do they do? They give you nonsense rules. “Never use voiceover. Never say we see. Don’t put things in parentheses. Never tell the reader where the camera goes.” Blah, blah, blah.

It’s all nonsense. Nonsense. Oh my god! [laughs]

**John:** The people who joined us for the live chat were mostly joining for that umbrage. So thank you for giving it to them Craig.

**Craig:** Woo-hoo.

**John:** I think it’s time for One Cool Things.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is a podcast called Crew Call by Anonymous Production Assistant. And the reason I found out about this podcast is because Stuart Friedel, my assistant, the producer of this podcast, was actually a guest on this podcast.

**Craig:** [laughs] Wait, I’m sorry, what?

**John:** Stuart was a guest.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** One of the Stuarts was a guest.

**Craig:** The world is changing so rapidly. I can’t keep up with the world anymore. Unbelievable. Good for Stuart.

**John:** Unbelievable.

**Craig:** God, amazing.

**John:** So, honestly what I like about the podcast is we talk about people who work in other parts of the industry, this is about people who work in other crew positions and who are so incredibly vital. So, to have a podcast for people who are interested in all of the other crafts and trades that go into making film and television I think is incredibly important.

**Craig:** It’s spectacular.

**John:** So, I salute this podcast. And Stuart’s episode is terrific, too. So, you can listen to that. He talks about making Scriptnotes and what he does on the show and running out and getting me coffee. And he only embarrasses me two or three times, so it’s pretty cool.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s wonderful. Oh, only two or three? Was I embarrassed at all? Because you know I don’t listen to podcast so I would never —

**John:** No, you weren’t embarrassed at all. He doesn’t say anything about you.

**Craig:** Oh, good. I prefer to be ignored.

Well, how could my One Cool Thing this week not be Robin Williams, the great Robin Williams who tragically took his own life. And this one — this was a hard one because it not only was tragic in and of itself because any suicide is tragic and because the suicide of a terrific artist sort of robs us all of something.

But he was really the first comedian in my life, you know. For those of us who are in our early 40s, Mork & Mindy came along and Mork from Ork came along and I wore the rainbow suspenders and he was that first, I know — [laughs]

**John:** I’m just picturing Craig with his rainbow suspenders. It’s great.

**Craig:** it’s adorable. It’s adorable. What I did not know were my gay pride rainbow suspenders. But he was the first standup comedian in my life and he was amazing and wonderful. And what I also — personally what I always appreciated about Robin Williams was the very thing that he often got criticized for, which was his sentimentality.

You could tell that he was very aware of his own pain and the pain of the world. He had an almost direct access to it, an emotional access to it. And he was able to convey that. And, yes, if sometimes some of the movies felt overtly sentimental or mawkish, it’s because sometimes life is a bit sentimental and mawkish.

Go to a funeral and see if you’re not sentimental and mawkish, but that’s part of life. And if it’s honest, I think it can be beautiful. And he sort of ran the gamut from the ridiculous to the gorgeous to the subtle to the dramatic. He could do anything.

Personally, my favorite Robin Williams movie is Awakenings. Maybe because I was a premed kid on his way to being a neurologist and I loved Oliver Sacks and all that. But I just though how amazing that this guy who could be Mork from Ork and who could do those incredible live performances where he would just go and go and never stop. And his mind would move a thousand miles a minute, to go from that to holding his own completely with Robert De Niro and delivering this beautiful portrait. And, a kind of character I always appreciate. A character in a movie who is the hero even though you don’t know he’s the hero.

You know, you think you’re watching a movie about a man overcoming this affliction, but you’re watching a movie about a human being figuring out how to be human. And he was just unbelievable. And, folks, go hug a funny person, you know.

This is — it’s sad. What funny people often do carry around this terrible hurt. And he will be terribly, terribly missed. A great, great, great performer and artist, the late Robin Williams.

**John:** I completely agree. So, by the time this podcast comes out it’ll be nearly a week that the news has past. And I hope that one of the things we take with us out of his passing is not just his legacy of great work and all that stuff we have there, but the real lesson of what depression is and that it’s a rough thing to struggle with. And if people can be more appreciative of what it is and the challenges people face when they are dealing with depression, hopefully we can help the people around us.

**Craig:** No question. No question. I had a friend recently who went through a really rough patch and, you know, got a little close to this situation. And suicidality and suicidal ideation is a very, very serious thing. And I think, frankly, people are starting to get it. I really do.

I think people are starting to get, the stigma is going away. I think the casual dismissal of depression is something that weak whiners do is going away. I think people are starting to get it. I can’t imagine, in a weird way, anything you could do that’s braver or stronger than harming yourself. Think about just what it would take to harm yourself. What you’re really saying is I’m in so much pain I’m willing to do this extraordinary thing to make the pain go away.

But, of course, there is a wonderful way to make the pain go away that has nothing to do with suicide and that gives you your life back. And I suppose that is really the strongest thing you could do, which is to fight. And to fight through it. And there are terrific medications that do work and there is therapy that does work and there are people that care for you that do very much understand this and who have been through it.

So, if you are depressed, do not be ashamed. Talk about it. You are not weak.

**John:** Yeah, if anything, if the shame of depression can be diminished through the acknowledgment that it really is out there and it’s a real thing that people are wrestling with on a daily basis, that would be progress.

**Craig:** It would. And it’s sad that it would take something like this to bring people’s awareness to it, but this is a problem that so many people are suffering with. They’re suffering with it silently. You don’t even know what’s going on. This is why we get surprised by these things. But I defy anybody — anybody in the United States — to say, no, there’s nobody in my extended family that has either been depressed or committed suicide. I don’t have a friend or anybody.

No.

**John:** No, not true.

**Craig:** No. It’s everywhere and it can be fought and it can be overcome. And I think at long last people are taking it very seriously. And, frankly, honoring what it means to be depressed. It deserves a certain amount of honor and respect as something very serious the way you honor and respect heart disease, or cancer, or anything like that.

**John:** That’s our show this week. The things we talked about on the episode, there will be show notes at johnaugust.com, so links to many of the things we talked about. We’ll include some links about depression and people who’ve written brilliant things about their own depression over the course of this last week. But also the Weinsteins Charity Buzz.

**Craig:** [laughs] Talk about depression.

**John:** An Amazon and everything else in this epic episode we did this week.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Thank you to everybody who listened in live on Mixlr. That was fun.

**Craig:** That was fun.

**John:** We’ll try to do this occasionally.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. If you are a new listener and want to catch up on back episodes, we have a whole zillion of them. We have 156 prior episodes at scriptnotes.net. You can get to all of those back episodes for $1.99 a month.

**Craig:** $1.99 a month!

**John:** That’s a bargain at any price. You can spend $13,000 on a Weinstein Charity Buzz auction, or $1.99 a month.

**Craig:** $1.99 a month!

**John:** Pennies a day.

**Craig:** Pennies!

**John:** If you are a subscriber to those premium episodes, you can also listen to those on the iPhone app and the Android app. Look for those in your app store.

If you are on iTunes, please click subscribe and also leave us a comment because that helps people find our show. There is potential that we are going to be doing a live show later this fall.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So nothing official yet, but maybe stay in Los Angeles is all I’m saying. Maybe stay in Los Angeles from now until the end of the year.

**Craig:** Yeah, just don’t go anywhere, at any time.

**John:** There’s a possibility, just in case.

**Craig:** Don’t go anywhere.

**John:** No. I am on Twitter @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. If you have a longer question for us, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. And, Craig, I’ll see you next week.

**Craig:** See you next week, buddy.

Links:

* This episode was broadcast live [on Mixlr](http://mixlr.com/scriptnotes/)
* Come see Scriptnotes live with John and Kelly at the [Austin Film Festival](http://www.austinfilmfestival.com/)
* Brian Koppelman’s The Moment Podcast [with guest Craig Mazin](http://grantland.com/hollywood-prospectus/the-moment-podcast-brian-koppelman-and-craig-mazin/)
* [Sparknotes: Goodnight Moon](http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/sparknotes-goodnight-moon) on McSweeney’s
* Slate on [How Gobbledygook Ended Up in Respected Scientific Journals](http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/02/27/how_nonsense_papers_ended_up_in_respected_scientific_journals.html)
* Christopher Wright [on Amazon vs Hachette](https://www.eviscerati.org/articles/2014/08/Amazon-v-Hatchette-Everyone-Wrong-Me), and Dave Bryant’s follow up [on the true costs of publishing a book](http://dave-bryant.livejournal.com/21544.html)
* John’s blog post on how [no one cares about manufacturing costs](http://johnaugust.com/2014/no-one-cares-about-manufacturing-costs)
* LA Times on [Amazon vs Disney](http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-amazon-disney-20140811-story.html)
* The Weinstein Company is [auctioning off an internship for charity](https://www.charitybuzz.com/catalog_items/597305)
* [Court docs show role of Pixar and Dreamworks Animation in Silicon Valley wage-fixing cartel](http://pando.com/2014/07/07/revealed-court-docs-show-role-of-pixar-and-dreamworks-animation-in-silicon-valley-wage-fixing-cartel/)
* The Anonymous Production Assistant’s Crew Call Podcast [with guest Stuart Friedel](http://www.anonymousproductionassistant.com/2014/07/31/personal-assistant-stuart-friedel/)
* Robin Williams’s obituary from [The New York Times](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/12/movies/robin-williams-oscar-winning-comedian-dies-at-63.html?_r=0)
* The [National Suicide Prevention Lifeline](http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org/) and [National Alliance on Mental Illness](http://www.nami.org/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Brian Shane ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))