Archives for 2014

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2014/lotteries-lightning-strikes-and-twist-endings).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Before we start the show today, I want to let you know about the live show happening on December 11th in Hollywood. It’s Scriptnotes with me and Craig and Aline and special guests Jane Espenson, Derek Haas and B.J. Novak. So we did this last year. It was a tremendously fun time. You should come.

Tickets go on sale tomorrow, November 12th. So if you would like to come, please go buy a ticket. There’s a link in the show notes but you can also go to the Writers Guild Foundation site. That’s wgfoundation.org. As always, it benefits the Writers Guild Foundation which is an awesome charity. And we had a fun time last year. We’re going to have a fun time this year. So come join us if you’d like and we’ll get on with the show. Thanks.

[intro tone]

Hello and Welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 170 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

So Craig, last Sunday I had a really strange experience.

**Craig:** Tell me all about it.

**John:** I went to Long Beach where I saw the West Coast premiere of Big Fish: The Musical.

**Craig:** Oh, that must have been both disorienting and pleasing at the same time.

**John:** It was. It was surreal in the best possible ways. So this is the production that actually bought all of our stuff when we closed on Broadway. So they bought our sets, our props, our costumes, our wigs. And so it’s that weird experience of seeing something that is incredibly familiar yet incredibly different at the same time. So it’s the same production in terms of the script and the music but it’s just different because it’s different people doing it. It’s a different stage. It’s at this really quite big house, the Carpenter Theatre in Long Beach. And I kind of loved it, at the same time it was sort of an out-of-body experience.

**Craig:** I know that it’s hard for a lot of people to have seen the Broadway show because it’s in New York only but it was my pleasure to see it. And one of the big show-stopping elements were these big elephant butts, which sounds kind of crazy when I say it like that, but they were. It was very impressive production design. Did they have the elephant butts?

**John:** They have the elephant butts.

**Craig:** Wow, that’s awesome.

**John:** Yeah. So here’s what was so fascinating is because this production is original theatre, it didn’t have automation of the stage. So they had a lot of our set pieces but they didn’t have all the magic under the stage things to make stuff move around. So they have to like push things around. And they did a remarkable job sort of accommodating what they needed to do for that. And they were able to do a lot of the choreography with the Broadway production but not all of the choreography.

So it was actually just genuinely fascinating. It’s an experience that, as a screenwriter, you and I would never have.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** To see the same text but with completely different people and being done without any of your sort of direct involvement. And so in many cases, people are making similar choices to the Broadway production because it’s just that’s the text. I mean like you’re going to play things a certain way because that just is what makes sense. But then sometimes a person will do something that is just different than intention. And sometimes that was kind of fascinating.

So Amos Calloway who, in the movie, is Danny DeVito, in the Broadway stage production it was Brad Oscar who was fantastic. The Amos that I saw in this version was sort of like I would say like a drunken cowardly lion, which is just a very different choice but it kind of worked. And so it was cool to see something very different.

So I would recommend anyone who makes a Broadway musical [laughs] to go visit a regional production of their own show because you’ll find it fascinating and surreal.

**Craig:** That’s spectacular. I’m glad it’s enjoying a second life and hopefully many more lives to come. I can see the show being done in schools.

**John:** We will be doing it in schools. So we have 60 productions this year of Big Fish across the country. Abilene Christian University did it in Texas. There’s a lot of university productions. Eventually there will be a Big Fish junior version like a school version —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Which will probably be different because I think a fifth grade musical about death is probably not the most ideal subject matter. So I will do some book changes to accommodate those needs.

**Craig:** There is actually some very interesting junior versions out there. My son was Jean Valjean in the Junior Les Mis in which some people actually were allowed to die.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So Éponine was allowed to die but Fantine was sent to a hospital [laughs] but then returns later as a ghost. So you just sort of understood that maybe the hospital wasn’t that great. But various changes were made. No one ever referred to prostitution or things like that. But your show, I think, wouldn’t require much.

**John:** No. I mean, our show is incredibly wholesome and family-friendly. The challenge is just how do you , you know, the idea of a father dying is quite a bit to put on the backs of a grade school cast. And also the split between the past and the present, that’s kind of sophisticated. And then to be able to show that and really act that when you have maybe a 12-year-old doing that could be challenging.

So I think we will find a way to simplify aspects of the storytelling so that it can best be the story of a son wanting to learn the truth about his father’s tales within the framework of what Big Fish should be.

**Craig:** Yeah. And I think you’ll find also that a huge part of the job of juniorizing the musical is making it much, much shorter and taking out — choosing which songs should just go because they can’t sing all of them.

**John:** Absolutely. And which songs can move from being a solo number to a group number because —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You have so many kids.

**Craig:** Right. That’s right.

**John:** So today on the program, let us answer some questions from listeners. We have a whole bunch that have been stacking up, so we’ll dig into that mail bag. We’re also going to talk about The Five Types of Twist Endings, this great blog post by Alec Worley. And I want to talk about lightning strikes and lotteries and sort of that sense of whether something becomes popular or successful because of its inherent awesomeness or just because magic happens.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So let’s get to it, but first a tiny bit of follow- up. Last week I announced Writer Emergency, this pack of ideas and prompts that we’re starting on Kickstarter. And Craig, you had to venture to the Kickstarter site.

**Craig:** Here’s the sick part is that I gave you money —

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Because you’re my friend.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** And then today, I gave our editor, Matthew Chilelli, some money because he does a really good job.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But it’s killing me.

**John:** It’s killing you. I really just want to dig into what it felt like to press that green Back This Project button. How did it feel when you clicked that and knew that you were supporting the Kickstarter economy?

**Craig:** It felt like I was betraying everything that I believe in. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** That’s basically I felt like I had turned my back on my values and had contributed to the weakening of civilization.

**John:** Craig, I want to thank you for that because you’ve helped and I want to thank, we’ve had so many backers. We had more than 2,000 backers and we —

**Craig:** Yeah, you guys did great out there.

**John:** We did great out there. So we were trying to raise $9,000. As we’re recording this, we’ve crossed $57,000 which is just nuts. So that’s fantastic. So now it’s pushing through the rest of the Kickstarter and putting these out in the world and then getting them to the hands of kids in creative writing programs across the country and around the world who could hopefully benefit from these. So I want to thank you, Craig, personally —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because I know this was not an easy thing for you. But you broke through that seal, that barrier just for this one and then you supported Matthew Chilelli and now you’re just not going to be able to stop supporting Kickstarter projects.

**Craig:** No, no, no, it’s very easy for me to stop. In fact, what I really want is for Stuart to have a Kickstarter that I don’t support [laughs] just as a matter of principle. I don’t care what it is. He’s getting nothing. By the way, do you think you’re going to make money on these things? Do you think you’ll profit at all?

**John:** We might profit a little bit. So here’s the deal. It’s like as I described on the first podcast when we talked about this, is printing playing cards scales pretty well. So they’re really expensive to make those first batch of decks, but the more you can make, the cheaper per unit it is. The challenge is we’re actually doubling that because we have to, we’re sending them out to kids. And then there’s some things that don’t scale like postage and like sending stuff out to backers around the world.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So we’re not going to make a lot out of it but I think we’re going to sort of do what I wanted to do out of the project which is sort of bend the universe in a slightly better direction. So it’s been exciting to do that and sort of engage with that community which has its own sort of esoteric rules and customs and try to both be a part of that world of Kickstarter and also introduce that Kickstarter kind of world to people who are backing their very first projects like Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Well, now that I hear that you are going to make some money on this, I’m full of regret because I would have just given you the $9,000.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I would just have bought you out, given you the $9,000.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is like Shark Tank for —

**John:** Oh, yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** For 100 percent equity in your company, it’s just, but now I’ve given money and —

**John:** But you’re going to be getting a deck of cards. And you said you actually wanted to donate —

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** The extra cards. So I think you did like the 12-pack.

**Craig:** Yeah. I want all the cards to go to the less fortunate budding screenwriters out there.

**John:** Great. And that’s a thing that backers can always do. So when you get your survey at the end of this asking for your mailing address, there’s this little field saying Special Instructions. You’re can just say I’m Craig Mazin and I want to give all my cards to the kids.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s right. You can just say I want to Mazin this.

**John:** I want to Mazin this.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s really the term that we’re going to use for this. And so when Stuart sees that on the instruction sheet, he’ll know, okay, this is the Craig Mazin special.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** Awesome. Let’s get to our things today.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** So first up is this Five Types of Twist Endings, which is a blog post by Alec Worley, and whoever sent this to me, thank you because it was great. It’s been sitting in our show notes for a while. But it was really cool.

So this blog post talks through twist endings and it defines twist endings as “the moment of revelation within a story that throws into question all that’s gone before.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And it’s not hard for us to think about twist endings in movies because some of my favorite movies have twist endings.

**Craig:** Yeah, and I thought that this was a pretty good summary of how these things work. We can go through them one by one. I’ll take the first one, reversal —

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Reversal of Identity in which someone turns out to be someone else. So your parent is actually not your parent but your grandparent. Your best friend is actually a shape-shifting monster so —

**John:** Yeah. The Crying Game where the woman you love is not —

**Craig:** Is not a woman.

**John:** Ta-da.

**Craig:** Ta-da. Or in Fight Club, Brad Pitt is not actually a person. He is your alter ego.

**John:** That would also maybe play into the third version which is the Reversal of Perception. And Reversal of Perception is the way you thought the universe was built is not the way the universe is actually built. And so there’s a fundamental thing that is not the way you thought it was. My movie, The Nines, has that aspect where quite early on in the film you realize something bigger is going on. And so it’s not a twist in the sense of like, oh my gosh, I didn’t expect that at all. But you know that there is a revelation coming, that the universe is bent in a way that you were not expecting.

**Craig:** Yeah, the universe is a bent in a way or time is being bent in a way. So Alec cites An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge which is an amazing short story by the great Ambrose Bierce and was clearly the inspiration for Jacob’s Ladder in which it turns out the entire movie is the fantasy of someone as they are dying.

**John:** Yeah. And short stories are actually a perfect place for twist endings to happen because in some ways, a novel, a twist at the end of a novel could feel like a bit of a betrayal. But a short story, you have just the right amount of investment in the reality of the short story that the twist ending feels great and rewarding. Where I would wonder in a novel sometimes you spent eight hours on this thing and like then to say like, oh, I’m going to pull the rug out from under you, it might feel like a betrayal.

**Craig:** No question. Twist endings have always been the stock and trade of science fiction and fantasy short story authors. In part, it works so well for short stories because a good twist makes sense of some confusing facts. And we can only bear to be confused for so long before we just give up. So short stories work beautifully for that.

One of the other twist endings he identifies is the Reversal of Motive.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I thought he was after this but he’s really after that. So he cites Seven where we realize in the end the serial killer isn’t actually helping them. He’s setting up Brad Pitt to become, Brad Pitt and Brad Pitt’s wife to become his final two victims.

**John:** Obviously reversal of motive is often found in comedies also where you have a misunderstanding of what a character is trying to do and that’s sort of driving things. So in Go, in the third section of Go, Burke and his wife, they seemed to be trying to seduce Adam and Zack like some weird kinky sex thing is about to happen and it’s revealed that they’re actually trying to sell them confederated products.

So their motive was very different and that was the surprise. That’s the jolt that you weren’t expecting. And part of what was fun about that is it was a good misdirect. So like, oh, that’s the twist and then the next scene, you’re going to see that they’re actually, Adam and Zack were a gay couple this whole time and they’ve been fighting.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So sometimes you can misdirect twice or like you can lead the audience into one misdirection and then surprise them with a second misdirection.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. And some of these things overlap. You know what just popped into my mind is that great character from Monsters, Inc. I can’t remember her name but she’s the one who talks —

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** And she is both the reversal of identity and the reversal of motive. It turns out that she’s actually there under cover and she’s not a file clerk. “You forgot to file your paperwork.” But she’s the head of some sort of internal investigation and that was her motive. So those things always, you’re right, they work well in comedies.

And here he also has Reversal of Fortune in which, this one was a little, I guess it’s kind of a twist ending. It’s really more of the kind of Monkey’s Paw theory — what you thought you were going to get you’re not quite getting.

**John:** Exactly. So it’s pulling defeat out of victory or that thing that at the very end you realize like, oh, you actually didn’t get what you wanted. He cites someone we talked about before on the podcast, Emma Coats from Pixar who writes, “Coincidences to get characters into trouble are great; coincidences to get them out of it are cheating”. And so this is basically there’s a coincidence often at the end that ends up pulling the rug out from underneath that character. And that can be rewarding in the right kind of movie. I think of noir movies sometimes having this or certainly like that Twilight Zone kind of fiction —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** May have that like suddenly at the end the great and short version where he finally has time to read and then he breaks his glasses.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is the hallmark of the ironic ending.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** One of my favorite Simpsons jokes was a Halloween episode. Homer eats the forbidden donut. He sells his soul for a donut, doesn’t finish it. [laughs] So he doesn’t have to go to hell but then he does finish it and he ends up in hell and he’s sent to the Department of Ironic Punishment —

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Where he’s put on a conveyor belt and —

**John:** And force fed doughnuts.

**Craig:** Force fed doughnuts except that he never stops eating the doughnuts. He’s perfectly happy to eat as many doughnuts as they give him. And the demon says, “I don’t understand. James Coco broke in 15 minutes!”

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Anyway, this would be the Department of Ironic Punishment.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And then we have Reversal of Fulfillment.

**John:** Which I found the most challenging of the ones he describes and how you differentiate that from reversal of fortune.

**Craig:** Yeah. And so what he’s saying is, somebody is going to achieve is kind of subverted by what somebody else achieves. And I think the best example he gives is the gifts, O. Henry’s Gift of the Magi where two people individually sell their most beloved possession to sacrifice for the other and then find out that they’ve done this.

**John:** Well, it’s not only that they’ve done this, but like one of them has bought a comb, but she’s sold all her hair.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The gifts are now useless for each other. So that was, yeah, that works. Again, it’s a little bit of an ironic. That sort of kind of is also —

**John:** It’s ironic too.

**Craig:** It’s a reversal of fortune in a sense too.

**John:** Yeah. What I think is important about all these discussions about the twist ending is it’s really looking at what does the reader know? What does the reader know at every moment in the course of the story? Because in order to create one of these twist endings to make sense, the entire narrative has to make sense without the twist. And so that the journey you’re going on seems to make sense. And then when you provide the twist ending the reader needs to be able to go back and say, “Oh, it still completely makes sense with this new information.”

So you’re withholding a crucial piece of information and then at the end providing it and that changes the perception of everything that came before it. And that could be a rewarding experience for the reader. It can also be a very frustrating experience for a reader. And if that’s kind of the only thing you’re story has going for it, it’s unlikely I think to be completely satisfying.

**Craig:** That’s right. You don’t want to start and I think you can see the problem in the progression of the career of M. Night Shyamalan. You don’t want to start with this edict that the twist rules all.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** It does not. The script that I’m writing now is essentially a neo-Agatha Christie Who Dun It? All Agatha Christie stories had a twist ending, all of them, because the person that you thought did it wasn’t the one who did it and you never could figure out who did it and then you find out. And she used these reversals of identity and motive all the time.

Interestingly, never a reversal of perception, a reversal of fortune or fulfillment. It was always the motive and the identity were the things that were constantly shifting with her. And what’s so interesting about her success as a writer was that she understood that her audience knew it was coming. And that’s quite a high wire act to do when you, it’s not like — we all went and saw The Sixth Sense. I did not- I wasn’t sitting there thinking I wonder what the twist is. I just watched the movie and enjoyed the twist. But no one sits down to an Agatha Christie book and thinks, well… [laughs]

**John:** Well, this is going to be straightforward. I am going to know who did it.

**Craig:** Just like, yeah, it’s like a true crime story or something.

**John:** And so it’s sort of there’s a meta level of expectation is that she has to write the story knowing that everybody is expecting there to be a twist ending.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So therefore, everyone is going to be reading everything she writes into it with the expectation of like, oh, but that’s not really true. And so she has to both honor that expectation and then surpass it in ways that continue to be rewarding and surprising. And so that’s a challenging thing.

What the frustration would be is if Agatha Christie ever tried to write just like a straight story, something that didn’t have that at all, everyone would be a little bit weirded out by it. I could imagine her writing under pen names because anything with the Agatha Christie brand on it is going to feel like, well, that has to be that situation. M. Night Shyamalan has a similar kind of jinx to him because three times is certainly a pattern.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. No, for sure. I mean, and frankly it started to feel a little desperate. I mean we don’t want to feel like our filmmakers are sweating to cook us the meal that they think we want. We want them to be expressing something competently and then we can enjoy it along with them.

By the way, Agatha Christie’s first big hit novel was called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. I think it was called The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. And at that time, she was a new member of this Mystery Writers of England organization. That’s not the real name, but it was essentially that. And this caused a huge uproar with the mystery writers organization because they felt she had violated the rules of the craft.

Because the twist in the, and so The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a first person account. A guy is living in this little town and Hercule Poirot is renting the house next to him and he describes how a man is murdered and Poirot goes about attempting to solve the crime. And at the end, spoiler alert, it turns out the murderer is the narrator.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And everyone just lost their crap over this. But boy, it really works in the novel. It’s great.

**John:** Yeah, we like that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** In many ways, I think that kind of reversal of expectation, that’s a reversal of the form in a certain way. Like you thought this was going to play by the rules and it’s not playing by the rules at all. And I certainly love that when that happens.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes, yes, yes.

**John:** It reminds me of Too Many Cooks. I don’t know if you’ve seen Too Many Cooks yet.

**Craig:** Well, it’s my One Cool Thing.

**John:** Oh my god. And so Too Many Cooks is fantastic. And so I will let it remain your One Cool Thing. But I think that also reverses the form. You have an expectation of like, oh, I know what this is, I know what it’s parodying.

**Craig:** Repeatedly. [laughs]

**John:** Repeatedly. And then it just through its length and its form and just how nuts it goes, it becomes something really transcendent.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** All right. I want to talk about two other little Internet things that came up this week. First is Alex from Target. Do you know this whole meme, this thing that happened?

**Craig:** I do. And I have to say, this is where the Internet just occasionally pukes something out. It just randomly decides you — I’m going to make you a star.

**John:** So Alex from Target for people who weren’t aware of it or who are listening to this six months later and wonder what the hell was that? So this is what happened with Alex from Target. There was a teenage checkout boy at Target, someone took a picture of him bagging groceries and another girl on Twitter wrote, “Yo, like so hot.” And that became like a viral meme sensation and then it got remixed and it just became this whole big blowup of a thing.

But then another company, a marketing company, claimed credit for having started it, but it looks like they really didn’t, which is juts nuts also.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If someone can try to jump on and claim credit for something they didn’t do at all. But it’s just so obvious we check that they didn’t really do it. So it was just a fascinating moment of kind of these Internet lightning strikes where this is not a person who, this Alex from Target, he didn’t do anything.

**Craig:** He did nothing.

**John:** He was just, he did nothing. He was just suddenly in a place and his photo went crazy and by all accounts, at the time that we’re taping this, he seems to be handling it remarkably well in the way that I think young people now who’ve always grown up with the Internet are sort of just kind of ready to be famous in a way that we never were. [laughs]

There’s that expectation like you could be famous tomorrow.

**Craig:** Well, also, I mean Alex understands inherently that he didn’t do anything. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, exactly.

**Craig:** I mean, there are people that want to be famous and start doing things to be famous and then they become famous either because what they do is legitimately good or it’s legitimately terrible.

**John:** Or it’s ambiguous in a way that’s, yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. Or it’s just bizarre or amusing, whatever it is. Alex literally did nothing. [laughs] He did absolutely nothing. This is one of those, this is like when there’s a glitch in the matrix and this happens.

And I think for him I can only assume that he’s like, yeah, this is just the Internet being Internet. I don’t have anything to do with this. It could have been me, it could have been anybody.

**John:** Basically, all he did was reflect light. And that was the extent of it.

**Craig:** Literally, all he did, it’s not even a well-framed photo.

**John:** No, I think that’s partly what makes it so incredibly great and charming. So I wanted to just take a minute or two to talk through what the Alex from Target movie would be, because I guarantee you that at least a thousand screenwriters go like, oh, that’s an idea for a movie. Like what if you suddenly became famous and like for no good reason. And I wanted to think about sort of what that movie would be because we’ve made other movies, good movies, about sort of the rise of Internet culture. I mean, Social Network, one of the best of them.

And I guess in Social Network of course, he’s creating Facebook, he’s actually doing something. But that sense of being plucked from obscurity and put up on this great stage and suddenly weirdly having a platform when you kind of shouldn’t have a platform is fascinating. And there’s potential there’s something to be made there but there’s also so many pitfalls in a character who has and wants nothing and suddenly gets everything.

**Craig:** Well, one of my favorite movies of all time is the old school version of this and it’s Being There.

**John:** Oh, certainly.

**Craig:** Yeah, and I think that I could easily see an Alex from Target’s version of Being There. If you were to make Being There now, that’s probably how it would go. Somebody is bagging, I mean, I don’t mean to suggest that Alex from Target is mentally challenged in any way [laughs] the way that Chauncey Gardiner was.

But somebody who’s unremarkable and perhaps even sub-remarkable becomes famous because the Internet has a weird burp and they end up being the president.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, it could totally happen.

**Craig:** It could happen.

**John:** Yeah. So I think there will likely be competing Alex from Target movies in development. And I suspect none of them will happen. But I suspect we will see this idea in general explored not because of Alex from Target but just because it’s an idea that sort of needs to be talked about in the universe is this sense of suddenly out of nowhere you can just have this giant spotlight on you and you have no way of anticipating it, controlling it, making it start, making it stop.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that’s a weird time that we’re living in.

**Craig:** Yeah, and somebody out there is pitching Jimmy from Taco Hut.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And probably selling it.

**John:** Yeah, probably.

**Craig:** Yeah. Probably.

**John:** Low six figures, yeah.

**Craig:** Low six.

**John:** Low six. The management company is involved as a producer, they shopped it around.

**Craig:** Right. The studio is, even though they haven’t gotten the script yet, they’re already thinking about who’s going to come and rewrite it.

**John:** Yeah, they are. And they’re probably going after like some of the Teen Wolf cast like Dylan O’Brien or somebody like kind of person for that role.

**Craig:** Totally.

**John:** Totally. So in a related thing, this was already on my show notes to talk about, is this great talk that Darius Kazemi did at XOXO, this sort of, I’ll summarize and say it’s a sort of TED Talk like, but his speech was actually really fascinating because it was like the most brilliant parody of a TED Talk speech. And so I’ll link to it in the show notes, but essentially he talks about how he made it. And we’ve heard a lot of speeches about how people made it and sort of how they became successful and how they built a community.

So what he did was he played the lottery. And he would, every day he would play the lottery and really think about what numbers and he started a community and he started like a blog where like he talked about his favorite numbers and like he’d mix it up and like played numbers in different combinations or sometimes like on his mom’s birthday he’d actually play his dad’s birthday to really throw things off. And eventually like he hit it and he became like super rich.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so it’s this brilliant parody of like how I made it but what’s so great about his speech is he actually segues into this idea of lotteries and this idea of lighting striking. And he’s a person who, this guy in real life, he makes sort of little Internet memes. And so he makes this little Twitter bots that combine random things. And so he gave a demonstration of like 50 of these different things that he’s made and combined.

And some of them are incredibly successful and some of them aren’t incredibly successful. And he can’t predict what goes viral. And his suspicion is that there is no reason. That it genuinely is just random, like Alex from Target, and that you cannot funnily predict it and shouldn’t therefore beat yourself up if something doesn’t work and you shouldn’t praise yourself when something does work because it kind of is random.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, look, there are way, there is good work and bad work. There are ways to do better and there are ways to do worse. But the magic that occurs when something takes off is unpredictable and does incorporate an enormous amount of random factors.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And that fascinates me. I talked a while ago, one of my Cool Things was Gödel, Escher, Bach, which is a great book, which I think is —

**John:** Which I bought, which I —

**Craig:** Wait, I sent it to you.

**John:** No, you sent it to me.

**Craig:** I sent it you.

**John:** You sent it to me. You sent me the physical thing. It’s like 1,000 pages.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s a massively long book. But Gödel was a mathematician and his — and I always worry that I’m not quite getting his theorem correct, but I believe this is essentially what he said was for any system of math with rules, there will always be things that are true that cannot be proven. There must be things that you can’t — that are true regardless of the fact that you can’t prove that they’re true which is fascinating to me. And I feel like entertainment is the same way. There will always be things that are good and there’s no way to prove why. And you could have never gotten to them intentionally. They just happen.

**John:** Yeah. I think that absolutely is true. What is interesting about this idea of lightning strikes or lottery tickets is that in a weird way you’re more likely to win the more things you do. And so I would say for people who are looking at a writing career or like trying to get into the movie business, the more times you’re at bat, the more likely you are to hit a home run.

And so you’re much less likely to sell a spec script if you’ve written exactly one script and you’ve shown it to one person. So that exposure to many opportunities and taking many chances is much more likely to get you into a situation where you can suddenly find yourself lucky.

**Craig:** Yeah, you have to strike the balance of course because there are people that shotgun a lot of things out there. One of them happens to click, but that’s the end of them because really their success was a product of nothing more than the shot-gunning.

When they talk about animal behavior, they talk about two reproductive strategies. I can’t remember, they’re defined by letters. But regardless, one of them essentially is a low quantity, high quality reproductive strategy which is a very human way of approaching it. Elephants do it this way.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It takes a lot to have a child, so therefore you’re going to have fewer of them, but really put a lot of resources into protecting them and raising them. And then there’s the other way which is, screw it, I’m going to have as many kids as possible and then a bunch of them are going to die but maybe a bunch won’t. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And what you find, actually, even in humans, is that when humans are in situations where there is plenty, they will go for the low-quantity, high-quality reproductive strategy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And vice versa.

**John:** The other thing which I think the lightning strikes theorem kind of misses is, especially in creative work, is iteration, in that sense of like, you know what, that first thing may not be the right idea, but by going back and tweaking it and tweaking it and tweaking it and tweaking it, that’s sort of how you find what is the thing that takes hold. And, you know, with all the sort of Twitterbots this guy did, that’s not really iteration, it’s a bunch of like things moving in parallel versus sort of serially going back through and seeing like, what, how can I make this thing better? How can I take the system and tweak it and make it better, and how can I make that experience better.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so, in rewriting a script, that’s iteration. That’s taking feedback and looking at the script again and saying like, okay, this is the better version of this. And you’re honestly iterating on your own ability to write because I’m certainly a better writer than I was 10 years ago because I’ve had the experience of looking at my work and saying, okay, these are strengths, these are things that are not strengths, and I can actually do things better through all that iteration process.

**Craig:** And for those of us who are making movies, our goal is to make something that is permanent. We don’t always succeed, but we try. Whereas when you’re doing pursuits like the kind that Darius is doing, there is no expectation of permanency.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What you’re hoping for really is a combustion, you know.

**John:** That’s true.

**Craig:** But everybody knows that when the combustion consumes the fuel it’s gone. I mean, there’s no chance that a meme will last forever. You know, Grumpy Cat will not be popular 10 years from now.

**John:** Yes. And so, we can love Grumpy Cat now, we can celebrate its impermanence.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** But we can’t try to emulate its impermanence. We can’t try to like, to make the next Grumpy Cat. That’s probably not the right idea. We should try to make the next amazing thing. And the next amazing thing could end up blowing up like Grumpy Cat or could be a long slow burn that is remembered 10 years from now.

**Craig:** Yes, yes. But when you’re trying to make things that are permanent the high-quantity approach often will bite you in the butt.

**John:** I would agree. Let’s take a look at some questions.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So the first one I have here is Jason from White Rock, British Columbia who has a location question. “How specific can you place action in the real world? Can you really place a scene on a specific street in a specific town with perhaps even a specific address? I’m a suburban Vancouver-based filmmaker, and we Vancouverites don’t have a lot of experience watching movies that are actually set in Vancouver. Mostly our city serves as a stand-in for other American towns. I probably know as much about the way addresses work in New York as I do about Vancouver itself. So when addresses are needed in your script, how specific can you make them?”

**Craig:** Well, yes, you can make the address as specific as you want. Generally speaking, it should be as specific as it needs to be.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s no point in saying that the building is 35 West 56th Street if you can say, well, it’s a building, you know, Midtown, you could say, or corner of 56th and 5th. But, you know, if you’re telling the story where the address becomes a matter of importance, for instance it’s a crime story and someone has lied about where they live, sure. Well then, that makes sense, yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Put the specific address in.

**John:** Yeah, I think Craig and I are generally always pushing for specificity. And specificity doesn’t necessarily mean the street address, but it’s describing things in the kind of detail that makes it this house versus that house and lets us know the kinds of people who live in this house versus the kinds of people who live in that house. And so really think about what information will help your reader understand what is unique and special about these characters and their world.

And if that means really nailing down to what that street is like, great, tell us the street, but also make sure you’re giving us words that describe what that street feels like so, because we’re not going to know this. Don’t just put in a link to Google Street View, like really describe the street.

**Craig:** Yeah. What we want to know really is about people more than anything. So places exist for people to be in and we need to know what that place says about the people that are there. So, yeah, be specific, but don’t be over-specific. If the detail adds nothing for the reader it’s probably dispensable.

**John:** It is. So anything that provides feelings, sentiment, emotional detail, that’s what you want.

**Craig:** Right. Okay, well, next question is Matt from LA. And he asks, “After a long time toiling in the entertainment industry, I’ve been lucky enough to make the leap into fulltime writing and directing. As a freelancer I’ve been very busy and I’ve taken every single job that’s been offered. Now, they may not be the best projects but I’ve learned a ton and I’ve always felt good about the decision to take the job. But I foresee a near future where the various companies that have been offering me jobs will present something I don’t think is worth my time or the paycheck. As two very successful writers — ”

**John:** Ah…

**Craig:** “Very successful writers, I’m sure you’re offered projects that you feel compelled to turn down by reputable studios.” I think he means I’m sure you’re offered projects by reputable studios that you feel compelled to turn down. “How do you turn down opportunities without souring relationships? Any tips would be greatly appreciated.”

**John:** That’s a really good question.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that happens a fair amount, I’m sure, I mean, to both of us. And so someone will send us something and say like, hey, we’d love you to do this thing. And I will read it, and I’ll say I don’t want to do this. And so how do you answer back in a way that doesn’t make you sound like a jerk saying like that’s a stupid movie, I don’t want to make it, but also doesn’t leave you on the hook for trying to write this movie for these people?

**Craig:** Yeah. There are a couple of reasons why you’re not going to want to do something. You either think it’s dumb or just not your thing, or you think this isn’t, it’s just not something that I want to do or that I think I could add something great to or that I could succeed with. What you want to do is always turn down things with that second reason, [laughs] even if they’re not always that second reason.

**John:** [laughs] Exactly.

**Craig:** Nobody minds if you say, listen, this is very cool, it’s not quite — I’m not quite sure what I could bring to it or it’s not quite what I’m looking for right now. John Lee Hancock has a great phrase, “This isn’t a pitch I can hit.”

**John:** Ah, nice.

**Craig:** You know, like so I’m putting it on me. I will often say, you know, it’s probably not something that I think I could succeed with, but I look forward to being embarrassed when this thing wins an Oscar for somebody else.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** So, you know, I try and be humble about it. I mean, people are offering you things, you should be polite. But, you know, they’re not unaccustomed to this.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Just as we are not unaccustomed to hearing no.

**John:** And that’s absolutely true. And so, often what I will say is truthfully I am too busy, so like, maybe I’m just not actually available to do it, and that could be a completely valid way to get out of something. The danger is sometimes they can come back to you with that same thing when it becomes clear that you are more available. Or they’ll say, we’ll wait. I’m like oh god, now I actually have to explain why I really don’t want to do it.

The other thing that I will say, which is often true, is that someone will come to me with a project and I’ll say, you know what, this is actually kind of like something I already planned to do myself. And so I sort of have my own version of what this kind of thing is, and yours is going to be great, but I sort of want to do mine at a certain point.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s another way to approach it. So from you, as a writer-director, Matt, I would say, always say thank you. Make it clear that you really did really look at it, that you’re not just dismissing it out of hand, that you don’t want to work for those people. Just say like I didn’t spark to it. It didn’t feel like it was my thing, but I’m excited to work with you in the future. And if you mean that, then they will come back to you with more stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah. By the way, something that I will often do is I’ll say, after I’ve said no, I’ll say by the way, I really like this. For this part, think about this. I’m just saying like here’s just some thoughts in general. It doesn’t cost me anything and it shows that I wasn’t just being a jerk.

**John:** Exactly. And you may actually have a suggestion of like a person who is the right person for it. And so that’s always a good thing, too, if you can get someone else who would be fantastic for it involved.

**Craig:** Great point, great point.

**John:** Jay writes, “Can you go over the correct format for writing different scenes in the same room? For example, a bar where protagonists split up and do battle separately but in the same room. Do I still separate each scene with slug lines? If so, how should it look since they’re in the same master scene location? If not, can you give an example to how you would phrase this?”

**Craig:** Okay. Well, I personally wouldn’t do separate slug lines here. The slug line ultimately is a tool for the production to know where they’re shooting this thing. And if it’s all in one room, they’re shooting it all in one room.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What you can do is, say something like OVER BY THE BAR, you know, in all caps, and then write some of that and then say OVER BY THE ENTRANCE and then some of that, you know, so that people will understand that the camera is picking off two different areas of the same room.

**John:** Yeah. So what Craig is describing is often called the intermediary slug line. So it’s not an EXT/INT. And you’re not changing going from a new, it’s not a new scene, it’s just like a new part of where you are at in a scene.

And you’ll see that a lot. And as you read more scripts, especially action things, you’ll see that happens a lot, when you’re in sort of the same general space but there’s sort of scene-lets happening. There’s moments happening over here, and there’s moments happening over here, and sometimes characters — you need to make it clear that characters are not in the same space and can’t interact, because they’re in different parts of an environment. That’s totally fine.

I would say, in general, as I read scripts from newer screenwriters, they tend to throw in too many slug lines and make things seem like there’s too many scenes. And a lot of like “same, continuous” they get so freaked out by the format, and sort of like moving through a house takes like three pages because there’s so many slug line.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s not how it really works in the real world. If you’re in a house and the character is moving through space, let them move through space and don’t worry about each little new location.

**Craig:** Well, it’s just in part it’s the toxic impact of all these know nothing scripted advisers and so forth who fetishize the rules and put the fear of god into these poor people that their script is going to be thrown out if a slug line is misused. It’s absolute nonsense. The screenplay is there to inspire a movie in the reader’s mind and that’s what you should be aiming for. Don’t panic over things like “this is the way the slug line has to be!”

**John:** Yeah. Or that it should say “same” rather than “continuous.” It’s like no, it doesn’t need to be either of that. You probably don’t even need the slug line.

**Craig:** It’s just crazy.

**John:** In general I’d say like save those scene headers. Let’s really call them scene headers because it’s a header for a scene. The movie has moved to a new place and time in general and if you really haven’t moved to a new place and time but you’ve just like moved to a slightly different part of the room, just keep going and just let us be in that place.

**Craig:** I mean, there are times when you need a different slug because it’s the same time but you have two people in the bar and then at the same time behind the bar outside two guys are climbing in through the rear window.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** You know, people need to know, okay, it’s a cheat to not kind of call out that you’ve made a big location change, because again, it’s really, it’s for the production. I mean, that’s what it’s there for. Frankly, readers tend to glide through these scene headers. It’s not the stuff that our eyeballs snag on, so.

**John:** I think, honestly, I doubt, most times as a reader I’m not really reading those, I’m just aware that there was and INT and EXT and it was all upper case and so therefore, okay, I’m in a new scene.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So it’s a sort of piece of visual punctuation that lets me know that, okay, I’m in someplace new, and I’m going to figure it out once I start reading it.

**Craig:** Precisely. All right. Well, we’ve got a question here from Jim from Durham, North Carolina. And he writes, “My question concerns use of paragraph breaks in a block of dialogue.” All right, we’re in the format session of our Q&A?

**John:** We are.

**Craig:** “Admittedly, in most scenes, there’s a lot of back and forth, so it’s not common that a character goes on for half a page, but it can happen. My natural instinct when writing a long speech like that is to use normal paragraph breaks, a blank line. However, I was chastised for doing this. In fact, I was told by a person who seems to know all the rules that I had to put, in parentheses, beat, between each paragraph. I didn’t really intend for a pause any longer than the normal speaking pace, I was just trying to make it more readable and less run-on. ”

Well, there wasn’t a specific question there but I think that the implied question is who’s right? [laughs]

**John:** Who’s right? Can you put that blank line in a long speech?

**Craig:** Yeah. What do you say?

**John:** I think you can. But I would agree with whoever said that it’s not standard and that it does sort of throw you because we’re not used to seeing it. And if I were to encounter that in a script I might wonder is this a mistake, did something get dropped out, is there something wrong, because I’m used to seeing a continuous block of dialogue being a continuous block. And if it’s broken up by anything, it’s broken up by beat or something else.

**Craig:** I agree. I mean, the problem isn’t that you’re putting the break in there, the problem is that the reader might presume that something went wrong and obviously that’s not what you intend. Beat is a perfectly good way to break these things up. Most people don’t read beat as long pause. If I want a long pause I’ll write in “long pause.”

However, I have to also say, if you don’t intend for any pauses or anything and it’s a half a page of a speech, try it without the pauses. I mean, just write the half a page. I’ll tell you this much, if it’s a half a page speech, better be a damn good speech. But if it’s a damn good speech, I’ll read it.

**John:** And you have other options rather than just beat and for that parenthetical. And there may be some good reason why there’s sort of a special moment of action or emphasis that it makes sense, like sort of like in the parenthetical, you might say like, you know, (to Jim) or like (straight down the barrel), or like some kind of a color line that you’re putting in that parenthetical that actually helps make the speech make more sense, and it’s also visually breaking it up. I think Jim’s overall instincts, like oh my god, this is going to be a very long block of dialogue if I don’t break it up, that’s the right instinct.

**Craig:** It is.

**John:** I would just that overall a use of a parenthetical or honestly just breaking out in speech to put it in a line of scene description and then going back into the dialogue is generally a better approach.

**Craig:** I agree, I agree. It’s a good instinct to break it up unless you’ve got something that really works best as a kind of spat-out run-on deal.

**John:** Yeah. So Clarence, from Canada, asks a marathon question.

**Craig:** [laughs] This needed to be broken up by beats.

**John:** Yes. So it’s in little bullet points in WorkFlowy here. So I’m going to read this and it’s going to be kind of long, but I think it’s interesting, so I’m going to get into this here.

“Two years ago, I wrote, directed, produced my second feature film with a meager budget of $7,000. It was solely financed by me and my own production company. I had screened it at a film festival in Los Angeles and was fortunate enough to be able to attend. Before arriving in Los Angeles, I got in touch with a handful of sales agents that the festival announced would be in attendance.

“I met with those three who were interested in representing the movie for international and domestic distribution. Two wanted to make changes to the cut, so I went with the one that didn’t.”

**Craig:** Act one.

**John:** “The deal was this. The company would own the distribution rights for my movie forever and ever. And they would work hard to sell the movie to territories worldwide because otherwise they wouldn’t make any money either. They had a number of other movies under their belt that range in size from no budget like mine, to about the $1 million range.”

**Craig:** Midpoint.

**John:** “Since its initial release on VOD and DVD in North America last year, it has also been released in 30 countries. But here’s the thing, I haven’t made that much money. It’s not necessarily the number that bothers me, it’s still a huge return on a $7,000 investment. What bothers me is that my sales agent has made much more than I have, about a 60/40 split. They take a 22% commission right off the top of each sale, and they recoup $20,000 they invested into marketing, like poster design, travel to film markets, et cetera. What’s left is mine. Unless the film reaches $100,000 in sales, then they recoup $15,000 additional marketing expenses. The movie has pushed past the $100,000 mark, and most markets have now been sold, giving a little room for much more income to trickle my way.”

**Craig:** Denouement.

**John:** “So finally, my question, is it normal for a sales agent or potentially distributor to make more money than the production company that actually made the movie? Not to mention put up the cash in the first place? Is this just the cost of doing business?”

**Craig:** Okay, so let’s summarize this Cecil B. DeMille production of a question. So he’s made a micro budget movie for $7,000. He has some sales agents that have sold it on VOD and DVD, and basically he’s not getting as much money back from the sales as they are.

The movie has grossed, I think is what he means, pushed past gross $100,000. There’s not much more that he thinks is coming towards him. So while he’s made some money here, it’s not what he was hoping.

Yes, this is normal. And here’s the problem. When you’re in this micro budget business, and you’re having an independent sales agent going out there and slinging this thing around, you are essentially, it’s like the pink sheets in the stock market. You’re penny-stocking it, you know?

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And so there’s this enormous built-in risk to these things. Some of these deals, the fact that the movie cost you $7,000 doesn’t mean anything to them. What they’re worried about is that they have to spend in this case, $20,000 to actually market and distribute this thing.

That $20,000 is at enormous risk. So the only way for them to make money is to build in the failures into the successes. And unfortunately, you’re not just paying them for what they did for your movie, you’re paying them for what they did for other movies that lost everything.

**John:** Yes. They’re sort of building a slate after the fact. They’re gathering up a bunch of movies. And in some ways it reminds me of sort of like the housing crisis where they packaged up a bunch of mortgages, and like put them into different bins and sort of like, you know, marketed them as one thing.

They probably were able to cut deals with VOD places and other stuff for like a whole big bundle of things. And yours was one of those bundle of things. And I think it’s unlikely that you’re going to see a huge windfall from that sort of situation.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Here’s the good news for Clarence though, like he made a $7,000 movie which got released on VOD and DVD. That is full of win.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And I think you have to take that as a victory. And the fact that your movie exists in the universe, is a really good thing especially if you like your movie. That’s a really good thing. Many, many filmmakers, Lena Dunham’s first films never had that kind of release, so you’re ahead of her from that perspective.

I wouldn’t stress out about this. I would kind of forget about this movie, this distributor. Work on your next thing, and then if you have a thing that has multiple people who want to distribute it, take a stronger look at sort of what those terms are and if there’s a possibility for better terms with a better person, maybe that will be the case.

**Craig:** Yes. Michael Eisner once famously said of negotiating for deals, “You can get what you can get.” And this is what you’re able to get.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So when you roll with these kinds of guys that are doing these high risk investments, yes, this is the way it works. There’s just no way around it. But John is absolutely right, the victory here is that you made the movie, people saw it, now it’s time to trade up and see if you can get into business with some people that aren’t necessarily in the, what my grandmother would call the schmatta business. John, that’s Yiddish for low quality clothing.

**John:** Ah-ha, I learned something today.

**Craig:** You learned something. Patrick in good old Blighty writes, “If I’m a British writer, writing a US-based script, most likely targeting a US production company or agent, should I be taking measures to alter my language and spelling accordingly? Hopefully, the dialogue should read as authentic to the setting. But should I be writing mom and not mum even if it’s against my nature? Would this freak an American reader out? Or would be people be able to accept the British-isms if it’s not affecting the story?

“I want to be able to write the script the way I feel comfortable. And I would feel as if I’m being inauthentic or misrepresenting myself as a writer by trying to remove or hide part of my identity from it, but I’m also worried at the same time it will be jarring, or take people out of the script. So what do you think I should do?”

**John:** You should absolutely not write mum instead of mom particularly in dialogue. Anything a character says needs to be written in the way that the character would actually say it. I mean, not going crazy into sort of like regionalisms or colloquialisms or trying to describe specific dialects accurately, but you don’t say mum instead of mom if it’s an American kid. That’s just not going to be natural. I wouldn’t worry about sort of every last little spelling. That’s fine. If it’s spelling in scene description, that’s going to be fine, but the big words, the words that are actually going to be said, those have to be American words if this is going to be a US production.

**Craig:** 100%. This is a slam dunk answer here. It’s not you, you’re not saying these things. You’re writing a screenplay with American characters, they have to speak as American people would speak. I’m on my second script in a row that is primarily populated by British characters. They speak like British people. What I don’t do is, for instance, if it’s a word that has a different spelling but the same pronunciation, I don’t go that far.

**John:** So honor, color, valor.

**Craig:** Precisely. If someone is going to say color, I just write it C-O-L-O-R. But I certainly, I take very careful, pay very careful attention to not use words that they simply don’t use over there. I mean, specifically if it’s in dialogue. For instance, in Britain, dumpsters aren’t called dumpsters. So I’m not going to have a character say dumpster. I’m not going to have an English character say dumpster.

This is an easy one, Patrick. Go ahead and write them however you want when people aren’t talking, but when the characters are talking, they have to talk like the people that they are.

**John:** Yes. John in Orlando writes, “I’m an attorney and screenwriter who is in Florida. I have a good friend who happens to be childhood best friends with a major showrunner you both surely know.

Oh, now I have to think of who this could be.

“We have hung out in social situations, but I’ve never revealed that I write scripts. I really hate to be ‘that guy,'” in quotes, “lest it change the social dynamic between the three of us, but I would like to at least pick his brain about some things. My dream would be to have a project gain traction first, and then mention it, but I feel this guy probably knows a ton that could help me at this point. Any advice for broaching this subject? This must happen to you with friends of friends who want advice.”

**Craig:** Yeah, it does happen with friends of friends who want advice. I think what nobody wants to hear is read my script because they already have scripts they have to read. There’s legal issues with reading a script, and so on and so forth, and of course, what’s hanging over it more than anything, is that they don’t want to be in that terrible position of having to tell you that your script is atrocious.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** However, I don’t think it’s a problem if you’ve hung out with this guy in social situations and you live near him to say, “Hey, can I just buy you a drink or a cup of coffee, an hour of your time, no more, no less? I just want to ask you some questions.”

That’s an easy one for somebody to say yes to. Frankly, it’s also an easy one for somebody to say no to. If they say no, then you just let them off the hook and that’s the end of that. But if they say yes, at least then you get them there. And if your concept comes up in the discussion and they get really excited by it, then they’ll ask you if they want to read it.

**John:** Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I think broaching it in a way that is sort of both direct but also not sort of confrontational, so like putting it in the context of like coffee or a drink is going to make things probably feel a little bit better. I’d be leery about having like someone else sort of broach the topic like having the wife call the wife or any of that stuff. That’s going to just be a mess. If there’s a friend of a friend and you are friends with this person, and it hasn’t come up yet, but it could come up, let that come up.

If it’s a situation which like you’re going to the Austin Film Festival and that comes up naturally in conversation, then clearly you are a screenwriter and they will know that you’re a screenwriter and that’s awesome.

**Craig:** Yeah, easy. All right. Here’s our last question, I think. Jawaad from Fort Lauderdale writes, “My question is about a recent fear I’ve been having about being trapped underground in a box.”

**John:** That’s not true.

**Craig:** No, I misread that, “About being trapped in one genre.” Sorry. I misread that word. [laughs]

“So my question is about a recent fear I’ve been having about being trapped in one genre. So far, I’ve been a comedy writer, I’m the head writer of my university’s sketch comedy show, done quite a bit of improv. However, lately I’m starting to realize that I may not love comedy as much as I initially thought. I realize with comedic features,” and he says here, “I just finished my first feature, a kids’ comedy and it’s definitely not as funny as it should be.”

All right. “There is a high expectation of laughs per minute and I’m not sure that’s the type of writing I ultimately want to be doing. Do you think there is an easy crossover for somebody who’s only done comedy to start writing dramas? I feel like sprinkling a little comedy into dramas would be an asset that would make my writing stand out.” John, what do you think?

**John:** So Jawaad is in college. He’s written one script and he’s worried about being pigeonholed.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s pretty awesome.

**John:** That’s actually crazy. And so, I put this question on here because I love it because it’s that sense of like I worry I’m going to be trapped in a genre having written one thing and being in a comedy troupe in college. That’s not how it works. If you had like a hit sitcom that ran for five years, then yes, you might be pigeonholed as a comedy person.

But you are at the start of your life. You can literally do anything. And so you should go off and write the drama if you think you’re a drama person. You are not trapped at all. The sense of being trapped is completely an illusion.

**Craig:** Yes. If a tree is pigeonholed in the forest and no one’s there to read it. Yeah, no, Jawaad, you are pre-pigeonhole, my friend. Nobody knows what you’ve written here, and it doesn’t matter. Your gut is telling you something, however, that is important and that’s you don’t want to write a certain kind of movie. You don’t want to write broad comedy, and you may not want to write comedy at all.

The fact that you maybe identify as a funny person or that you like writing sketch comedy, so you like writing comedy in sketch format as opposed to feature format, that doesn’t mean that that’s all you can be or all you should be. You should write the kind of movie you want to write. That’s really the only sort of movie that you are ever going to have success with anyway.

Sprinkling a little comedy into dramas is a good thing if that’s what the movie wants to have. I would not think in terms of assets. There’s a lot of calculation inherent to this question that I would advise you abandon.

**John:** Exactly. It’s always like, it’s trying to figure out like, well, what if I build this mansion and I don’t like the bathroom in this mansion that I build. It’s like, well, you don’t have a mansion yet, so like, stop building your mansion and actually like, you know, go to work. It’s one of those sort of like, what if I don’t —

**Craig:** It’s a Steve Martin joke. You know, how to not pay taxes on $1 million, step one, get $1 million. You’re not there. This is not something you should be worrying about. You have all the ability and time to write precisely what you want in the manner you want to write it.

**John:** I agree. Craig, it is time for One Cool Things.

**Craig:** One Cool Things.

**John:** My One Cool Thing is so short. It’s Tim and Susan Have Matching Handguns. It’s a documentary by Joe Callander. It is 1 minute and 47 seconds long. So I shouldn’t say too much about it because I could actually talk longer than the actual documentary is. But it’s just a perfect little gem that I just love. And it reminds me of like an Errol Morris film, but it’s 1:47. I loved it.

**Craig:** You had me at 1:47. I’ll be watching it as soon as we’re done recording. My One Cool Thing is the aforementioned too many Too Many Cooks by Chris “Casper” Kelly. So Chris Kelly, who goes by Casper Kelly because there are four billion Chris Kellys out there, he’s done a lot of shows on Adult Swim which is the Cartoon Network, I believe. And he did this thing that may be the greatest thing actually that anyone has ever done in an Internety way. This is the best of the Internet. If Alex from Target is the sort of most pointless of the Internet, this is the greatest.

Adult Swim has this thing where they do these infomercials which aren’t infomercials at all, but they fill in an 11 minute gap at 4am.

And so he floated this thing out there and lo and behold, a few days later, it is a sensation. And it truly is a sensation. We talked about subversion. The concept is a simple comic concept. We’re watching the opening credit sequence of what is sort of like a Full House sitcom. And the gag is that the song is super cheesy and everybody in it turns and looks at the camera and smiles when their name appears underneath them.

And you think, okay. And then the joke becomes, oh, there’s actually way more characters than there should be on the show like there’s like way too many characters and you think, okay, that’s a joke. But every 40 seconds, Chris Kelly says, “No, that’s not the joke. This is the joke.” And then, about seven minutes in, it’s not a joke anymore at all.

It’s actually something brilliant, and subversive and kind of existentially gorgeous. And where it ends is quite beautiful actually. Smarf, that’s all I say is Smarf.

**John:** Smarf. I’m going to watch it again because I’m not sure I got to the moment of existential beauty. I got to a moment of just tremendous appreciation for sort of just the ongoing genius of it. And to me, where it crossed over is there’s a moment where a young woman is hiding in the closet, and it’s one of the most sort of bizarrely brilliant little ideas. So I just loved it.

**Craig:** I think my mind went into a Nirvana space when the names rearranged themselves as people, and the people appeared as the names. That’s when I just thought Chris “Casper” Kelly, and really, I’ll just say this, why I love it so much is that this is truly a marriage of chaos and discipline.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** We typically just get chaos on the Internet. It’s easy to be weird on the Internet. Super easy, and there’s lots of it. But this was absolute madness within a structure that was so good. So anyway, it’s out there, by the time this airs it’ll probably be, everybody will be like, oh, we all know about Too Many Cooks, but if you don’t, my god, Too Many Cooks.

**John:** Check it out. So we will have a link to that in the show notes, and also there’s a piece I read in Entertainment Weekly this morning about an interview with him talking about sort of why he did what he did and how he did it. It was just remarkable.

You’ll find links to that in the show notes in addition to other things we talked about. You can find those at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. If you want to subscribe to Scriptnotes, you can join us on iTunes, and click subscribe there, you can also leave us a comment which is always lovely and helps us out.

If you want to listen to the back episodes, and also the special bonus episodes, we’ll have special things with the Three Page Challenge from Austin. We’ll have Simon Kinberg. Those are found at scriptnotes.net and you could subscribe there. It’s $1.99 a month, it gives you access to the whole back catalogue.

**Craig:** $1.99.

**John:** $1.99. Craig, we are super, super close to the 1,000 full-time premium subscribers, so we’re going to have to do that dirty episode and I’m so excited to do it.

**Craig:** You said you had a great idea. Do you want to say what it is?

**John:** I don’t because I’ve not reached out to that person yet.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Yes, but it’s a great idea.

**Craig:** Okay. Well, I trust you.

**John:** Well, I told you who the person was, right?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I did. Craig, your memory is failing. It’s a person who, I’ll tell you again after the show. But you said, I told you after the last show, you said oh my god, that’s a great idea.

**Craig:** Oh, really?

**John:** Yes. Wow, Craig. I’m sorry, maybe you should like have a medical professional because last week you asked about the whole Retina iMac and the display —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You said like you wanted to get the Retina display but without the iMac and I explained why. And I explained that I’d done it before.

**Craig:** Let me put your mind at ease. I have a 13-year old son. He’s destroying my mind. [laughs] It’s just him. It’s not medical. It’s just my son.

**John:** It’s not medical.

**Craig:** No, he’s just consuming me. He’s consuming my mind because I have to remember all of my stuff and all of his stuff.

**John:** Yes, it’s a burden.

**Craig:** Yes, huge burden.

**John:** If you would like to jog Craig’s memory, you can reach him @clmazin on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. If you have a long question like the ones we answered today, you can write it to ask@johnaugust.com.

If you want to get a Writer Emergency Pack, you can just go to writeremergency.com, that’s a link to the Kickstarter. There will also be a link in the show notes. Our show is edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did our outro this week, who also has a Kickstarter project, so back that.

Stuart Friedel is out sick today. He will be back next week.

**Craig:** Good, good. [laughs]

**John:** How do you dare say that?

**Craig:** I hope it’s fatal. [laughs]

**John:** Craig gets very mean late in the episode. This is the one where everyone turns again Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Exactly, I don’t know why. I think this is my new theme is that Stuart is bad.

**John:** Stuart is all things good.

**Craig:** I’m sorry, Stuart. But it’s, what if he’s dying?

**John:** Well, it could be Ebola.

**Craig:** Oh, sweet.

**John:** All my staff went and got their flu shots because the flu sucks and it’s much more likely that you’re going to have the flu than to get Ebola.

**Craig:** Slightly more likely, yes.

**John:** Just a little —

**Craig:** Just a touch.

**John:** Just a tiny bit, but I learned that everyone who works for me is afraid of needles.

**Craig:** Oh, what a bunch of babies.

**John:** I know. [laughs] Like it’s very rare that I run around with a needle and stab them.

**Craig:** Like what a bunch of, first of all, the flu shot, you don’t even feel that needle. It’s the tiniest, skinniest needle.

**John:** I know. And it’s so rare that I stab them. And for them to have this sort of, you know, instinctive reaction just because I’m running around with a needle is weird. [laughs]

**Craig:** Honestly, it’s so bizarre. Wait, you gave them flu shots?

**John:** Well yes. It kind of saves them money.

**Craig:** I like that you sit them down and just start injecting. No wonder Stuart is sick. It’s your latest concoction over there at Quote-Unquote.

**John:** I told them it was the flu serum.

**Craig:** Yes, it’s not Stuart.

**John:** You’ll never know.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** It’s not.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Craig, thank you for another fun episode.

**Craig:** Thank you, John.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* Tickets to the Scriptnotes Holiday show are on sale tomorrow at the [Writers Guild Foundation website](https://www.wgfoundation.org)
* Big Fish: The Musical is now playing [at Musical Theatre West in Long Beach](http://www.musical.org/MusicalTheatreWest/bigfish2014.html)
* [Writer Emergency Pack](http://writeremergency.com) is going strong [on Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/913409803/writer-emergency-pack-helping-writers-get-unstuck)
* [The Five Types of Twist Endings](http://alecworley.weebly.com/blog/the-five-types-of-twist-ending) by Alec Worley
* [Alex from Target](http://nymag.com/thecut/2014/11/alex-from-target-fame.html)
* [Darius Kazemi’s XOXO talk](http://boingboing.net/2014/10/28/every-artists-how-i-made-i.html)
* [Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0465026567/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Douglas R. Hofstadter
* Screenwriting.io on [intermediary slugs](http://screenwriting.io/what-is-a-slug/)
* [Tim and Susan Have Matching Handguns](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgrjhtbQlOQ) by Joe Callander
* [Too Many Cooks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrGrOK8oZG8) by Casper Kelly, and [his interview in Entertainment Weekly](http://popwatch.ew.com/2014/11/07/adult-swim-too-many-cooks/)
* Get premium Scriptnotes access at [scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/) and hear our 1,000th subscriber special
* [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/descending-into-darkness).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Uh….my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 169 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, it’s been far too long.

**Craig:** Been far too long.

**John:** You were not around last week. You were doing something else, so I had to do a podcast without you. I survived, but it’s good to have you back.

**Craig:** Well, thank you. I was at the wedding of excellent screenwriter Ted Griffin and remarkable Broadway performer and film and television performer, Sutton Foster. It was a beautiful wedding. Had a great time. But I did miss you. I missed Austin. I mean, I haven’t missed Austin in years. So, that was a bummer.

And then I wasn’t there to do the show. And that was a bummer. But I did listen to it. The first podcast I’ve ever listened to in my life. And it was good. Everybody did a really good job.

**John:** Yeah. We had Susannah Grant stepped in and was the co-host in your absence. One thing that may not be completely clear to people who are listening to that episode is so we’re in this church, but the actual layout of where we were was incredibly awkward. So, a church has pews, which is lovely, and then there’s like two steps up and it gets to where actual services happen. And the steps are very important because that’s why you can actually see what’s happening.

But they had us set up in front of those steps, down at the same level as the pews, so sight lines were actually awful. In many ways listening to the podcast would be a lot like attending the podcast because it was very hard to see anything while you were there.

**Craig:** I did notice on the schedule that they had you in that church. And I confess that I thought to myself, oh, John is going to throw a fit. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Because why did they put you in a church? Why weren’t you in the regular room?

**John:** Because it was one of the biggest available rooms. The biggest room at the Driskill was actually bigger than this would have been, but this was what was big and available at the time. So, once again, I want to thank the Austin Film Festival for having us there at all. It was a great experience. We had great guests. It was super fun.

We also did a Three Page Challenge with people who were in the second round of scripts for the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Oh, terrific.

**John:** And that was really cool, too.. So, a few weeks from now we’ll have the audio up for that. We had Franklin Leonard and Ilyse McKimmie as the guests for that. And they were so insightful, because these are people who read scripts all the time. They’re sort of gatekeepers. And their perspective on stuff was just terrific. And to be able to have the actual writers of those three pages in the room to explain sort of this is what the actual full movie is like is so useful, because we could talk about — that movie you’re describing sounds great, here’s the movie I thought I was reading based on these three pages. Let’s try to get these things a little closer together.

**Craig:** And that right there is the core of what a good relationship between a writer and a development person should be.

**John:** Absolutely. So, today we’re going to be doing a new batch of Three Page Challenges. We have three new scripts to look at, so that will be cool. And they’re actually really interesting scripts, so I’m eager to get into them.

But we have so much follow up. We could do a whole episode with just the follow up stuff. So, let’s burn through this stuff first.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** I’ve set it up in two previous podcasts, there’s this thing we’re working on called Writer Emergency, and it is a deck of cards for when you are writing something and your story just gets stuck. And it’s the kind of thing where — Aline mentioned this on an earlier episode — where sometimes just someone needs to give you a nudge, an idea, saying like what if this. And sometimes everything just breaks open, like oh, I suddenly get how to do that.

You don’t always have that person to give you that idea. And these cards are just full of those ideas. So, you saw these. I sent you a deck of these cards.

**Craig:** Yes. I saw an early version and they’re adorable.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** And they’re full of very cool little exercises and exercises are good things. I mean, they get you — it’s kind of like the text version of writing in a different place. It just jostles you out of your normal which is always a good thing.

It’s funny. On Twitter when you had mentioned that you were going to be bringing something like this but you were being intentionally vague, a whole bunch of people thought that you were about to launch some sort of pay me for notes service. And I just thought that was hysterical.

**John:** That will never happen.

**Craig:** Ever.

**John:** Ever.

**Craig:** Ever! No, but this is a great little deck of cards. And it seems like if I made a list of gifts you could get for your writer friend, it would be — I don’t know, what do you get writers?

**John:** Yeah. It’s hard to get things for a writer. So you get them like pens or backpacks.

**Craig:** Or Advil. I mean, we don’t need anything. But this is a fun stocking stuffer. I think you’ve timed it well for Christmas.

**John:** Yes. So, we cannot actually guarantee Christmas delivery. It’s something we would love to be able to do, but we are working with suppliers who have to print these things, and we have to ship these things, so that could be complicated. But it could be possible.

The most fascinating thing I’ve learned over the past six weeks as we’ve been trying to put this thing together is that shipping physical goods is really challenging. I always make apps and things, podcasts, things you can ship out digitally. When you have to ship physical things to far away countries, it gets to be challenging.

And so we’re dealing with these suppliers that are sort of all over the world. But it’s turned out really cool.

One of the most interesting things about this whole process, and the thing that made me most nervous about my conversation with you, is how we’re actually launching these into the world. We’re using Craig’s favorite thing in the entire world. Craig, what is your favorite thing in the entire world?

**Craig:** Uh, well, my number one favorite thing is death by anthrax. And then my second favorite thing is Kickstarter.

**John:** Yes. And we had a whole episode about your love of Kickstarter.

**Craig:** Love it!

**John:** You love it to death. And so I was really nervous when I sent these to you and said, and Craig, we actually went through a lot of different ways, and the best way for us to make these is actually to do a Kickstarter campaign. And you said…?

**Craig:** What was the lie I told you? [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** That it was okay? Did I say it was okay? It’s okay.

**John:** I think you said it was okay.

**Craig:** It’s okay because you are essentially using them like a store. You’re saying, look, you buy this and we’ll give it to you. You’re making them. It’s not like you’re saying we might one day make these.

**John:** It’s not like you’re investing in something that we are getting all the profits from. The goal behind this is, so, every deck of these cards that we give away through Kickstarter, we’re also giving a deck to a kid’s writing program. Because these things are actually really great for learning about story and how you would talk about story. And so we’ve been doing exercises with kids to figure out what actually works and these cards work really well.

But Kickstarter is a good way for us to be able to make a bunch of these at once. And when you make physical goods, the more you can print at once, the cheaper each unit becomes. That whole like curve of economics thing, it actually kind of works when you’re dealing with physical goods. So, we have to make enough so we can actually print enough so that it’s actually worthwhile to do. So, that’s the goal behind doing the Kickstarter of it all.

**Craig:** Look, I make an exception for you. What can I say?

**John:** Ah, thank you. It means a lot that Craig is not angry at this Kickstarter.

**Craig:** Can I just say as an aside…?

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** [laughs] It is kind of sad that my podcast character, I mean, Mike Birbiglia called me the antagonist of Scriptnotes and it made me laugh. But, you know, Lindsay Doran, she’s been doing this independent producers thing lately where she goes and talks to independent producers about, I don’t know, producing stuff. I guess it’s like Sundance Labs for independent film producers.

And somebody brought up that she was working with me and they had heard this on the podcast. And they’re like, is he okay? Is he mean? [laughs] Do I yell? And she just started laughing because I’m actually — I’m very nice.

**John:** You’re actually very, very nice.

**Craig:** Yeah. I don’t yell. I’m not a jerk.

**John:** No. Maybe three times in our entire relationship have you been sort of really, really angry. And they’ve never been directed at me, because I would never want to be the focus of that rage. But I was actually genuinely concerned, because I know you have deeply held feelings about Kickstarter, and so I actually approached this Kickstarter thinking like how would I build something that Craig wouldn’t hate.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** That’s really how I go through my life is how do I do things that Craig can possible stand. So, we designed the pledge tiers at levels where like no matter what you’re doing, you’re getting the thing.

**Craig:** That’s the thing. I mean, look, you’re delivering the product, so you’re not asking people to give you a bunch of money so you can go buy a bunch of lunches for yourself for a year and then not deliver. And, also, you’re donating these to charity. I mean, it’s just — it’s the best possible version of this. So, how could I — by the way, it’s the same thing that Franklin Leonard said when he called me about the Black List.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** He was like, I really was just thinking how can I get you to not hate this. [laughs]

**John:** I was asking myself what would Franklin do, and how can I get Craig not to hate this?

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** You were the two standard bearers for me. Aline factors in there, too, so I actually showed these to Aline right away. And significant changes were made based on Aline’s feedback.

**Craig:** She’s tough. She’s tough.

**John:** She’s tough. So, if you are interested in seeing these decks of cards and perhaps getting one, the Kickstarter campaign will probably be up the morning that this podcast comes out. If I don’t have the URL tweeted, you can just go to writeremergency.com and there will be a link to the Kickstarter campaign. It’s a super short campaign. It’s like two weeks or so. So, you don’t have a lot of time to dilly and dally, but the people who listen to this podcast, they’re on it, they’re buying t-shirts during limited windows.

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re good.

**John:** It’ll be fine.

**Craig:** We have the best listeners.

**John:** Well, we do have the best listeners. And I met so many of them at Austin. It was really nice.

**Craig:** What a lovely thing.

**John:** At Austin I always see Scriptnotes t-shirts, which is great. And now that there’s multiple generations of Scriptnotes t-shirts, I see the different eras, the different colors, the different everything. But I saw one of the very few shirts we ended up selling that was sort of Frankenweenie inspired. It was a quote from my Frankenweenie script. And they want what science gives them, but not the questions science asks.

And someone was wearing that shirt. And it was just so nice to see, like, aw. That one shirt.

**Craig:** I didn’t even know. Is that a Scriptnotes shirt?

**John:** We sold it through the same store. We sold it through the same johnaugust.com.

**Craig:** Well, I will, for all of our listeners who do attend Austin and those who are thinking about attending, I will absolutely be back next year for sure. No one else is getting married that I care about.

**John:** Absolutely. And you will be at our next live show. And on the next podcast we will be able to announce the dates and possibly even the guests for that. And that’s going to be great.

**Craig:** Good one. It’s going to be a big one.

**John:** Cool. Further follow up. Last episode that you and I were talking, I got a new computer and it’s so nice.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** It’s the 5K Retina iMac.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** I would encourage — if people are on the fence like, oh, will it really make a difference, it’s so nice.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve been reading some reviews. People are just tripping all over how awesome it looks. I’m waiting now for the Retina Cinema display, because it doesn’t exist yet, but I have to assume it’s on the way, right?

**John:** We talked about this last week. It’s actually incredibly hard to build that because there’s not a cable fast enough to get the —

**Craig:** Oh that’s right. We did.

**John:** So you may be waiting awhile.

**Craig:** I’m like your grandpa that just now he’s repeating stuff. [laughs] That’s just sad.

**John:** It’s okay.

**Craig:** It’s just sad. Someone tuck me in. Tuck me in and give me soup.

**John:** The podcast, we’ll forgive you.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m old.

**John:** Last podcast we also talked about the Marvel superheroes. We talked about all the superheroes and that there were 31 superhero movies coming out.

**Craig:** And now we know who they all are, right?

**John:** We do. So, the published the list with actual names for those dates. Because I had kind of mocked Marvel for like saying, oh, these are Untitled Marvel movie in this slot. And it’s like well that’s cheating. But they decided to stop — because of me — they decided they had to actually decide what movies they were going to make.

**Craig:** You are at the hub of our industry. You are the beating heart.

**John:** The same way that I look to you and Franklin Leonard, Kevin Feige says, “What does John August think?”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** He probably wakes up in the middle of the night going, oh my god, what does John August think?

**Craig:** They call you the Eye. The Great Eye.

**John:** We’ve talked about Kevin Feige a lot and I realized that I actually met him a zillion years ago because on the very first Iron Man I came in and did just this tiny, tiny bit of work on it. And even back then I predicted success.

**Craig:** I also met him many, many years ago. He was super nice. I remember he was super duper nice. It was a general meeting and I remember he gave me his card. It was like a Marvel card.

**John:** Aw.

**Craig:** Yeah. Now look at him. Now look, our boy is all grown up. Yeah.

**John:** Exactly. So, the movies are Captain America: Civil War, which was predicted. Doctor Strange, which was sort of predicted, but it had been un-slated. Guardians of the Galaxy 2. Thor: Ragnarok. Black Panther. Okay, sure. Captain Marvel, which just makes things incredibly complicated.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Idea wise, because Captain Marvel is the original name of Shazam and they’re also making a Shazam movie, but Shazam is DC and it’s confusing. But Captain Marvel is a female superhero with sort of — she does superhero-y things. So, that could be good.

**Craig:** You struggled through that a little bit, I think. You were like, “Who does…” You wanted to say female superhero-y things, didn’t you?

**John:** No, no, I was trying to say that she did Superman kind of things, but I perceive her as having flight and strength and stuff, but I don’t actually know the details and limits of her powers. I will confess my ignorance to that.

**Craig:** I’m right there with you. Honestly. Like for instance, I know that Black Panther is black. I don’t actually know what his — I’m kind of reaching the edge of my comics knowledge. So, I don’t know actually what his powers are, or Captain Marvel. I mean, I know Doctor Strange. Who else? Oh, yeah, Thor.

**John:** Thor.

**Craig:** I know Thor. He’s got a hammer.

**John:** He’s got a hammer. And we know that his evil brother is —

**Craig:** Loki. And his dad is Odin.

**John:** Yeah. But his dad is dead.

**Craig:** Right. Oh, yeah, forgot.

**John:** Yeah. The Avengers is a two-part thing, which of course, why wouldn’t it be a two-part thing?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s the Infinity War. And so that deals with a lot of stuff that’s been set up in the universe so far. All those infinity stones and it’s been through all the different —

**Craig:** I don’t know, the infinity stones, I don’t know about those. I’ve never followed that story. I know that they’re there and they have something to do from Guardians of the Galaxy, but I feel like I’m totally — like obviously I didn’t know anybody from Guardians of the Galaxy. I honestly didn’t know about Hawkeye. [laughs] I just didn’t. There’s so many of them. I just don’t know.

**John:** But I think your life was pretty fulfilling even not knowing that. So, when you do know it, it’ll just be an extra plus.

**Craig:** I think there should be a team, like Guardians of the Galaxy was a team of people that theoretically most people didn’t know. But I think Marvel should make a movie of characters that most people do know, I just don’t. So, it would have Hawkeye and Captain Marvel. Like Ant Man? I don’t’ know.

**John:** No idea.

**Craig:** Does he get small? I assume he gets small?

**John:** Yeah. Yeah. We’re going to say small.

**Craig:** Small.

**John:** And, finally, Inhumans, which is November 2, 2018, and almost nobody knows the Inhumans since they’re a completely different thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, I don’t know them. [laughs]

**John:** The best description I heard of what they will represent likely in the Marvel universe is because the Marvel universe for Disney does not have X-Men, and they actually apparently can’t even say the word “mutant.” Inhumans apparently do — may serve a similar function in that universe.

**Craig:** I see. Okay. Well, they can be in the movie of characters that other people know that I don’t know. Which, as we can see, is going to be an enormous movie because I’m grandpa. This is a Craig as grandpa day.

**John:** Yeah. We divide the universe into two things —

**Craig:** What I know.

**John:** Things Craig knows. Things Craig doesn’t know.

**Craig:** It could be a great movie. Everybody knows who we are, except for Craig.

**John:** Final bit of follow up, last podcast I was talking about — the podcast we did together — I was talking about how I had had this phone pitch and then I had to go in and do the real pitch and sort of what the difference was between that first impression, everything happening on the phone, and having to really dig in and figure out story.

And so that digging in and figuring out story, that went really, really well. But, I listened to a podcast that actually had a guy having to give a pitch that was so smart. It’s such a good version of this that I want to share it with people. It’s a podcast called the StartUp. And it’s Alex Bloomberg, who was a reporter from This American Life and Planet Money, and he’s attempting to start his own podcasting company. And so he’s trying to raise money for it.

And so he’s going to investors and pitching his podcast company. And pitching a company, a startup, and pitching a movie, they’re different skills. They have different terms of art and sort of ways you do things, but what was so insightful in this first episode he’s trying to pitch Chris Sacca, who is a big investor guy, on his company. And to hear it go horribly, and then hear Chris Sacca pitch that same idea back to him in ways that actually mean something to him.

And it was just a great episode to listen to. The differences between how you perceive your own idea and how someone on the other end perceives your idea and what that idea could be. It was just a fascinating version and that happens all the time in Hollywood, which is where you are describing the story you think you see, and they will sometimes describe back the story that is actually meaningful to them. And you have to decide is that even a movie I would want to write.

**Craig:** Do you watch Shark Tank at all?

**John:** I don’t. But I know what that is. That’s the thing where people have these inventions and things?

**Craig:** Yeah. They have ideas for businesses, basically. Sometimes it’s an invention. Sometimes it’s a service. And they come in and there are five people there who have a lot of money, like Mark Cuban, who is a billionaire. And the individual investors make decisions about how much they are willing to invest, if anything at all, and how much of the company they want in exchange for their investment.

And it’s based on, there was an English show that my wife and I used to watch years ago called Dragon’s Den. And it looks like they just ported it over and called it Shark Tank for the United States. Same idea. And we’ve always loved it because it is people pitching and it is them telling a story. Everything comes down to some sort of narrative.

But there is that remarkable thing that happens where somebody comes in and they are inherently likeable. They are — it’s a single mom who has fought really hard. Sometimes they’re kids. It’s a 16-year-old who’s got this brilliant idea. It’s a man who has been downsized and he’s getting back on his feet with his own thing. And there are these very likeable stories, but there’s always that moment where they hear the story, they really appreciate the story, and they show this guy some empathy and love, or this woman some empathy and love, and then the wall just drops. And it becomes business.

And they couldn’t care about that at all. It’s amazing to watch it happen. Like you see it literally flick, like a switch. And I think the same thing happens in Hollywood. We come in and we have these great opening moments and I love you, and you love me, and everything is wonderful, wouldn’t this be wonderful. And then you pitch. And then they just flip a switch. And now it’s business.

**John:** So, what’s so interesting about that situation and what happens in the room when you’re pitching a movie is you start by talking why the story is meaningful to you, but at the same time you have to be able to describe it in terms that are going to be meaningful for them in terms of what their actual decision-making process is. And so you have to be able to talk about how it’s resonating with you, your personal connection to it, who you are, why they should trust you. But at the same time you have to be able to then flip it and say like this is why this is going to be a thing that needs to happen in the world. This is why this is going to be a movie you’re going to want to make and green light and spend all your money and all your time doing.

And it’s easy to figure out why something is meaningful to you. It’s hard to figure out sometimes why it’s meaningful to them. And it’s practice is what does it. You start to hear these investors talking about sort of what’s meaningful. You start to hear the words they use. Things like what’s your unfair advantage, which I’d never actually heard before until Chris Sacca said it. And then I was an investor pitch earlier this week and a guy slipped that in. I’m like, oh my god, that felt kind douche-baggy, but also wonderful.

The same way that we would use “end of the second act.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Or at the midpoint. The way we would use those kind of terms or tent pole, they use these kind of terms and you have to be able to understand why they’re looking for those things because those are meaningful parts of their decision process.

**Craig:** Yeah. When you are pitching something, it’s great to start with that question you raised. Why should this movie exist? And you need to have a good reason for it. Not a good intellectual reason, but a good passionate reason. You have to actually believe your answer, because that’s what’s going to power you through writing the script. Only through believing your answer and having faith in your answer do you have a prayer of having them agree with you.

**John:** And one of the toughest matches though is sometimes you can pitch a movie that you actually have no interest in writing. And I’ve encountered this a couple times where I’ve gone in on a project and I can sort of see like, oh, there’s a movie there. I can see what that is. I can see what they’re going for. Or, sometimes I’ll be sent some adaptation and I’ll be like I see why there is a movie there, I just know I don’t want to write it. And I know that it’s the process of trying to write this thing is going to be terrible. And that same kind of thing happens in this StartUp podcast, where there’s a version of what an investor is looking for that is not at all what Alex Bloomberg is trying to create.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And he has to question himself, like, I see why they want this thing, I’m just not interested in doing that thing. I don’t think I’d be good at doing that thing. I think everyone is going to be miserable if I try to make that thing.

**Craig:** And then you have a choice.

**John:** You do.

**Craig:** Because, it’s funny, when Lindsay and I went around pitching the thing that I’m writing now, we had terrific success. A lot of people said, yes, we would like this. After about three, I think our first three meetings were big successes. And then the fourth one was just terrible. Terrible meeting. Not because they were being mean, it just was awkward from the start. It was a rough one. And we knew it wasn’t going to be a yes. It was going to be a no.

And in thinking about it later, I was just so grateful that that hadn’t happened to have been the first one.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** Because you just don’t, sometimes it’s just that’s the one person, or even if it’s the two people, and you have to ask yourself, okay, is it me or is them? And, of course, when you’re looking for a big investor, or in our case, when you’re looking for that one investor, all it takes is one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You just need one person to love it. You don’t need everybody to kind of like it.

**John:** Exactly. And sometimes that decision process of who do you go to first can be so important because, you know, sometimes it’s good to go to sort of the softer place that you’re not that invested in them saying yes or saying no, just so you can practice what it feels like to you telling it to somebody else.

And so in times where I’ve done TV pitches, I’ve noticed that I often do schedule the most unlikely place first, or the least exciting place first, because that way you sort of get all the butterflies out.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a little bit like you’re scheduling your movie, you always try and pick something that’s kind of a layup for day one. You know, oh yeah, we’re just going to shoot two people talking in a restaurant. That’s easy. Easy first day.

**John:** I was out a dinner with Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber who wrote 500 Days of Summer.

**Craig:** Great guys.

**John:** Great guys. Love them to death. And I had met Scott before, but this was the first time meeting Michael.

**Craig:** He’s the best, isn’t he?

**John:** They’re wonderful.

**Craig:** And he’s like, and Michael is like, he’s 12 as far as I’m concerned.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So young. Yeah.

**John:** So young. So, one of them lives in Los Angeles. One of them lives in New York. And so they often have to do pitches or meetings on the phone with people. And they talked about how difficult it was to plan for it. And they had to actually sort of be really meticulous about who is going to say what, because otherwise they’re just talking over each other. And they need to make sure that all the points get made. It’s really, really difficult to do in person and then to try to it on the phone, too, it’s a challenging world we live in.

**Craig:** Yeah. I had lunch with — or coffee or something with Michael in New York and I was fascinated by this, how they managed to do it that way. But they do. I’ve spent time with both of them now, but never in the same room.

**John:** Yeah. So, this was my first time ever — they’re rarely together, so it was nice to have them both there at Austin.

**Craig:** I mean, but then again, look at us.

**John:** Look at us. We’re never in the same room. It works out fine.

**Craig:** Yeah, we’re the Elton John and Bernie Taupin of podcasts.

**John:** Oh my god. I think that’s a much better comparison that the Van Halen of podcasts.

**Craig:** Let me ask you a question. Which one of us is Elton John and which one is Bernie Taupin?

**John:** I’m Bernie Taupin —

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** You’re the flamboyant showman.

**Craig:** I’m the one in the boa and duck glasses. Yeah.

**John:** I’m Bernie Taupin because I have no idea what he looks like, but I sense he’s really the power behind the whole relationship.

**Craig:** He’s certainly the serious one. Yeah. He’s the one who’s like, okay —

**John:** He’s like, “Elton, no, got to get this done. We’ve got to finish this.” That’s completely my function. In Big Fish with Andrew Lippa, and I adore Andrew Lippa, but I always the one who had to say like, okay no, we’re going to sit down and we’re going to finish this song. We’ve got to get this thing happening because we promised these people. I’m always — that’s my job.

**Craig:** Yup. And I’m the guy in the Mozart wig and sailor outfit.

**John:** Yes. You put something on the show notes which I think is potentially fascinating, because it’s something that you’re writing right now. On the show notes you write, “Descending into darkness. When you have to write terrible, tragic moments.”

**Craig:** Yeah, I actually did it this morning. And I’m just going to be incredibly honest because this is the place where I’ve learned how to be honest, I think, on the podcast. I wrote this sequence this morning, and then I — honestly, I bawled. I bawled. I cried my little eyes out, because it was so sad. And it just made me so, so sad.

And if that sounds like something that you find laughable, maybe this isn’t for you. Because I do feel like this is part of what we have to do. It’s not something that’s come up frequently for me, because most of the movies that I’ve written over my career have been lighter fare. And while there are sweet moments or dramatic moments in lighter fare, it’s never quite so gut-wrenching. I mean, you just don’t want to kill — you don’t want to deflate the soufflé of lighter movies.

But when you’re writing a movie that has room for tragedy, sooner or later you’re going to come to that point where you have to go to a bad place, because you have to write something that is terrible. The sort of thing that if it happened to a friend, you’d feel it in the pit of your stomach and you would be horrified.

And it’s not easy. And I’m not sure, I sort of wanted to ask you if there’s anything you do particularly to prepare for those moments and how you go into those moments because for me it seemed like the only way to prepare was to not prepare and to just let myself experience bad things.

**John:** So, yes, I’ve had to do this actually quite a lot. And so Big Fish was sort of the most notable example, where that last sequence where you’re sort of taking Edward Bloom to the river and he passes away, that’s opening a bunch of veins. And writing that sequence, I’ve talked about this before and sort of not secret knowledge, what I would do is in my bathroom at my old house there was this big mirror and I would sit in front of the mirror and I’d bring myself to tears. And then I would start writing the scene. I would write it all by hand.

And it sounds very, very method, but in a weird way your brain switches to a different place when you’re in that kind of heightened emotion. And you can sort of capture that emotion when you are writing, sometimes when you’re feeling that same way.

And so I didn’t have to necessarily bring up horrible memories of my past. I didn’t have to do any of that stuff. But I let that moment be really real in my head to the point where it would bring me to tears, and then I would write through it.

The danger and difficulty of doing that is that same sense memory will come back every time you see or reencounter that scene. And so as I had to sort of go through the script again, and again, and again, I couldn’t get through that stuff, reading it sometimes, without evoking that same memory and those same tears.

Then, of course, I went off and did the Broadway version and to write that sequence with Andrew Lippa I had to bring us both to tears, and then we had to write the song, and then figure out the scene that goes around it and stage it and perform it ourselves like 100 times. So, that whole moment is deeply, deeply wired in to sort of how I experience the show, how I experience the movie.

And that’s not a bad thing, it’s just the reality. You have to remember that you are the first performer of this moment that you are creating. And so if it doesn’t have an emotional impact for you as you’re writing it, it’s not going to have an emotional impact for someone who is watching it.

**Craig:** That’s right. And in many ways while it is uncomfortable to feel these emotions as you’re writing these things and to cry over what you’re writing, it is the reward of a lot of good work that you’ve done before that. A lot of logical non-emotional work you’ve done. Because the only way you’re going to get to that place — tragedy ultimately while felt irrationally is constructed of rational things. Circumstances make things tragic. Not emotions.

And when the circumstances align in such a way, then they allow the emotion to occur. So, this is your reward. You’ve done your job. If you are crying when this happens, it means you have carefully constructed the proper recipe for tragedy. But then going through it, it’s interesting — I didn’t start crying before I did it. I just started doing it and then started feeling those moments where I would begin. And that’s how you know it’s true.

I mean, this is where I have to say drama is easier than comedy. Because when you write something funny, I don’t know anybody that sits there writing — any comic writer who sits there writing and then suddenly starts laughing as they type. I’ve never seen such a thing. It’s because it is so, I don’t know how to, I want to say intellectual.

**John:** But comedy is ultimately a function of surprise. Comedy relies on that sense of like something that you didn’t see happening happens, or someone says something that you didn’t expect, and it takes you by surprise.

**Craig:** And you know the surprise.

**John:** And once you know the surprise, it’s not going to be funny the same way. Same reason why you watch any movie that you love as a comedy, you may still love it, but it’s not going to be as funny the second time.

**Craig:** That’s right. And so you have to — the only way to write a funny moment is to know the surprise at the end and then it build it backwards like a magician designing a trick. But that’s dangerous work because there is no instinctive moment where you say my lizard brain has just informed me that this is impactful.

You know, when you cry, that’s not you. You’re not crying. The sense of who we are as people is all about our consciousness and our frontal lobe. This is the animal underneath. So, not only are you the first person performing this part, but then your limbic system is the first audience member listening to it, in a true sense different than you. And so you have to listen to that and you have to be on top of that.

And if you get to a place where you’re descending into the darkness, and none of this is happening, then you have to ask yourself if you’ve constructed all the circumstances necessary to make this moment tragic, or if you were just leaning on the moment itself. It’s not enough to watch somebody die. We have seen people die in movies 14 billion times. Why are they dying? What did they do to die? Who is watching them die? What does that person mean to them?

All of those questions are what makes something tragic as opposed to just henchman number four falling to his death.

**John:** It is your emotional investment in those characters that it makes those moments have stakes, have meaning. And so it’s not necessarily your emotional investment in a character who is dying, but it could your emotional investment in the characters who are witnessing that death who are affected by that death. That is what’s meaningful.

You’re absolutely right in that if in a movie you see a character die in a car crash, that’s not necessarily going to bring tears. It’s not necessarily going to have an emotional impact. Only to the degree that we love that character or relate to that character or see ourselves in that character, or someone else who we can identify with who we can feel that connection to the character. Then we can feel it. Otherwise, we don’t feel it.

And your point about construction of a joke is absolutely true with drama as well. And I often describe Big Fish as one very long joke and the punch line is tears. In that it really is very carefully constructed to set up this expectation of we know from the start that Edward Bloom is not going to live at the end. The question of the film and the question of the musical is what is going to happen with this relationship between Edward and his son, Will. And we are paying that off right at the very end and the surprise of the movie — I’m going to spoil everything for you — but the surprise of the movie is that Will actually finally does get there and is able to deliver that last moment.

And so it’s that happy tears thing can happen because you’ve spent so much time and so much energy making it possible to have meaning in that moment.

**Craig:** Right. Now, there is a danger hidden behind all of this. And the danger is this. You will write this and you will care deeply about it. It will be emotional for you. And sometimes it’s emotional for you because it has a resonance to you personally, separate from the story. However, you must remember that the audience, either the people in the theater or someone reading your screenplay owes you nothing.

**John:** Zero.

**Craig:** Nothing. And it is absolutely within their right to say this didn’t move me, or I think it would be better if this, or I think it would better — you don’t have to agree with them, but what you can’t do is hold them responsible for your emotions. Either you have managed to welcome them in to your limbic theater, or you haven’t. And so just be careful not to force people to be accountable for what you feel, just because you felt it.

**John:** Absolutely. And so sometimes you will encounter a script where there’s clearly supposed to be this emotional payoff and we’re not feeling it. We’re not feeling those moments. And something along the way did not click fully. And someone got off the ride. And if someone got off the ride, they’re going to see this moment and say like I should feel something, but I don’t feel something, and therefore I don’t like it.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And that is really going to happen. And obviously the same thing happens in comedy, too. When you feel joke-oids or things that should be funny but aren’t funny, there’s something that’s just fundamentally not working there. And it’s your job to put aside your experience of that moment to really be the scientist to figure out why is this not working the way I thought it was going to be working.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** So, let’s take a look at these Three Page Challenges and see if we can get them working the way they want to be working. So, as always, if you want to read along with us, we have the PDFs for this Three Page Challenge are attached to the show notes at johnaugust.com. So, go to johnaugust.com and click on this episode and you’ll see the PDFs for these things so you can read along with us.

So, Craig, which of these Three Page Challenges should we look at first?

**Craig:** Well, the first on my pile, because I like to print these out, is —

**John:** Oh that’s right, old school.

**Craig:** Old school. It’s the signal by Cody Pearce.

**John:** Let’s go for it. Do you want to do it or should I do the summary?

**Craig:** I’m happy to do it.

**John:** Summarize!

**Craig:** Okay. So, opens with a pair of gloved hands. One of them is holding on to a leather satchel. The other is grabbing a large knife and hiding it within the folds of an animal skin coat.

We see the hermit, this is our hero that we’re following, moving out of a rustic cabin in the pines and then wearing a pair of earplugs. They put the earplugs in the ears. We don’t see a face.

The hermit moves through the woods, moving past some hidden bear traps. And then eventually arrives in a town, a small town called Pine Brush. And it looks like it’s been abandoned for decades, kind of post-apocalyptic.

As the hermit walks down a street we see a family coming. They avoid the hermit. Interesting. And then the hermit enters a general store which is run by Bob. Just this average guy. And he offers to help the hermit with something. And then the phone rings and a high pitched noise comes out of the phone and Bob suddenly stops being Bob and becomes controlled by something. He’s channeling some other voice and he attacks the hermit who is now revealed to be Michelle, a 30-year-old woman.

And the voice says, “Oh, Michelle,” through Bob says, “oh Michelle, you look terrible.” They have a fight. Bob is trying to pull out her earplugs and saying please let me help you. And eventually the fight ends when Michelle rams the knife in between Bob’s ribs. And that is our three pages from Cody Pearce. John, take it away.

**John:** So, I was intrigued by this overall. I was excited to read pages four through ten at least and see what this whole situation was going to be. Clearly The Signal is this thing that can take over people and the hermit, this character Michelle, has good reason to be isolating herself in the woods to do something.

I liked a lot of this. I was a little ahead of Cody. For whatever reason I tipped that the hermit is probably a woman dressed up under all this other stuff. But on the whole I dug it.

It was interesting to hear your summary where you say, so this is the bottom of page one. “The buildings of Pine Brush haven’t been updated in decades. Most are abandoned, businesses closed and boarded up. A few old, beaten-up cars scattered about.” Now, you read that and said post-apocalyptic. I don’t think that’s the intention. I think the intention is it’s just like a rundown town.

But, it was ambiguous, and that ambiguity hurts because those are two different universes. And I think a little bit more — I’m going to say that word — specificity could help us here. Because I need to know what kind of universe we’re in. Because I think I’m probably more right because Bob’s general store is running.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so it wouldn’t be running otherwise. But it was a reasonable choice and I read it both ways the first time.

**Craig:** I agree. Many, many promising things here. I always like to say, hey, you can do this to somebody. I think, hey Cody, you can do this.

Let’s talk about what works. The style here is right for the material. There’s a lot of whitespace on the page. Very short descriptions. I’m not hearing these overdone elaborations of what the pine trees look like and how the footsteps sound in my ear, all this stuff. It’s nice and punchy and good. I was completely with you that I was ahead that something was up with the hermit. Either it was going to be a child or a woman. And the reason why is because when you write something like, “Out steps…THE HERMIT, age unknown, wearing the animal skin overcoat, his face hidden beneath a large hood.” And then, again, “We do not see his face.”

Well, then it’s not a him. You’re kind of cheating on your misdirect. If it’s a big deal that this is a woman and that we can’t see her face and that we’re supposed to be misled, I would just underplay it here in your description. Finally we see this person’s face. And not make a big deal of holy gosh it’s a lady.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** At first I was a little surprised by “Howdy. Can I help you with anything?” because that seemed so corny. You know, nobody really talks like that anymore. But then I thought, okay, once the little squeal-y sound happens, maybe that’s sort of Bob, that’s all that’s left of Bob’s personality. I don’t know.

**John:** See, I took this as Bob really was Bob from the start. And that was genuinely him. And then that Signal took over and he became a different person. So, I would want to take this as, and I don’t know Cody’s intention, but everything actually is fine and normal until The Signal takes over.

So, The Signal is specifically looking for her.

**Craig:** I see. Well, in that case “Howdy. Can I help you with anything?” is —

**John:** Howdy is a dangerous word.

**Craig:** Just bad dialogue. The action I thought was very well written. I understood what was going on. Personally, so okay, Cody has an issue here. There is a cinematic concept whereby characters that we see onscreen are occasionally going to be possessed by some unseen intelligence that will speak through those characters.

And what Cody says, what he writes for us is in brackets: “[NOTE: from here on out, whenever a character is under the control of the Signal his dialogue will be show ” — instead of shown, that’s a typo — “(tapped)]” And then in parenthesis tapped. And so as a parenthetical every time Bob speaks with the Signal voice it says, “(tapped) Oh Michele, You look terrible.” Again, another typo Y is capitalized. And then again, “(tapped) Please…Let me help you.”

I’m not sure that’s going to work here. We’ve got, I assume, at least 90 pages of this. A lot of people are going to be talking this way. Tapped is a very strange word for this. I understand that it may make sense later, but to see it over and over and over. Plus, you’re stealing your ability as a screenwriter to put a different parenthetical in if you need to. What if the Signal voice is sarcastic or angry? Or whispering? How are you supposed to do that?

So, my argument would be that instead maybe everything that is a Signal should be in italics.

**John:** That’s exactly my suggestion.

**Craig:** Yeah, it would just make more —

**John:** Yeah, I think it makes more sense. So, keep the same note, just say that when under the control of the Signal, everything will be in italics. We’ll get it. It’ll be fine. And I agree with you. Tapped, I think, is a weird choice of that word anyway because tapped implies a physical reaction, like something is actually physically happening and that’s not what’s happening.

**Craig:** Right. My last comment for Cody is this. As screenwriters, sometimes we get trapped by convention. One of the conventions of screenplays is that when we meet characters for the first time we present their name in capital letters, we give you the age, and then we give you some brief description. Devastatingly handsome. Plan girl next door with a light in her eyes.

Well, that’s what he’s done here. “MICHELLE, 30, cute but very tired. Bangs cover her forehead.” Here’s the problem: when we see her it’s because Bob, under the influence of the evil Signal, has ripped her hood off revealing her face. That’s the last point in a movie where you want your character to be described as tired. [laughs]

**John:** Well, it’s also the last point when you want to have her described as cute.

**Craig:** Cute.

**John:** Cute is not very helpful.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, find some words that will tell us, might give us a sense of her size, but also her tenacity, whatever. Give us a little bit that’s going to cue us into the action sequence that’s about to happen.

**Craig:** I mean, and plus, it’s perfectly fine to say Michelle, 30 frightened, you know, blurry-eyed, scared, whatever. Something that’s appropriate for the moment. Unless her forehead is marked with some fascinating information, I definitely don’t need to know about her bangs at this point.

And even if it is a tattoo on her forehead of something brilliant, I still don’t need to know about the bangs right now.

**John:** Exactly. You can save some of these character descriptions till a moment after this bite has happened. And make it a story point. There’s a reason why she brushes back her bangs to reveal that thing if that’s an important story — because if something about her forehead is important, put a light on it. And you can do that after this.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, she’s still going to have bangs in both places, even if you don’t say it.

**Craig:** Yup. But all around, I would say very good stuff.

**John:** Yeah. So, a couple things on the page that I want to talk about. Page one, middle of the page, “The hermit moves swift and silent through the dense forest.” So, classically that’s swiftly and silently because it’s an adverb, but this swift and silent works for this. Grammatically those should be adverbs, but we tend to sort of use swift and silent. I was fine with it. But I wanted to point out that it’s the kind of thing that you can do it right or you can do what sort of works on the page. And I felt it worked on the page really well.

**Craig:** I actually prefer this incorrect method.

**John:** Yeah. And then, top of page three, first line of real action, “Michelle hits Bob’s arm, causing him to let go of her coat. She pulls out the KNIFE she had hidden in her coat.” So, awkwardness here. Causing him to let go of her coat. That is really weak. Michelle hit’s Bob’s arm, breaking free of his grasp. Causing him to let go of her coat is just really weak and passive and it’s not indicative of sort of the action that you’re describing.

**Craig:** Right. He pulls away in pain. Something other than a very clinical description.

**John:** Exactly. And both sentences are ending with her coat which is just not ideal

**Craig:** Yeah, you don’t want to do that.

**John:** So, always look for repetitions between two sentences and there’s going to be reasons while you’ll want those repetitions, but most of the times you don’t want those repetitions. And this is a case where that was getting in his way.

**Craig:** 100 percent.

**John:** Cool.

**Craig:** All right. What’s next, John?

**John:** Next let’s do Eric Webb’s script and I will attempt to summarize this. Immortal Coil.

We’re starting in Seattle, Washington, sunset. Winter scenes of the scene transition into night, intercut with the sun setting behind the Olympic mountains. We’re seeing sort of details of the city, Pike Place market, college students, the sun dips, we hear a jingle, jingle, jingle off-screen. In the central district of town, we’re at dusk, there’s a pockmarked street with shabby apartment buildings.

Inside the bedroom of one of these apartments a form is shifting under heavy covers. The only other light in the room is a temperature controller for an electric blanket. So, there’s somebody in here asleep. Moments later, the person gets out of the bed, opens the drapes.

We’re going to meet Kaleb and Kaleb is covered in blood. Let’s see what the actual description is. “He is half undressed, his crumpled clothes twisted at awkward angles around his frame from having been slept in. He is covered from head to toe in SPLATTERS OF BLOOD, but no wounds are apparent.”

He’s going to be taking a shower in the bathroom and we notice after the shower there’s a faint glimmer of reflectivity can be seen in the pupils of his eyes.

More details of his apartment. Getting dressed. He tells himself you forgot something. He puts on a charming smile and drops the smile and say a word that we’re not going to say on this podcast because it’s PG-13. And then he goes out into the street. It’s night. And as he’s walking through the snow he seems to be enjoying and sort of soaking up the energy of the people around him.

He seems like he’s potentially a dangerous person. And that is the bottom of our three pages.

**Craig:** So, I can’t say that I was in love with these. Most of the issues have to do with the content as opposed to the style, but there are some style issues as well that we need to discuss. So, I guess I’ll start in with those.

We’ve got the first half of page one, for all intents and purposes reads like the introduction to a Christmas movie. We’ve got a sun setting behind the Olympic mountains. Businesses in Pike Place Market being shuttered. College students building snowmen.

And then a cell phone alarm that says Jingle Jangle Jingle, which in my mind means Christmas. [laughs] It’s just Jingle Bells. Jingle Jangle Jingle. I just think like, oh, we’re on our way to a Christmas party or something. And now we’re into this — then he reestablishes, he goes from sunset to dusk which is — I know that DPs know the difference, but the average reader doesn’t.

And actually we went from sunset to dusk to dusk. I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter.

Obviously the sun setting is the important part because we’re dealing with a vampire. And I know this because Jingle Jangle Jingle, which I know realize, okay, yeah, for sure, this is not a Christmas movie anymore, there’s a guy who’s hiding from the sun under this bed.

Now, at the bottom of page one we have a five line action block which in my mind becomes mush.

**John:** It’s five lines, but actually almost nothing happens.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** I think that’s really the tragedy of the five lines. It’s not describing this amazing moment from a war. It’s basically like there’s somebody under the blanket for five lines.

**Craig:** Right. He’s under the blanket and he’s turning his alarm off, which we’ve seen a billion times. So, now he wakes up and, I’m just going to read this because it just doesn’t work. “From behind, we see the occupant of the bed throw open a set of black-out drapes revealing make out a man’s silhouette against the battered blinds that cover the windows.”

Guys, this needs to be like sewn onto a pillow as what to not do. Obviously there’s a mistake in there, but it’s a run-on sentence. You’re missing commas. We see the occupant of the — you never want to say something like we see the occupant of the bed throw open, because people just see bed throw. The words don’t go together. It just — what’s wrong with just saying the man throws open the set of drapes. We see a silhouette.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** It’s just so over-written. And now he’s parting the flaps of the blinds close on his eye. You want to capitalize CLOSE for me, otherwise people are going to read it as close on his eye. As he peers out at the last embers of daylight in the west. This is just — you and I talk about purple. This is purple.

Okay. But the point being at this point I’m for sure I know we’re dealing with a vampire. And I’m already a little annoyed because his name is Kaleb with a K. And this is starting to just feel very YA and very well-trodden ground. He is described as “in his early twenties with pale skin, a slender build, and long jet-black hair.” AKA, every YA vampire ever.

And, this is really where — ugh — I started to get a little squirmy. “He is covered from head to toe in SPLATTERS OF BLOOD, but no wounds are apparent.”

First of all, don’t tell me no wounds are apparent. He has just woken up. If he’s covered in blood, he’s okay. It’s not his blood. He’s been sleeping all night. He’s not screaming. It’s not dripping. He looks at himself in a mirror and we see “there are channels cut into the crusted mask of blood that covers part of his face, carved by tears when the blood was fresh. New tears now trace those same paths.”

Forgive me, but at this point I’m starting to feel like I should be laughing. Because that’s so over-the-top, I’m not sure what to do. And then he takes a shower and we are told, all capital letters, “THE BLOOD WAS NOT HIS.” We know. We know. We get it. This is making so much more of something that frankly we’ve seen.

**John:** My biggest challenge overall with these pages is it is totally valid here is a vampire in Seattle, great. But this introduction — benefit of the doubt, maybe it’s not a vampire movie. There’s some special details about this that it’s a different kind of supernatural thing we’re going to go into, so it’s taking the vampire tropes and it’s going to push against them. But from these three pages it feels like a vampire wakes up. And that’s sort of all we got. A vampire wakes up and takes a shower.

And I wasn’t seeing special things that let me know what kind of movie I’m in. Well, I sort of knew what kind of movie I was in, and I was not excited to be in that movie because I’ve seen this movie before.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It felt like too familiar of a setup and everything to begin with. And the writing felt like book writing rather than screenwriting. It felt like the kind of sentences that are trying to very painterly, you kind of over-describe everything because you’re trying to paint these whole scenes that you don’t really need to do in screenwriting because screenwriting is about this happens, and this happens, and this happens. It was too much at all times.

**Craig:** Yeah. You have to remember that we, Eric, we control time as screenwriters. We can present things in a remarkably compressed manner, or we can drag them out so that they are painfully slow. And there are times when you want to do one or the other. And there are times when you want to just move at a general neutral speed.

What you’ve done here is you’ve dragged time out to the point now where you’re describing the color of the wallpaper and the color of the carpet and how the carpet smells, none of which is relevant here whatsoever.

The only information that I get from this is that there’s a vampire in Seattle and it makes him sad that he has to kill people to eat stuff. And that’s fine. It’s not new. And I’m certainly not — look, if it were me, god, I would much rather prefer this thing open in a bar and a woman is there and this guy comes along and starts talking to her and they’re actually getting along great. And he really likes her. And we can tell he really likes her. And then he kills her. And then he cries.

I mean, just get me into this somehow other than vampire wakes up looking just like a vampire doing vampire stuff like hiding from the sun. And then he’s got vampire blood on him. And, bummer.

**John:** Well, honestly, it’s the two kind of tropes that happen so often in these movies which is sort of like here’s the vampire and he’s being a vampire. And here’s a character waking up, here’s a character’s alarm clock going off the first thing in the morning and that’s how the movie starts. And so it’s weird that you’re sort of doing both things at once, but not weird in a fantastic way.

And Seattle is an interesting place to set, and maybe this can be some kind of artisanal vampire thing happening. That there can be something very specific about it that could be great. But Twilight is also set in the Seattle area, so that’s not even…

So, the only thing I want to say that I think is really useful for talking about craft is on page two, we’re in the bathroom, and there’s these stacked scenes where it’s like moments later, angle behind mirror, this type of thing. And it’s an example of making things much more difficult than they need to be.

And in real scripts that shoot, you’re going to find this stuff is simplified greatly. Each of these little moments, you could slug them individually, but you could also just sort of just talk through them in paragraphs. Because if it’s just a time cut within one little space and it’s just a montage of things that happen, you can call that a scene and everyone will figure out what’s supposed to happen in it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the good news is clearly you guys, you, Eric, sorry, saw this scene in your head. You saw all of it. You did what you’re supposed to do. You imagined every detail of the moment, down to the colors and smells and angles. But you can’t actually then just go and dictate all of that out. You have to decide where and what to let other people in on. It’s important for you to know everything. It’s not as important for the reader to know everything.

**John:** Much more important than sort of this geography stuff, and so the color of the walls is what it feel like. And I didn’t get a great sense of what it actually felt like and what this is supposed to feel like to a person. So, like, does this apartment feel like an old grandmother’s apartment that someone inherited? Does it feel like the most seedy rock club you’ve ever been in? What does it feel like? Just give me that one line of description. Would have done a lot more good for telling the story than all the stuff that I got there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Tweaker pad. Flop house. Unfurnished corporate apartment. There’s so many ways to just get this out there and I get it. By the way, hipster vampire is not a bad idea. Like if you just did a movie about just like bearded flannel-wearing, mutton chop, handle bar mustache vampires who sort of quibble over like who they drink blood from. Like are they on antibiotics. Like I don’t drink blood from anybody that’s been vaccinated. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Absolutely. The anti-vaccination vampire.

**Craig:** The anti-vaccination vampire is awesome.

**John:** The last thing I want to point out, so this script is called Immortal Coil, and it’s written by Eric Webb, story by Eric Webb with Casey Ligon. And the “with” is just a really weird thing. And it’s not an actual thing that exists in the world. And would be what that would look like.

**Craig:** And.

**John:** With doesn’t exist as a credit in film land.

**Craig:** All right. Our last three pages is called Nexus and it’s written by Carlos Aldana. And I put the hard stop there because I really want to say Carlo Saldana. Carlos Saldanha is the director of the Rio movies. But this is Carlos Aldana. And it’s called Nexus.

I shall summarize thusly. SUPER: “November, 2014” We’re in darkness and then the sound of metal screeching. A big door opens up revealing Lucy. She’s 35 years old. And she’s telling some people to hurry and four people running after her, just silhouetted. She guides the group up an emergency stairwell in a building. They all carry guns. They’re all dirty and tired.

Ryan, who is 39, Ashley, 17, Earl, 44, and Eddie Jeong, 23. And they’re asking how much longer. And Earl is saying you better haul ass if you don’t want to get caught by one of those things.

**John:** We’ll come back to that line.

**Craig:** We’re going to come back to a lot of these lines. So, then we get in to the office. Something is growling. And it turns out, oh, it’s not a monster. It’s just a dog. This is an abandoned office. Lucy opens up a safe. Rather, she tells Jeong to open up a safe. And Ashley says mom. So, that turns out to be Lucy’s daughter, Ashley. And she’s looking at the Los Angeles skyline, except the buildings are destroyed and abandoned. I think I’m now safe to say this is post-apocalyptic.

**John:** Yeah. I think it’s fair. I think there’s been a recession. There are issues. But I think we’re now safely post-apocalyptic.

**Craig:** Right. So, Lucy is reminiscing about a Los Angeles that once was. And Jeong opens up a safe.

Now, here’s what’s in the safe. A disk the size of a quarter, a key card, and six high tech pucks called either DITs or D-I-Ts. It’s hard to tell. And they are futuristic objects that stick together and also do not stick together and also stick to concrete. And she throws them at a wall. There are some geography issues. The point being that they create a portal. That these things open a portal up. And the portal appears to reveal another place that’s just like the place they’re in. It’s like a mirror, but a mirror into another place.

You know, if I’m running out of juice on the summary, you know there’s some trouble. [laughs] I’m not really sure what happened. That’s the god’s honest truth, John. I’m not exactly sure what happened.

**John:** So, I thought the idea of you throw this thing at the wall and it opens up and forms a portal, yeah, I’ve played the game Portal. I like the game Portal. So, maybe there’s something really great to do there. So, I wasn’t nuts about the description of it, but I was intrigued enough to say like, well, what kind of movie is this.

The thing that obviously intrigues me right from the start is it says November 2014. And it’s like, well, that’s now. That’s actually today. But it’s a post-apocalyptic Los Angeles. So, something has changed. Either the timeline has changed, or Carlos actually wrote this a couple of years ago and made some bad predictions.

**Craig:** Well, but on his front page he writes May, 2014. And also copyright 2014, which by the way, Carlos, not necessary to write.

**John:** Not necessary. Also not necessary to have the comma after May, but that’s fine.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So, something has happened. I think it’s a deliberate choice to say this is an alternate timeline. There’s something else going on. And given that we’re able to bend the laws of physics in order to create these portals, maybe the time has moved, too.

Unfortunately, while it’s generally great to start in the middle of action, that’s usually a really good thing to try to do, I don’t think it’s helping us so much here because I don’t know who these characters are in a useful way. And I’m not particularly intrigued, just based on the little bits of dialogue that I’m getting.

And so, “How much longer? Almost there.” Okay. Fine. “You better haul ass if you don’t wanna get caught by one of those things.” I don’t know what this world is, but these people seem to know what they’re doing, and no one would say that if they’d been through this before.

**Craig:** Yeah. Why would you say that about the most important and dangerous thing. Like if you were working in the Ebola zone, and you saw somebody, like one of your fellow doctors without a surgical mask on, would you say, “You better put your surgical mask on, or you’ll catch Ebola.” That’s the equivalent. I mean, it’s just crazy.

**John:** It is truly the equivalent. And so that felt weird and it just took me out of the movie because it so made it clear we’re in a movie.

**Craig:** Well, if that didn’t make it clear that you’re in a movie, how about these descriptions. And talk about these descriptions for me, please, these character descriptions.

**John:** Okay. Let’s read through them. So, Lucy is 35, petite and brunette. That’s all we get.

**Craig:** Petite and brunette. I think you’ve got to just stop there. We cannot — I get that we have lived in a world where men have reduced women in movies frequently to the girl. We can’t do this anymore. You cannot define a human being by their physical height and then their hair color.

**John:** Well, to be fair, Lucy is 35, petite, and brunette, while Ashley is 17, petite but tough.

**Craig:** [laughs] Okay. She’s tough. Okay. Fair enough. She’s also petite, though.

**John:** So, women in this movie so far we’ve learned can be brunette and they can be tough.

**Craig:** You certainly can’t be both.

**John:** And it’s possible they can be both. So, what we’re really saying is that Lucy is the first person we’re introduced to. We need some description of her that tells us what she’s like, not what she looks like.

**Craig:** Correct. Unless Lucy dies on page four as a big shocker and Ashley has to become the hero of the movie, we need more from Lucy, because right now she feels like the hero. And it it’s true that Lucy dies suddenly and Ashley has to become the hero of the movie, then we need more about Ashley. Either way, nobody — the script has given us no information about who we’re supposed to be concentrating on.

**John:** So, two things about this. First off, is the misdirect is that Lucy’s going to die on page four, the misdirect has to happen on the page, too. So, give us a little bit of stuff about her so we have sense of who she is, because then it’s actually going to be rewarding for us that she got killed off. So, give us a description that sort of lands for us and anchors us.

But, the bigger issue here I think, in addition to the specific choices of the words we’re using to describe these characters is you’re shooting us, all four of them at once. There’s that shotgun approach. Here’s four characters and they’re running and doing things. That’s really hard to be great in any circumstance, because we don’t know what we’re supposed to pay attention to. And we’re desperately looking for things, but you have them running and doing all this other stuff. It makes it just very hard for us to relate to any one of your characters because you’re giving us four all at once.

**Craig:** I mean, this is what you’re suggesting. Screenplays are proposing to an unseen, unknown director, what to shoot. What you are proposing here that the director shoots is Lucy guiding people up stairs. And as they walk our camera just sees each one of them. And none of them say anything until the last one. So, we’re just literally watching this lineup of four people.

This is ultimately what we know. Lucy is petite and brunette. Ryan moves and carries his gun like a pro. Definitely military or police. Ah, okay. We won’t know that in any way, shape, or form. Ashley, petite, but tough, looks a bit old for her age. We won’t know her age, so none of that matters. And then, Earl, 44, big muscular black guy in mechanic overalls. Lastly, Eddie Jeong, pale and skinny Asian, clearly tired going up the stairs.

Not only does this read like the kind of group you see in B-level zombie videogames, but it’s a bad version. It’s kind of racist. It feels like — like what race is Ryan? What race is Lucy? What race is Ashley?

**John:** That’s a very good point.

**Craig:** I guess they’re white, because you don’t mention it.

**John:** The default is white.

**Craig:** The default is white and that’s just not cool. Like, especially if you’re going to end in big black guy and skinny Asian dude land. Eh…

**John:** Yeah. So, let’s talk about, let’s say that you needed to introduce these characters in the stairwell. A way you might want to do that is if Lucy’s in front, we meet Lucy, and she’s like, “Hold up.” And she’s looking for something. We’re on her for a moment and she’s talking to unseen people. And then she finally gives the go ahead for them to follow her up. And so then we have a moment with her. Okay. Here’s a spotlight on her. And then she’s going to move up. And then we can meet one or maybe two more people and see what their dynamic is. And then we’re finally going to meet those last two people.

But right now getting all of these people on screen at once, it helps nobody.

**Craig:** It’s impossible to do well. The truth is you kind of need somebody to say something before you give a damn about who they are. Or, they have to do something before you give a damn about who they are.

So, if it were me, I would probably have Lucy and Ashley together, talking quietly with each other. Nobody else. And then when they make sure the coast is clear, they open up another — like they’ve wriggled through a window and now they open up a door and there’s a guy saying, “What took you so long?” Some terrible movie line, but the point being, okay, and now we can see who that is.

**John:** Or, they split up in two groups. So, two of them are searching one place and two of them are searching another place. And then they’re going to cross paths again and they’re looking for something. Obviously they are looking for something, so separate them and then bring them together. And establish stakes that way. So, we don’t even know what the relationship is between these people. Are they on the same side or opposite sides? Just create some tension there by not giving us all these team together at once.

**Craig:** And you know you have a problem when already on the top of page two, just page two, you’ve now shorthanded the most important human beings in your movie to “our group.” That’s bad. That’s a bad sign.

**John:** So, I want to talk a little bit about some of the word choices on page one. “A gap opens and light shines at the camera.” Okay. So, we’re talking about the camera, but did we need to? A gap opened. A light shines through. Ah, I got rid of the camera. “The door finally gives in, the light floods in and we see the silhouette of LUCY.” I’m not opposed to we sees, but there’s a lot of we sees here. And we don’t need this we see. The door finally gives in, light floods in. The silhouette of Lucy. Better description for Lucy.

“They rush up a set of emergency stairs in an unnamed building.” [laughs] In an unnamed building? It’s unnamed because you haven’t given it a name.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You can’t say that you’re not telling us something because you’re not telling us something. Rush up a flight of stairs in an office building. In a something building. Give us something.

Next paragraph. “We can barely see them in the dark. But we can tell they’re tired and dirty.”

**Craig:** What? What? How?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** How? If we can barely see them, how are we supposed to tell they’re tired.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And dirty.

**John:** But we don’t need those two we cans. There’s ways to write around that so you can save those we’s for when they’re actually really important.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, that’s my stumping for — I hate the script rule say you can never talk about the camera and you can never say “we see” or “we hear.” You can do all those things, but you have to be really judicious about when you’re going to pull out those tools, because sometimes there’s no better way to do it. So, you use those things. But in all these cases there were ways to just describe things and not have to say we-s.

**Craig:** I agree. I mean, in general, if I’m going to use we see, it’s because we are seeing something shocking, or I want the screenplay to let the reader know that we in the audience are seeing something that the character on screen is not.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** But you’re right, this is just sort of peppered in there. If the other stuff were working I wouldn’t mind that stuff so much. The building that has no name is described later as, again, as a generic office building. And, again, sunlight floods and blinds — we’ve got a sunlight flooding in at people. Not sure why. It’s kind of unmotivated sunlight.

The bigger issue is what the heck is going on on page three. I mean, let’s just jump ahead. [laughs] Because, you know, first of all, let’s talk about this description. You’re introducing new technology to us. We’re in a zombie movie, presumably, or something like a zombie movie. But, also, you have a twist which is portals. Okay. Fine.

So, what comes out of the safe is some mysterious disk which we’re not going to address at this point, a key card which is a key card and we won’t have to deal with it at this point, and “six high tech pucks called DITs.” What the hell am I supposed to think from that? Like, all right, I’m the prop guy. What’s a high tech puck? What is that? You’ve got to give me more.

**John:** Because I don’t know. I saw pucks and I didn’t think about the high tech of it all. I bet they’re glowing LED pucks.

**Craig:** Are they? Are they?

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** Are they glowing? Do they have buttons? They have grooves? Are they metallic? Are they intricate? I mean, these things are central to the movie. You’ve got to describe.

**John:** Yeah. Do they look like human technology or some sort of alien artifact thing? Yeah. I agree with you there, Craig. And it’s obviously going to be central to our story, so it’s worth a little bit of time right here to do. This just wasn’t the best way to do it.

The only other thing I was to point out on, halfway through page three. “The 4 pieces spread until the light rectangle is about the size of a door.” He used the number four rather than the spelled out four. Just follow general kind of AP rules. Numbers that are less than ten, spell out. Numbers that are in dialogue, kind of always spell out. Because that’s the only way you’re going to get people to pronounce things properly, the way you expect them to be pronounced. But there was no reason to use the numeral here. It slows you down.

**Craig:** Yeah. No reason at all. Take some time to make us love the DIT. I think you’ve got to — help me out here. Is it a DIT or is it a D-I-T? Also, don’t tell me what it’s called if these people aren’t going to say anything. If someone is going to talk about it later, that’s when I find out what it’s called. I don’t need this information now because it’s not being used by me or the people in the scene, the name of it. See?

**John:** Yeah. And it would be a simple thing that I would actually buy if the character opens the safe and is like, “Got ’em. Six DITs.” And it’s like I see there are six things. They must be called DITs. I know what to call those things now.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** So, it’s very doable. This is always a fun process because people send in these pages and they are being incredibly brave to show the work that they’ve done and let us talk about. In the case of two of these scripts, we dug in and we didn’t like sort of what we were seeing on the page, but it’s still incredibly useful I hope for other writers to look at their own work and see, oh, these are the kinds of things I’m doing that work or don’t work. And maybe I can make some different choices.

**Craig:** That’s right. And for those of you today, the two of you who kind of got a little bit of a beating, and even our other guy who got a little bit of a beating, just take comfort in this: these are the beatings that we give each other. And these are the beatings we get ourselves.

Lindsay Doran and I spent, I don’t know, an hour the other day talking about two paragraphs, two small paragraph descriptions. And if it were clear, or how to make it clear where somebody was standing. This is the kind of OCD level of detail that you need. And you need to love it. And this is part of the game.

**John:** Well, it’s that crucial ability to see this is what my intention was and this is how it’s coming out on the other side. So, for these people who sent in these pages, they clearly had an intention. There was a reason they wrote these pages. And they didn’t land with us the way I think they thought they would land. And so that is hopefully a valuable experience. So, that’s why we do Three Page Challenges. That’s why we did it in Austin and why we’re doing this one.

But I need to thank these writers for sending them in and all the writers who send in Three Page Challenges. We have like a 250 script backlog of these samples. And, honestly, Stuart picks the ones that are pretty good. So, that’s a sign that people are, you know —

**Craig:** Yeah. They’re struggling out there.

**John:** They’re struggling and they’re also making choices that can hopefully be improved by just having someone take a look at them and really look at them critically.

**Craig:** Yeah. And if you are playing the home game, take a look at your first three pages and ask yourself how would this go with John and Craig? [laughs] You know? Because, honestly, we are not particularly hard on this stuff. I really do believe that. I know it feels that way, but this is the name of the game out here. It’s the way it goes.

**John:** So, if you have three pages of your own script that you want to send in to have us take a look at, the proper URL to send them to is johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. And there’s a form you fill out and you check some boxes and you attach your file and you send them through.

We still call it the Three Page Challenge, it’s really meant to be like the first sequence of a movie. But three pages ends up being about the mountain we can actually talk about usefully in a show. So, for now we’ll stick with Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. So, Craig, do you have a One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** Yeah. We’ve got a big long show, so I’ll be quick about my One Cool Thing this week. Yosemite, the new operating system for Macintosh, has an excellent new feature that works in concert with their new version of iOS and it’s called Family Sharing. And I find this incredibly useful because I used to give my kids an allowance of, I think I gave them $10 a month to spend on apps. And then they would do that, but I didn’t really know exactly what they were getting.

And then, inevitably, if they wanted something that was more expensive or two things, and they were worth it, they’d have to come to be, and it was annoying. So, Family Sharing is great because now every time they want to buy anything, if it’s an app, or a song, or anything, they request it. And the request comes to me on both my MacBook and also on my phone and on my iPad and on Melissa’s phone, and on her iPad, and her computer.

So, either one of us can hit approve or deny. And therefore we’re in charge of all of it which I find very satisfying.

**John:** That is a really good thing. Mine is also short. It’s this collection of Aesop’s Fables that have been rendered as web pages using Google Fonts collection. So, Google Font’s, like Typekit, has all these amazing typefaces. And so these designers took the Google Fonts and told the stories using these amazing typefaces. And it’s a great example of sort of how expressive type can be on the internet now. And this is all real type. This is isn’t just picture graphics. This is actually — you can select every word there and it’s just done programmatically with fonts. It looks great.

And so it’s a good inspiration for anybody who is designing something on the web in 2014/2015, to really look at the expressive power of typefaces.

**Craig:** Mm, good show.

**John:** Good show. Good long show.

**Craig:** Good to be back. Feels good to be back.

**John:** Back at my place.

**Craig:** You know, I can smell all these people, John. They’re aiming for my job. They’re gunning for me. I know Birbiglia wants this gig.

**John:** Oh, he absolutely wants this gig. And Susannah Grant was great. She put in a great audition.

**Craig:** Yeah, Susannah, actually, I think would be better than I am.

**John:** Susannah is pretty great.

**Craig:** She’s awesome. But Birbiglia. Huh.

**John:** He’s got that comedian thing. It’s dangerous.

**Craig:** It’s Steal-giglia.

**John:** Yeah. I confessed to Mike that I actually wrote him in as a part in this one thing I’m hoping to do. And so I’ll get to work with him regularly if that were to happen.

**Craig:** That’s very clever.

**John:** See? You should do that, Craig.

**Craig:** No, I’m not going to do it. He deserves nothing. [laughs] Nothing.

**John:** He deserves nothing. He’s a job poacher.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** As always, you can find some links to things we talked about in today’s show at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes. If you go to scriptnotes.net, that’s where you can subscribe to all the back episodes and all the bonus episodes. We’ll have two bonus episodes coming up really soon. We have an interview I did with Simon Kinberg for the Writers Guild Foundation.

**Craig:** Nice.

**John:** And we’ll have the Three Page Challenge we did at Austin. So, both of those will be going up as bonus episodes, so if you want to listen to those. We are so super close to having a thousand subscribers at scriptnotes.net.

**Craig:** Dirty show.

**John:** For the premium feed. And, Craig, off recording I will tell you the best inspiration I had for a guest for the dirty show. So, people, sign up.

If you want to subscribe to our normal feed, that’s in iTunes. While you’re there, leave us a comment. It’s because people left so many great comments that iTunes featured us as one of the best podcasts, which was just so nice of them to do.

I am @johnaugust on Twitter. Craig is @clmazin. Longer questions you can send to ask@johnaugust.com.

If you are interested in Writer Emergency, those decks of cards we are starting to do in Kickstarter, go to writeremergency.com and there will be a link to our Kickstarter campaign for that.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** That’s a lot.

**Craig:** So much.

**John:** Stuart Friedel produced the podcast. Matthew Chilelli edited it. Thank you, Matthew. And he has a Kickstarter campaign, too. So, there will be a link up in the show notes for Matthew’s Kickstarter campaign for —

**Craig:** Ugh, god.

**John:** A movie he’s doing. Craig, you’re going to be the last person with a Kickstarter campaign.

**Craig:** Uh, yeah.

**John:** You are going to start a Kickstarter campaign to shut down Kickstarter.

**Craig:** [laughs] I might. I just might.

**John:** Yeah, it’s going to be good.

**Craig:** That’s dividing by zero.

**John:** [laughs] Good stuff. Thank you. Have a great week.

**Craig:** You too. Bye.

Links:

* [Writer Emergency](http://writeremergency.com) is live [on Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/913409803/writer-emergency-pack-helping-writers-get-unstuck)
* [Marvel announces its superhero slate](http://www.cinemablend.com/new/Marvel-Just-Announced-All-Movies-With-Release-Dates-Title-Art-67919.html)
* StartUp, Episode 1: [How Not to Pitch a Billionaire](http://hearstartup.com/episodes/1-how-not-to-pitch-a-billionaire)
* Three Pages by [Cody Pearce](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/CodyPearce.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Eric Webb](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/EricWebb.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Carlos Aldana](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/CarlosAldana.pdf)
* [Submit your Three Pages here](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [Family Sharing](https://www.apple.com/ios/whats-new/family-sharing/) on iOS 8
* [Aesop’s Fables in Google Fonts](http://femmebot.github.io/google-type/)
* Support Matthew’s film [Escape the Dark](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1379703609/escape-the-dark-a-horror-feature) on Kickstarter
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))