Archives for 2014

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/to-chase-or-to-spec).

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

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

**John:** And this is episode 147 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, this is the last episode of Scriptnotes we’re recording…

…before the Worldwide Developers Conference. Apple will release all the brand new stuff on Monday but this is before Monday, so we don’t know what that stuff will be.

**Craig:** When you say they’re going to release all the brand new stuff, is this when they’re going to announce the next iPhone and such?

**John:** Well, they’re going to announce the new operating system, so for Macintosh and for iOS. And so it’s where all, you see, it’s sort of the future. And so our listeners who are listening to this on Tuesday or sometime after Tuesday, they are living in a future in which all these things are known. But we are living in a place of uncertainty. It’s like — it’s a quantum flux — flux is really the word but there’s — the decisions have not yet been made about what the future’s going to hold but they are made in the future that they’re living in.

**Craig:** You know what happened is the power of movies just happened there, because you saw Back to the Future.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And in your mind, flux capacitor is permanently lodged. It’s neurologically lodged right next to time travel.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Well, I mean quantum and quantum flux, I think they sort of feel like they belong together but I’m not sure they really do in a scientific way. But I do know that I envy the people in the future who know what the future’s going to be and, yet, I don’t want my time to move any faster.

**Craig:** It’s getting a little sad.

**John:** No, no, it’s getting exciting because exciting things are brewing. So, you know, it’s exciting for me as a developer because we are always so excited to see what the next things are going to be and what the next shiny bits of goodness are going to be. And so the very first Mac app we ever created was called Bronson Watermarker. I don’t know if you remember Bronson Watermarker.

**Craig:** I do, I do.

**John:** So Bronson’s really useful for watermarking scripts or any PDF that you need to send out. And it does a good job with that. But it looked just so awful and it actually sort of caused me pain every time I looked at it, so we decided a couple of weeks ago like you know what, we’re just going to dust it off and make a new version. The challenge is you would have to figure out like, well, do you make it look like the apps look right now or how you think the apps are going to look like after they announce all the shiny new goodness.

So we just kind of took a guess about where we thought the apps were going to look like. And so we just released it today, the new version today. And we think we got it right, but the people who are listening to this podcast will know whether we got it right or didn’t get it right because we made choices that could be completely wrong.

**Craig:** Let me get this straight. You guys a couple of weeks ago decided to significantly update your software.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And even though you only have 40 people working for you, [laughs], you managed to do it in two weeks?

**John:** We did manage to do it in a very, very —

**Craig:** That is right. You have 40 people working for you, right?

**John:** No, we actually — that’s not quite correct. If you count me, and you count Stuart who you can sort of only kind of half count because he’s really, you know —

**Craig:** Stuart.

**John:** He’s Stuart. Stuart’s wonderful but he’s not a programmer.

**Craig:** No, he’s not a full human being, right.

**John:** Stuart’s a wonderful human being with many other qualities, but coding and design are not his forte.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So it’s really a team of like two and a half, counting me as a half person that could do it in two weeks.

**Craig:** Two and a half — but that’s — what?

**John:** No, I know it does seem impossible. Granted, it is a simpler app then, you know, a mega-giant screenwriting app. But it does a lot of stuff and so it does sort of the watermarking stuff it always did, and does it better. But we also added in password protection, so we now create encrypted PDFs with passwords that are going to be individually generated and it’s stronger. A couple of weeks — not couple weeks — probably months ago we talked about the Tarantino script that leaked.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And there are all these people who were saying like, “Oh, if they just like watermarked it, it would have been safe and protected.” It’s like, yeah, stuff can always get out.

**Craig:** Ish. Yeah.

**John:** Ish. It would have been a little bit more protected. I think a watermark is useful for saying like, “Hey, you know what? Don’t copy this.”

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s like a socially engineered protection. You don’t want to be blamed.

**John:** So for this new build we did a couple of things that are sort of also social engineering and a little bit more hidden engineering. So password protection is really obvious. So like if you’re sending someone a password protected PDF and separately sending them like this is the password to unlock it, you’re really sending a message like, hey, you know what, we really don’t want this going any place.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We also had this thing called finger printing which is it creates a bunch of invisible watermarks on the file itself, so you don’t necessarily know that it’s invisibly watermarked but if that file gets out some place, other people can see that, ah, this was who the file actually came from.

**Craig:** That’s cool. You know, when you say developers, you know what I think of because I mean —

**John:** Who do you think of?

**Craig:** I’m not in the business, but whenever I hear the word developers, I think of —

**John:** Silicon Valley?

**Craig:** No. No, I mean, I love Silicon Valley. No, I think of Steve Ballmer.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** Developers. Developers

**John:** Steve Ballmer is so excited.

**Craig:** Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers! And you could hear — you could hear his heart, whatever is inside of his heart, congealing, and his cardiac arteries are struggling and he’s just — it seems like he’s killing himself by talking that much.

**John:** You know what? I think for Halloween you could go as Steve Ballmer and I could go as Tim Cook and we would be like the CEOs.

**Craig:** Developers, developers, developers, developers! And the other thing that’s so great about Steve Ballmer is he’s got this really high voice. So, you know, because, I don’t know, when I think of the man that runs Microsoft, they go, “Developers, develop…”

You know, and he looks like a — he’s like a linebacker, you know. But he has this really high… — It’s funny, both he and Bill Gates have very I guess you’d call them tenory voices, you know.

**John:** Maybe that’s the quality of being a great Microsoft CEO is that you have to have that voice. The new guy, Satya, I’ve never actually heard him speak. I’ve seen photos of him. I have no idea what his speaking voice is.

**Craig:** I do. You ready for it?

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers.

**John:** It’s going to be a great voice.

So last bit on Bronson, so we put that out in the world today, so it’s out and through next Sunday… — So if you are listening to this on Tuesday, through Sunday it’s half off, so it’s $15 rather than $30. And we cut the price on all of our apps just to celebrate that, so Highland is half off. Even Weekend Read, if you want to unlock the full library, Weekend Read is only $4.99 through Sunday, so enjoy that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We have a show today to talk about. We’re going to talk about whether to chase projects or whether you should spec scripts. And this was a listener question that we thought was great and applicable to many of our listeners and sort of at many stages of your career.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** We’re going to talk about Edgar Wright’s style of comedy and a video that says that more directors should take lessons from Edgar Wright.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** And we will talk about Shawshank Redemption which is 20 years old and was not a success in its time and it has done really, really well for itself in the 20 years that have passed since then.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So let’s do it.

**Craig:** All right. If you would —

**John:** First, we have a bit of follow up because several episodes ago we did The Angeles Crest Fiasco where you and me and Kelly Marcel played Fiasco. And we played a specific scenario in Fiasco called Hollywood Wives and I know that we mentioned the guy’s name who created it but somehow it got dropped out of the edit. So Hollywood Wives was created by a guy named Jobe Bittman and he did a great job, so.

**Craig:** Thank you, Jobe. Yeah, we did for sure because I remember when we were there we had a very brief sidebar about how to pronounce Jobe because it could be Hobe or Hobé or Jobé, but we ended up on Jobe which I hope is correct.

**John:** Yeah, we hope it’s all correct.

**Craig:** Yeah. So thank you, Jobe, and we do apologize for the initial omission.

**John:** Our question today comes from Jason. And we actually know Jason because I talked to him at the live Scriptnotes we did. So I remember who he was and in the email he singled out like, “I’m the guy you talked to.” It’s like, I remember that guy.

Here’s what he writes. “I’m a writer with an agent trying to get my first assignment. I’ve been on almost 50 general meetings. And the advice from productions and execs seems to be the same: spend time to write more specs because they usually find buyers and chasing assignments never works out. But my agents and managers think the chase is good and puts me in rooms with people who remember me. But so far, I’ve lost a bunch and aside from the feeling of defeat, I’m actually more upset about the amount of time I spend coming up with fixes or building worlds for projects that don’t choose me.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “The last one was over a month back and forth to the pitch and the same idea three times. And in between I was tweaking my pitch and world base stuff, each person’s notes to have it ready for the next meeting. Now I’m faced with a conundrum of the summer. I’m house-sitting for the next three months with no rent to pay and a small stipend, so I quit my job just to write fulltime. I can get my job back if I need it back.

“I have the whole summer before me and I want to write a spec but several assignments have been put in front of me and my team wants me to go and try to snag them. I don’t want to waste this golden opportunity for writing, but come September I would like to not have to go back to my day job. If you were starting out in a similar situation would you go all in on yourself or chase some ideas that aren’t bad but you’d have to beat out seven to 10 writers possibly to get the gig?”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** What I love so much about this question is like it so encapsulates the experience of being a starting writer presently in Hollywood. And honestly, kind of at every stage in your career you kind of face the same questions, whether you should try to land that job or you should just write your own thing.

**Craig:** Right. And of course, things have changed somewhat over time. There was a time when chasing down jobs as a strategy, putting aside whether it was creatively fulfilling for you as a human being but just as an economic strategy of somebody trying to pay bills, it wasn’t a bad strategy. They were making a lot of movies and they would have to hire a lot of people. They were making a lot of movies and their ratio of movies developed to movies made was greater. So overall, it just seemed like there was a — there were many, many more jobs in features.

Today, no longer the case. They really, as an industry you can see them moving towards this theoretical one-to-one development ratio where they only pay for scripts for projects that they want to make and they make many, many fewer movies.

So it’s absolutely true that when you’re chasing those movies, you are in fact competing with many, many other writers. Many of those other writers are more experienced. Many of those other writers will be more comforting as hires to the people who are spending all the money. And most disturbingly, because of that pressure, because there’s so much more leverage on the employer side now, they will make you jump through endless hoops. It becomes Kafkaesque really quickly.

And it does require a lot of work. I mean, listen, they, on their side, think that screenwriting is, you know, when you start typing Fade In and putting things in a format. And we, on our side, know that so much of the work, perhaps the most important work is what happens before that. But that’s the stuff that they’re sort of expecting from you speculatively just to see if maybe they’ll hire you, maybe.

**John:** Yeah. The other thing we should stress is that a change from when you and I first started to what we see happening now is it’s not just that like we’re going to develop, you know, these movies — the ones we’re going to produce. It’s like a lot of them won’t, they’ll never hire anybody, o they’ll never actually proceed. And so I think so many more movies like never actually pick any of the writers. Like seven people will go in on a pitch, they’ll pick the best of the pitches to go up to the highest level and then they’ll say, “Nah.”

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** “We don’t really want to do that.” And so then all seven of those writers have wasted a month trying to do that.

**Craig:** Yeah. People lose jobs to no one.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** That we, the writer we prefer is no writer. And, you know, what’s going on also is that just as we have pressure on us now because of the way that the world has changed in terms of film production, so too is there great pressure on the executives. They now are almost acting entrepreneurially because they need to justify their jobs. So what’s happening is back in the day when you and I started, some executive picks up the phone and says, “I have this thing and we love it internally and we want to make it and we want to hear from a writer.” You would at least know it was real. Not anymore.

Now they call sometimes and like, “There’s something and I love it and I know that, you know, whoever the boss on high is is really into it and I want to bring this pitch.” They’re actually trying to make something happen which may not happen with anyone.

**John:** It may not happen with anyone. So Jason is talking about the very first wrung, when you’re trying to land that first job. But from my personal experience, I can talk about two projects in the last six months that a similar kind of thing has happened. So both of them I think I obliquely referred to in an earlier podcast where we talked about like well what should I do next.

And one of them was an adaptation of a book. And it was a YA book that was a hot sale, a studio bought it, they were looking for a take and so I went in and I met with them and I pitched a take to the producer. And I met him and pitched the take to the studio boss and that went really well. And so as we started to make a deal things just slowed down and things slowed down. And sometimes it’s like, well, maybe I’m just too expensive for this property and this book and this whole world and that can happen.

But really what had overall happened is like the book came out and it wasn’t a huge bestseller. It wasn’t The Hunger Games. It was more just like a mid tier. And so suddenly they were looking at the book and it’s just like this book, this plot, this story. And while there was something promising there, it wasn’t — it had no extra juice to it. And basically, I think they hired nobody. And that’s a thing that happens.

**Craig:** They just kill it. Practically speaking, it does seem to me where we’re both going with this is that this — Jason should in fact spend his summer writing something original.

**John:** I think he should.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And probably in retrospect, should I have spent that time writing something original? It’s very easy to say that hindsight. The other example I wanted to give was I think I’d also kind of obliquely referred to this in the podcast was there was a property that was based on a piece of IP that was very linked to a studio. So no one else could do it.

And the real question was like, is there a movie here? And that’s a really dangerous thing because when you go in on a property that is exclusively at one place either because they own the book or because it’s already part of the studio general package, you’re really competing against nothing. You’re competing against the alternate choice of just like let’s just do nothing.

And so this is the process over like many, many months of like this meeting and that meeting and this meeting and that meeting, going up through the ranks to see whether everyone sort of agreed like this is a way to approach the movie. And so when I pitched it they all said like, “That’s a really good pitch. I totally get what that movie is, it’s not what we see ourselves doing with this property.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That was a lot of time wasted.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know.

**John:** And that’s going to happen. So from a beginning writer’s perspective, Jason’s representatives are saying, you know what, it’s good for you to be in those rooms, it’s good for you to have exposure to those executives, to know who they are, know who you like, know, you know, sort of all that stuff. To some degree, that’s true. But after, you know, 50 projects, you’re wasting a lot of time.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s come at this from a couple of angles. The first angle is from the agency side. Why are his representatives advising him this way? Because it’s what makes sense for them. As an agent, the amount of work that is required to put your client in a room with somebody and who’s willing to meet with a certain tier of writer is de minimis. And you are also aware that those jobs are jobs. I mean, listen, maybe it turns out that they’re not really jobs, whatever. But the point is they’re there. Someone’s going to get hired. That’s at least your theory, maybe it’ll be my guy.

And while he goes through, even if he’s not hired on this particular one, they’ll know him, they’ll like him, he’ll impress them and they will think of him. And in this way, it’s a very simple way for them to have their client do the work for them. All they have to do is pick up a phone.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** On the flip side, specs are a lot of work for agents. You write a spec, you give it to your agents and you say, “I want to sell this.” The first thing that has to happen is they need to agree, right? And they don’t — not all of them, but many of them frankly don’t really have very strong or reliable opinions anyway. So if they’re going to go out with a spec, they feel like, well, first I have to find other people that like this. Can I find an actor that goes along with it? Can I find a director that goes along with it? So that’s work. And it also requires them to go out on a limb which they hate.

**John:** They do. It’s requiring them to take a risk saying that I like this thing, I believe in this thing and then if they aren’t people to sell it you’re going to blame them to some degree for not selling it versus you not getting the job, yeah, you didn’t get the job.

**Craig:** Everybody will blame them even if they never — even if it’s stillborn. You hand them a script and they say, okay, and you — and well, we should go to the studio and give them a movie here. Let’s give them a director, an actor, and a script. Fine, well, this is the actor I want for sure. And they work up the courage to go to that agent down the hallway and he says, “Why would you give me this crap? I hate you. You’ve lost credibility with me.”

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s all — that’s how they see the world. It’s just a lot of risk. Doing nothing, no risk; doing something, lots of risks. Specs require them to do a lot of somethings. And so this is not — I don’t mean to imply that they are being aggressively manipulative and self-serving. I think they’re just simply being human.

**John:** They’re being rational to some degree. They’re taking the path that is least likely to end up in tears for them.

**Craig:** They’re being rational.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes. Well, yeah, what they are doing is they’re following a risk minimization strategy. The problem is that risk minimization strategies aren’t very useful for new writers. In fact, the opposite is useful. Risk maximization strategies seem to be what works for a new writer because they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. They’ve got to make big rolls of the dice. Because if you really want to get to the kind of land of milk and honey where somebody calls you up and says, “Hey, would you be interested in getting paid a lot of money to work on this thing,” and all you’ll have to do is basically say, yes, I would be interested in that because here’s what I would do with it. And after that 20 minutes, they go, “Great, here’s $2 million.”

You’re never getting there unless you can establish a beachhead as a writer with an original voice who can take a script from start to finish, guide the readers through it well and write something that could be a movie.

**John:** Write something that actually was a movie. I think that’s a crucial thing too is that you could have written the most brilliant screenplays that mankind has ever known, but if they’ve not been produced as movies and turned out as really, really good movies, you’re not going to get to that mythical land of milk and honey that Craig just described where they pick up the phone and just sort of offer you the job.

**Craig:** I don’t like milk or honey, by the way.

**John:** Really? Both of those things?

**Craig:** I don’t like — well, I’m Jewish —

**John:** You don’t like any substance that like comes out of a creature.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, that’s excreted from insects or mammals. I mean I don’t — I’m Jewish and Jewish people are notoriously poor at processing milk. I’m definitely in that subset of Jewish people. I’m not — I don’t do well with milk. And honey, I don’t know, it’s like — it’s too much. It’s just too much.

**John:** It can be overwhelming at times, yeah.

**Craig:** You know, like if somebody said, “Congratulations, you made it to the land of milk and honey,” I’d be like, “Oh…”

**John:** Oh, but come on, you get a good buttery buttermilk biscuit and a little honey on top of it, that’s a delicious thing.

**Craig:** You are so Goyishe it’s unbelievable.

**John:** Or if you ended up at Casa Bonita in Denver and you had the sopapillas and you poured the honey in there, come on, it’d be great. You raise your little flag again and again for more sopapillas.

**Craig:** Yucky.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I don’t like it.

**John:** You don’t like it.

**Craig:** No. I just want — can I just have dry toast? I just want dry.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Anyway, that’s — I think that Jason should spend his summer writing something original. You’re not going to lose out on some wonderful opportunity by taking a break for two months from the water tour of Los Angeles. Go ahead. Take the two months. Write something wonderful because I’ll tell you, when you do resume your water bottle tour of Los Angeles, you’re going to have something to talk about because they love to hear, “Oh, you have a script? Oh, well now there’s an action item. We can do something. We can read a thing.”

**John:** You can read a thing. Here’s the other reasons I wanted to talk through Jason’s decision process. So the reason why you take those general meetings is to meet people but I think it’s also very good practice of figuring out like how would I write all these different kinds of movies. And so that sort of quick scramble of like, you know, figuring out like how to do this movie or that movie or this movie or that movie, I did a lot of that.

And that was incredibly helpful for me thinking about story overall. So someone would said like, “Hey, would you want to do a Highlander movie?” And so I’m like, well, how would I do a Highlander movie? And so it’s a project I never got but it was really valuable learning experience.

Here’s why you only do so many of them. It’s because you could spend six months doing that and never have actually written something new. And suddenly then you’re not actually a writer, you’re a person who pitches things. And that’s not what you came out to Hollywood to do. Writing something give you something new, it gives you leverage with your agent to some degree. They’re going to try to sell this.

But also if you’re not really all that happy with your agent, that new script is a great way to transition to another agent or to another manager. That’s what I did as I left my first off agent and came over to my current agent was I had written a new script. I really doubted that the first guy could sell it and so I wanted to pick a new agent who I thought was going to be the right person to sell the script and this was a great entrée to introduce myself as, you know, a writer who can write this kind of script. That was Go, so.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, listen, there’s no question that the screenplays are the commodity, not the people. And you need to have some work that they can review. And if it’s not a prior job, it needs to be a screenplay. Fresh material keeps you fresh. I think you’re making a great point that the practice that you get from very quickly breaking down something and coming up with a story is excellent experience for the new writer.

Like you, I did that deal. You know, I can remember my former writing partner and I spending a couple of weeks coming up with a whole scene-by-scene story to rewrite a project that was a modern day Noah’s Ark.

It was like a comedy where — you know, and god, there was probably a thousand of those, you know. And it just doesn’t work, you know, it just doesn’t happen. But you do learn from those. There is a point, however, where you have to stop batting practice and actually go out onto the field and face live pitching. And that’s the deal. Write your spec . I mean, I started with an original, with something that was original and you started with something that was original. Most people start with something that’s original. I don’t know of anybody that didn’t. I mean, I don’t know how that would happen in any other way.

So in a weird way, if you haven’t sold anything original yet, that’s what you got to do first. The Black List is not a substitute for selling a screenplay.

**John:** So to clarify, I did actually get hired to write something before I had sold something. So I wrote a script that got me an agent and I was able to actually land a paid job without ever having —

**Craig:** Really?

**John:** Sold something before that. But I would say that’s unusual and it was one of the things where I think I just ultimately got lucky. I was the right person to hire for that job and it was also in a day when it was like a five-step deal and they paid me through all five steps which is just crazy now, but that’s how it used to be back in the day.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, and also to be fair, I didn’t actually — the first thing that my writing partner and I sold was original but it was a pitch. So we hadn’t actually sold a script ourselves either. But my point being we sold something, you know.

**John:** You sold something, yeah.

**Craig:** One way or another, it seems to me that Jason could certainly do much worse than spending a couple of months this summer writing some fresh interesting material so that when his current agent or his new agent calls and says, “Listen, we’ve got a Black List writer, he’s got his new thing, you got to jump on this.” It’s a selling tool. And sometimes we as writers have to, in a weird way, excite our agents. It doesn’t seem like we should have to do that, but sometimes we do.

**John:** Sometimes you do. Great.

Let’s move on to our next thing which was this video that Tony Zhou did about Edgar Wright and Edgar Wright’s directing choices for comedy and Zhou’s call to action for comedy directors to take lessons from Edgar Wright and use some of his filmmaking techniques in their own movies. Basically, really it was, you know, it was a celebration of Edgar Wright but in some ways at the same time kind of a condemnation of what he perceives as kind of laziness or lack of filmmaking finesse among comedy directors. And I have a feeling this provoked a little umbrage out of Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** It provoked quite a bit of umbrage. And it bummed me out more than anything but I think the umbrage was certainly there but the stronger note in the bouquet of my reaction was sadness because this — it was so unnecessary to have been done this way. I think that Edgar Wright is extraordinarily good at what he does. And I loved how much passion this fan had for the work and how carefully he had studied it and how careful he had placed it in the context of other movies that he really liked. And particularly zeroing in on something that Edgar Wright is known for which is, I guess I would call it a visual bravura in the storytelling that he does.

And his movies are comedies. They aren’t traditional comedies. Frankly, even all parts of Edgar Wright’s movies are distinct. They are not genre films. He’s one of those guys that’s sort of his own genre which you will find here and there across many different kinds of movies. And so I love that and I thought how wonderful. And then it all succumbed to that thing, that disease of needing to justify and define that which we love by placing it in the context of that which we do not love.

And in doing so, I think, frankly, the creator of the video was just wrong. He was just wrong on so many levels.

**John:** Yeah. So let’s talk a little bit about Edgar Wright’s style and sort of what makes it so successful for an Edgar Wright film. And is that some of the eight things that Tony Zhou highlights are things entering frames in funny ways, people leaving the frame in funny ways. There and back again where a character walks over something and then walks back to where he was after having encountered something. Matching scene transitions. The perfectly timed sound effect. Action synchronized to music. Super dramatic lighting cues. And then sort of two gimmes of like falling fences and fake guns, or really like repetitions of visual gags.

What I noticed in all of the things he’s clarifying is that they’re all very planned, very meticulously chosen beats that aren’t just sort of discovered. They were very much like you can sort of feel the storyboards in them.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And all of Edgar Wright’s movies really exist in a kind constructed universe.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Sort of like how I feel about Wes Anderson movies. And Wes Anderson movies kind of used to drive me crazy and then just — I crossed over into a place of just loving them. But they’re not natural, normal worlds. And I was frustrated that he was — Tony Zhou was comparing the Edgar Wright movies to movies that aren’t supposed to take place in a special artificial, unnatural world. They’re supposed to take place in a really real world. And real worlds don’t necessarily have this kind of visual flair for really good reasons.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t think Tony understands how the music works. I mean, listen, there’s nothing particularly visually arresting or again, I’ll use that word bravura in Groundhog Day, which we went into at length on the podcast a few weeks ago. But Groundhog Day is brilliant. Most of the filming in Groundhog Day is consistent with Harold Ramis’s oeuvre and that is shot extraordinarily traditionally with extraordinarily traditional coverage and a naturalistic camera that isn’t structuring reality-bending moments because tonally that’s not the kind of story he’s telling.

Why would we beat that up? Similarly, he makes strange straw dummy comparisons. At one point, he goes after Todd Phillips. And, you know, granted, I’ve worked with Todd Phillips, I’ve made movies with him, so naturally I’m a little biased here. But I thought that was really off base because Todd actually is and has been visually arresting at times when he chooses to in his movies, when he feels it’s tonally appropriate. In The Hangover there’s that great car crash moment where that’s been aped by many other directors since, by the way I’ve seen, where they’re talking in a car and we see headlights in the distance and they keep coming and all it’s one take and the car crashes, it t-bones them, all in one shot.

And it’s really creative and not at all the way you normally would shoot something like that. There are many other examples I could cite, but it seems like he just ignored those and instead just cherry-picked a moment where people were just talking, which by the way, works great. He picks a moment in Old School that sets up a joke that works really well. And then he also does something else that I don’t understand. He compares some things that Edgar Wright does to other visual jokes that he does like and appreciate but they’re very different kinds of moments.

For instance, one of my favorite visual jokes he cites in this compilation which is the soldier running in Holy Grail

**John:** The Holy Grail. Yeah.

**Craig:** Which is great. And it’s a wonderful visual trick and it worked and it’s hysterical. But then he shows this bit with the pouring of the beers and the pouring of the water which he’s citing as visual comedy. And frankly, I just don’t think that that’s funny.

**John:** I don’t think that’s funny either.

**Craig:** I think it’s really interesting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s visually engaging and fascinating, but I don’t think it’s funny. Similarly, the transition of a policeman going from one town to another, which I have to say, kind of was cribbed from Guy Ritchie who did it I think in Snatch with Dennis Farina. But regardless, that’s a really cool moment. That’s not funny. It’s not meant to be laugh-out-loud funny. I just don’t think this guy gets the — how the music of this all works.

**John:** It’s also your relationship with your audience. And if you’re in an Edgar Wright film, and again, none of this is like criticisms of Edgar Wright’s films. They’re very specifically and very planned.

**Craig:** They’re awesome. They’re great.

**John:** They’re great. And they’re very well planned for being in that universe. And they establish an expectation that you’re going to have these kind of quick cuts at times. You’re going to have this again visual bravura that’s not part of your universe.

If you try to apply that same kind of speed and time and tempo to something like The Heat, you’re not going to have a good outcome.

**Craig:** It will break it. It will just break it.

**John:** It will break it because you have to believe that those two women are existing in a moment together and that this is the fatigue. And the most alarming thing in the frame has to be Melissa McCarthy’s actions, not how you’re cutting.

**Craig:** Well look, I engage with the characters in Edgar Wright’s movies. I believe that they’re real. But I also understand that the entire thing is pushed in an interesting way.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s part of his style. It’s part of his deal. That’s why I don’t need every movie to be a Tarantino film. I don’t need every comedy to be an Edgar Wright movie. I’m happy that Edgar Wright makes Edgar Wright movies. I just found that there was this bizarre chauvinism that other movies were lesser because they weren’t doing this.

And I have to say, maybe I’m totally off base, but if Edgar Wright were with us right now I have to presume he would agree, because I’ve always found that the people who make comedies and who have been bloodied in the war of making comedies are so much more charitable and understanding of their fellow filmmakers then is often the case with some of the more — some of the more attentive viewers out there.

**John:** Yeah. So a few things I do want to give him credit for which is I think it’s reasonable to have a call to action, really, a call to awareness for all filmmakers, comedy and otherwise, to certainly think about making some of these choices, and think about like, can you service a joke better by moving the camera in certain ways.

Can you service a joke better by holding in a shot and not trying to, you know —

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Revert to standard coverage. These are all really laudable things. And I think if this video had been framed around the idea of like, look at some of the great things that Edgar Wright does, let’s point some of these things out —

**Craig:** I would be so much happier, yeah.

**John:** Other filmmakers can learn from this thing rather than sort of, you know, crapping on other people who don’t —

**Craig:** Calling people out… — Yeah, like, I love Bridesmaids. I understand that Bridesmaids isn’t visually arresting. I understand that it absolutely broke zero ground visually or cinematically if you want to use the term. But I also loved it. It made me laugh and I cared about the people in it. And I have to think that some of these things would have broken that movie.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Now where I think Edgar Wright has terrific lessons for all comedy filmmakers is in his complete rejection of the very overdone visual tropes to move people around. There is, no question, there is a certain malaise in a lot of comedy filmmaking where everybody goes, “Nobody is here for that stuff. Let’s just get to the parts that are funny.” And he’s right about that.

One thing that’s interesting is that in studio comedy making, and I’ve often come up against this distressingly: the budgeting process is such that it becomes very hard actually to do the kind of things that Edgar Wright does. His movies are not inexpensive.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** When we were making Identity Thief, at one point there is a car chase and, you know, we were down to like how can we make a car chase when they’ll only give us two cars?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Suddenly, you run into these budget issues where believe me, you have all these interesting ideas for how to make these transitions and then they say, “Nope, it’s the second unit and they’re going to be doing the thing with the car goes from left to right and we’ll just play music.” And you get jammed.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Part of the situation in studio comedies is that they will budget the movie. They’ll just say, look, here’s what we’re going to give you for this comedy. Most of the money will go to comic stars who deservedly get a bunch of money. So then what you have left is enough money to make a kind of a dingy looking movie. [laughs]

I see this happening all the time where, you know, Hot Fuzz, that’s not an inexpensive movie. I think it was into the $40 million in terms of budget. And because of the way he works with his collaborators, I suspect that they — it wasn’t a case where they have to pay, you know, each actor $5 or $6 million, but rather everyone is kind of working together and sharing in the pool, but I’m just guessing.

Similarly, Scott Pilgrim was $70 or $80, possibly $100 million.

**John:** It was a pricy movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, Bridesmaids I’m guessing was about $25 million.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So when you look at the shots that he is doing, for instance, the montage of Simon Pegg moving from one city to another, that’s many, many multiple shots and it’s set-ups, and it’s time, and it’s money.

**John:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** I would love comedies to get that money.

**John:** But they’re not getting that money right now. The last thing I’ll say is that he does highlight a little bit like, you know, oh, Pixar will still do these things. And yes, animated films will do sometimes much more visually sophisticated things because they have that time and it’s honestly generally no more expensive to build that as a really fascinating shot because you’re building everything from scratch anyway.

So those visual gags are very natural there because you’re not trying to — again, it’s completely constructed reality. So within that constructed reality, the choices you’re making for angles and shots and how you’re telling your joke, you can do whatever you want and you have so much time to think of what those shots are.

So if you don’t like what that one was, throw it out and put a new thing in there and you’ve got that time.

**Craig:** And I’ll just say in conclusion, I could go through a bunch of movies that this guy is implying are visually inept or mediocre and find moments that comedically are entirely about how the shot was composed and how the editing was composed.

I learned a lot, you know, David Zucker made wonderful comedies and none of them were visually stunning, on purpose by the way. And yet, there was an enormous attention to detail when he made those movies.

One thing, one wonderful lesson that he taught me early on was, in physical comedy, if you can see the result of an action within the same continuous cut as the cause of it, it will be funnier. There was a lot of attention to these things. And camera placement and how to shoot things was a constant discussion.

But it was not visually shocking or bravura or in your face or innovative. It was rather just quietly constructed. And I think that’s okay. I guess what I want to say to the guy making this is you should love Edgar Wright movies. They’re wonderful. Please don’t beat up other movies because they’re not doing that. That’s just unnecessary. And frankly, it’s just misguided.

**John:** I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about these concepts in relation to actually writing the words on the page, because a lot of what he’s describing here you would never see manifest on the page. It becomes very annoying to read about sort of like, you know, a spoon enters frame from off-screen.

Sometimes you can do that and sometimes it works. But it’s very hard to picture what that’s going to be. So like trying to sell a visual joke on the page can be really, really tough.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Sometimes you can do it, though. And techniques for like the there and back again. It can be very hard to describe like in a continuous shot the guy goes, you know, says something, goes to the window, look out the window, comes back. But sometimes the way to do that is to sort stay in the dialogue block and like put all that action in parenthetical, which is sort of cheating. But sometimes it’s worth cheating so people can actually follow what it is that’s funny that you’re doing there.

**Craig:** Well there’s — I don’t know how those guys go through their process. But if I had to guess, there’s a certain kind of casual, visual experience that I suspect is either figured out in the storyboarding process or on the day when they’re staging the scene in the morning and figuring how they’re going to do it. And they find these moments like, you know what, let’s follow with him and then let’s follow back.

But then there are other things that must be scripted. Simon Pegg’s traveling montage has to be scripted because it has to be shot. The pouring of the beers in the water must be scripted. There’s no way that they just decided on the day to do that. Or if they got it into storyboards, it probably then had to be written into the script so that you understood, okay, we’re going to need some macro shots and we have to shoot through the bottom of the glass. There’s a whole — there’s 10 meetings about that shot, so that it comes off, you know.

**John:** In the script I wouldn’t be surprised if it says, you know, in uppercase “SERIES OF SHOTS,” And either bullets them out or like in that action block talks about what happens in there and that they did have to have three production meetings to talk through what was going to be in that, what the steins looked like. And is going to be shot as a primary unit or is that something that is secondary unit? Are you going to pre-shoot that, is it all, is it happening weeks after you’ve wrapped your thing to get those extra shots? That is how it’s going to go.

So you don’t know what that’s going to look like. To the idea of storyboarding stuff, The Coen Brothers are very — who often have very visually sophisticated movies. Apparently, when you show up on the day of shooting, they’ve present your sides and they show like the storyboards, like they’ve storyboarded everything so you know like this is where — this is what the shots are going to be for the day.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So everyone can actually really have a plan for this is how it is. So you look at a movie like Raising Arizona that they do, the visual guides in there were really planned. They knew they were going to be using those wide lenses and how stuff was going to be going through the frame. But you wouldn’t necessarily see that in the script.

**Craig:** That’s exactly right. In fact, if they’re presenting the storyboards to the actors on the day, it means that they haven’t seen those things because they do have the script.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And those things are — I mean you can’t — basically, you shouldn’t put anything in a script that as you’re doing it makes you think, oh, I’m just ruining it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No one’s going to think that this is any good if I spell it all out in the script. I have to again give Edgar Wright a lot of credit for having the patience and the faith to carry through on these plans because, you know, what happens is you do end up in your seventh meeting about how to shoot the glasses and the close-ups and everyone’s asking these questions. And inevitably people start to think, why am I doing this? This is an enormous —

**John:** Do you really need this? It’s not that special.

**Craig:** I’ll give you an example from something I did with Todd Phillips which I thought was very visually interesting. In the second Hangover movie, Alan, Zach Galifianakis’s character, has a flashback where he remembers some of the incidents of the night before but in a kind of a dreamy state. But in Alan’s point of view he remembers himself and his friends as 12-year-old boys because that’s how he sees the world.

**John:** Which I love that moment in the movie. And I remember commenting, I think even on the podcast, like that must have been so hard to shoot —

**Craig:** It was so hard.

**John:** And convince people to shoot that.

**Craig:** It was so hard because on paper, it takes up a half a page and all you say is, “Alan and Stu and Phil as 12-year-olds.” But then you realize, oh my god, we’ve got to cast 12 year olds to be like them. We’ve got to put them in these clothes, and then we have to shoot a second movie, because all the stuff where these guys have been, we’ve got to then redo, so we have a riot scene where Ed Helms is freaking out and there’s this enormous riot and police and mall to have cocktails, then we have to shoot it again with children.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And we have to do it over and over and over. But, you know, it kind of came together but many, many times Todd and I looked and each other and thought why would we have ever done this. Just like, you know, very famously Parker and Stone decided early on that they were going to make Team America with marionettes.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And about, you know, a month in of misery they just thought, we have killed ourselves on this, killed ourselves. But, you know —

**John:** They already committed.

**Craig:** They already committed. And frankly, in the end it’s not the audience’s problem. If you can provide them with something that is visually fascinating, it doesn’t matter how long it took, it doesn’t matter how meetings you went through. It’s really cool.

So I think — look, I think he’s great and I think that what he does is spectacular. I would be shocked if Edgar Wright were ever to stop and think, boy, I wish all comedies look like my comedies. I just think he would say, oh my god, no.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Why would I want that? I like my comedies looking like my comedies.

**John:** You want to be distinctive. That’s absolutely true. And same with Tarantino and same with Wes Anderson. I mean, the fact that you can parody a Tarantino film or you can parody a Wes Anderson film means that they’re doing something very special. They have a unique voice and unique eye and celebrate that rather than sort of, you know, crapping on everybody else.

**Craig:** Yeah and at least acknowledge that while there are lazy tropey moves in comedies that I would love to see eliminated, budgetary concerns aside, there are also incredible classic, great, great comedies that invent not one new bit of cinematic language.

**John:** Yeah, it is true…

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Our last topic today is The Shawshank Redemption which is rated on IMDb as the best movie ever made. But a lot of people could agree with that. There’s an article that Russell Adams wrote in the Wall Street Journal last week celebrating the 20th anniversary of The Shawshank Redemption and I had to remember sort of like what it was up against, but it came out the same year Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump.

So in its time, Shawshank Redemption wasn’t a big success. It only made $16 million in the box office. It got seven Oscar nominations, but no Oscars.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And now it’s kind of a classic. So this article is specifically talking about how, you know, the residual value of a well regarded movie and literally the residuals that happen. So, you know, minor actors in there are still getting residuals and they’re still getting like a tremendous amount of residuals because that thing airs all the time.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That movie aired 151 hours of air time for Shawshank Redemption just in 2013.

**Craig:** Did I ever tell you the story of sitting in a car with Bob Weinstein and he was talking about the movie business and he said to me, “Hey, Mazin, you want to know how to make money in the movie business?”

**John:** And you said, no sir. I don’t want to know. I want to make art.

**Craig:** I said, let me out of this car. I said, yeah, sure, how do you make money in the movie business? He said, “It’s really simple, man. Have a library of movies and don’t make movies.” And he’s right, I mean —

**John:** He is right.

**Craig:** That’s, the library costs nothing to maintain and generates profit forever whereas making movies – oh, here they come, here come the alarms.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s Bob Weinstein.

**John:** It was your terrible impersonation.

**Craig:** Oh man, it’s actually dead on.

So yeah, a library sits there and unlike most warehouse products, it costs nothing to keep and yet it generates money forever. And a movie like Shawshank Redemption which crosses into that I’m going to say a land of potato chips and ice cream, a movie like that doesn’t just generate a lot of money, it generates a massive amount of money forever and increases the value of other movies, because if you want to show Shawshank Redemption, you can’t get it unless you also agree to take a bunch of other movies that maybe aren’t, you know, quite as exciting to the audience.

**John:** And that’s something I don’t think people appreciate is that when you see a movie on television, you think like, oh, okay, so ABC bought the rights to that movie so they could show it. And yes, they bought the rights to that, but they had to buy a package.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And so what the studio did is they package together this one movie that everybody really wanted along with a bunch of movies that you really didn’t want. And they would only sell them as the package. And the frustration as a filmmaker is the studio wants to divide that money equally between those films just because and pretend that it’s not like the one movie is actually the one that’s worth doing, so they’ll spread it on all the different movies that they’re selling. And that is incredibly frustrating.

And sometimes it’s the subject of lawsuits. And I don’t know that it ever actually went to trial, but the first Charlie’s Angels was a big success. And we ended up selling it to I think ABC, selling rights to ABC, but it was packaged with these other movies.

And I remember producers being not especially happy about the way that it was packaged and the way the money sort of being divided it up because obviously we were the movie that was the goldmine there.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, what they do is they divide it up. They’re not looking to screw over any individual writer, director or actor. What they’re trying to do is avoid any movie showing a profit. [laughs]

**John:** Yes, that’s exactly what it is.

**Craig:** Yeah, so they’re just sliding this stuff around so that, you know, the waterline never hits a certain thing. But when we talk about this thing, and this is all under the heading of distribution.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is the answer to the question, why are there the same five big movie studios that were around for decades and decades and decades? Why if we live in a world now where Tesla can show up and actually be a viable new car company, why can’t there be a viable new movie studio? And the answer is distribution. Distribution impacts everything.

That is why these studios have a strangle hold on films and television, because to get a movie into a theater, all those screens is an art of negotiation where you are trading on a very desirable title. And thus, getting in maybe ones that are more speculative because theater owners lose money when nobody’s in the theater to see the movie.

**John:** Yeah, absolutely.

**Craig:** They don’t want bad movies. They want the good movies. Well, you’re not getting the next say, you know, they’re making new Harry Potter movies. Warner Brothers is making —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Well, you’re not getting one of those unless you take a bunch of these things, too. And it works that way for television and pay cable and all the rest. I have a question for you.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Of all your movies, can you tell from your residuals which one has had the most after theatrical success?

**John:** Yes, that was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by like a landslide. And just because it sold a tremendous amount of DVDs right at that moment where like they were still selling a bunch of DVDs.

**Craig:** They were still big.

**John:** Yeah. And Go does fine and Big Fish certainly generates a fair amount. But Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was definitely the winner.

How about you? I mean you’ve got The Hangover movies. Those have to be the number ones.

**Craig:** They’re not. They’ve both done very well in video but by far, Identity Thief.

**John:** That’s not because it’s the sole credit — ?

**Craig:** No, no, no. I kind of did the math. I kind of did the math. Identity Thief has just been after market-wise, after theatrical I think the most popular movie I’ve ever done.

**John:** Well, that’s great.

**Craig:** I think so.

**John:** That’s wonderful. And again, this is a good lesson in why residuals matter so much. So the short version of what residuals are for people who are sort of new to this discussion is writers as part of this sort of grand charade we do legally about the work we do and copyright all this stuff, we don’t have royalties on movies, we have what’s called residuals.

And as movies are displayed on things after theatrical, so after they’ve left the movie theaters and after they’ve left airplanes, but as they sell on iTunes, as they go through Netflix streaming, as they show up on broadcast TV, we get a certain percentage of what that money is that comes back to the distributor or the studio to the film. We get that percentage. And that percentage can add up and be a very meaningful part of a writer’s career.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** Yup, it’s good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so is Shawshank Redemption which I don’t think I’ve actually seen since it came out, so it’s one of those things where it’s always on. If you flip the channels, it’s always on somewhere. Yet, it’s a great movie and it was Frank Darabont’s sort of first big success. He bought the rights to it for $5,000.

**Craig:** Isn’t that great? And I love that Stephen King didn’t cash the check.

**John:** Ooh, Stephen King.

**Craig:** Shawshank Redemption is a fantastic movie. It’s one of those movies, I’ve never met anybody that didn’t like it.

**John:** No, how could you not like it?

**Craig:** I don’t know. It’s just a terrific movie. It’s also a movie that while very cinematic in moments, plays wonderfully on TV. It’s like The Godfather. I very happily have seen The Godfather a number of times in the theater, which is obviously it’s not something that happens frequently because, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But when I see The Godfather on TV, I’m like, yeah, this works on TV, too. It actually works everywhere. I can watch this in my shower.

**John:** Yeah, I think maybe the reason why it does, both of those films would work well on TV is because they’re sagas and they definitely kind of feel like there’s act breaks in them. You feel like, there’s moments like, okay, this is a moment where we can go away and we go to commercial and come back and regain the energy. And like it’s not going to be shattered.

**Craig:** The only thing that bugs me about Godfather is that sometimes when people are going from one place to another, Coppola will just show a car driving by.

**John:** That’s so incredibly lazy. I wish they wouldn’t do that.

**Craig:** Like when Michael Corleone goes to Vegas, there’s a plane landing and we hear a waa, waa, waa, waa. That’s not cool.

**John:** That’s not cool at all. But, you know, what is cool? One Cool Things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s time for that. So my One Cool Thing is also on the topic of filmmaking. It’s this thing called A Guerilla Filmmakers Guide to After Effects. And it’s this course — I think it’s like $99, with a whole bunch of videos that you get access to, about how to use After Effects to develop visual effects for Indie projects.

It’s really well done. The sample video they have up there is Gareth Edwards who did Godzilla and Monsters and is now doing the new Gary Whitta Star Wars movie.

**Craig:** Gary Whitta.

**John:** Gary Whitta.

**Craig:** Gary Whitta.

**John:** It’s Gareth Edwards talking through doing the visual effects for this Attila the Hun movie he made and he did all the visual effects himself. And you’re literally seen his screen, you’re seeing After Effects and he’s narrating as he’s, you know, like a 40-minute lesson on sort of how he’s dealing with the timeline, the spreadsheet he’s built for himself for the work, how he’s composing these things.

And it’s just the little lesson I watched, it was basically he had to put I guess Constantinople on a hill, and so he had two shots that where handheld shots, a wide shot and the closer shot and like Constantinople had to be over there.

And so he’s doing motion tracking and figuring out like to get this city to land right in the distance. And it was just really, really cool. And so I think if you are a person who is looking to make films or honestly just kind would want to learn more of about how that stuff works, I thought it was just fascinating and really well done. So there will be a link to that in the show notes.

**Craig:** Excellent. Well, my One Cool Thing this week is a updated app for the New York Times crossword puzzle. I am a —

**John:** Now, you hate crossword puzzles.

**Craig:** [laughs] How dare you. I am an avid crossword puzzler. I’ve gotten my times down to a place where I promised my friend and New York Times crossword creator, David Kwong, that I will compete this fall in the crossword tournament here in Los Angeles.

**John:** Holy cow.

**Craig:** I’m not going to even come close to winning. I mean the scary thing is like the guys who have really, really good times, I just — I don’t even know how they fill the grid in that quickly. But they’re actually — I think they could beat me if I were just writing answers in that I had, you know.

**John:** You had the keys beside and you’re like filling it in.

**Craig:** Yeah, but I’m getting pretty good. Like I can now routinely do a Saturday, you know, around 20 minutes which —

**John:** That’s great.

**Craig:** Which is respectable. I mean, in the crossword puzzle world, maybe not so much. But I’m obsessed with the New York Times crossword puzzle. And they have a new app that actually is very nice. It’s very clean. The apps powering crossword puzzles have always been a little clunky and oldish. And the New York Times stepped it up. I mean, for instance, you couldn’t sync your puzzle across devices until today. And now you can.

**John:** Yeah, so it’s an app for iPad and for iPhone?

**Craig:** It is, yes. It is in iOS app that syncs between your iOS devices and also syncs with the desktop New York Times crossword site so that you can pick it up and do it wherever and it’ll keep track of your time and your answers. It is a subscription. I want to say it’s $30 for the year.

**John:** If you like crossword puzzles, it’s worth it.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Of course it’s worth it. I mean, my god. Even, let me just say, even if you don’t like crossword puzzles, it’s worth it because you should start liking crossword puzzles, because if you’re a writer, it keeps your mind sharp. It’s words. It’s good for you. It’s just good brain stuff. I’ve got Missy Mazin working on crossword puzzles now. I’m very excited about that. You know that my wife used to be Missy.

**John:** I had no idea. But it makes sense, her name is Melissa, so yeah.

**Craig:** Right, so she was Missy and then after we started dating, like maybe a year before we got married, she’s like, you know what, I don’t want to be Missy anymore. I want to be Melissa now. It’s too juvenile. I want to be Melissa. And I was like, oh my god, I’ve got to actually change what I call my girlfriend. And I did. But lately I’ve been thinking that it’s time to bring Missy back.

**John:** Missy Mazin.

**Craig:** It’s just adorable.

**John:** Missy Mazin has pigtails though. She’s the not the woman I perceive.

**Craig:** She’s never had pigtails.

**John:** I just perceive her as being a Melissa. That happens.

**Craig:** All right. Well, let’s see what, maybe — let’s see if I can get this to catch on.

**John:** That is our show this week. So if you would like to learn more about the things we talked about on the show, there are show notes for every episode. They’re at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. We are on iTunes. You may be listening to us through iTunes. If you are listening to us on the website, we would really love it if you’d actually subscribe in iTunes because that’s how more people find us and then we move up the charts. And, honestly, we’re a little competitive that way.

If you’re on iTunes anyway and want to listen —

**Craig:** You’re a little competitive.[laughs] I don’t. Let me just be clear to everybody out there. I actually don’t, I never look at the charts. Where are we on the charts?

**John:** We’re pretty good.

**Craig:** Oh really?

**John:** Yeah, we are good in that film and TV category. But we can be better. We’ve been better at other times.

**Craig:** Oh really.

**John:** That’s sort of why I’m bringing it up. And so it’s not that we have fewer listeners. We actually have a lot more listeners. Those stats are really, really good. It’s that when people don’t interact with us on iTunes, we drop. And so it’s people adding us on iTunes is what moves you up the charts.

**Craig:** All right, well then everybody you’ve got to add us on iTunes.

**John:** Just add us on iTunes. It’ll take three clicks.

**Craig:** I suddenly got competitive.

**John:** Yeah, yeah. You were the person who wants like to be below 20 minutes on a Saturday crossword puzzle. This matters.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I get it.

**John:** It matters so much. [laughs]

**Craig:** I get it. I get it now.

**John:** And if you’re there and you want to leave us a comment, we love comments, that’s all really nice and good. We also have a Scriptnotes app for your iPhone and for your Android device. With that app you can access all our back episodes back to episode one is you want to. Subscriptions for the back episode are $1.99 a month. Pennies, for you. Less than — a year of that would less than a year of the New York Times crossword puzzle.

**Craig:** But not necessarily more valuable. Not to run us down. But boy, those crosswords are good.

**John:** Those crosswords are good. We have transcripts for every episode. So about got five days after an episode airs, we have transcripts for it. So if you need to go back and refer to something we said, you can always look for that, so just look for the original episode and there’s always a link to the transcript for that. It’s also how I Google to see what the hell we said. It’s been incredibly useful part of that.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel and is edited by Mathew Chilelli who this week also did the outro and it’s lovely. It uses a brand new woodwind sample library which is great.

**Craig:** Ooh, woodwinds.

**John:** And last reminder, if you would like Bronson Watermarker or Highland or Weekend Read, they’re all half off this week. So go for it. This is your week of bargains.

**Craig:** Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers!

**John:** Nicely done, Craig. Have a great week, Craig.

**Craig:** Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [WWDC14](https://developer.apple.com/wwdc/)
* [Bronson Watermarker PDF](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/bronson/) is available now! (And is half-off thru June 8th)
* [Highland](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/highland/) and [Weekend Read Unlimited](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/weekendread/) are also half off thru June 8th
* [Steve Ballmer on developers (developers, developers…)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8To-6VIJZRE)
* [Tony Zhou on Edgar Wright’s visual style](https://vimeo.com/96558506)
* [Russell Adams on The Shawshank Redemption](http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304536104579560021265554240?mod=trending_now_1) from The Wall Street Journal
* IMDb’s [Top 250](http://www.imdb.com/chart/top)
* [A Guerilla Filmmaker’s Guide to After Effects](http://www.fxphd.com/store/fast-forward-a-guerrilla-filmmakers-guide-to-after-effects/)
* [The New York Times Crossword](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/the-new-york-times-crossword/id307569751?mt=8) for iOS
* [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/wet-hot-american-podcast).

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

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

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

Today, we are going to be talking about abortion, religion, politics and which way is the proper way to hang toilet paper on the roll. Is it over the top or against the wall like a heathen? Craig, where do you stand on the toilet paper issue?

**Craig:** Before we get into that, I have to express my doubt that anybody would want to pick up any of our opinions and put them on a blog somewhere or on Time.com. That’s the nice thing about our podcast — no one listens.

**John:** That’s the crucial thing about our podcast is that absolutely no one listens. So no one will hear us today as we talk about the origins of the three-act structure, the weird situation with Legends of Oz, and hear us answer some questions. But probably most tragically, no one will hear our special guest on the podcast this week. He is the writer and/or director of really great movies, including Role Models, Wanderlust, Wet Hot American Summer.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Mr. David Wain, welcome to the show.

**David Wain:** Hello, guys. I’m so happy to be here. It’s a real thrill.

**John:** Hooray. So you’re going to join us as we talk about these things, but kind of most crucially, we also want to hear about this new movie you have coming out that stars Amy Poehler and Paul Rudd which is kind of amazing.

**David:** It is amazing that I get to work with people like that, I will say that, and a movie I’m super happy with. It’s called They Came Together. It’s kind of a rom-com spoof of sorts, also in the weird particular voice of me and Michael Showalter who we did Wet Hot American Summer together before.

**John:** Oh, I want to talk to you about that. I want to talk to you about Wet Hot American Summer. I want to talk to you about Childrens Hospital.

**David:** Sure.

**John:** I basically just want to talk to you constantly about all the things you do, if it’s okay.

**David:** Oh my god. I mean, let’s go. Let’s rock it.

**John:** Let’s go.

First we have a tiny bit of follow up from a previous episode, the episode before the Superhero Spectacular. I had mentioned that Big Fish was going to be playing at Liberty University or I thought it was Liberty University. It turns out it is Liberty University. And so somebody, one of our listeners wrote in. Marcus Jay wrote in with a link to an Atlantic piece about being gay at Liberty University, which is actually fascinating. So we’re going to put that in the show notes.

It made me actually kind of feel better about doing Big Fish at Liberty University because it’s a big diverse world and sometimes bringing in new opinions to a place that is otherwise a little bit cut off can be really good and useful.

**Craig:** That was a really good piece. And not that Big Fish is what you would call a gay musical, it’s just that it’s a musical, therefore —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** To some extent, it is gay. But, oh god, I’m doing it again. There is another blog piece — I love musicals. But I thought it was a really interesting piece because he basically said really it wasn’t a big deal. That’s what it kind of came down to. I mean, the institution is fundamentally against homosexuality and here is a gay man at that place and he’s like, hmm, yeah, feels fine.

**John:** My husband went to Notre Dame and really the situation seemed kind of similar, maybe like 10 years offset but, you know, traditionally, the Catholic Church says like, well, we don’t think that gay people should be around. Yet, if you actually talk to individual people who are at that university, that’s not sort of what it feels like on the ground.

**Craig:** The Catholic Church may be aware that there are gay people around.

**David:** It seems like the winds are changing no matter what.

**John:** I would agree. The winds are changing and you can —

**David:** And it’s hard to resist the winds when they keep blowing in the same direction for a long time.

**Craig:** The most shocking thing to me, I don’t know if you guys saw this, the guy who was the long time head of the Westboro Baptist Church, apparently they excommunicated him because near the end he was like, “Ah, you know, maybe gay people aren’t that bad.” Even that guy. I feel like that — yeah, the winds.

**John:** Well, it’s also fanaticism. I mean, when you believe in something so incredibly intensely, anyone who — countless part of your group who doesn’t believe as intently as you do is a heathen, is — has to be thrown out.

**Craig:** Purity of thought.

**John:** Purity of thought. Weirdly, I was joking when I said we would talk about religion and politics and all this stuff, but we just did.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, this is what we do now.

**David:** Can we do 20 minutes on abortion now?

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Fantastic. Is there a way you can feed that into your discussion of They Came Together? So tell me about this movie because… — So I actually met you I think for the first time in person or I may have met you way back at Sundance when you were there with The Ten.

**David:** Yes, we did.

**John:** I had a movie called The Nines which is the same year as The Ten.

**David:** Exactly.

**John:** And that was not confusing at all.

**David:** [laughs]

**John:** But I think I first met you on the set of Childrens Hospital. I came to visit you and even then you had finished the movie and you were figuring out what you were going to do with the movie.

**David:** Exactly.

**John:** And now it’s coming out. So tell us about the origins of this movie and what people can look forward to.

**David:** It’s actually kind of an interesting story that might be of interest to screenwriters and people who are interested in screenwriting. It might be good for this podcast. But Michael Showalter and I made this movie, Wet Hot American Summer, that came out in 2001 and after it — we were living in New York. And after that, we came out to LA to kind of meet the studios and try to figure out something else to do.

And we met with Shady Acres, Tom Shadyac’s company at Universal, and pitched them this idea which was very simple, just, you know, doing a spoof movie of romantic comedies. No more or less than that. And they were like, yeah, let’s do it. And so we wrote this movie that was that but it wasn’t similar to the more successful ones that had come out around the time, all the Scary Movie and so on. It was just weirder. And it also, you know, it was kind of a mix between Wet Hot American Summer and those kind of movies.

So it didn’t go. The studio paid us to write it but then it never got made. But the Shady Acres group was interested in trying to get it done, so we tried to do it at a lower budget. We tried to do it independently. In fact, one company was down the road with us to make a $10 million version of it and at the last minute, like right before pre-production, the head of the company watched Wet Hot American Summer for the first time, said, “This is not funny…”

**Craig:** Oh, no.

**David:** “You guys have no idea how to do comedy.” And he was about to pull the plug and we said, please, this is funny. So he did the first and only test screening that ever existed for Wet Hot American Summer.

**John:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** How’d that go?

**David:** Which was two years after it had come out.

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh my god!

**David:** And it was a bunch of sort of older, you know, like 40s Latino and Asian women it looked like to me.

**Craig:** That’s your audience.

**David:** It really tanked, obviously.

**Craig:** Wait a second. I have to ask you. This sounds like Bob Weinstein to me. It just sounds so Bob Weinstein.

**David:** I’m not going to say who it was but it wasn’t Bob Weinstein.

**Craig:** Boy, it sounds like him.

**David:** It was an LA-based independent company that had recently come into a lot of money based on a couple of —

**Craig:** Hold on a sec. Just so to clarify how insane this is, we go… — For people that don’t know, when we make a movie, particularly comedy, before — while we’re in the editorial process, we show the movie to a test audience and they rate the movie excellent, very good, fair, poor, very good, whatever they want.

**David:** This is while we’re still making the movie.

**Craig:** While we’re making the movie. And the point is, the point is to see do they like it, can we make them like it more? And the studio uses it to decide should we really promote this or kind of promote this? Is this any good? That movie came out, it was, I mean, regardless of what it did at the box office, there was — there’s just a love for it. I mean, it kind of defines what it means to be a cult movie in that regard. I mean, people found it and they loved it. And even then, still this studio was saying let’s test it anyway. [laughs] That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard in my life.

**David:** Well, in — just to contextualize, it did do horribly. You know, it basically tanked at the box office and then it was before kind —

**Craig:** Oh, I see.

**David:** It was years before… — And, you know, Wet Hot American Summer has more awareness today and more screenings and more people probably watching and talking about it than it ever did. It was just — it’s been a slow build and now it’s probably, you know, now it’s considered by many to be this touchstone classic comedy but it really wasn’t at the time.

That said, it was the same movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**David:** And I think it’s pretty damn funny. But —

**John:** So give us a timeframe here. So what years would this have been that you had —

**David:** This would be 2002. 2003 was around when we were pitching and trying —

**Craig:** Wow.

**David:** And 2004 I think maybe was when we were doing this other version, this other, and was going to shoot in Canada even though it’s like defined as the ultra New York romantic comedy and we were going to make a joke out of that and —

**John:** You should have shot in Montreal and like not changed the French signs.

**David:** Well, that was the idea actually, is we were going to have Canada everywhere you look and then, you know, pretend it was New York.

**Craig:** We tried to do that. Around the same time we were shooting, unfortunately hurting your chances, with Scary Movie 3 and we were shooting it in Vancouver and we really wanted to open the movie with one of like the Welcome to Vancouver sign but put up a subtitle, you know, New York 1930.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** They wouldn’t let, yeah, Bob Weinstein didn’t think that was funny either. [laughs]

**David:** Well, what happened was, I mean in fact, people — the reason the studio didn’t make it and the reason no one else made it was because everyone said the audience for romantic comedies and the audience for spoof movies are two separate audiences and they will never meet. And so we’re like, all right, whatever. And so, meanwhile, they then made Date Movie and they made Romantic Movie which were literally the same premise.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**David:** Ours being, though, a totally different take on it I think.

**Craig:** We’re going to get the whole timeline from you. But just jumping in on this particular point, because I’ve spent some time in the spoof camp and —

**David:** Yes, I know.

**Craig:** See, I feel like that form of spoof is just dead, you know, like the kind that I was doing with David Zucker, it’s dead. And we could go into a whole discussion about why it’s dead and how I may have contributed to its death, but it’s dead. And I’ve been sitting around kind of waiting for a new model to come along and, you know, when I see the trailer for this, I think this might be it because it is… — Clearly, there are some classic elements of spoof in it, but there also seems to be a different kind of self-awareness and a different method of kind of satirizing a genre.

Can you talk a little bit about why your approach is different than what you’d call traditional spoof or even the current crop? Yeah.

**David:** Well, yeah, and I’m curious for you to see it. You know, having been in those trenches, I’m curious to see how you feel the differences are once you see it. But essentially for us, and this is not — wasn’t so much exactly by design as much as just following our own taste, it doesn’t make nearly as many or almost any specific references to specific movies or specific scenes. It’s much more about the genre and much more poking fun at really storytelling conventions as much as specific genre conventions.

And doing it in different ways that are sometimes weirder, more subtler, or more — and a lot of times, it’s just doing those kinds of pieces of banal dialogue that go into these things very sincerely and without even a particular twist on them. Just the notion of doing it in this context is the joke.

**Craig:** Right.

**David:** You know, it’s not for everyone. And it’s, it was, you know, we did a lot of the similar kind of humor in Wet Hot American Summer which came out to some incredibly hostile reviews at first where people were like, this is so unfunny I don’t even know what to do, like I can’t believe… — I think reviewers were upset that they didn’t get it or somebody was getting something that they didn’t.

Meanwhile, what’s kind of amazing about this one is I think times have changed and Wet Hot American Summer is known by a lot of people. And we’ve been — I’ve gotten — the pre-release reviews of this movie has been far more positive than anything I’ve ever been involved in.

**Craig:** But you can’t possibly be shocked by that. You understand how these people work, right? I mean, you get the deal with reviewers and comedy. They’ve been told now, they have been informed that you’re cool and you’re good. You know what I mean? They follow, they follow. I mean, it drives me nuts.

**David:** I think you’re right. I know there’s an element of that. I also think that we did some things in this movie to make sure that people liked it more, which I can tell you about which are interesting.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Just go back for one second, just the nature of what this kind of spoof is versus another kind of spoof. It sounds like in order to appreciate the movie you have to understand not a reference from another movie but a reference to a trope. And so you have to see like they are doing this trope and they are commenting on this trope but not commenting on exactly that scene from When Harry Met Sally.

**David:** Exactly. But I don’t think you have to be super film literate in any conscious way to appreciate it. And I think that’s what we tried to pull off here is it’s not like a thinking man’s movie exactly. It’s much more just we’re doing this but we’re helping you understand the jokes just by the context, which I’ll explain how we did that. But I, and I think if this movie works for audiences, that’s why. And it seems to work so far.

**Craig:** That’s great. I mean, my favorite, you know, because there is even in what I would call traditional spoof there was always room for absurdist moments. And we tried, you know, we tried to do that. You know, again, we, not to keep saying the name Bob Weinstein, but we kept getting steered to a different direction. But —

**David:** One thing I’ll say about any kind of original comedy is it cannot be done by committee.

**Craig:** No.

**David:** Like you can’t have studio layers overseeing it. That will absolutely generally kill it unless somehow they’re all on the same comedic wavelength which would be incredible.

**Craig:** It’s…yeah. It’s a rough thing, but my favorite joke from the trailer is when they’re having the leaf fight which is a trope of just a goofy fight with leaves which we’ve seen before. And then they walk off happily and there’s a dead body under the leaves. And there’s that — that’s wonderful because that’s actually not even a commentary on the genre. That’s just a joke about, well, but there’s also — I’ve always felt that great spoof characters were absolutely idiotic. That they were almost bordering on sociopathic, that they would not even stop to notice a dead body because they’re just happy. I love that.

**David:** We definitely have, you know, especially the Paul Rudd main character in this film is, you know, as is kind of the deal with these bland everyman rom-com leading men, he’s borderline retarded. I mean he’s —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**David:** Yeah. [laughs]

**Craig:** Yes, that’s right. That’s exactly right. I would constantly have to explain this that these people are —

**David:** Innocent to the point of being like brain dead.

**Craig:** Well, they’re like soap opera characters in that regard. They’re designed to be thin and I actually, and not to wander off again from the narrative of how this came to be, but I’ll do it. I’m also interested in — you can get to this when you want — the challenge that there is when you say you do a movie like Role Models which is about actual human beings. I mean, it’s a comedy and it has set pieces and all the rest, but it’s about humans. And when you do a movie like this where you’re actually not writing human beings, I want you to get into a little bit of the challenge of that.

**David:** Well, it’s, for what it’s worth, my comfort level over my career has been the latter because I started out in sketch comedy and I’ve done so many things that are considered meta or whatever. You know, Childrens Hospital and these are utterly absurd and often purposely cookie cutter characters. And so for me, leaving my comfort zone was doing something like Role Models where I had to constantly curtail my instinct to like blow out the fourth wall or to, you know, make an overt comment about the scene structure or something within the scene.

And we actually did layer some of that stuff into Role Models in much more subtle ways knowing that we had to keep it real. But I think that little, tiny layer that we did was part of what made a lot of people like Role Models. Here, of course, you know, everything was absurd.

This movie, everything is a joke. And it’s, you know, I do think it wasn’t so deliberate in the making of it, but now stepping back from it, the model really is ultimately Airplane.

**Craig:** Right.

**David:** And I think what I find interesting about the spoof genre which I have now thought a lot about over the past couple of years making this movie is Airplane, for how iconic and classic and loved it is, hasn’t really been duplicated that much, you know.

**Craig:** No.

**David:** The successors have gone in different directions.

**Craig:** Yeah, no, it’s true. Well, Airplane is also fascinating because it is in fact a spoof of one single movie. It’s just a movie that nobody saw called Zero Hour.

**David:** There is something amazing about that actually.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**David:** And our movie is sort of in that vein too, like we’re really — some of the spoof targets we have we think of as these widespread, universal spoof targets, but then when we go to like talk about them with our collaborators and our crew, we realize it’s only like one movie that had this thing that we’re making fun of that nobody saw and we don’t care.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah, no. Very cool.

**John:** So talk us through the movie got stuck and then how did you get it unstuck? How did it become a real movie that you shot?

**David:** What happened was, so after that went away, then we still kept it in mind over the years, but it never came together and I moved on to other things. And then I know that my wife, Zandy, was working on a web series with Michael Showalter, and they were just talking about this script that was something that kept gnawing at us. It’s something, you know, you write a lot of things, and they don’t get made, fine.

For some reason, we knew this should or we always thought it was funny. And so I pulled it out in bed one night with her and we started laughing so hard. The next thing you know, we decided to do a reading of it at the San Francisco Sketch Fest with a bunch of friends on a Sunday morning with an audience just to hear it out loud.

That went so well. Everyone went berserk. Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler were part of that reading. And they came up afterwards and said let’s do this. And that was in January. They had only four weeks free overlapping in the entire year which was June. And so we scrambled and basically found financing for a very low budget through Lionsgate and got the movie to be shot in 23 days in June.

**Craig:** Oh, wow. 23 days.

**David:** No, it was, and you know, my first film, Wet Hot American Summer which to me seems like the lowest budget kind of imaginable was 29 days.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, because it was all in one spot, so it’s cheaper.

**David:** And all in one spot.

**Craig:** This one you’re moving around and wow, that’s tough.

**David:** This is like a big — this has the look and feel of a big, big budget New York romantic comedy. 23 days. So I had to call on 25 years of experience of how to get this done in the most clever, effective, outside-the-box way to achieve this feel. Because we couldn’t do the normal shortcuts when you have a low budget, are to shoot it all handheld, shoot it all with a certain look —

**Craig:** You can’t do that because you’re modeling movies that cost $50 million.

**David:** Exactly.

**Craig:** I mean that’s really challenging. Plus also, you know, people think of action movies as being more expensive or time consuming to produce. But anytime you’re introducing physical comedy into a scene, that’s like doing an action sequence. It’s complicated.

**David:** Exactly. And we had plenty of, you know, in a way a lot of what we counted on was we had more visual effects than you’d imagine because we didn’t have time to or ability to build or go to sets and locations. And so it was — we did a lot of little tricks to get it done.

But what the biggest one was just to move really fast, not get a lot of takes, not have time for a lot of improv, have the very best actors and know that they were going to deliver it and work hard on the script to make sure that it was all on the page and know that we didn’t have time to dick around on set.

**Craig:** Well, that’s actually a question, you know, people think of improv and comedy in the same thought and that makes sense. But for spoof I’ve always found that improv is kind of deadly because spoof is so structured and so formalist.

**David:** Exactly right. And we realized that this movie was not a good candidate for that more rambling improvised loose style that so many comedies today have. It just wouldn’t have made as much sense. And so the kind of written quality was part of it.

**Craig:** Right, exactly.

**David:** Now, there was plenty of improv too, like when people had ideas or just when stuff came up, of course, we follow whatever is funny. But probably a lot less so than you might think.

**Craig:** Well yeah, because like for instance in Judd Apatow’s films, part of the fun is watching somebody like Paul Rudd express themselves spontaneously. But in a spoof movie, Paul Rudd’s character can’t be that fluent, he can’t be that articulate. It’s really rigid. You know, he’s dumb. I mean they’re all really profoundly stupid.

I mean when she, his mother — I love the physical bit where she throws the drink in his face, but there’s only a tiny little drop and he reacts.

**David:** Right.

**Craig:** That’s only something you can do if you are in fact a fictional character. I don’t know how else to put it.

**David:** Exactly. I mean every — another way we put it is the entire movie is in quotes.

**Craig:** That’s right, exactly.

**David:** But, you know, also, Paul Rudd and Amy Poehler are two of the greatest improvers alive, so we used that to the degree we could. But yes, and so what was interesting, here’s the interesting thing. So we shot this movie very quickly as I said. We cut it together over the rest of that summer and we had a two-hour cut which I thought was pretty tight where we, you know, cutting out everything that didn’t work and, you know, getting it down at the bone and I consider myself very brutal with the material and throw things out and whatever.

And we start screening it into the fall and it’s working okay, you know, particularly among people who are our friends and fans, they like it.

**Craig:** Right.

**David:** Nobody’s going nuts for it. Then we do our, you know, we get to our official preview for a much more random audience in LA in a mall —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**David:** And it tanks.

**Craig:** They usually do. Spoof movies’ first screenings, worst things ever.

**David:** Yeah. Crickets. So at this point the studio kind of moves their attention onto other things. I actually moved my attention onto other things to some degree because I had to. I was going into another season of Childrens Hospital. This is when you came to our set.

**John:** That’s right.

**David:** And we were sitting there around for a while thinking about what do we do, how do we do this movie? They’re not going to give us another dime. So we have no money to spend. And I took on the editing myself essentially on a laptop and just started looking at it and thinking about it and working with Michael and talking about what to do.

And we realized that, you know, studying the tests and just studying the movie that too many people whether subconsciously or not, were actually taking it at face value. They did not realize it was in quotes enough to like it.

And so we carefully devised this storytelling device which is Paul and Amy sitting with another couple, Bill Hader and Ellie Kemper, at a table at a restaurant telling the story of their relationship, which is its own trope.

**John:** Yeah.

**David:** But within that setup, we also blatantly and overtly spoon feed to the audience what this movie is.

**Craig:** Right, she almost looks at the camera and says, “It sounds like a bad romantic comedy.”

**David:** Exactly. And so the whole setup is in almost these words saying to the audience, “This movie is a joke, don’t take it as not-a-joke. Just relax and laugh.”

**Craig:** Right, you’re basically teaching them, “We didn’t make a bad romantic comedy.”

**David:** Yes, exactly.

**Craig:** We made a comedy that makes fun of bad romantic comedies.

**David:** Or another way to put is we did it on purpose.

**Craig:** We did it on purpose.

**David:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yes, this is intentional.

**David:** This intentionally bad romantic comedy. And so I’m telling you, better than I ever expected, it worked.

**Craig:** Right.

**David:** The audience completely shifted and now in screenings you can’t hear the movie because they’re laughing from the very beginning to the very end, which is so gratifying. And also what this device did, which by the way we shot for almost nothing in one day, one three-camera setup, 34 different drops into the movie, it also allowed me to cut out every single thing that didn’t get a laugh.

**John:** Yeah, that’s a beautiful thing.

**David:** This device allowed us to skip over any part of the story — it didn’t matter — and then like I did this, and we realized how little the story matters in a movie like this. And whatever you did need to tell that wasn’t done in a funny scene, you can just say, and then I did this and I did this, and now here’s the next funny big thing that really does work.

So it allowed us to cut characters. It allowed us to — it really worked better than I ever imagined. And it didn’t cost us anything.

**Craig:** I love that story. You know, because these movies are designed to be stupid on some level, smart stupid, I don’t think people understand how much science goes into it. It’s just an enormous amount of science.

**David:** Well, I agree. And I think that the care and thought that goes into it over the course of years to then make something that looks thrown off and silly and fun is the key. And I think the ones that work really well, they’re not thrown off. There’s so much thought put into every frame.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re obsessed over it. I actually was talking to David Zucker the other day. And he, we’ve had this war for years about Top Secret because I love Top Secret. I think Top Secret is amazing. And he would always say, “You know, no.” He would say, “Top Secret is deeply flawed, we messed up, we’ve made a lot of mistakes, we should, the story, it’s too many stories jammed in and the ending is no good.” He just went on. But over the years he slowly started to let in the notion that maybe Top Secret is good.

And he said he went up, there was a screening in fact in San Francisco, and he went there and the audience loved it. And he said, “But, you know, I know how to fix it now.” And he said, “I want to reshoot. I think I could get the — I could fix the ending. And I’d just do it with body doubles and I can fix…” And he was deadly serious.

**David:** That’s so funny.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Deadly serious.

**David:** For some reason, I’m glad to say, I have this thing with the movies I’ve done. Well, so far I’ve made five movies and they’ve all got many, many flaws and many mistakes, but somehow I feel like when they’re done, they’re done and they are what they are, and I wouldn’t want to change them, you know.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, you don’t have the same level of autism that David Zucker has. I can already tell. You’re much more acclimated to humans.

**David:** But until it’s done, I’m going crazy and obsessing on every little thing. And I can’t —

**Craig:** Right.

**David:** And I keep having to open up and open up and open up. I guess once it’s like released in theaters and I just have — a switch turns and I’m like that is the thing and now it’s not mine anymore. It’s out in the world.

**John:** Because we’re a podcast that’s mostly about writers, some of what you’re saying seems kind of dispiriting, because like you went into this with a script that you loved and you shot a script that you loved and you were really happy with how it worked on the page.

**David:** Yeah.

**John:** So to go through and basically restructure the entire story by this whole new device feels like, I don’t know, it could feel like a failure, but it’s honestly the way most movies work. Is that you’ve made these choices which were absolutely right for the page, but somehow how it all came together on the screen, it doesn’t work the way you anticipated.

With Go, I loved the way that Go opened in the script, but then when we shot it, it just didn’t make sense the same way. And people — it was exactly the same kind of problem where people weren’t quite sure what movie they were in. And so we shot a new intro and it really got people onboard.

**David:** I think moviemaking is far too complicated to know any — you can’t possibly know it all on the page. On the other hand, I do think that they should do more testing of some kind with a script before they start wasting film. But, you know, we did — we tried to know everything we could know before we got, but to me it’s not dispiriting. I think it’s an inspiring writing story because some of my screenwriting that I’m most proud of was figuring out how to fix this movie at the late stages and writing those, that framing device while editing it at the same time and having the benefit of knowing exactly the actual cut footage that I’m working around was a fascinating process.

And I’m so relieved to say that the movie that we now have, I am so proud of and so happy with. And I really had a lot of reservations about it until we figured that out.

**Craig:** Well, there’s no prize for getting it “right at the beginning.” That’s not the point of a screenplay.

**David:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, and especially with this kind of comedy, which I really do feel is written in practically every genre there is at this point. And writing spoof was by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s incredibly hard because you’re doing a normal comedy, you know, I don’t know, there’s a joke every page maybe or something. There’s like three jokes a page, mandatory. The characters, there’s never a point where a character can just be quiet or thoughtful. There’s no break. There’s no breath. The audience is well aware that you’re doing this.

It’s like you’re a pitcher and you’re saying, “Okay, here comes another fastball.”

**David:** You’re sitting there literally as an audience waiting for the next —

**Craig:** Waiting for the next joke.

**David:** Make me laugh again.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**David:** Make me laugh again.

**Craig:** Arms crossed, you know. And I’m sure you’ve had this experience too where you show them the movie and you think, well, I know that this joke is killer. This one, oh boy, let’s see what happens there. And the joke you knew was a killer is deadly. And then they just go crazy, it’s something that is barely even a joke to you at all.

**David:** My five favorite jokes from the screenplay that were the things that made me excited to make the movie are all cut.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** There you go.

**David:** I mean that’s just “there you go.”

**Craig:** There you go. You have to be — you have to have an ego strength to do spoof that is just unparalleled.

**David:** And one of my things that I’m most proud of is the ability to recognize those things and say, “You know what, I loved it all the way until now, and now let’s cut, you know.”

**Craig:** Absolutely. Oh no, the audience is your boss in spoof in a way that is just disturbing. But necessary.

**David:** But I will say and having been through this on many movies, you’ve got to be very, very careful about audiences as well because an audience might be crickets on one screening and the same exact cut might have a huge uproarious response at that same joke. And so it’s just you’ve got to be also careful. And sometimes, I’ve left in things just because I know they’re funny to me and I will never my change my mind about it. And, you know, it’s just —

**John:** Or that funny joke is actually cueing up a laugh, a bigger laugh later on.

**David:** Exactly.

**John:** So if you take that out —

**Craig:** That’s right.

**David:** The organism is so complicated, it’s hard to — you can’t just blindly follow how loud the laugh is.

**Craig:** There are some jokes that aren’t meant for an audience to laugh at together. They’re meant for people to love five years later.

**David:** Exactly. And I’ll tell you when we did Wanderlust, it was, you know, a big studio situation and a very different kind of process where we did so many screenings. Sometimes we did — we did a couple times where we screened two versions of the movie side by side at the same time to two different audiences and then run numbers on that. And it got bewildering and confusing. So many different versions floating around, it was very hard to keep track of what the spine is of what we were doing.

**John:** One of the great things about doing Big Fish night after night after night on Broadway is we would have the audience there. And so we’re really doing exactly the same show. At a certain point the show was frozen. It was exactly the same show. And things would get laughs one night and not laughs the next night.

You start to realize there are certain key people in the house who if they started laughing would sort of make it safe for other people to laugh.

**David:** Yeah.

**John:** And if you didn’t have those crucial key people in there it was tough. And you kind of wish you could seed the audience with designated laughers, just to sort of get stuff started.

**David:** It’s such a mysterious thing. And if you think about it, ultimately, what makes you have this involuntary physical response to something? You know?

**John:** Yeah. Let’s keep talking about this, but I also want to get to some of our real topics on the show today.

**David:** Yes.

**John:** The first of which is a listener sent in a link that was really kind of fascinating about not only film history but really the origin of the three-act structure. Basically this guy, David Bordwell, did a study looking at when did people first start talking about three-act structure. Basically looking through old memos, looking through old Hollywood stuff saying like is the idea of a three-act structure something that’s a pretty recent invention, like sort of a Syd Field thing, or has it always been there.

Did you guys get a chance to look at this blog post?

**David:** I did. I remember he wrote the textbook that I had my first film class at NYU.

**Craig:** Oh really?

**John:** Very nice. Talk to us about your film education. So, you went to NYU as a film major?

**David:** Yeah.

**John:** What’s weird is I remember watching The State and like in my head I was like in high school watching The State but that’s actually possible because we’re about the same age. You must have started incredibly young. Is that correct?

**David:** Well, yes. I went to film school at NYU from 1987 and I graduated in 1991. In ’88 when I was a sophomore is when The State was formed as a comedy troupe at the college. And when everyone was out of school in 1992, by that time we were already starting the process of getting our show on MTV.

**John:** Wow.

**David:** It was a very lucky set of events.

**John:** So, when you were at NYU you were studying filmmaking, you studied screenwriting, and you learned about a three-act structure, right?

**David:** I did. I took several dramatic writing classes as part of film school, but I don’t remember ever getting the kind of straight up Syd Field or Robert McKee like really here’s the formula kind of thing in film school. I also, frankly, was spending most of my time in film school doing The State.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, not learning but doing?

**David:** Yeah.

**John:** The State was so great. And it’s so amazing that all of you guys have done so incredibly well since that time.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s been fascinating. It’s funny, John, I was sort of — I feel like I was watching The State in my old house in New Jersey, but I wasn’t. I was watching it here in Los Angeles. I don’t know why that is. What hypnosis have you — ?

**David:** It exists in a weird time period. I don’t know.

**Craig:** Yeah. But everybody from it, I mean, it is true. They’re all out there. They’re all — talk about an all-star cast.

**David:** They did one little sketch show at NYU my sophomore year. Most of them were freshman and I wasn’t in the group. And I saw it and I was like, holy mother of shit, these guys are incredible. And I tried to hook in and get into the group right then which I did, thank god. And, yeah, it’s just somehow these people came together and every single one has gone on to be fairly successful in the business.

**John:** Now, how did you move from doing sketch writing into a full on screenplay. So, was Wet Hot American Summer the first full-length thing you wrote?

**David:** It was the first full-length thing we basically finished. When The State started to fizzle in activity, Michael Showalter and I started writing a high school screenplay that was going to be a big high school epic. And that was around 1997. And we got a draft or two done, but we knew we had a lot more work to do. And we wanted to shoot something that summer, because we were anxious to do it. So, we decided to just write an outline and just get our friends together and go to some summer camp in Westchester and just shoot a summer camp movie because we knew it would be easy and we could shoot it all with the same clothes and it would be outside.

And just as we started writing it, it turned into just, well, A, no one — we couldn’t even get the financing for a hundred grand or whatever we wanted for that. And then it took us three years really to get the money. And during that time we kept developing it more and more and more into a real screenplay, so to speak.

**John:** And you cast some like terrible people who never did other stuff like Bradley Cooper.

**David:** Right. Well, yeah, both Bradley Cooper and Elizabeth Banks and many others just kind of walked in and auditioned for it. This was their first movie.

**John:** It’s a good time. So, as you’re writing this for a screenplay, sort of going back to this topic of like three-act structure and sort of how that gets sort of drilled into you, did you have a sense of this is the end of our first act and this is where things are changing? Because my recollection of Wet Hot American Summer is it’s just the arc of a summer and it’s not trying to do sort of big worst of the worst scenarios, but maybe it does.

**David:** Oh, it does. At least we definitely did have that in mind by then. It was — the way we wrote that was every character pretty much had their own storyline. And so it was an ensemble piece and there was, I think, ultimately maybe 10 to 12 storylines. And then each of those we did think of in a three-act structure. And I think we might have specifically been following the Robert McKee version of it at the time. I can’t remember exactly. But I do know that we thought about in those ways.

And like, okay, we made charts and we made graphs and we’re like here’s how this starts, here’s the inciting incident of this, here’s how this develops, here’s the climax. And then we meshed them all together into one day and then tried to come up with a climatic sequence at the end that climaxed each character’s story at around the same time.

**Craig:** Well, you guys in a weird way you were doing the Robert Altman model, which then you saw again in Magnolia. And it’s the disparate stories that interweave throughout, they kind of come together, separate again. And then there’s some kind of disaster, like an earthquake, or a plague of raining frogs, or Skylab falling that forces everybody to kind of experience the ending of their stories together.

**David:** It was totally deliberate because the movie that kind of changed my life that I saw when I was in college was Nashville.

**Craig:** Right. There you go.

**David:** And that was for sure a very conscious model. All those stories in Nashville are somewhat separate but they’re tied together by place and by time and then they all come together literally in this climatic time when this woman gets shot and kind of turns everything around.

And then also Dazed and Confused was such a favorite. And so those were kind of the structural tent poles that we looked at.

**Craig:** But tonally one thing that I thought was really interesting about Wet Hot American Summer was that you weren’t in the zone of say Meatballs which was more of a standard comedy where there was some serious stories and serious human beings or actual human beings, and then some broad characters. And you weren’t really doing what I would call a spoof in the traditional like Mel Brooks or Zucker and Zucker sense.

Every character was kind of nuts. You were already in that zone where you were kind of making your own thing where, you know, for David Zucker he always says, “There’s one person in the scene who’s crazy or stupid and one person who is sane and normal and they might switch during the scene or in a different scene.” But for you guys it was like everybody at once could be nuts, which I thought was great.

**David:** Thanks. For us it was a lot of just instinctual we’re doing this kind of a camp movie thing and we tried to source it as much in our own actual memories. It wasn’t really a spoof of camp movies because we didn’t think of that so much as a genre that we were so interested in getting. It was more of a spoof of what camp was like for us.

**John:** Well, that sense of where every character is kind of crazy in their own special way is something that really bled through to Childrens Hospital, because that’s my same sense of Childrens Hospital is like there’s not one normal person who’s like the voice of reason in that show. Everybody is nuts and everyone can sort of do whatever they need to do. It’s probably more heightened in Childrens Hospital than it was in Wet Hot American Summer.

**David:** We discovered that phenomenon in Wet Hot first which then has carried over into Childrens Hospital which is to say any given character can be malleable to serve the plot or comedic point to the point in a way that would just be absolute no-no in regular screenwriting.

**Craig:** Right. Yeah. There’s a chaotic nature to the whole thing. I mean, that is informed by the way the cast did come out of sketch comedy. There is a chaos to it. There’s an anarchy.

And I can understand why critics or even theatrical audiences at first just couldn’t handle it.

**David:** And it’s fair. I mean, if you’re going to see certain kind of rules followed then you’re not going to like it. And I don’t even mean that flippantly. It’s definitely not for everyone.

**Craig:** Well, I’m not surprised that the movie kind of found this second life because I do feel like some comedies are designed for big rooms of people together and some comedies are simply, they’re too offbeat for that. And because the theatrical experience of comedy is one where it’s about commonality… — Everybody, or at least we would always say if 40% of them think this is funny that’s good enough. Then the people that aren’t laughing are forced to say, “Well, I guess other people think it’s funny.”

But when it’s challenging like this and kind of trying to redefine how the rules of it work, sometimes the best way for it to succeed is in the privacy of somebody’s home where they feel safe enough to kind of, you know, enjoy it for what it is and explore it.

**David:** And with a movie like ours, which I think that was the middle period for Wet Hot American Summer over the years where people discovered it, show it to a friend, pass it around. And now it’s come into this thing where there’s 7,000 people at Brooklyn Park watching it, all big fans, and that’s — everyone is having this communal experience now.

**John:** I watched your movie, I watched Wet Hot American Summer I remember out in Santa Monica at the Laemmle Santa Monica that doesn’t exist anymore. And I remember seeing it like opening weekend out there and loving it.

But I have a thought experiment though. You talked about what you did when they came together and you shot those new blocks, changed the setup of the movie, sort of what your expectation was. Was there a way that you could have setup Wet Hot American Summer that could have made it more accessible from the very beginning?

If you had a time machine and could go back and shoot something, do you think there’s a way to do that?

**David:** You know, probably there might have been, although part of what made Wet Hot, what I love about it is that it starts off in kind of a normal place and it just sort of slowly starts moving to the left. And not surprising that was not a formula for success. Many, many people have said to me over the years, “I saw your movie. I really didn’t like it. And then I saw it again and it became my favorite movie.”

**John:** Yeah. So, once you know what the movie is you like it, but while you’re watching it the first time —

**David:** It’s like a fine wine, I guess. You need to taste it and get the sense of it and then you can relax and like it.

**John:** So, David Wain, can you comment on this. So, I see stories that there is discussion of making a Wet Hot American TV show or something for Netflix.

**Craig:** Yeah, the Netflix.

**John:** Is that something that’s interesting to you?

**David:** I can’t comment on it.

**John:** You can’t comment on that.

**Craig:** So, the answer to that is, no, that’s not interesting to me at all. I wish they wouldn’t do it. [laughs]

**David:** I can’t comment on it.

**John:** All right. That is fantastic. Let’s go to our next —

**Craig:** By the way, I will now speak for David for the rest of this. David, you just make little Morse code blinks at me. Yeah, you Morse code blink to me and I will tell them what you’re thinking.

**John:** Yeah, Morse code blinking is really effective on a Skype podcast I have found.

The next topic on our agenda is the Legends of Oz. And so I sent through this blog post about this which was so Legends of Oz was this sequel to the Oz movies, or sort of an extension of the Oz movies, an animated feature starring Lea Michele and a bunch of other people. And I knew about it before it came out only because a friend of ours was doing the posters for it. She didn’t work on the movie but she did work on the marketing of it. And so I knew that this movie existed.

The movie did not fare well at all and it was not a box office success. So, there’s this blog post which is going through and talking about the investors in the film. And I had assumed that this was, when she was first describing it it sort of felt like it was a made for video thing that turned out well enough that they were talking a gamble and releasing it theatrically. Turns out it was actually always meant to be theatrical. And they had raised this money with investors putting in $100,000, but individual people putting in $100,000 to make this potentially $100 million budget to make this film.

And the individual investors are really upset that this movie didn’t do better. They’re blaming Hollywood. They’re blaming some of the people involved in producing the film. So, I don’t know very much more about the actual Legends of Oz itself, but I think it was a good way to talk about the weird way we have to raise money to make movies.

And, David Wain, you’ve had to raise money a lot of times to make movies.

**David:** Well, I have to say that you sent me that story and I was fascinated by it just because it is such a weird story of that particular kind of — to me it was a complete Hollywood outsider guy who raised $70 million somehow $100,000 at a time thinking he could kind of hone in on the big budget animated movie market that is the Disney/Pixar world.

And I actually think it’s really interesting. And then there’s all this postulation, I was reading all the message boards, really why did it tank? And they were saying, “Oh, it’s a conspiracy. The critics were paid by the studios to trash it.” But to me that seems utterly ridiculous. However, it seems like it really was a marking thing because from what I can tell the movie is not good but many movies are not good. And many kids’ movies, particularly, are not good. It feels like it was fine. It was serviceable, or whatever.

And so it feels like what they didn’t do is put enough money or smarts into marketing it, or they could have been successful. I just think it’s interesting.

**Craig:** I mean, I read this stuff and the whole thing smells like a weird scam to me and not a scam that Hollywood perpetrated on small time investors but the people who were raising the money perpetrated on these small time investors. I mean, there’s a bit, so one of the investors referred to he put something on Facebook about the movie coming out on May 9th. “To all my friends that invested in this blockbuster, congrats. For those that had the $100K minimum handy but were too busy to take a look, you’re going to be so sorry.”

That’s the kind of stuff you read on like Penny Stock forums on the internet. It’s this — like, okay, we’re all in this together and we’re going to all get rich off of this thing. And so people who raise money for high risk investments will start to inspire this kind of religious fervor among all the people investing because either they’re all going to win together or they’re all going to fail together.

I mean, you almost see a little bit of that rhetoric, for instance when we all went on strike it was like everybody hold together, completely, or it’ll all fall apart. So, you’ve just got to be religious about it. And, you know, then when it doesn’t work, who are they going to blame?

And this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard: the idea that Hollywood doesn’t want serious new competition from individual investors so they’re going to pay critics to not like stuff. God, I wish that were true. I wish —

**John:** Hollywood loves money. Hollywood loves people coming with money.

**Craig:** It LOVES money. They’ll take money from anybody. Anyone.

**John:** The thing I would stress is the three of us on this podcast, but really anyone we know who works in the industry would never have invested in —

**Craig:** Ever.

**John:** $100,000 of their own money in this project, because they would talk through what their plans were and we would have said like, “Uh-oh, that’s not going to work.” Or, the odds of that working are incredibly remote for this kind of system.

**David:** And no one who personally invests in movies ever invests in a single project.

**Craig:** Correct.

**David:** Especially if it’s a big budget like this, unless they’re just — the only ones who do are the ones who are saying I’m going to give somebody I know X amount of money just knowing that I’m tossing it in the toilet, just for fun or to do a favor for a friend or something, you know.

**Craig:** Look, here’s the biggest warning sign of all: someone is going to make a movie using the intellectual property behind The Wizard of Oz and the Frank Baum world and they’re asking you, an orthodontist, for $100,000. Something is really bad there. And in fact I don’t know if looking at a — I was just poking around doing a little research on all this, but apparently now some people are in fact talking about that there were deceptive practices in the raising of this money.

It just feels so scammy to me. I am just bummed out that people did that.

**David:** I read one thing by an animator who was like there’s no chance they spent even a quarter of this money on the movie. And so maybe it’s a Producers thing where you knew it was going to tank and now he’s keeping all the money.

**Craig:** Yikes.

**John:** Yeah. We don’t know what the actual reality is behind the situation. But what I kind of want to stress is that raising money for any movie is difficult regardless. I mean, if you’re going to a studio that’s actually fully funding something, that’s one situation. But when you’re trying to raise money for an independent film, this is a very big independent film, there’s always that weird boundary between being ambitious and being scammy. And trying to convince people like, “Well, this is the way we can make money back,” but at the same time having to be honest of like you’re probably never going to get your money back, because very few of these movies are really going to be so profitable that like the people who put in $100,000 are going to see a return on that, or even get their money out of it.

That’s the reality of this. And not even just shady Hollywood accounting. It’s just the nature of the business.

**David:** That’s just reality, yeah.

**Craig:** That’s just reality. It’s such a speculative, high risk business. I mean, the reason that studios have lasted as long as they have is because they have massive libraries that generate profit with no costs required to generate that profit, so there’s this huge featherbed that they’re constantly landing in every time they whiff. And they whiff all the time.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s it. They have to whiff. We’ve talked a lot about the theory behind the big, huge franchise bet is that if you get one hit and four flops you’ve actually gotten eight hits and four flops because that one hit is sequelized and then spun off into ancillary things. I mean, it doesn’t matter, if Lone Ranger doesn’t work it’s okay because Pirates did work. And there’s five Pirates movies, plus Pirates stuff, you know.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** To invest $100,000 in a single movie is a little bit like saying, “I’m going to have a Major League baseball career, but I only get one at bat, and it has to be a home run, or I get sent down.”

**David:** Right.

**Craig:** It’s crazy.

**John:** It’s not a good track record.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** There’s another headline that came out this last week which was our friend Eric Heisserer wrote a script that Amy Adams is attached to star in that got sold at Cannes. And it was a really confusing headline that came out because it’s a $20 million sale but the headline didn’t sort of say like what actually sold. And what happened was — I emailed with Eric — and it was a foreign financing deal, so essentially that $20 million is money to help make the movie.

And so I get frustrated when these headlines go up, like $20 million deal for something, and it makes it sound like it’s a spec sale. It’s just the way movies sometimes get financed. And they used to get financed that way all the time where you sell off the foreign rights and you sell off the domestic rights and by selling off those rights you have enough money to make the movie. It’s much more common than sort of this Legends of Oz or Kickstarter way to make a movie. It’s a natural way that these things sometimes happen.

**Craig:** Kickstarter.

**John:** Mm, Kickstarter.

**Craig:** Don’t get me started. Don’t get me started.

**David:** [laughs] I heard the head of Kickstarter at Sundance London giving a big speech and Q&A and I was thinking about you, Craig.

**Craig:** [laughs] Thank you.

**John:** Yeah. I had coffee with him. He’s great. And I like that they exist. So, I was happy that at least Veronica Mars, the one thing we talked about on the show, did as well as it did.

**David:** Yeah.

**John:** For that it made a lot of sense.

**Craig:** It did make sense for that, yes.

**John:** Yeah, but you’re not going to kick start Legends of Oz. Not $100 million.

**Craig:** Well, that’s what these people, I mean, the reason that Kickstarter annoys me is also the reason why it’s better than this. I mean, so there’s no chance of ever participating, truly participating, in the success of something as “investor” in Kickstarter because you’re not an investor in Kickstarter.

But on the other hand, the world of investment is full of people with bad intentions. And, look, I don’t know if — these are all allegations now about this guy and he may have done absolutely nothing wrong. This just may be a situation where a guy said, “Here’s something to invest in,” a lot of people just got their heads full of dreams. And really though, my god. I mean, I get it. It’s like, “They’re making a Wizard of Oz movie and it’s going to be like a Pixar movie? Sure.”

**David:** I mean, the fact is — the fact that the movie got made and came out makes it less of a scam than most.

**Craig:** You’re absolutely right about that.

**John:** I would agree. Yeah. It would be very easy just to sort of never have it come out and blame it on something.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Insurance loss.

We have some questions to answer, so maybe David Wain can help us out with our questions. The first one is from Hayward in North Carolina. He writes, “First, this is not a situation where I think someone stole my idea. There are no billion dollar lawsuits forthcoming.” Good.

“That said, what do you do if you’re halfway through a screenplay and you read an article on the internet discussing a movie coming out next year which sounds fairly similar to the one you’re working on? Not exactly the same, but the premise strikes you as being pretty close to the one you’re working on, especially when reduced to a log line where all the differences wouldn’t be as apparent.

“Do you scrap it and move onto something else? Or do you push yourself to finish it anyway with the hope of maybe using it as an example when seeking representation or writing assignment?”

So, David Wain, you had two other spoof dating movies, romantic comedies, come out in that time that you already had your thing written.

**David:** Exactly.

**John:** How, I mean, talk to us.

**David:** Well, that definitely did, in fact, a friend of mine made that other movie called Not Another Teen Movie soon after. And, yeah, it did damper our aspirations. Seeing that happen, you know, you feel like, okay, there’s not going to be two of these. But I do think if you love a movie, if you love something you’re doing in a specific way, I would keep going with it knowing that maybe you might have to sit on it for a little while. Everything has a chance to come back. If that movie gets made and it’s not a success or it is a success, that could potentially work to your advantage either way if you time it right when to bring the thing back.

But I definitely, I mean, you know, yeah, there is… — I remember a friend of mine worked on this movie for quite a long time that he was writing as a spec and he was an established screenwriter, and then he read in Variety that somebody else was making basically the exact same movie and he said, screw it, and he moved onto something else.

**Craig:** You know, I always, what’s that — John, you’re really good at this, figuring out the names of fallacies. What’s the deal where you buy a car and then you think suddenly there are more of that car on the road?

**John:** Yeah, it’s like a validation fallacy.

**Craig:** Yeah, I think we always are so much more attuned to what our idea is and the specificity of that idea. So, it’s natural for us to look at one thing or another and say, oh no, I’m done. But the truth is that’s not actually how the world works and, frankly, if Date Movie had come out last month and I were now seeing trailers for They Came Together I wouldn’t even really connect the too, because the way we judge stuff as we see it is so visual and so based on cast.

When we watch things, I think it’s the cast, and the look, and the vibe that jumps out at us much more rapidly and accessibly than maybe the log line or the idea, because we are trained, having watched movie after movie, to understand that ideas are repeated constantly. It’s the execution that attracts us to things. So, I would certainly counsel this questioner to stick with it and at worse, they’re right, they’ll end with a sample.

But, frankly, I suspect no one will care.

**David:** Also, the only caveat I would add is sometimes it depends, depending on the genre, how specifically is this other thing exactly yours. Is it in all ten plot points, or is it just the general idea? I’d be interested to hear that.

**John:** Yeah. I would also say that sometimes one other film is like a direct comparison, but if there’s like three other films kind of like it, well that’s a genre. So, suddenly, oh my god, there’s another vampire movie. Well, yeah, there’s lots of vampire movies. The fact that you’re writing a vampire movie doesn’t preclude that or a zombie movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. Even if you were writing, there was the zombie teen romance that came out a couple years ago. If you were doing that now I think it would be okay. Where it gets a little trickier if you were writing something that is very specific and really twist-based and another movie comes out with that same deal and that same twist. That can be an issue because —

**John:** That can be an issue.

**Craig:** Because people do feel like twists are, because they’re so surprised-based you really can’t get away with, “Oh, he was dead the whole time.” [laughs] It’s tough to pull that one off twice.

**John:** Yeah. We know there’s an upcoming Disney movie that actually had that twist problem. They had to sort of very carefully work around that situation. What I will say, personally from my own experience, you can’t get much closer to this problem than I was writing Monster Apocalypse and then Pacific Rim came out which was so remarkably similar to what I was writing. It was like we couldn’t make the movie.

What’s fascinating is now Godzilla has come out and also made a lot of money and I’m starting to wonder whether it’s suddenly now just a genre. They were — too easy to directly compare the two movies, Pacific Rim and Monster Apocalypse, but if we have more movies with giant monsters smashing down cities, well, that’s now a genre. And suddenly mine doesn’t look as similar to that movie that came out.

**David:** That’s so interesting, when something evolves from copying something to just a formula of a genre or a form of a genre.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, so we’ll see what happens.

**Craig:** I mean, we all know the word Kaiju now.

**John:** Yeah, which is awesome. Which is Japanese —

**Craig:** I guess. [laughs] I don’t know.

**John:** All right. Nate writes, “What is the difference between a green-lightable script that needs revision and a script that still needs revision and is not green-lightable yet?”

So, I’m going to rephrase this question: Why do some scripts get green lit even though they still say there’s work to be done on it, whereas other scripts that “need work” don’t get green lit. Do you have a sense of why that happens?

**David:** Because what’s written in the script is so not the factor that contributes to the green light most of the time.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** Yeah. Green-lightable is a tautology. It’s green-lightable when someone green lights it. All that means is that the people who are paying for a movie have decided, yeah, we want to pay for this. There’s a thousand reasons why they make that decision, some of which are good reasons.

**David:** And some of which might be that the executive is in a good mood that day.

**John:** Yeah.

**David:** Really. It could be anything.

**Craig:** An actor shows up and wants to do it and they want to make a movie with that actor, so now we’re green lighting it. And fix it. Fix it before you shoot, you know.

**John:** Yeah. For some reason the train has started moving. And they’re going to keep going and they’re going to try to make this movie. And they will do the work that they want to do on the movie, work they could have done six months ago, a year ago, but suddenly now they’re starting to make a movie. And it may have nothing to do with the script at all.

**David:** I’m sure that both of you have been in situations where they’re like, “We love this project, we want to do it. Now we’re going to throw the script out and start over on that.” As if the script is just this minor afterthought in making a movie.

**Craig:** You know, it’s funny — less now. It seems like in the last couple of years or three years there’s been this bizarre realization that maybe the screenplay counts and in a weird way I think it’s part of the result of the inflation of budgets and inflation of marketing costs. People say that the way that Hollywood makes movies everything costs too much and that’s bad. And on some levels it is bad. On another level they are way less cavalier about the screenplay than they used to be. When movies cost $20 million and video would make sure it was a profitable venture anyway, at that point they honestly would treat the screenplay like it didn’t matter.

**John:** I don’t know that that’s changed, Craig. I mean, you and I can both think of people working on movies where like they’re starting shooting soon and they are massively overhauling the script.

**Craig:** That is true. That is true. But, even then they’re massively overhauling the script because somebody whimsically decided to do it. They’re massively overhauling it because the script isn’t very good, or the script has a lot of problems.

I guess what I’m saying is there used to be a time when there would be a perfectly good script, everybody would be onboard with it. It was the product of years of development and careful consideration. And then a director would come along and say, “Eh, I want to do this and I want to do that.” And they’re like, “Fine. Do it. Because we don’t care.”

**John:** Okay. That’s maybe true. But, I mean, the frustrating thing for Nate’s question that we’re not really answering is that there’s really probably no difference in a script that’s green-lightable versus a script that’s not green-lightable.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** The decision for green light is really rarely about the script itself. It’s really about sort of —

**David:** The elements around it. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. And we know this scientifically be true because there are scripts that do not receive the green light at one studio, get put into turnaround, are bought by another studio, and then made.

**David:** All the time.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. All the time.

**John:** Our last question comes from a different Nate. And he was actually at the live show. He was one of the people who was lined up to ask a question but wasn’t able to ask a question so he wrote in with his question.

“My question has to do with character motivation and stakes. Specifically let’s mandate that the character is ambitions and driven by a desire to succeed. Maybe he wants to be a famous movie star or the next Steve Jobs. Is the possibility of failure sufficient stakes, or does it need to be a more acute stake?”

Basically, what are stakes and what is enough stakes for something to be? Does it have to be a very specific thing that he’s trying to achieve or just an overall ambition or goal?

**Craig:** Well, I’m excited to hear what David Wain has to say about this one.

**David:** To me it has nothing to do — I mean, any screenplay can be about any stakes. It can be about something as tiny as like trying to get a piece of gum off your shoe, or saving the world, and it’s irrelevant. The point is that the stakes are important to the character and that you care as an audience about what the character cares about.

I think of Swingers and him making that phone call and how you’re just like on the edge of your seat freaking out and going no, no, no, just as you are when you’re watching Indiana Jones in exactly the same level of energy from an audience. So, it’s just about how you build and present those stakes. Right?

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. I think that it isn’t enough to simply say this person has some kind of external ambition, to build a business or to become a star, or change the world, and failure is the only relevant negative outcome.

Typically we’ll see in characters, when David says “what they care about,” the character does care about the external thing, but it’s also extensible to internal things. There’s something relatable for me in the audience to that person, where I can say, “Oh, I understand why that matters to you.” Because most people don’t want to build a business, that isn’t their ambition. So, what am I connecting to?

I’ve never done a day of karate in my life, but at the end of The Karate Kid when he says, “I have to go out there and win because I’ll never have balance otherwise, I’ll never have balance with myself, with my girlfriend, with the world,” then you go, “Okay, I understand. You’re trying to figure out a way to find your place in this world.” And that’s relatable.

That becomes so much more important than whether or not you punch the guy in the face. So, there does have to be some sort of common, human desire there so that if he fails we understand that he’s not just failing at a business. He’s failing himself in some big way.

**John:** Yeah. I think what Nate is confusing here a bit is goal, what is the character aiming for, and stakes being like what happens if he doesn’t achieve that goal. And really defining so for the audience what the consequences will be if he doesn’t achieve that goal. And so sometimes within a scene you might have a goal, like he’s got to disarm this thing or this bomb will blow up. That’s a very simple kind of stakes. But in the overall course of your movie the stakes might be if he doesn’t build this dam then his daughter will see that he’s a failure.

I mean, it could be something more, you know, like make it clear to the audience what will be the consequence of a failure so we can actually feel the potential loss or actually see the loss if he doesn’t succeed, because sometimes the stakes should be manifest and the character doesn’t win. That’s always a nice choice in movies as well.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I’ll say that movies tend to have movie stakes in the sense of like this is a story that can happen once and the nature of why we’re watching this story is because of this goal and these stakes. In a TV series, the stakes are a lot different because you’re hopefully experiencing this character’s journey over many, many episodes and things will grow and change. And their goals will change and the stakes will change based on what’s happened to them.

**Craig:** That’s a great point. And it’s one of the things that people should consider when they’re asking themselves the question of what they ought to write. I mean, should I be writing movies, should I be writing TV shows? And one thing that is specific to movie storytelling is the idea that you are resolving somebody’s problem. That the stakes ultimately do come down to character and specifically what gets finished for this character, whereas in television you can’t finish. If you finish the character your show is done, so the stakes do tend to be far more external in TV, I think.

I mean, there are obviously shows, wonderful shows, where the characters grow and change. But they don’t resolve.

**David:** Unless it’s the new genre of TV that does seem to have more finite endings sometimes, which I love.

**Craig:** Well, when the series ends it’s over. But like in Breaking Bad you watch Walter White have a ton of moments where most of the stakes are external stakes, but obviously there’s a lot of internal stuff where he’s trying to maintain his family unit. He’s trying to balance these two lives. He’s making these very difficult decisions about the people he loves and about himself.

But there is no final resolution until the very end. And in movies we’re basically telling one long TV episode and it ends. And you do need that resolution. Even if it’s — I mean, sometimes my favorite moments of, I guess stakes, resolution are the ones that seem so out of whack with what we would expect. That’s why I love the end of Tin Cup. I just think it’s one of the greatest endings of all time because it seems like the stakes are standard to a sports movie — a once great golfer who is down on his luck goes in for a Rocky style comeback. And he’s doing it. And then he approaches this moment where he has to face a choice: should I play is smart or should I go for the perfect shot?

And he goes for the perfect shot. And he blows it. And he blows it. And he blows it. And he blows it. And then he makes it. And the stakes of win the golf tournament, nope. You do not win a golf tournament, but you do hit a perfect shot. And it’s sort of like this is what I’m about. I thought that was, you know, that’s the kind of thing. It’s not enough to say, “Oh, I win or lose a golf tournament.”

**David:** Well that’s what Rocky was like, too.

**Craig:** Exactly. He loses as everybody seems to forget. [laugh]

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** You know, he loses. But in losing he finds himself. He finds honor. And so that’s another great example of why external stakes are always less compelling for me in movies than the internal ones.

**John:** This is the time on the podcast where we talk about One Cool Things. David, we should have warned you about this. Do you have a One Cool Thing to talk about?

**David:** I do. I do.

**John:** All right.

**David:** Am I going first?

**John:** You go first.

**David:** I just forgot the name of it. It’s this amazing iOS app that I just started using. You know, one of the things that I have now that I’m in California is all this time in the car. And I’ve always been trying to find a way to read screenplays while I’m driving, or read scripts while I’m driving.

**Craig:** [laughs] Oh god. Get him off the road.

**David:** And this is my own thing. So, what I used to do was I would actually do a little tinkering in formatting. I would turn script into text and then I would turn the text into audio and then I would have to do a little text expander and find and replace to reformat it enough so that I can understand it well when it’s audio text. It was a pain in the ass.

Now there’s finally this app. And the app is called Voice Dream. And I guess it’s been around maybe a little while, but I just found out about it. And it really works beautifully. The voices are great. And you can just pull down something from your Read It Leader account, from Pocket, or whatever, or from your Dropbox, or from any number of other sources. It then brings it into that app so that you don’t have to start from, you know, when you’re just doing normal speak it on your iPhone you have to select the whole thing and then it loses your place if you get a notification and if you want to start it over from — it’s impossible for reading screenplays.

So, this one turns it into kind of an audio book.

**John:** That’s great.

**David:** And you can also double click on where you want to go and you can read a little bit regular and then you can pick up again with voice. It’s really, really great.

**John:** And does it work well with Fountain?

**David:** Yeah. It works great with Fountain.

**Craig:** How about that.

**John:** Great. Cool. I should have — I don’t know why we didn’t talk about this at all on the podcast, but David Wain is one of the premier champions of using Fountain to write scripts.

**David:** I love it. I love it.

**John:** And so he’s been on the betas of all of our apps, and Highland, and Weekend Read. So, thank you very much again for all the stuff you’ve done to help us move that format forward.

**David:** Well, I think the more people that use it the more it will get developed for and the more it will help my work. So, spreading the word is a selfish thing.

**John:** Cool. Craig?

**Craig:** I’ve always said that David Wain is very, very selfish. That’s his thing.

I have Two Cool Things this week. One very quickly, One Cool Thing, Ian Helfer, who has worked with David Wain a number of times. I went to 7th and 8th grade with Ian Helfer and he’s such a great guy. Do you guys work on anything together or what’s the story?

**David:** Yeah. He’s a great screenwriter. He hasn’t worked with me in any official capacity since Role Models. He came in and worked for a little bit. But, very good friend of mine and he works all the time with John Hamburg who we’re all buddies from back in college days and afterwards in New York. And, yeah, he’s one of my very good friends.

**Craig:** I love that guy.

So, my other One Cool Thing is a live stage reading that the Black List folks are doing. And it is of a script that made the official Black List of the best unproduced screenplays. And this one is a script written by Stephany Folsom and it’s called 1969: A Space Odyssey, or How Kubrick Learned to Stop Worrying and Land on the Moon.

And that script is about a White House public affairs assistant who basically convinces Kubrick to fake the moon landing in case something goes wrong. You know, that whole story that we didn’t really land on the moon, which some people, [laughs], basically you know I’m a pretty tolerant person. But if you don’t think we landed on the moon, I can’t talk to you. [laughs] I just can’t. I have to remove you from my life.

Regardless, this script is supposed to be pretty great. I haven’t read it, but they are doing a live stage reading of it. It will be at the LA Film Festival on June 14th, so they’ll actually have an interesting cast doing it and ticket info. So, look for information about that at the LA Film Fest website.

**John:** Yeah. We’ll also have a link to that in the show notes.

My One Cool Thing is this app for iOS, for the iPad, called Hopscotch. And it is a little programming app designed for kids, but really adults can use it, too. It’s very, very clever. I think on a previous episode I talked about Scratch which is this sort of programming environment that MIT developed for kids. This is like that, but actually a little bit more stripped down and I think a little bit more accessible for kids to get started with. You can build these little monsters and have them run around and interact with each other in ways that’s really, really smart.

The women who created the app are really big on sort of getting girls to code and it feels like a great way to sort of get your daughter to start interacting with code in a great way. So, I highly recommend it.

**Craig:** I really do believe that coding should, I don’t know if it will, but it should become an actual piece of core curriculum in primary education. There’s no reason that we expect as a matter of course American Children to learn geometry but we don’t expect them to learn how to code. It just makes no sense.

**David:** I think it will eventually happen, although it might take awhile. But it’s inevitable. It’s like it probably took a long time before they said everyone should learn how to type.

**Craig:** Do they do that? I mean, is typing mandatory now?

**John:** They teach typing now.

**Craig:** Oh good. Good.

**John:** They do. And they sort of gave up on cursive and they teach typing, which I think is a good tradeoff. I think the way that you will stealthily get people coding is Minecraft. I think you build some more logic into Minecraft where there’s switches and do this and this thing becomes a chain of events. I think you sneak that into Minecraft which every young person already plays and you will get a new generation of coders. That’s my guess.

**Craig:** Well, I hope we do.

**John:** All right. That is our show this week. But before we wrap up, David Wain, we need you to plug hard your movie.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And tell us when it’s coming out.

**David:** It’s They Came Together.

**John:** They Came Together. What day?

**David:** It is June 27th on Friday. It is in selected theaters and it’s also at the same time on VOD. And if —

**Craig:** Oh, you mean, you guys are doing day and date?

**John:** Are you guys at the Arclight in Los Angeles? Where are you?

**David:** Yeah. It’s day and date. So, you’ve got to go to the theater if you’re in one of those handful of cities that weekend, please. In LA it’s going to be Los Feliz, AMC City Walk, and Laemmle Playhouse.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** Fantastic.

**David:** But also you can watch it on your TV that day if you choose. If you go to TheyCameTogether.com you’ll see a selection of some of the amazing reviews we’ve gotten, and a trailer, and clips, and poster. And Paul Rudd, Amy Poehler, and a cast of incredible comedic talents including Jason Mantzoukas, Bill Hader, Christopher Meloni, Max Greenfield, Cobie Smulders, Michael Ian Black, Ellie Kemper, etc, etc.

**Craig:** Keep going. Keep going.

**John:** It’s pretty amazing.

**Craig:** It’s pretty awesome.

**John:** How about Childrens Hospital? Is there another Childrens Hospital coming?

**David:** Childrens Hospital is starting to shoot actually in two weeks, the sixth season, and also the other Adult Swim series that I do the lead voice on —

**John:** Newsreaders.

**David:** Well, there’s that. That’s also coming out in a few months, I believe. And then there’s also June 15th, just in three weeks, is Superjail! Is premiering on Adult Swim at 11:45pm.

**Craig:** You know, this is really our first podcast after all these shows where we actually did a late night talk show style guest with something to plug. It’s really..it’s fun.

**John:** I like that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think we should honestly just do it. And I’m serious about this. I’m actually very serious.

**David:** [laughs]

**Craig:** We should never do this again except with David Wain. Like I honestly, like we should always have David on to plug his stuff.

**John:** Well, because you’re always kind of busy, so there’s always going to be something new to plug.

**David:** I can just come on at the end and plug.

**John:** Do it.

**Craig:** I just think we should always —

**David:** No matter who the guest is.

**Craig:** Like I don’t care if Tom Cruise wants to be on Scriptnotes. No. No. But David Wain can show up. He’s got — he’s just dropping by a block party. [laughs] And he just wants to mention that he’ll be there.

**David:** Come by. I’m baking cupcakes.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** It’ll be good. And that’s our show. So, you can find links to most of the things we talked about on the show today at the show page, johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. That’s also where you can find transcripts for our episodes. You can also find the last 20 episodes on iTunes. If you’re there you can leave us a comment or a rating, that’s always lovely and nice.

If you want to go back to the old episodes, you can find them at Scriptnotes.net. You can go back to episode one and all the way up through to the present time. We offer subscriptions for $1.99 a month which gives you access to all those back episodes and occasional bonus episodes.

Scriptnotes is produced by Stuart Friedel. Is edited by Matthew Chilelli. And if you have a question for us on the show, like the ones we answered, short questions are really good on Twitter. So, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. David Wain, what are you?

**David:** @davidwain.

**John:** Very nice. If you have a longer question, like the ones we answered today, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. And David Wain thank you so much for being an awesome guest.

**David:** I’m a big fan of this podcast and of both of you and I’m really happy to be here. Thanks.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** All right. Have a great weekend.

**Craig:** Bye guys.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [David Wain](http://davidwain.com/), and on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0906476/) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/davidwain)
* [Being Gay at Jerry Falwell’s University](http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/04/being-gay-at-jerry-falwells-university/274578/), from The Atlantic
* [They Came Together](http://www.theycametogether.com) is in theaters and On Demand June 27th
* [Wet Hot American Summer](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B005EYLFOW/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon
* [Caught in the acts](http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2014/05/18/caught-in-the-acts-2/), from David Bordwell’s website on cinema
* [Legends of Oz Investors Believe Hollywood Conspiracy Destroyed Film](http://www.cartoonbrew.com/business/legends-of-oz-investors-who-each-paid-100000-believe-hollywood-conspiracy-destroyed-film-99641.html), from Cartoon Brew
* THR on [Amy Adams’ Story of Your Life selling to Paramount for $20 Million](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/cannes-amy-adams-story-your-704004)
* [Voice Dream](http://www.voicedream.com/), a text to speech app for iOS
* [Fountain.io](http://fountain.io/)
* [Ian Helfer](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0375043/) on IMDb
* Get tickets now for the [Black List Live! read of Stephany Folsom’s 1969: A Space Odyssey, or How Kubrick Learned to Stop Worrying and Land on the Moon](http://filmguide.lafilmfest.com/tixSYS/2014/xslguide/eventnote.php?notepg=1&EventNumber=9107&utm_content=buffer89d0e&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer) on June 14th, part of the LA Film Fest
* [Hopscotch](https://www.gethopscotch.com/), a coding for kids app for iOS
* [Childrens Hospital](http://video.adultswim.com/childrens-hospital/), [Newsreaders](http://video.adultswim.com/newsreaders/index.html), and [Superjail!](http://video.adultswim.com/superjail/index.html) (which returns on June 14th) on adultswim.com
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Mike Timmerman ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))