Archives for 2016

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/an-alliance-with-house-mazin).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 252 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, it’s another craft episode. In the past we’ve looked at heroes, we’ve looked at villains. This time we’re looking at allies and the discussion will be led by Sir Craig of House Mazin.

**Craig:** So excited. So excited to the return of House Mazin on Game of Thrones.

**John:** So this was the Hodor episode. And some people were very excited about Hodor’s backstory and Hodor’s disappearance from the show, but we were, of course, most excited by the return of House Mazin.

**Craig:** Yeah. I actually call it the House Mazin show, in which also something happened with Hodor. Crucial moment. Crucial moment where Sir Davos, he’s looking at the map and figuring out how many people they can rally to Jon Snow’s side. And obviously House Mazin, the most important house in the north. Why there’s a Jewish house in North Westeros? I don’t know.

**John:** It’s a fantasy world.

**Craig:** You know, that’s the thing about my name. It actually is a weird… — You know, Rob McElhenney, who is the creator and star of Always Sunny in Philadelphia, he wanted to name the villain — he’s working on a Minecraft movie.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** And he wanted to name the villain Mazin after me, because it’s a good villain name, too.

**John:** It is a good villain name, sure.

**Craig:** But they were like, uh, I guess the problem was that there are other Mazin’s out there. Apparently they couldn’t clear it. Yes.

**John:** Disappointing.

**Craig:** But like if my last name were Greenberg, there would be no House Greenberg.

**John:** I was watching the scene, this is midway through the episode, and I haven’t gone back to look at the episode to see whether they actually said the name on camera, of it it’s like a looping line that got slipped in there.

**Craig:** I think it was, well, I don’t know if it was a looped line, but they definitely played it over I think an insert of the map. But someone took a screen cap from the closed captioned version and there’s House Mazin spelled correctly.

**John:** Fantastic. I’m so excited. So, that was probably what prompted you to think of this episode about allies and alliances, because that’s what they’re discussing when your name was brought up.

**Craig:** Correct. And when we get into it, you’ll see that Game of Thrones is incredibly useful because there are so many relationships.

**John:** There are.

**Craig:** And every relationship is defined as either an allegiance or as some kind of hero/villain situation, or conflict. So, we have so many different kinds, so we can illustrate so many different kinds with Game of Thrones. But, I suppose first we have follow-up.

**John:** We do. So Emily from Sydney, Australia wrote in to say, “I just wanted to write in to say that the transcript of high quality audio with only two voices, no background noise, is fairly easy and very cheaply done by computers, so it probably isn’t done by child labor or exploitation.” Which is something that we brought up last time. I didn’t know how our transcripts were done. Emily seems to think that it’s probably done by computer transcription.

She continues with, “My mother is a lecturer at a university and likes to read transcripts of her lectures from previous sessions, so she can easily revise. So I’ve gone very deep into computer transcription world.” She says, “I’d also like to thank you for providing the transcripts and just all your other efforts to be inclusive as possible on the podcast.”

**Craig:** Well, thank you very much, Emily. But you have raised a matter of concern. [laughs]

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Because, again, I feel like, all right, you know, John, he’s collecting money from tee-shirts, USB drives. “Oh, well, you know, we have to pay for the transcripts.” Oh, apparently, according to Emily from Sydney — from Sydney.

**John:** Sydney.

**Craig:** It’s cheap.

**John:** Maybe Stuart needs to reevaluate how much we’re paying our transcript person. The transcript person who is typing up the words that I’m talking right now. See, that’s the whole thing. You know, if it’s a computer, who knows, maybe the computer is the person who is typing up these words.

**Craig:** Right. The computer wouldn’t find any irony in just repeating TRANSCRIPT, TRANSCRIPT, TRANSCRIPT.

**John:** So, I do know how much I pay Stuart, and I can tell you with absolute certainty that this podcast does not make enough money to pay for Stuart’s salary. So, there’s that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Bit of brightness.

**Craig:** Well, I suppose we’ll just have to eliminate some salary from Stuart. I mean, listen, [laughs]…

**John:** Craig is volunteering to do the hard work of transcripts.

**Craig:** Oh, no. No, no. No, no, no. I’m the talent.

**John:** Oh, that’s right. Talent doesn’t do that.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No. I should say that some people don’t know we have transcripts. So, basically when an episode goes up on Tuesday, on johnaugust.com you’ll see the blog post that has the episode and has the audio for the episode. But usually by Wednesday, Thursday, definitely by Friday, that same post will have a new link added that says “This is the transcript.” And click through to that, and you’ll get the full transcript of everything we are saying.

**Craig:** Fantastic. Shall I read some more follow-up?

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** Bretton Zinger. That’s an — oh, god, I wish my name were Bretton Zinger.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** House Zinger.

**John:** House of Zinger. House Zinger. Come on.

**Craig:** House Zinger.

**John:** What would their little sigil be? Like what would their symbol be on their shields?

**Craig:** It would be a guy making like a pointing like Zing! Bretton Zinger, oh, so good, Bretton Zinger writes, “In Episode 250, The One with the Austin Winner, the script you read contained the following: INT. DC METRO STATION. NIGHT. The cavernous dome thoroughfare stands eerily still. It’s beyond late. The midnight train long emptied.”

Bretton continues, “The script is set in 1950. The DC Metro system did not open until 1976. Based on the description here and later, I believe that the writer, Amanda Morad, is actually referring to DC’s Union Station where Amtrak is located rather than a Metro station, which is the subway station, though both have domed thoroughfares.

“When describing real cities, landmarks, et cetera, how much fudging do you think is acceptable? I know writers can do whatever they want, and that good writing always trumps everything else. But how much do you worry about the audience or readers calling BS on something you include?”

**John:** Well, I think it’s a good point about Amanda’s script, and also a good question overall. So, in terms of Amanda’s script, I think that was actually probably a mistake. I think it would be better to actually make that correctly Union Station, if that’s what would actually be there in the 1950s. But it doesn’t really mess me up as a read. I don’t think of it as a different thing because of a Metro station versus Union Station.

So, for Amanda I would say it would be great if she swapped that out for Union Station, just for accuracy and authenticity. But in terms of overall, I think readers have to understand that we’re writing for the ability to create a picture in your head of what things are. And that’s why we’re not so necessarily accurate about geographic locations, about sort of how things fit. You’ll find in movies people can get across the city much more quickly than they really could. And that’s just the nature of moviemaking.

**Craig:** Yeah. You’re always allowed to do anything in your screenplay that a director can do when they’re shooting the movie, right? You can elide time and elide distance. Chop up the shoe leather. I do agree though, I’m a stickler for getting things right if I’m putting them in. So, yeah, she wants to change this for sure. The one thing you definitely can’t do is put something in where there is not a substitute for it. So, for instance, if Amanda had — here she simply makes a mistake, and so she can switch the stations and she’s fine. But, let’s say there were no stations like that in 1950. That’s a problem.

And so you do want to get things as right as you can. I get a little crazy about it. I actually, I was writing a scene yesterday that takes place in the ’80s and on a certain day in the ’80s. And I wanted to know what the face of the moon was that night. And I was kind of hoping it would be full. And it was almost full.

Because, of course, you can go on the Internet and type in any day and they’ll tell you what the moon was doing that day. And in what time zone.

**John:** That’s lovely. I will say that what tends to be more important than being completely accurate is feeling accurate, feeling true. And sometimes one of the things you bump into as a writer is what is actually true doesn’t feel true. And, you know, if you’re basing something on historic event, things could happen a certain way and you won’t actually believe they can happen that way in the course of a narrative film. And so sometimes you have to find ways to either really hang a lantern on like this is how it actually happened, or you have to move things around in a way that makes the simplest believable version of what it is that you want to convey.

**Craig:** Yeah. I actually think it’s a gift sometimes when true life seems unbelievable, because it gives you as an opportunity for somebody to say, in the movie, “I don’t believe that.”

**John:** Yeah. One of the things I really liked about The Big Short is there’s moments where characters will turn to camera and say like, “Okay, this didn’t actually happen this way,” and sort of really explain it. But in their explanation you see like it’s actually even kind of crazier than what we’re doing right here. And that was a good shorthand they were able to do. Most people will not be able to do that in their movies.

**Craig:** Yeah. I moderated a discussion at the Guild with Adam McKay and his cowriter on Big Short and we talked about that a bit. And he said the one where Ryan Gosling turns to the camera and says, “I would never be caught dead in a club like this. This isn’t where we were when this happened,” happened because the person that that guy was who read the script and had to approve that his name be used and all that, he said, “I would never…”

His exact words. And so they were like, well, can we do what you just said in the movie? And he’s like, “Um, okay.”

**John:** Nice. Let’s skip ahead from some questions and get right to the meat of this, because I’m desperate to see what you want to say about allegiances and alliances.

**Craig:** Allegiances. Well, enemies are easy to do, I think, because, you know, we understand what’s going on there. Things are well defined. We have instant conflict. Friends are hard. And a lot of times I will read a screenplay where friends or alliances, partners, are bland. Because they are lacking conflict, and I think is something that people make a mistake about — the idea that an ally is an absence of conflict. Or an ally means a resolved relationship.

Quite the opposite is true.

**John:** Yeah. So often I will read these scripts where it feels like that character is just there to sort of set the balls so the other character can spike it. And they have no life independent of that main character. And there’s no friction between them and the main character at all, or they just have good-natured barbs to each other that doesn’t help us at all.

**Craig:** Exactly. And that, unfortunately, counters the whole point of what an allegiance is. So, let’s go to the fundamentals. Why do we even need allies in movies? And these seem like crazy questions to ask because, you know, why do we need allies in life and we like movies where people are doing stuff together. But it’s good to ask why, because it helps, I think, lead you to the path of writing good versions of these things.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, the point of allegiance in narrative. Some general notions of it. Individual characters are trying to advance their own selfish interests through relationships that help them do so. Similarly, characters will learn about themselves through their relationships that are not defined by conflict relationships, but allegiances.

One thing that allies help characters do is suffer pain for the wrong rewards, because friends will get you to do things sometimes and then you find out, oh, I shouldn’t have gone along with that. There are things friends can do in this regard that help characters see themselves much, much better. And, of course, an allegiance helps the screenwriter define what’s wrong about where a character is in the beginning of a movie. And then also helps them define what’s right at the end.

**John:** Great. So, let me try to go back through these four points you just made and see if I can restate them in ways that might anchor them in sort of experience of what you sort of see in a movie? So, characters advance their interests. So, it gives a character the ability to express what they’re after, and it gives another person that the hero can express what they’re actually going after, but more interestingly, the character who is the other part of the alliance, they have their own wants and needs. And so those conflicting wants and needs are the source of tension and also provide propulsion within a scene.

If you have one character who wants something, and another character is just there to listen to it, that’s not a good scene. But if we can see that two characters have different wants within a scene, there is some tension there and there is some — there’s a reason for that scene to be there.

**Craig:** Yeah. It also helps your character as they’re going for something that is maybe just for them, they have to do it through the prism of a relationship with another person, which is vastly more interesting to us. Even in movies where people are really alone on purpose, they’re not alone. This is why you had to have Wilson, you know. You need a relationship. We lose sight of what a person is going through if it’s not understood through that interpersonal connection.

**John:** Let’s get to your point about suffering pain for the wrong reasons, or for the wrong rewards. So, this is the case where it lets you put your hero, your protagonist, in a situation where they’re trying to do something which isn’t necessarily even something they believe, but they are doing it because of a relationship. They’re doing it because they promised their wife they would do this. Because they want to look better in the eyes of this other person.

There’s a reason why they’re doing it which is not a purely selfish reason. It is a bigger reason. And sometimes they’re willing to do things they wouldn’t do for themselves for other people. And that can be great for both comedy and for drama.

**Craig:** Exactly. That there’s something about your friend, your partner, your ally that gets you into trouble. We all have that experience. Every single one of us has had that friend that got us into trouble. And that’s the best kind of trouble. It’s so much more interesting when your friends get you into trouble, I think.

**John:** Absolutely. And so also your friends who can point out where you are starting. They’re the people who can put words to what your starting situation is, but hopefully if you’re trapped with this other character through the whole story, they’re the ones who can tell you, oh, you know what, you actually got there. And you sort of function as a proxy throughout it and say like, “Oh, I see what’s wrong with you here and you actually did this thing that is very good for you to do.”

Without that character there to clock that, you don’t have the sense of accomplishment, the sense of reward at the end of the movie.

**Craig:** That’s right. And sometimes the disruption or disillusion of one allegiance and the creation of another, in and of itself, is a signifier that you’ve done it. You know? So, the bad one leaves you and the good one returns.

**John:** Let’s talk about the experience of allegiances, because very few of us in our life have enemies, but we all have allegiances. So, do you want to dig into sort of what the realities of having allegiances in real life are?

**Craig:** Well, if you have an enemy, there’s a clear state. And there’s not a lot of ambiguity. I don’t like you. Here’s why.

So, Ted Cruz, very clean relationship for me. I do not like him, right? There’s no confusion. There’s no ambiguity. And I’m also not challenged internally in any way by that. It’s nice and easy.

Friends, much harder. Friendship cuts to the heart of all, I think, of our innate human flaws. Because friendship is asking us to do things that go against the selfish gene sometimes. Being friends, having an allegiance, implies honesty, loyalty, self-sacrifice, even love. And these are the things that people find hard to do. Even when they’re trying to make an allegiance with themselves.

**John:** What I also find in the real world is I am a different person to some different people. And my relationships from my high school friends, to my work friends, to my people in other parts of my life, I’m a different person with them. I’m not a completely different person, but what’s important to me about the relationship is so very different. So, my relationship with my housekeeper is very different than my relationship with you.

And so, you know, I’m talking about different things, but I’m also presenting myself in a very different way. And so in narratives, the allegiances you show onscreen let you see different sides of a person that you would not otherwise be able to see.

**Craig:** That’s right. They also let you see people struggle to be good. And we don’t really believe in characters that are just good. We have them, but when we have them, they are rarely the protagonist. They’re usually some kind of rainmaker that comes in to enlighten us all, you know, like K-PAX, or Starman, or Jesus Christ.

Or, Elwood Dowd in Harvey, right? But it’s the people that are struggling to the right thing that are interesting. And so they’re struggling to maintain these allegiance. The boyfriend is leaving and the girlfriend doesn’t want to lose him, but doesn’t know how to keep him. That’s an interesting allegiance that’s falling apart, and she’s trying. We like that sort of thing.

I mean, when you look at a movie like The Avengers, what’s more interesting, the relationships between the heroes and the villains, or the relationships between the heroes and the heroes?

**John:** Absolutely. If you look at the most recent Avengers: Captain America movie, that is based around entirely those relationships. Those people who are neither your friends, nor your enemies, because of the complicated situation you find yourself in. And so when you have Iron Man facing off against Captain America, you are fascinated because you can see from both sides. You know the depth of the relationship between those two, and yet they’re also kicking the crap out of each other. That is fascinating. And that’s a thing I think that they were able to do brilliantly in this most recent incarnation is really dig into what it’s like to be fighting someone who you have a relationship with who’s not purely a villain.

**Craig:** Exactly. Because, we actually spend most of our time fighting with our friends. Very rarely do we fight with enemies, and the reason why is they’re not near us. We avoid them. But we don’t avoid our friends. We don’t avoid our spouses. We don’t avoid our children. We don’t avoid our business partners. We are constantly with our allies. And so naturally that’s where the most interesting fights happen.

**John:** Yeah. Because you would not choose to be around those enemy figures. And you’re getting as far away as possible from them. So, all those tensions that come out, which should be there, can erupt. And that can be the source of drama.

**Craig:** You know that super hacky line, “After all, you and I, we are not so different.”

**John:** Ugh.

**Craig:** Right? The worst villain line ever that just shows up over and over. That is just a very clunky overdone way of trying to say, “Look, even though I’m your enemy, we could be friends in some other world. There’s some connection between us that is almost like an allegiance.”

Where it happens best is when you have enemies and heroes that you believe actually, if not for a slight flick of fate, could be allies. Batman and the Joker are a fascinating partnership. They do feel more in a weird way like allies, even while they’re fighting, because of that strange notion of similarity.

**John:** Absolutely. Without the other person, they would sort of cease to exist. And Batman without Gotham City and without the crime of Gotham City, what would Batman be? And if Joker succeeded in killing Batman, would he be happy? Hard to say.

**Craig:** Exactly. And so in a weird way there, and that’s why maybe the finest of these Batman stories, The Killing Joke, which they are animating, and it looks wonderful, and Joker voiced by Mark Hamill, the greatest Joker of all time, I will say. That’s what that is about. It’s entirely about we love each other, in the strangest way. We do. We love each other.

So, we can talk a little bit about different kinds of allegiances that exist.

**John:** Let’s go through it. I see you have a whole sort of hierarchy built around Game of Thrones, and the kinds of patterns that characters find themselves in. So, I think it’s important to note with Game of Thrones is that because it’s a big giant soap opera, you can’t say like this character is the hero and this character is a villain. Everybody has their own motivations. And so each character in this relationship is sort of equal parts.

And so let’s go through Game of Thrones. Let’s also save some time and talk about movies which tend to have a central character and a character who is not a central character and sort of what’s different.

**Craig:** Sure. So, these are all allegiances. Sometimes they will sound like they’re not, but they are. They function essentially as two people — I guess I would define as an alliance or an allegiance is when two characters are operating toward the same goal.

So, the most common kind of shaky allegiance you’ll see in anything, movies or television, is the marriage of convenience. Essentially, we don’t like each other, but we need each other. That is essentially every buddy film you’ve ever seen.

**John:** Every film in which two characters are handcuffed together for some strange reason.

**Craig:** Correct. Or, in the case of Game of Thrones, Jon Snow and Tormund. Tormund is the best. So, there you have Jon Snow. He’s a member of the Night’s Watch. And you have Tormund, who is a leader of the —

**John:** Wildlings.

**Craig:** Yeah. The Wildlings. And they are historical enemies. They hate each other. But the two of them need to work together because they’re facing a larger common enemy, which are the White Walkers. So, marriage of convenience.

**John:** I’m recognizing as we’re about to go through this whole Game of Thrones thing is that most people’s experience with Game of Thrones is probably my experience with Game of Thrones, where I kind of know some character’s names, but I mostly like point and say, “That guy.”

**Craig:** Oh, well Tormund is the big redheaded Wildling dude.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And he’s the one who has the Brienne fetish with chicken.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s totally into Brienne.

**John:** Nice. Next up. What kind of pattern next?

**Craig:** Well, here’s a great one. Unrequited love. And this is a tragic one. Now, you may think, well, if someone is pining for somebody else, how is that an allegiance? Well, it is because the person who’s pining typically will do whatever they need to do to get the person to return the love. Which means they’ll help them.

And in the case of Game of Thrones, we have Jorah Mormont and his lovely Khaleesi.

**John:** Yeah. Daenerys Targaryen.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, in the case of — we can clearly see what he’s in it for. On her side, she can use him to do anything, but she also has a responsibility to him, and that’s a thing we saw in the House of Mazin episode, where she felt the responsibility of having this person who was so drawn to her. It strikes me that actually all of these relationships we’re talking about, it’s sort of like gravity. Like you have two items that have their own gravity and they’re sort of circling each other. And that’s really what you see in allegiances.

It’s two characters caught in each other’s gravity. And having to decide what they’re going to do with each other and for each other as they’re sort of doing this dance around each other.

**Craig:** That’s a great analogy. And to dig even deeper into it, the gravity has to kind of be in a weird stasis, right? Like the way the moon is around the earth. Too close, boom. Too far, wee. Right? So, and that can happen. But, when it happens, that’s how you end relationships. That’s how you end alliances, by people disappearing from your life, walking away from you. Or, from a collision that’s so emotional or the circumstances are so significant that you hate each other.

**John:** Yeah. Those high school romances that burn far too hot, and then they just completely flare out.

**Craig:** God.

**John:** Oh, I remember those.

**Craig:** Ugh, me too.

Here’s one: misplaced faith.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** So this shows up a lot. People are devoted to somebody out of some sense of follow the leader. In this case in Game of Thrones, we have Cersei and the High Sparrow. She kind of puts her faith into him, although really she was hoping for something else. But maybe a better look of it is Sansa and Joffrey. She believes, she has faith, that Joffrey is going to be a good king who will love her and be a great guy and he’ll make her the queen. There’s faith involved in this. There’s an aspirational element to it. If I just stick with this person, and give them all of my belief, I know that blankety-blank-blank-blank.

**John:** Well, it’s also a sunk cost fallacy. And so you have Sansa, oh, actually I’m thinking Cersei. But there is that sense of like I’ve invested this much time in the relationship. And so therefore I’m going to see this relationship through or else.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. I mean, you’re in for a penny, in for a pound. By the way, you see this in life all the time. It is very hard for people to say that they’re wrong. It’s incredibly hard for them to say that they’re wrong after they insisted they were right a lot. When other people were saying they were wrong. That’s the toughest one. Because there’s a certain humiliation to it.

And, of course, then that is an example of a kind of allegiance that almost always ends with some sort of Ka-boom, Wee, because it is not stable. It’s not stable.

What is a very stable one, though, is the parent-child allegiance. So, in Game of Thrones, you have the Three-Eyed Raven and Bran. You have Tywin Lannister and Tyrion, which is a bad version of it. And even though that one ends poorly, you can see that at least it lasted for a good chunk of Tyrion’s life.

Parent-child is sometimes a biological parent and child. Sometimes it’s Yoda and Luke. But it is a pretty strong allegiance. It’s an allegiance of either blood or a sense that you are going to replace me.

**John:** Yeah. Now, there are some — what’s fascinating about Game of Thrones, and I think a lot of good dramas, is sometimes it’s kind of unclear what type of relationship these characters are supposed to be in. So, you look at Arya and sort of her assassin training. What is her relationship with that dude? Like the faceless guys? Is it a parent-child relationship? Is it sort of a mentor relationship? It’s not really clear whether he cares for her at all. And it’s not clear whether she cares for him at all.

The same thing when she was traveling with the Mountain. [sic] You don’t know sort of what the boundaries of this relationship are. And this is partly what forms the conflict and the tension and the friction and all the delight within the scenes. These characters are trying to figure out who they are to each other.

**Craig:** Exactly. You can change the nature of the allegiance depending on the circumstances involved. For instance, take Arya Stark and the faceless man. When she meets him initially, he’s a guy trapped in a thing and she saves him. Then, he offers her something in exchange. He’ll kill three people for him.

Their friendship became almost like a buddy comedy there. And he was in her debt. And it was cute. It was actually kind of cute. And then it became something else. Now, you know, I would describe it more like disciple and prophet. There is somebody who can do things that are supernatural, and she now is training with him to do those supernatural things, to get the power that he has.

**John:** And certainly like Luke’s experience with Ben Kenobi in the first Star Wars tracks sort of that experience. Where like this is a person who is teaching you in these mystical ways, and yet is a very hard mentor. Then becomes a much more difficult mentor with Yoda in the second movie. There’s a track for that. What’s so unnerving and unsettling about Arya’s situation is we’re not sure he’s a good guy. And that’s a large part of the tension there.

**Craig:** Well, yeah. This is something that Game of Thrones generally does well. And I always tip my hat to Dan and Dave, but I also — after this last episode really just reminded myself to tip my hat to George Martin, because he is the one who thinks ahead on this Hodor thing. And he comes up with these remarkable characters that oftentimes you do both hate and love at the same time.

It’s pretty amazing, like the faceless man is a good guy, and definitely a bad guy. He’s a murderer. For money. So, bad guy.

And these allegiances don’t have to be fun. There’s codependency.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Codependency is an incredibly powerful kind of allegiance. Do you know — have you ever met couples, usually married, where it seems like they’re in their own cult?

**John:** Oh, for sure.

**Craig:** Yeah? And no one can get in. And it’s just like they whisper to each other a lot. And they’re just like only into each other. And it’s not like they just met. And if one doesn’t like somebody, the other one is not allowed to like that one either. Codependency.

**John:** It’s really crazy. And sometimes they are literally kind of in that cult where like they only listen to the same talk radio programs. They have one brain. And I’ve met some of those couples that have then later divorced, and both of those sides were just crazy afterwards.

**Craig:** Right. And in part because what you’re looking at there are two people that are missing something and the other person is giving it to them. And that’s a very powerful bond, but it’s also very disruptive to any kind of sense of being a better person.

So, in Game of Thrones, is there anything more codependent than Jamie and Cersei Lannister, the incestuous twins, who are just bad for each other.

**John:** Yeah. They are. And they’re bad for each other in a way that actually kick-starts the entire saga of Game of Thrones. Their lovemaking is what sends Bran flying off the tower. And so if they hadn’t been so messed up for each other, there wouldn’t be most of the drama we see.

**Craig:** That’s actually kind of an interesting idea of just what Game of Thrones would be like, how boring of a show it would be, if that were just — then it’s just mostly like meetings of the small council.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs] I would watch it.

**John:** Bureaucracy of Thrones.

**Craig:** Exactly. Anyway, we have a bunch more of these. I have a bunch more. But rather than belabor them all, I’m just going to pick out a couple of my favorites. Animal loyalty. I like it in movies and shows when there’s a character who is — and they’re always a side character, they’re always fairly minor — but they are defined by their dog-like loyalty to another person. It is completely irrational and it is totally unquestionable. There is comfort in knowing that of all the twists and turns that narrative can throw at you, that one thing will never twist or turn.

So, in The Godfather, Luca Brasi, he’s — that’s pure loyalty. He will never turn on you. And he will do whatever you ask him to do. And similarly in Game of Thrones, Hodor.

**John:** Hodor. You separated out Hodor’s sort of dedication to Bran from Brienne’s dedication to Sansa, which I think is actually smart. Because Hodor, he’s that dog that will just keep following you around, and nothing will ever dissuade that dog from following you. Brienne, she’s really sort of bound to herself in a way. She’s bound to own oath. And that is what is making her stick with Sansa.

And while she would do anything for Sansa, she’s really kind of doing it for herself. It’s a strange thing that happens there.

**Craig:** There’s a sense — some characters have a strong sense of honor or a strong code. And when they find somebody that allows them to indulge their code, and allows them to fulfill their purpose, that is a very strong allegiance.

But, if the person they are serving fails to meet the ideals of their code, then they are no longer serving the purpose, and then the allegiance breaks.

**John:** Yeah. So, you single out a couple other ones. Let’s just highlight them here. You certainly have the Oedipal pull between Robb and Catelyn Stark, which was just strange. I loved seeing it, but I was never quite clear what was going on. You have the master and his slaves. You have Ramsey Bolton and Reek, which is just so messed up.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And you want to say it’s codependent, but it’s not even that. It’s the desire to destroy another person and sort of reforge them in a different light. And it’s just taken to such an extreme in the example of Ramsey.

**Craig:** And then you can also get into the mindset of the abused. So, when his sister comes to rescue him, we understand why he acts in accordance with his allegiance with his master, Ramsey. Because in his mind we have now come to understand — it’s the strangest thing, to identify with a slave, because of the suffering and torment they have endured.

**John:** You know, what’s fascinating about the Ramsey character is there’s no one — I guess there is the girl he kind of liked who got thrown off the wall. But like you don’t see him with anyone else who is sort of on his side. Everyone else is just a puppet that he’s using.

And you feel like if you could stick him in a room by himself for a week, he would go insane, and would not be able to function anymore.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a reason why he — I mean, if you think about what he does to the character of Theon, it required an enormous amount of thought, planning, personnel, creativity. You know, like he actually had to sit and think like, “What would be the most screwed up thing I could do now?” And that implies a need.

There’s no reason for him to do all of that, unless there’s some need, which means he gets something from it. And I find that fascinating.

**John:** Yeah. So, this is Game of Thrones. So, Game of Thrones is a huge universe with a lot of characters, and each character theoretically can take the narrative off in their own direction. And so every character in Game of Thrones basically has storytelling power. There can be scenes just with them.

But when we’re going back to feature films, you tend to have — well, you have a hero, you have a protagonist. You have a central character. You have some sort of opposing force — an antagonist, a villain. And then you have allies. You have people who are there who function in ways like we’re describing here, but they don’t have their own storytelling power. They generally can’t drive scenes by themselves.

And it’s this weird thing in movies I find where you sort of want those characters to feel like, oh, they could take control of the movie by themselves, except they can’t. And so you’re deliberately sort of building the system in a way so the audience never feels like I want to see that character run off and take control of the narrative, because that’s not how it’s going to work. You still want your hero to be the person in charge.

So, what’d different about these allies in movies is they need to be able to illuminate aspects of the hero, the protagonist, without pulling focus. They can’t be so mesmerizing, attractive, fascinating that we stop focusing on our hero.

And that’s a thing you’ll often find where it feels like the minor characters run away with it. That’s what happens. A lot of times you’ll see in the animated films where they’ll go through the scratch reels and say like, “Oh, we’ve got a big problem. The sidekick is stealing the movie. Maybe we should make the movie about the sidekick?”

And that’s a thing you have to worry about in movies is making sure that your actual hero/protagonist is really at the center of the story. And is the reason why you’re wanting to watch this story.

**Craig:** Right. The people around your protagonist should express their allegiance to the protagonist in ways that hopefully add into the hero’s character by the end. You know, so you’ve got this woman and she’s a bit of a broken mirror. And she meets people along the way that are pieces of it, she just doesn’t realize. And each one of them, each one of their stories and their relationships with her should start to put her back together in a way that allows her finally at the end to say, “Oh, I know what I am. I am remade. And now let me do a thing.”

**John:** Yeah. I’m looking back at sort of the in-depth things we’ve done on movies in the past. So we’ve looked at Ghost, we looked at Raiders, we looked at Little Mermaid. In each of those cases, sometimes like Ghost is sort of a two-hander, like Demi Moore’s character almost has sort of full storytelling power there. But in each of those cases, those supporting characters have to be great, they have to be funny, they have to be wonderful, and they can’t pull us away from what we are actually focusing on which is what is the quest of our main character, and what is he or she trying to do.

**Craig:** Yeah. The function, it’s so true, the function of allegiances in movies is vastly different from television. Because, they aren’t designed to go on and on forever. They’re actually designed to resolve. So, it’s the difference between a very slow burning fuse and kind of a bomb, you know. So, movie relationships are more like grenades. They go off and then there’s a lot of noise and confusion, and then things settle down quickly and are resolved.

And so you have to think about your friendships in movies in a much different way than you do… — It’s one of the, you know, writing this miniseries, it’s been fun to extend the nature of some of these relationships, even though they too must end. They’re not designed to spool out forever. But it’s been fun.

**John:** Yeah. The last thing I’ll say is in movies these alliances, these supporting characters, they’re there often to serve as a proxy for the audience. They’re asking the questions that the audience would want to ask. They are helping you feel about the hero the way that these characters feel about the hero. They are the person who lets you into the world of the movie, so you could look at the hero the same way they are looking at the hero.

And it’s one of the reasons why some of the movies I have done have been incredibly difficult because they don’t have that single hero. So, I’m thinking about the Charlie’s Angels movies, which are actually weirdly the most difficult movies to write, because you have three heroes that have their own relationships with each other, and have their own relationships with Bosley, who have their own relationships with the villain. And all of the other supporting characters. It’s just a tremendous amount to try to manage and a tremendous amount to try to manage within scenes that actually have to have plot.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Big Fish —

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, those team movies kind of feature the allegiance as the hero.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Right? So there’s no one Charlie’s Angel that is the hero hero. It’s the team. Right? And the idea that they come together and fight together. I mean, there’s always going to be one that’s got slightly more, you know, but yeah, that is tricky. Because that relationship — it’s hard to tell those stories without falling into a very well-worn rut in the road. We break up. We’re jealous of each other and blah, blah, blah, we get back together. You know.

**John:** Yeah. Big Fish was the other example of a very difficult sort of relationship movie, because the relationship between the father and the son is the center of the movie, and yet the father and the son are not onscreen together a lot. I mean, we’re seeing the younger version of the father. We’re seeing the Ewan McGregor version of the father and his life. But we’re also trying to see the story from the point of view of Will, the grown son.

And trying to set up that story in a way that you understand both character’s relationship, that you invest in both of the character’s relationship, and understand the conflict is really challenging. And that’s because they both have very legitimate points. They both have very legitimate needs. And they have this gravity that is sort of destructive to both of them.

**Craig:** Yeah, that kind of destructive gravity to me is fun. That’s where things get interesting. To me, the most fun of writing on the Hangover movies was writing bad allegiances. I mean, they were just — it was just bad friendships from start to finish. These guys were bad for each other. One of them seemed to know it. You know, like that was — Ed Helms’ character Stu, he understood that this was — particularly Alan, Zach’s character, was just a bad friendship that would lead to no good things.

And, yet, without that he doesn’t necessarily win the respect of the father of the woman he loves. And then in the last movie, it really was about the end of that. It was basically how do we take this character, who is obsessed with his friendship, his allegiance with these guys. How do we take him on a journey where they basically say to him at the beginning there’s something wrong with you, and he denies it. And then get to the end where he says, “I’m okay to leave you now.”

And so, again, it was all about managing allegiances. I think they’re the most interesting relationships that you can have. Weirdly more interesting to me than standard romances, where you’re just waiting for the people to kiss. And they’re more interesting to me than hero/enemy, where it’s like I hate you, I hate you, blah, blah, blah.

Friendships are tricky, in our lives, and in television shows and in movies. That’s where I think the fun is.

**John:** Very nice. Cool. All right. Let’s answer a few questions from our listeners and see how much time we have left here. Josh in New York writes, “This year a film by Asghar Farhadi played at Cannes named The Salesman. The film takes its title from Miller’s Death of a Salesman, published in 1949. The film directly references the play, showing the two lead characters, both actors, exchanging dialogue as Willy and Linda Loman. How much published material of that kind can you reference in a screenplay? I’m working on a story that involves the cast and production of Tennessee Williams’ Streetcar Named Desire. And only attempting to reference material in a couple of scenes. Is this doable?

“I’m assuming there’s copyright laws at play.” So, Craig, what advice would you have for Josh?

**Craig:** You know, I wish that I could tell you that there was a clear line on these things. Partly it involves how much you use. If you’re going to use a very small amount, sometimes you can just kind of say it falls roughly into fair use.

If you’re doing any kind of parody of it, then there’s much more leeway. But the truth is, if they want to go after you, they go after you. And if they don’t, they don’t.

For you, Josh, I would say write whatever you want. And then the best problem in the world is that a studio loves your script, wants to give a lot of money. The only problem is that they’re having trouble clearing some of the dialogue that you put into that one scene.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** You’ll figure it out.

**John:** For a while, I was going to adapt this book Wonder, which is a great novel, great middle grade fiction novel. And one of my concerns about was in the course of the novel one of the characters is in a production of Our Town. And so the book talks through this production of Our Town.

And in a book form, that was fine, because it’s a book form. But I was nervous about, well, when it comes time to actually make this into a movie, we’re going to have to sort of show scenes from Our Town, and there’s a blurry line at which point like, well, you’re actually just doing Our Town. And that’s a real concern that people do have in the real world. Like, do you change out that play? Do you do something different? Do you deliberately not show it? Do you cut that whole section of the story?

That was something that another writer had to figure out. So, that movie I think is going to get made now. So, we’ll see what they end up doing with that.

**Craig:** That definitely is something that you have to… — It’s a red flag when there’s any sense that someone might be confused and think, wait, am I watching a Streetcar Named Desire, or am I watching something that involves a reference to Streetcar? So, if there’s confusion, that’s generally bad.

**John:** A bad thing. There’s an addendum for Josh. He says, “Last episode you got a question from someone in Launceston, Tasmania, Australia. As a fellow Aussie, I want to clear this up. John, you nailed the pronunciation. And then you, Craig, totally steamrolled him with something that sounded stiff upper lip British.”

**Craig:** Oh, well, here’s the thing, Josh. You’ve released the Kraken.

**John:** Uh-oh.

**Craig:** I’m going to dedicate my life to making sure that the people of Launceston pronounce it the way I think it should be pronounced.

**John:** [laughs] Nice.

**Craig:** I will spare no expense.

**John:** Yeah. Launceston.

**Craig:** Launceston.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** In Tasmania.

**John:** Tasmania.

**Craig:** Mania. Amanda writes, “I sent a query letter with a short description of my script to a production company. The emailed back to say, ‘Feel free to send along your material as well as a signed copy of the attached submission release form.’ Is this a normal thing? And is this safe to sign? I don’t want to naively sign over the rights to my script, or find myself in a sketchy situation. My script is copyrighted, but not registered with the WGA.”

And you and I have taken a look at this attached submission release form.

**John:** Indeed. And, in fact, we’ll actually include this PDF with the show notes, so people can take a look at this, too. Craig, what did you think of this?

**Craig:** I thought it was perfectly reasonable.

**John:** I thought it was reasonable, too. I’ve seen things like this a lot. So, basically, this company is called Cartel, but a lot of these forms are very similar. They’re basically just trying to cover their ass, so you won’t turn around and sue them six weeks later for an idea that’s the same kind of idea.

Some places, the only way they’ll read your stuff is to sign this. You got to kind of sign this.

Definitely read through it. And if there’s things that make it sound like they’re taking ownership of your property, well, that’s not good. But here it was very clear that they were trying to protect themselves because some ideas are just similar. And things will get out there.

**Craig:** Yeah. To me this is sort of a good model actually of what these things should look like. So, running it down, they’re saying here’s what you’re agreeing to when you sign this. You’re agreeing that you actually are the owner of what you’re submitting. You haven’t ripped somebody else off or copied it. You’re agreeing that just by giving it to them doesn’t mean that only that person can read it. They can share it with anybody else within their company.

This is the big one: you are agreeing that they might already be exploring similar ideas. They might already have something else like it, or somebody else talking to them about it. So, you can’t sue them, essentially for misappropriating your work.

That doesn’t mean, by the way, copying your work. It doesn’t mean you’re signing the rights away. It doesn’t mean they can take your script, change the cover page, and say you waived your rights. No. This is what it says. “Accordingly you hereby waive any claim that whatever the company is misappropriated any ideas or portions of your submission.” And really that comes down to, look, if you — it’s a little bit like the Gravity case.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, there’s a couple of things that are similar, like the title, and it’s a woman in space, and she briefly gets burned at some point, right, and then one movie is about getting home, and it’s a survival story. And the other one is like a scary aliens on a spaceship story. You can’t sue over that. And nor should you be able to. And the rest of it is nothing.

**John:** Basically saying we’re not going to send back your script. We’re not paying you. That this is a blanket release form. So, this seemed pretty reasonable to me. If people who are doing this for a living want to take a look at this form and give us any guidance about things you think are sort of unusual about this, let us know.

In my experience, I haven’t had to sign one of these for a very, very long time, so I don’t know what the current state of these is. But this seemed very reasonable to me.

**Craig:** Do we have people sign something like this when they send their stuff to us?

**John:** That’s a very good point. So, we do have them — if you’re sending in your script for the Three Page Challenge, you go out through a form, and you’re basically saying like we’re cool, you’re not going to sue us, I’m doing this just for funsies. That’s basically what you’re signing as you submit for us.

**Craig:** Okay. Well, hopefully that covers us. [laughs] You know, because somebody sends something in and it’s like, I feel like once I think I said I’m working on, or have worked on, something similar to this. Yeah, I just don’t want to get sued by somebody.

That’s why these people are doing it. Because unfortunately people do sue, because they’re stupid.

**John:** Yep. So, my One Cool Thing this week is a video by Estelle Caswell for Vox. And she’s looking at the rhyming scheme of great rappers, all the way back from the ’80s with Kurtis Blow, through the present day with MF Doom, and there’s Eminem along the way. There’s really great little snippets of these songs and that they chart out sort of like how the rhyme schemes work.

And it’s really just fantastic. It’s about 13 minutes long, so it’s an investment, but it’s a good thing for the end of the day when you’re just burned out.

And what was weird is I was helping my daughter with a poetry project this weekend when I was watching this video, so she was doing her haikus and her clerihews and these other sort of poetry forms. But I was watching this video and thinking like, you know what, actually rhyming still does matter because it is so fundamental to hip-hop. It’s so fundamental to sort of how modern music works. And to see these great writers working and sort of how they are finding their rhymes, and finding rhymes that not only work sort of mathematically, but also have such great content behind them. I was really inspired watching this video.

**Craig:** I will check that out. You know what it reminds me? This is not my One Cool Thing, but did you ever see that video that this guy did on YouTube of the Amen break?

**John:** No.

**Craig:** Basically it was a little snippet of a song from a B-side of another song. And the song wasn’t popular at all. It was called Amen Brother. And the only thing interesting about the song was that in the middle of it all the instruments dropped out and there was just a little drum break. And the drum beat was basically [hums]. And that little bit got sampled and used for everything.

It literally became like the weird urtext of hip-hop, jungle, trap, everything. It’s a great video if you watch it. Anyway, it’s on YouTube. You can just look up Amen break. But my One Cool Thing is Star Wars: A New Hope in infographic form, which everyone has been talking about. This is on a website created by Martin Panchaud, who is a Swiss illustrator and graphic novelist.

And what he has essentially done is a vertical scrolling, two-dimensional graphically designed explication of Star Wars: A New Hope, the movie, in a timeline, with all the dialogue, and representing everybody and all action graphically. And it’s beautiful. And really ingenious.

**John:** I’m scrolling through as we speak. It really is quite clever. So I would definitely recommend people check this out.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s nice. Well done. Cool. That is our show for this week. So, as always, our show is produced by Stuart Friedel. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Timothy Vajda. If you have an outro for us that you’d like us to play, you can send that through to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send questions like the ones we answered today.

We are both on Twitter. I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

You probably are listening to this on a podcast player. It’s great that you subscribed, but it would be also really wonderful if you would leave us a review in iTunes, because that helps people find us.

Next week will be — oh, we have a special guest next week. I’m so excited. But I don’t want to spoil it.

**Craig:** Ooh, who is it? [laughs]

**John:** Next week we’re going to be talking television. And we’ll hopefully be talking television with Jonathan Groff, who is one of the executive producers of Blackish.

**Craig:** He plays King George in Hamilton.

**John:** A different Jonathan Groff.

**Craig:** Oh…

**John:** Yeah, he gets that all the time.

**Craig:** Oh…

**John:** Don’t bring it up with him.

**Craig:** Oh…

**John:** And then we have special guests the week after that, too. It’s going to be so exciting. We actually recorded this episode on Wednesday because, Craig, you are headed to Princeton for your college reunion. Is that correct?

**Craig:** Yes. I am heading back to Princeton for my 24th reunion, which isn’t exactly a popular one, but I’m going really because it’s Melissa’s 25th.

**John:** Oh nice.

**Craig:** Which is a big one. Yeah. So, I’m joining her. Princeton reunions are insane. I don’t know if you’ve ever read about them or heard about them. I think they are the second or third largest beer-consuming event in the calendar. I’m not joking. Like behind the Indianapolis 500 or something.

It’s crazy. I mean, it’s insane. Like these old people can drink.

So, yeah, and it’s fun. It’s crazy.

**John:** Oh, it’ll be good. So Ted Cruz won’t be there, because it’s not his reunion. It’s really Melissa’s reunion.

**Craig:** I mean, listen, I hope he is there.

**John:** Yeah. That would be great.

**Craig:** Somebody sent me a picture. There’s a breakfast place in Princeton that has been there forever, PJ’s, and somebody had carved into the wooden table, “We didn’t like Ted Cruz here either.” I mean, now he’s part of the lore of it all.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You have your own weird sort of alliance with Ted Cruz. You’re caught in each other’s gravity.

**Craig:** No, he’s caught in my gravity. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] All right. Have fun, Craig. See you.

**Craig:** Thanks. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [Find Scriptnotes transcripts at johnaugust.com](http://johnaugust.com/transcript)
* Scriptnotes, 250: [The One with the Austin Winner](http://johnaugust.com/2016/the-one-with-the-austin-winner)
* Scriptnotes Bonus: [Craig and Adam McKay](http://scriptnotes.net/bonus-craig-and-adam-mckay)
* [Idea Submission Policy and Agreement](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/SubmissionReleaseForm.pdf) release form
* Vox’s [Rapping, deconstructed: The best rhymers of all time](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QWveXdj6oZU) on YouTube
* [Amen break](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen_break) on Wikipedia
* Martin Panchaud’s [Star Wars: A New Hope in infographic form](http://swanh.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Timothy Vajda ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/they-wont-even-read-you).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 251 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the program, it has been 12 weeks since our last Three Page Challenge. So, we will be doing one of those today, looking at three samples from listeners and offering our honest assessments. We will also be answering some provocative questions from our listeners.

**Craig:** Yeah. Let’s see if — I mean, you’re not going to get into trouble, but I probably will.

**John:** Yeah. I’m looking forward to that conversation.

**Craig:** I’ll end up in jail.

**John:** We have seen way too much of each other this week. You and I had a great lunch with Larry Kasdan, which was fantastic.

**Craig:** We did. Yes.

**John:** We recorded a one-hour podcast for the Dungeons & Dragons podcast, the official Dungeons and Dragons podcast, so that will be coming out at some point. I had a hard time reverting to my role as a guest and not a Segue Man.

**Craig:** [laughs] I know. It was amazing. You really just — your natural mien is to run a podcast, and you’re really good at running podcasts. So it makes sense.

**John:** Yeah. So, when things would go way off topic, I kept trying to bring us back to Dungeons & Dragons, for example, and not Sexy Craig. And I did not succeed.

**Craig:** Well, listen, they wanted Sexy Craig. You can’t —

**John:** They clearly wanted Sexy Craig.

**Craig:** You’ve got to give people what they want. Sexy Craig always gives people what they want. It’s a huge issue with him.

**John:** We also got a chance to give people what they want on the 250-episode USB drives. So, we recorded a special little introduction to that. We’ve been talking way too much. So, I barely even remembered that we had not recorded an episode this week until yesterday afternoon and said, oh you know what, we should actually find some topics.

**Craig:** It did seem like we had already covered about five podcasts worth of stuff, but here we are. And then I’m going to see you again like in a week or whatever when we have our Dungeons & Dragons game again.

**John:** Plus, we’re playing Pandemic on Monday. So, there’s too much.

**Craig:** That’s right. We’re playing Pandemic on Monday. Oh my god. Well.

**John:** Far too much.

**Craig:** Listen man, whatever. You know what? You’re an easy person to spend time with.

**John:** Aw. Thanks Craig. That’s sweet.

**Craig:** I didn’t say you were fun to spend time with.

**John:** Yeah. Just easy.

**Craig:** Just easy. [laughs] Aw, Craig.

**John:** Aw, Craig. Let’s do some follow-up. So, back in Episode 242 we discussed the Internet outrage over the death of a gay character in the show The 100. And what TV showrunners owe to fans and sort of that weird relationship between TV showrunners and fans.

So, this week a friend pointed us to a site called LGBT Fans Deserve Better. And it has a thing called the Lexa Pledge, which is basically TV writers pledging to take certain steps in relation to their LGBTQ characters. Craig, did you get a chance to take a look at this?

**Craig:** I did. Yeah. I read through all of it.

**John:** So, let’s talk through some of the points. We will ensure that any significant or recurring LGBT characters we introduce to a new or preexisting series will have significant storylines with meaningful arcs.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Other ones that are very similar to that, I would say. We refuse to kill a queer character solely to further the plot of a straight one.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** All right. We acknowledge that the Bury Your Gays trope is harmful to the greater LGBTQ community, especially queer youth. As such, we will avoid making story choices that perpetuate that toxic trope. We promise never to bait or mislead fans via social media or any other outlet.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** That was the one which I thought like, really, that’s a broad general thing that they’re doing there.

**Craig:** Kind of tipped their hand there, didn’t they? What this is really about.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I don’t like these pledges. I mean, listen, I’m completely in favor of treating all characters, but especially characters that are portraying people that have been either underrepresented on television, or treating unfairly in society in general. Treating them with respect. Treating them with dignity. Not falling back on stereotypes. I’m entirely in favor of that.

I am not at all in favor of anybody taking any pledge about their characters. They’re our characters. We’re writers. I don’t want to say ever I’m going to ensure, for instance that any significant or recurring LGBTQ character will have significant storylines with meaningful arcs. What if I want to have the police captain be gay and just have him be gay and it’s not a thing. We just hear that he has a husband and that’s that. And that’s it. And he’s not an important character. I’m not allowed to do that? That’s crazy.

**John:** Yeah. I think that’s not the intention behind this. My bigger worry with this kind of pledge is that you’re addressing a situation that has happened, obviously there’s one sort of flashpoint for it, but it’s an overall problem and a real trope. And so to call out that trope is useful and meaningful. But it feels like, again, a very blunt force way to approach how we’re going to deal with it.

And especially like, you know, most of these things you’re pledging are really subjective considerations. Like we refuse to kill a queer character solely to further the plot of a straight one. Well, what does that mean? What does further the plot of a straight one, what does solely mean?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** How good of a death does a gay character have to have? It just feels well intentioned, but I can’t imagine this having a great impact overall.

**Craig:** No. No. I don’t want to live in a world where writers can’t kill gay characters. Writers should be able to kill any character they want. We love Game of Thrones because everybody’s head is on the chopping block. Gay, straight, or otherwise. And that’s fair. I mean, it’s what we do. What this kind of thing ignores is that we have eyes and ears and we can watch and listen to movies and television shows and then draw a reaction, or draw a conclusion from what they’ve done. And if the conclusion is these people are just mishandling gay characters, and they’re being kind of irresponsible about it and a bit dismissive, vote with your eyes and ears, and get rid of it. And just don’t watch it. And probably it goes away.

Or protest. Do whatever it is you want. But I can certainly — as an adult, I feel like I can watch a television show and if a gay character dies and like, for instance, Renly died on Game of Thrones. Not because he was gay.

**John:** No. Everyone dies on Game of Thrones.

**Craig:** Everyone dies on Game of Thrones. I didn’t walk away from that episode going, “Argh, Dan and Dave, there you go burying the gays to advance the plot of the…”

We are far more capable of determining what is — and then when you get to “we promise never to bait or mislead fans via social media or any other outlet,” what do you think social media — what do you think these shows use social media for? That’s it.

**John:** Yeah. I think at we’re at a really weird time, especially with social media and misleading and sort of what the creator’s responsibilities are to the show and to the fans via social media, because part of your job now seems to be kind of misdirecting people about what’s going on. Is Jon Snow dead? Well, they maintained a ruse for two years about Jon Snow being dead because that’s kind of their job now. So, you know, by the time this episode comes out, the news will have leaked about a major character dying on this one series that my daughter watches, and so I’m debating like do I tell her in advance, because it seems to be out there in the world that it’s going to happen. And she’ll be kind of traumatized by it.

But, I don’t know. We’re in a weird place.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, we get traumatized because we care. I mean, listen, everybody I think who is a reasonable good-intentioned, big-hearted person is concerned about the high rate of suicide and self-harm among LGBTQ kids. Okay? But when they say that the deaths of queer characters can have deep psycho/social ramifications, A, we are not responsible for people hurting themselves when we kill characters. B, they have deep psycho/social ramifications because we do our job. If they didn’t, that means you didn’t care.

We all go through that feeling, that terrible feeling of watching a character you love die. It stinks. It’s just no good. Nobody likes it. But that’s part of what drama is, right?

**John:** Yeah. So, if I were — I’m not going to sign this pledge — but if the pledge were just one of these points, I think I might sign the version that is just I acknowledge that the Bury Your Gays trope is harmful to the greater LGBT community, especially queer youth. As such I will avoid making story choices that perpetuate that toxic trope. That, to me, feels like something I could actually sign on to. Because that’s saying like, listen, I see what you’re calling out, and I agree. It’s a stupid trope that we need to avoid, not only because it’s lazy, but because it actually has a negative impact on a very vulnerable section of the population. I totally get that.

It’s the broader thing I thought just went too far.

**Craig:** Well, I’m in total agreement there. I would sign that. But, of course, here’s the irony of signing these pledges. The only people that sign the pledges are people that weren’t going to be doing that anyway.

**John:** I think you’re right. Yeah. So, to bring this back to me, which is part of my favorite subject, back in 2006 on the blog, I had the screenwriter’s vow of Air Vent Chastity. So, this is the trope that drives me crazy is that in movies and in TV, characters are always climbing through air vents and it’s always so unrealistic and it can never actually happen. So rarely in actual life do people go into air vents, do heists happen through air vents. It happens all the time in TV and in film.

So, the pledge that I asked people to sign was, “I, John August, hereby swear that I will never place a character inside an air duct, ventilation shaft, or other euphemism for a building system designed to move air around.” And people signed that pledge.

**Craig:** I’m with you. In fact, I thought of you because I never forgot that. And I thought of you yesterday, because I was playing Unchartered Four, which is very good.

**John:** I hear it’s great.

**Craig:** And there is a sequence where — no spoilers here — in a couple of sequences they flash back to the time when Nathan Drake was a kid. And in one of those sequences, he goes through the air ducts. And actually, and then no, come to think of it, there is also an adult section where he goes — not pornographic — but when he’s an adult character, he also goes through an air duct.

You know, air ducts, A, aren’t that big. If they were that big they wouldn’t work as air ducts because there would be too much flow and no pressure.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** This is the nerdiest reason — it’s so nerdy.

**John:** Here’s what I will say. I have enjoyed many pieces of quality entertainment that have involved characters climbing through air ducts. And so going back to Aliens, favorite movie of all time, and even like 10 Cloverfield Lane has an air duct moment. In both of those, it didn’t bother me because it felt like, well, given the situation that you’re in, that may be a reasonable choice.

I just get frustrated that I feel like it’s a lazy kind of hacky way that I see every one-hour adventure show doing a lot.

**Craig:** They love the air duct.

**John:** They love the air duct.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** False suspense. All right. Some questions that are also kind of follow-up. James from, we’re going to say Launceston, Australia.

**Craig:** It can be Launceston.

**John:** Launceston?

**Craig:** Launceston.

**John:** “In your last episode with the Austin winner, that was Episode 250, you mentioned that her lack of dialogue in the teaser might be improved with lyrics that have some connection to the action. My question to you is do you write that specific sample lyrics in your dialogue? Or do we just write the song title in the action and assume the reader knows the lyrics to the song?”

Craig, that was your suggestion, so tell us what you think.

**Craig:** In all cases when I do things like that, I do use the lyrics. The whole point is that the lyrics, not the song title or what people might remember of it — usually when people see a song title, they’re just thinking the music, you know. The whole point is that the lyrics are a commentary on what we’re seeing. Some kind of ironic commentary or interesting commentary.

So in circumstances like that, I always use the lyrics. What I do is I don’t print them as dialogue, I print them in the action paragraph area, but I just put them in italics. And it’s quite clear. And then I break it up, so a couple lines, some action. A couple lines, you know, that sort of thing.

**John:** Yeah. So, I think the reason why I was asking for dialogue and why you suggested lyrics is because those first two pages were so dense and it was asking a lot of the reader. So, just breaking up that page a little bit more would help. In that circumstance, I probably would put them in dialogue, but I also would put them in italics. So I would like, you know, singer, and then those lyrics as being sung by a person in the space.

You don’t have to have all the lyrics to the song. I think just like two lines here, two lines there would be great. You can jump ahead in the song. Just anything that feels like it’s fitting the moment you’re describing would be great.

**Craig:** Yes. You definitely want in your mind to have a general sense, okay, this is roughly taking this long, and this song — here’s a section where the lyrics make sense. Yeah, you’re right, sometimes if things are very blocky on the page I might put it in dialogue. And sometimes the character’s name will by Lyric.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, you know, yeah. But I wouldn’t not put lyrics in, if that’s the whole point.

**John:** Absolutely. All right. Do you want to take the next one here?

**Craig:** Sure, Anonymous writes, “I’m an aspiring writer in Los Angeles and I’ve been trying to land a TV writing assistant job. These are actual quotes I’ve been getting. ‘We love your resume and you’d be a great fit for this job, but the higher ups told us we have to hire a girl.’ Or, ‘It’s going to be extremely hard for you as a white male to get into a writer’s room.’ Additionally, there are competitions or fellowships that are not advertised as diversity programs, but every year the winners will be along the lines of female, African American, ex-Marine. Let’s say there were 20 winners, there might be one or two white people. I’m sure all the writers are greatly talented, however it is statistically impossible for so few white people to win in competitions where race supposedly doesn’t matter.

“This is not at all an angry email. I totally support equality across the board and I get what Hollywood is trying to do. I just find it interesting and a little frustrating at times. And I’d like to hear your thoughts on this.”

**John:** Great. So this is the kind of thing I’ve heard both from showrunners and from young staff writers, is that it is challenging in some cases to hire a young white writer, a young white male writer for certain positions. And it is challenging and frustrating to be a young white male TV writer trying to get one of those positions.

And frustrating is, you know, a good term for it, because it’s less than angry, but it’s annoying. And from a young TV writer I talked to recently, his manager said like they won’t even read you. Because basically when they’re looking at some of those positions, they really are going into it with the mindset of like this person we’re hiring needs to not be a white male.

And that is annoying for that writer, but it is sort of the reality that they’re facing. So, I thought we might start by talking about what these positions are and sort of why people are going after them.

Distinguishing between a writer’s assistant and a staff writer. A writer’s assistant is a person who is kind of like a PA. They are often in the writer’s room. They’re helping out the writers. They’re taking lunch orders. They are taking notes down. They’re helping the showrunner. They’re not hired as a writer, per se. They’re not hired based on their writing sample. They are hired because they seem like a competent person who can do a good job doing that sort of administrative stuff that they need to get done.

A staff writer is hired based on writing samples, and so that’s most of what we talk about on the show are people’s writing samples. So, this is Amanda who was on last week, the script she wrote, that would be a writing sample and she would be trying to use that to get staffed on a job. So, those are kind of two separate things, but they’re both considered very classic entry level ways to get into Hollywood.

You and I didn’t come through TV, but if we had come through TV, those would be our first jobs.

**Craig:** No question. And I don’t know what the legality is of saying to somebody, “We’re not hiring you because you’re white.” It doesn’t sound legal. I mean, I know that there’s a difference between I guess what you’d call sort of the sort efforts and then the hard — no white people.

But, yeah, here’s basically the deal. For a long time, the scale was weighted heavily in favor of white guys. And now the scale is being heavily weighted against them, at least in these early positions. And that is a function in part of how clumsy Hollywood is at diversity. They just — Hollywood, when it comes to diversity, Hollywood is like a surgeon with no fingers. Just fists. And they swing their fists around and inevitably in an attempt to help somebody, and inevitably somebody gets hurt along the way.

What do you advise for — because, look, I don’t like — I was working this out in my head. Part of the problem is you have a certain amount of jobs, right? And there are certain groups that underrepresented. You want to bring them in. If you maintain the same amount of jobs, and it becomes a zero sum game, then you are necessarily saying to maybe the best applicant, maybe the most qualified applicant is a white man and you’re saying, “No, sorry, because you’re a white man,” which in my bones feels gross. Any kind of discrimination based on gender or race, I don’t like it.

But, if they expanded the hiring pool so that it was more than a zero sum, it was a — but then I thought, yeah, but then, you know, what’s going to happen then? It’s the same thing. You could look at this pool as the expanded pool. You know what I mean?

**John:** Absolutely. So, we’ve talked about diversity a lot. And whenever we go through the WGA diversity numbers we’re like, well, these are terrible and we need to make improvements, and we have to sort of — some systemic needs to be made.

And so what I think you’re seeing here is this is the uncomfortable grinding of gears as you’re trying to make some systemic change. So, let’s take a look at the macro decisions that are going on here and what the studios are looking at when they’re saying — you know, whether they’re officially saying you need to hire a diverse candidate for this slot, what their intention is.

And so I think the industry genuinely wants more diverse writers. They want people of color. They want women. They want people from a wide variety of backgrounds. And not only do they want new writers, but they want experienced writers. So, in their fantasy world there would be a whole bunch of really talented, really experienced diverse writers they could hire for their shows.

There’s a supply and demand problem. There aren’t enough of those really talented experienced diverse writers, because we haven’t been hiring them at those beginning levels for so long. And so the kind of brute force way of trying to get more experienced writers is to hire a bunch of really inexperienced writers to start in those entry level positions and try to grow them up. And so I think Anonymous is frustrated and I think everyone who is encountering this right now is frustrated because they’re trying to grow this generation and they’re just planting as many seeds as they possibly can. And there’s not sort of real estate to grow Anonymous because they’re trying to grow some diverse writers.

That’s sort of the macro thing I think is happening here.

**Craig:** I think you’re absolutely right.

**John:** But on a micro level, let’s look at it from the showrunner’s point of view. If you were showrunner running a show, you want an incredibly — let’s say you have eight writers on your writing staff. You want the absolute best writers you can find. I completely agree with you. You’re looking for quality. But you also want writers who bring different experience to the table. Ideally you don’t want like three writers from Brown who just graduated three years ago. You want people who sort of represent a range of experiences and who look kind of like America, who look kind of like the world, who look kind of like the cast of your show.

And so with those things in mind, the most qualified candidate isn’t necessarily the candidate who had the best writing sample. It’s the candidate who’s going to bring something into that room that another candidate can’t bring. And that’s why I think you end up sort of going for the diverse writer sometimes, even if script to script you might say like, well, the other one is a little bit better writer, you might say this is the reason why I’m hiring that person.

Or, in the case of a writer’s assistant, you’re not even really looking at a script. You’re looking at this is a chance to bring this person into the room and hopefully get the benefit of some of their experience. And that’s why I think you’re going to go for — even if like there wasn’t an official mandate saying we want a diverse candidate for these entry level spots, I think you’re going to — you may steer yourself towards that because, look, if you want a diverse staff and you would love to have — you’re going to have a hard time finding a Pacific Islander Co-EP because there just aren’t that many.

But you might be able to find that kind of person in a writer’s assistant, or a staff writer. And comparing two people, you might pick that person because that’s a chance to bring that person and that voice into the room.

**Craig:** Yeah. That is all correct. And the point of this gear-grinding, I think that’s an apt analogy, is to hopefully avoid gear-grinding in the future. In the meantime, somebody like Anonymous is at an individual basis sitting there going how is this fair for me? And it’s not.

**John:** It’s not.

**Craig:** It’s not.

**John:** And it’s not fair for him. It’s not fair for him in the sense of I’m trying to get this entry level writer’s assistant job, and I’m not getting this. And so I think what Anonymous needs to do is also take a step back and look at like, okay, have I had any advantages going into this situation that I’m not fully recognizing or addressing?

And so he may have social connections that would have sort of gotten him that job naturally kind of anyway, so like a college connection, alumni, his roommate is friends with this roommate who is friends with this roommate. That kind of stuff. You’re at a bit of an advantage I think in Hollywood coming from those social connections as a white person.

He might have had economic advantages. And so one of the things I hear a lot from people who are going after these sort of entry level jobs is like, oh, well they had these great unpaid internships. Well, you can only sort of take an unpaid internship if you can afford to take an unpaid internship. And so that’s an advantage that Anonymous might have had that he doesn’t sort of realized he had.

And, finally, there’s just geographic advantages. If you live in LA or in New York, you had more chances to sort of go in after those things than a person who is coming in from Chicago or someplace else. And so there may be a reason why they’re going after that writer who — or writer’s assistant who is from someplace else because, well, that’s a chance. Or, an international writer, or somebody who came from a different country because that’s a chance to get that experience in there.

**Craig:** All of that is true. Now, it may also be that Anonymous is a bit like I was when I started out. Even though I went to a pretty fancy college, I didn’t have any social connections in Los Angeles. Alumni were of no help. [laughs] And there was no college anything, I mean, you know, we’ve told the story. I mean, I basically got a job because I went to a temp agency and typed.

And my family didn’t have money. And I was living on the opposite side of the country from the city I wanted to be in. So, it would have been really frustrating and upsetting to me personally if somebody said to me, “You are the best candidate for this job. However, I cannot hire you because you’re white.”

Now, with that said, the only real advice I can offer Anonymous on this is this, and it’s the same advice that I remember talking to a writer. He’s black and it was about four or five years ago. And he was just saying, “I’m so tired of these moments that I encounter.” That it’s not like overt white-sheet racism, but it’s racism. And it’s just exhausting. And the advice I gave him is the same advice I’m going to give you, Anonymous. It’s happening. You are not in control of what is happening. Stay focused on what you are in control of, which is you and your work.

So, the world around you will continue to revolve in a way that is not fair. And while other people attempt to make adjustments to make it fair, or not, or make it worse, I don’t know, you may go ahead and fight for your rights as you wish. But when it comes to work, stay focused on what you control. The better you get, the more persistent you are, the harder and harder it will be for people to deny you.

**John:** So as I talk to young white male writers who are facing this, the ones who have had success more recently had been basically creating their own stuff. And so if you write a show, write a pilot that people want to make, well, congratulations. You’re now a TV writer because you wrote something that’s going into production.

And so they’re basically skipping the step of being the young staff writer and trying to get that entry level job. The other thing I would say is that I think Craig is exactly right in both I think you can acknowledge your frustration and look at it, and then you just have to kind of set it aside because dwelling on it is not going to improve the situation. And so trying to label it, or I’ve heard this term thrown around, the “white guy tax,” basically it gets more expensive to hire a white guy for something, that’s not going to help you or anybody. So just don’t think that way.

Instead, think about sort of what you can do, how you can distinguish yourself. To what degree you are offering a diverse voice in one of those rooms can be useful. When I had Aline and Rachel on for the episode two episodes ago, they were talking about they had a diverse staff and talking about sort of different racial things. Like, “We have a guy from the Midwest.” And that got a laugh in the room, but Aline was serious when she said that. She needed people who were not just from the coasts. Who were not just this one thing.

And having from different backgrounds really helps. And so there may be something about your specific background, you specific experience, things you’ve done that are useful. And so Anonymous singles out like, oh, a soldier got it. It’s like, well yes, a soldier is an interesting different experience. And so if you have something like that in your tool belt, don’t be afraid to use that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ll tell you, and I’ll say this to anybody. I don’t care what your identity is, or how you identify. In the end, no matter what a system attempts to do, in the end talent will win out. So, if you are at home, and you are Latina, and you are feeling ignored by a system that seems with a deck that is stacked against you, your talent I believe will win out. And if you are 22-year-old white kid who is headed out here and is getting doors slammed in his face because you’re not diverse, talent will win out.

Keep your eyes on your own paper, I guess, is the way I would put it.

**John:** Yeah. There’s nothing more frustrating than trying to insert yourself into a system that is not ready to accept you. And I think ten years ago, feature screenwriters were in a similar situation where there was a whole generation of young feature screenwriters coming in, and there just were not jobs because we stopped making a lot of features.

And so those screenwriters could have complained, and some did complain. It’s like, well where are the jobs? There used to be like young screenwriters used to get these jobs. And the smart ones recognize like, you know what, that door has kind of closed. And they started finding other ways to get work. So, they started working in TV.

And now if you’re this guy here, and it’s hard to get started in TV, well look for the thing that’s not hard to get started in. And so that may be the next industry, the next wave, the next thing that is just looking for great writers and hasn’t even really kind of thought about sort of how to diversify it. Go after that, but don’t beat yourself up about someone not letting you have this one job you think you should have.

**Craig:** Holler.

**John:** Cool. All right. Next question comes from Ben. Ben writes, “I’ve had two low budget indie movies produced. Made the Nichols finals. And landed my first two studio jobs in quick succession.” Congratulations, Ben.

**Craig:** Yeah. Sounds like — is this a white guy, do you think? I mean, what’s going on here?

**John:** “With those two projects moving in the right direction, and two new ones on the horizon, I find myself faced with a different kind of challenge. I’m a pretty fast writer and comfortable juggling multiple projects at once, but my biggest question at this point in my career has to do with managing steps. If I submit my first draft and the studio starts hunting for a director, I want to take another job. But what happens if I’m in the middle of job two when job one calls and wants its first rewrite? The last thing I want to do is overcommit and piss people off. But I can’t let great opportunities pass me by just because I’m sitting around, waiting for the next step on a prior job.

“From two guys who juggle a lot of studio projects, how do you handle this?”

**Craig:** Well, carefully. This problem is a wonderful problem to have.

**John:** Yeah. High class problems.

**Craig:** High class problem indeed. But nonetheless, it is probably the thing that comes up the most when I’m talking with writers who are in similar situations. This is the big agita of our lives. When there is more demand for your work than your ability to supply to supply it, then these things happen. What I find in general is this: everybody understands that sooner or later the shoe will be on the other foot. If I’m taking a job and working on one thing while I’m supposed to be working on your thing, that’s no Bueno.

But, if I take your job and I do it, and I’m successful at it, and I leave and I start another one, and then you come back and say, “Guess what? Everything is going great. We need some more work.” And I say, all right, I’ll get back to you as soon as I’m finished with this. Give me a couple of weeks, or whatever time I need, they can’t really get angry at you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** If they try, it’s all too easy to just say what I’ve said so many times over the last 20 years. It should be like a little thing I could press a button. You wouldn’t want me to do this to you. I’m on your thing. You wouldn’t want me to just drop it and walk away. And they always seem to get it when you put it that way.

**John:** Yeah. Everything is always a huge rush and priority when it’s their thing. And when you’re waiting for them to read something or do something, there’s no hurry on their side.

So, when you are making a contract to write a movie, you’re signing a deal, and there’s generally multiple steps. Back in the golden days when Craig and I were starting, those steps were guaranteed steps. And so you would have a first draft. You would have a rewrite. You might have a second rewrite. You might have a polish. And there were reading periods between those steps. And I remember very fondly and vividly off of one of my first writing jobs, this if for How to Eat Fried Worms, I had like three guaranteed steps. And so I figured out I could make my little spreadsheet of like I will turn this in then, and there will be a reading period on this. And I could count on that money coming in because those were guaranteed steps. And that was a golden time.

That doesn’t exist anymore. So, I will bet you that Ben is taking a one-step deal on these projects. And so he is writing his little pen to the nib, and turning it in, and hopefully they’re loving it and they’re going after a director. When that director signs on, that will be the next step. But Ben has no way of knowing whether that next step is ever going to happen. So Ben has to be looking for that next job.

So he gets that next job, he’s working on that, and they finally come back to him and say like, okay, now we need you to sit down with the director. But he’s busy doing other stuff. In reality, what you do is you kind of make it work. And you take the meetings, you start figuring out how to do that stuff, and then you try to finish up job number two so that the minute you hand that in, like later that afternoon you’re working on that next thing.

And that is the reality. And it’s because I think we work in a draft-based business rather than a time-based business that it gets so uncomfortable. If we were working just on a clock, like when I’m doing a weekly, it’s like, you know what, that was turned in. That’s done. And I can walk away clean. That never happens in normal draft set mode of business.

**Craig:** Yeah. Make it work is pretty much what you got to do here, Ben. You will have some late nights. You’re going to have some weeks. I mean, I’m too old to work to the extent where I go, oh my god, I am exhausted. But it happens all the time.

**John:** Larry Kasdan at lunch said like, “How do you guys juggle multiple things at once?” Which seemed like a bizarre question from him. Because like how could he not have been this his entire life? And so we will tell you, Ben, what we told Larry Kasdan is you just make it work.

**Craig:** You make it work.

The one thing you got to be aware of is that on these one steps they have an option almost always for a second one, and they have a certain amount of time in which to exercise that option. But, this question of who is in first position and who is in second position, at some point your agent is going to litigate all this for you.

Let your agent kind of handle this, right? She knows what you’ve got. She has all of your contracts. She has all of your deals. She also knows that if you’re this busy, it’s good news. Nobody gets angry at somebody they don’t want. They only get angry at you because they do want you. That’s the best kind of angry at you and it doesn’t last. Because they know that if they get too angry and they throw a real tantrum, A, they’re not going to get good work out of you. And, B, that’s the last they’re going to see of you. And this is what your agent can do. This is why — this is why agents exist. If we didn’t this kind of buffer, my god, we’d all save the 10%.

**John:** Yeah. My last final rant is that if studios would just stop making one-step deals, a lot of this would be a lot simpler. Because Ben would not have had to sort of go after that second job, or that third job right the minute he turns in the script.

**Craig:** We’ve said this — when we go and meet with the heads of the studios. Billy Ray, he always says, “These people are looking for their next job the day you hire them for your job.” Because they have to. Because they have to. And that’s a problem for everybody.

**John:** Craig, why don’t you take the next question?

**Craig:** Right. Andrew, the delivery guy, writes, “I’m about 30 podcasts out from your first live taping in Austin. In the event you haven’t done a follow-up episode regarding it, and now that many years have passed, have your opinions regarding the Black List evolved any? Is it still a positive, viable inlet for new writers? Or has it perhaps succumbed to the gravity of financial immorality?”

**John:** Oh, I like that. I like that terminology.

**Craig:** The gravity of financial immorality. There’s got to be something other than those two options, right John?

**John:** [laughs] I think we’ll find a middle ground here. So, Andrew is not referring to the NBC show starring James Spader, he’s referring to the Black List, which is a creation of Franklin Leonard who is a friend of both of ours.

And so Franklin came to the live show in Austin — I think our first live show — and talked about the launching of the Black List as a paid service, which is where writers pay money to submit their scripts. They get professional coverage. And then industry professionals can download those scripts and read them. And so that was a new thing that Franklin was doing. Confusingly, I still think it’s confusing, Franklin also runs the Black List which is the annual assessment of the best unproduced scripts in Hollywood, which is gathered together from the hive mind groupthink of all the top executives in Hollywood.

I’m sure Andrew is talking about the paid service Black List.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And when we talked about in Austin, Franklin was very nervous that Craig would hate it. And I think your exact quote was, “I don’t hate this,” maybe.

**Craig:** Right. It was I won’t attack it.

**John:** Oh yeah, you won’t attack it. That’s good.

**Craig:** Yeah. I won’t attack it.

**John:** And since then we have not attacked it. And we’ve brought it up a couple times on the show saying like, you know, as people asked for like what should I do next, we will send people to that, or to the Austin Film Festival, you know, screenwriting competition saying that might be a check for whether you are a good writer or not. Because you just may not know.

But we’ve come short of like fully endorsing it, because we don’t have personal experience with success or failure or how it all feels and fits to our lives.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, we don’t really endorse anything to be honest with you, because that’s not what we do. But the Black List is, there are a lot of services that are like this. It is the only one I think that has the proximity to actual legitimate decision makers that’s required for it to be viable.

That doesn’t mean that an enormous amount of people are coming out of the service with gigs. But then again, an enormous amount of people will never come out of any pool of people with gigs, because there are very few jobs and there’s an enormous amount of competition.

What I can say about the Black List is that I know a lot of the people that are on the reading side of it, and they’re real. It’s not like these ridiculous pitch fests where some C-level production entity is sending their third assistant’s intern to hear your pitch. And it’s baloney, right? I mean, so much of that is just nonsense.

It’s fairly affordable. It doesn’t seem like they’re gouging you price wise. And it seems also like you would be able to figure out within a month or two if it were something that kind of might help you or not. So, is it a positive, viable inlet for new writers? I’m going to say yeah, or at least it’s not a bad one. You know?

**John:** I think the “not a bad one” is where I would land, too. If I were envisioning a service that does what Black List does, it’s kind of the best version of it. I’ve seen so many terrible scammy versions of it. And it’s like Franklin is actually smart enough to create like the good version of it. The good version of it is not perfect. And one of the things I admire about Franklin is whenever there’s like criticism of it, he will go right to where the source of the criticism is and like fully engage, be it on Reddit or wherever. And he will explain sort of what they do, what’s been working well, what’s not been working well.

And he’s both smart and responsive. And so that leads me to believe that probably the organization is run in a smart and responsive way. So, again, I’m short of endorsing it, but I feel like it’s the best version of that kind of idea I’ve seen.

**Craig:** I’m with you. I think that Franklin is a legitimately decent man. And he is legitimately connected to our business. He is close with a lot of agents and a lot of producers and a lot of managers and a lot of studio executives.

And, I mean, you and I, we’re not hanging out with some random dude that runs a baloney Scriptapalooza three times a year in Tulsa. We don’t do that. So, he’s a legitimate guy, and also he’s a decent guy. Those two things often don’t overlap, so it’s nice that they do for Franklin. So, certainly I can say that, no, I don’t think anything Franklin Leonard will ever do is in danger of succumbing to the gravity of financial immorality. He’s a very moral person actually.

**John:** Here’s one thing I will say. Stuart is friends with a lot of development executives, and we were talking about the Black List and Stuart relays that his friends will say in theory, they could be going on the Black List and looking at the highest rated scripts, and reading them and finding great new writers. That in reality their reading lists are so packed anyway with the stuff that they’re being assigned to read by their bosses that other colleagues are telling them to read, that they’re not going on the site to find those scripts.

And so that fantasy of, you know, you will discover these great writers, or that these industry professionals are going there to look for the next great writers, from Stuart’s limited development experience and his friends, doesn’t seem to be happening as much.

**Craig:** I would not be surprised if the real notice only comes when you are in the very, very, very, very top of the distribution pool of however they rank things. You know, essentially there’s like a — you should read this script. Really? On Black List. What did it get? It’s a 9.7 after 14 reviews. Oh, yeah, okay. That one I will read. People only read things because they’re frightened somebody else is going to read it and turn it into a hit. None of those people read things for any positive reason. They’re just scared to death that they’re going to be hammered over the head with it when somebody else reads it.

**John:** I worked for a year as a reader at TriStar. And I covered a hundred scripts, so I wrote full coverage on stuff. And of those things, I recommended exactly one thing. I recommended two things. And both times I got called to the mat for wasting people’s time recommending these things that they wouldn’t want to make.

So, it’s — Franklin is doing the Lord’s work trying to write up coverage and get people to really engage on material.

**Craig:** Indeed. We have one last question here. Should we do it?

**John:** Do it.

**Craig:** All right. JD writes, “I have a question.” Well, that’s convenient, JD. “I have a question about how you go about getting text transcriptions of the Scriptnotes podcast. Do you farm it out to a transcription company or do you use some super advanced speech to text software? I’m curious because I have a lot of interview footage to transcribe and yours are always pretty spot on.”

John, how do we do that? Because god knows I don’t know.

**John:** So, Stuart does it. And so Stuart farms it out to a guy. And for all we know that guy is farming it out to a guy. So it’s sort of a black box. What happens is we’re recording this on a Friday. Stuart will take the file and he will send it to the transcription guy, who often before the episode actually is out he’s already started transcribing that. And so that transcript comes back to Stuart. Then Stuart has to do a lot of work manually by hand just fixing things.

And so the transcription guys have been smart about, they’re starting to recognize names of things, like how we like stuff to appear. But Stuart still has to do a lot of work. And it’s hours of his week doing that. That’s the job of the producer.

**Craig:** I would have thought that it was just Stuart alone in some kind of spider hole, underneath your house, little bits of fish bones around him as he poses Gollum-like over his laptop, his big moon eyes staring at it as he types, types away.

**John:** There’s a bit of that, too.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** Yeah. And I don’t know whether any of this is being done programmatically, or if it’s all people typing, or if it’s in India. I don’t know. I kind of don’t want to know. I hope it’s not child labor.

**Craig:** I guarantee you it’s an entire village of nothing but children.

**John:** Indeed. But maybe they’re learning a lot about screenwriting.

**Craig:** You know what they’re learning. They’re learning that if they get arthritis at the age of eight, they’re tossed down a well.

**John:** Before we get on to Three Page Challenges, I have one last note, and this is sort of a frustration that I have not singled out, but I’m going to single it out now. So, in JD’s email he writes Scriptnotes, but he capitalizes the N in Scriptnotes.

Let’s not do that. That’s not how the actual word should be. I think people do that because the feature in Final Draft for Scriptnotes is capitalized, has that camel case where they capitalize the N. I just hate it.

So, if you’re a fan of Scriptnotes and you’re writing in, or you’re seeing it anywhere, or you’re tweeting about it, it’s just capitalize the S and nothing else. Or don’t capitalize anything. That’s fine, too. The camel casing of the N just drives me crazy.

**Craig:** That’s called camel casing?

**John:** It’s camel casing. It’s from programming, which is where you join two words together. Hashtags do it a lot, too.

**Craig:** Because it’s like a camel’s hump in the middle of the word?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I’ll tell you people out there, I don’t care. [laughs]

**John:** Craig was the guy who thought up the title of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** I did. That’s true. I did. I did. As far as I’m concerned, camel case the hell out of it.

**John:** He did exactly one thing.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know. [laughs] Exactly one thing.

**John:** All right, let’s get to our Three Page Challenges. Our first Three Page Challenge is from Bryan Koo. It’s called Korea Town. It is a pilot. The pilot’s title is Ma Vlast. I don’t know what that means after three pages. But that’s what it is.

As always, if you would like to read along with us, you can find PDFs of these Three Page Challenges on the show notes, so just click through and you can see all of the PDFs for these writers that we are about to read. I will attempt to summarize this. So, in the teaser we hear the deafening noise of a helicopter flying over the streets of Los Angeles. It’s in flames. A spotlight sweeping. We see a middle-aged Asian guy with a fishing hat and rifle. This is Lee Chang-Soo, 55. He shoots the rifle. A black kid drops dead.

We hear radio saying that we are in the middle of the LA riots. This is 1992. We see Chang-Soo slide the bolt in his rifle, getting ready to shoot again. And then a Molotov Cocktail is thrown in a parabolic arc through a building. Not quite clear what connects to what.

We are inside a convenience store. We see Michael Lee, 30. He’s got a handgun. He is scanning the aisles. He’s looking for Benson. The window shatters. Red lights reflecting on the remaining windows and then bam, bam. Police open fire. And then we tilt up and reveal Family Mart, which is sort of the place that we’re at. That’s the end of the teaser. Start of Act 1. Establishing shots. Everything is beautiful in Los Angeles. We see the pier. Beverly Hills. The Hollywood Sign. And then we’re in Korea Town. So, some time spent setting up what Korea Town feels like. By the way, this is where I’m recording this podcast. I live at Korea Town, so it’s fun to see this stuff.

We see the same guy, Michael Lee, from the start. He is jogging past a homeless man. He meets up with Hannah, his I believe wife. And they’re having a little bit of dialogue before he goes into the Family Mart. And that is the end our page three.

**Craig:** I have a theory.

**John:** Tell me.

**Craig:** My theory is that the harder it is for us to summarize these things, the worse they are. I could see you suffering and struggling trying to summarize here, because this is a very choppy three pages. I have multiple issues, Bryan, but I’m going to start with sort of the overarching one. And then we’ll get into some granular stuff.

I’ve seen every single in this before about 200 times. It is so generic. It’s even a generic portrayal of the LA Riot. We begin with what is kind of an iconic image from the LA Riots, Korean men standing on the roofs of their shops, defending their property. I’m immediately disoriented because I see this Asian man up there and, bang, a black kid drops dead.

Where is this black kid?

**John:** That was my first note, too. The geography in this first thing was really confusing. I also got confused, is the convenience store, is that a direct cut? Are we at the same place? I don’t know where I am.

**Craig:** Precisely. It doesn’t appear to be the same place or time, because it’s not a continuous or same time, it’s night. So, I usually think we’re in a different spot. You have a radio announcer coming in the middle of all this action. So, that seems weird. If you’re going to have a radio playing behind something, it’s got to be right up front, otherwise you’re going to hear somebody just suddenly out of nowhere a radio starts.

It seems like a rioter throws a Molotov Cocktail, which flies in a parabolic arc and crash, interior convenience store, broken glass showers the younger Asian man. We have a Molotov Cocktail. That’s not just a bottle. That’s a bottle of gasoline and a rag that’s on fire. So, is there now fire in the store? You don’t seem to say.

**John:** I don’t know.

**Craig:** We meet this character, Michael Lee, black suit and a handgun aimed with highly trained accuracy. At what?

**John:** I didn’t have a picture of sort of who this guy was, and I kept thinking suit. Is it like a Tarantino kind of black suit and gun, or is it military, is he special ops? I just didn’t know what I was seeing there.

**Craig:** I agree. And here he has the physical description of him is “fierce eyes with one eyebrow bisected by a deep scar.” Which, again, this stuff feels like kind of honestly a lot of these descriptions feel like video game kind of stuff from 15 years ago, not from now. So, he finds — he’s yelling for Benson. And he finds Benson. Benson is a skinny Asian boy, hugging his knees, shaking in fear and tears, which is a bit over the top unless, you know, he’s special needs or something.

He’s 18 years old. He finds him and then yells his name at him again. Benson! Which, I don’t understand, unless he didn’t find him and then we’re cutting to behind the counter and we’re hearing him off-screen saying, “Benson.”

Then he turns to the window. A window shatters. We see red lights. Bam. Bam. It shatters. To police open fire. Are the police shooting at him? What’s happening? Ugh. Very difficult.

**John:** I’m frustrated with you, too. So, a few little word things to sort of get to and sort of some formatting things. So, going back to his description of Michael Lee, “Scans the dark abandoned store with fierce eyes with one eyebrow bisected by a deep scar.” The two withs — with fierce eyes, with one — like you got to — don’t give me two with clauses there. That didn’t help you there.

“Chang-Soo calmly slides the bolt on his rifle despite the tremor in his hand.” Well, he’s calmly — is calm but has a tremor?

**Craig:** That means early onset Parkinson’s. That doesn’t mean emotion.

**John:** Yeah. It’s strange to me. Also, Bryan has the more and continueds turned on for — a Final Draft thing, so there’s like Continued at the bottom of the first page and at the top of the second page. Don’t do that. That feature is useful when you are turning in a production draft and there could be broken pages, and A/B pages. Don’t use this for now, because it’s just getting in the way of stuff. You don’t need any of those continueds.

**Craig:** And similarly, I think, you want to do page breaks when you end your teasers and begin your acts, right?

**John:** 100%. I think we can probably stop here. This didn’t work for me. And so here’s what I will say about the idea of this is that a 1992 set show from the perspective of a Korean family going through the riots, that could be great. I think that is actually a potentially really interesting pilot. In some ways, the same reason why I liked Amanda’s thing being period is that it is timeless because it’s always going to be 1992 in that pilot. So, I think this could be a good sample if the writing was good.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah. The only advice I’ll give you, Bryan, but it’s big advice is everything counts. Every word counts. Every detail counts. If you put it on the page, you got to mean it. You’ve got to know exactly what it is. And you got to make me want to know what it is. And you’ve got to make me understand it. This just — it was a bit of a muddle. Bit of a muddle.

All right. Well, I go ahead and summarize the next one here. Let’s go with Open 24 Hours. Screenplay by Jamie Napoli. Story by Jamie Napoli and Joshua Paul Johnson. Okay.

So, we open on — by the way, we got a couple of Stuart specials here. Did you notice, by the way?

**John:** I did notice this.

**Craig:** The old Stuart and medias res. He loves it.

**John:** So we should explain what a Stuart Special is for new people. When something opens and opens with a teaser, and then it flashes back in time, that’s a Stuart Special. And it’s not that Stuart picks them, it’s just that so many of the things that people send in are Stuart Specials.

**Craig:** He picks them. He does.

**John:** Yeah. Maybe so.

**Craig:** Stuart Special. Okay, so our Stuart Special, Open 24 Hours. It begins outside of a diner in Bloomfield, New Jersey. The year is 1989. There is a crowd of police with their cars and a reporter is saying that tragedy struck at the Two Greek Brothers Diner. There was a deadly shootout.

And a reporter interviews a man named Ed, who is the night manager, or former night manager. And the reporter says he witnessed tonight’s bloodshed. Ed, tell us what you saw. But before Ed can say anything, there is an explosion from within the diner. And that little Stuart Special ends with the neon sign of the diner, Two Greek Brothers Diner, Open 24 Hours.

Then we go to morning and this is six months earlier. And we’re hearing Paulie. And Paulie is talking about how basically the glory days of the diner, how when he was 10 the governor of New Jersey came by and he called Two Greek Brothers a Jersey treasure. No one is saying that anymore. And it appears that he’s rehearsing a little bit of a speech to somebody. We don’t know who.

And then a waiter, Nico, comes in. And says, “Did you tell Ed he could take over staff training?” Paulie goes out onto the floor of the restaurant and he sees that Ed is with some new hires, including Kourtney, the girl next door, and Timmy, a busboy in training. And Paulie has a little bit of an argument with Ed, takes over the training. Ed is upset and walks away.

**John:** Yep. I loved these pages. I just loved them. And so I’m going to mostly focus on the things that I thought were great and a few little things to cut or move around. But I dug them. And we talk about specificity all the time, but I like the specificity of this. I liked Paulie a lot. I got a little confused who he was talking to at the start, but I liked his voice a lot. I loved Ed. You know, from the very start like when we first meet Ed, is like, “Do you still want me to talk?” Like after the explosion. Or like right before the explosion. It’s just — all of the details felt really right. And I could totally see it. And that’s where it really comes down to.

I could hear the voices. I could see it. I felt like, oh, I get what I’m going to experience if I were to watch this on a screen. It felt sort of lived in and interesting and real. On page three, the very sort of passive-aggressive fight between Paulie and Ed here about who’s going to give the instruction is great.

There’s a moment on page three, just a parenthetical. So, Ed says, “Your uncle doesn’t mind — ”

Paulie, in parenthesis, touching Ed’s elbow, “It’s not your job.” The touching the elbow is such a great sort of like, it’s a passive mood where you’re not really putting your hands on somebody, but you’re just trying to steer them away. I really thought it was just a very strong batch of pages.

**Craig:** It was. They were very well-written. I enjoyed Ed. I could see Ed in my head. I liked the descriptions of people. “Ed, bone-thin and fidgety. Ed is the sort of guy co-workers smile at in case he’s planning a shooting spree. He stares unblinkingly into the camera lens.”

This is exactly the kind of thing that I think is legal, but creative, right?

**John:** Totally.

**Craig:** That’s something an actor can do.

**John:** But look at his name. Ed Nissirios. It’s just so great. It’s well-picked.

**Craig:** Yeah. And similarly Kourtney, who is there for the waitress job. “The girl-next-door, if you happen to own property on the Jersey Shore. Big hair, blue eye shadow, an FU expression,” he says the whole thing. I’m just trying to keep it clean here. “An FU expression she wears like armor…And she’s just Paulie’s type.”

All playable. Like doable. And you know me, hair and makeup. That’s my big thing.

**John:** Totally playable. Yep.

**Craig:** So, here are the only things I — my only suggestions. One small and one big one. Small one. You have Paulie as a pre-lap. That’s not really a pre-lap. Pre-laps are — I mean, it kind of is.

**John:** I think it’s pre-lap. It’s a long pre-lap.

**Craig:** It’s a long pre-lap. Yeah.

**John:** I circled that, too. It is technically a pre-lap, because it is the dialogue he’s speaking in the next scene. But it’s a really long one.

**Craig:** Yeah. And it’s just easy to do off-screen and connect it up. I think it might be — if the idea here is that he is practicing a speech for somebody, help us just a little bit. I had to read it a couple times to make that inference.

For instance, on the line, “I got a dream. A dream… nah, that’s too much.” Even if there were parenthesis, you know, (reconsiders), or something just so I understood. Because at first I thought that’s what he was saying. I thought maybe you were going to reveal that he was talking to somebody. And then you didn’t. So, that’s the small thing.

Here’s the big thing. If this were a TV show, I would think ending with the diner going Ka-Boom would be a decent end to the Stuart Special. But it’s a movie. If you’re going to do this in a movie, Stuart Specials in movies are — they’re bigger than that.

**John:** I think they are bigger than that. Bigger not just in the sense of explosion, but more story beat has to happen there.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Because right now it’s not really happening.

**Craig:** No, it’s got to be really — like John Wick begins with a Stuart Special. And a car just drives in, smashes into a wall. Keanu Reeves gets out. He’s bleeding. He’s dying. And he starts to die. That’s okay. You can start a movie that way. This could be a gas fire. It’s just not enough. It’s not enough to make me go, Whoa!

**John:** I would cut the first reporter voiceover. I feel like we can get that — it’s actually stronger without it. We get the information we need before that. So, get rid of the “Tragedy struck at Bloomfield’s own Two Greek Brothers Diner.” No, don’t tell us that there was a shoot-out. Let’s get into it.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** It’s more suspenseful. And then you get a little more moment with Ed and the reporter, or just like the reporter getting set up, or trying to get the angle. But it’s going to be great. So, well done, Jamie. And I should also single out that the story is by Jamie Napoli and Joshua Paul Johnson. So, to whatever degree Joshua Paul Johnson helped out there, well done.

**Craig:** Well done.

**John:** All right. Our final Three Page Challenge comes from Suzanna Christopher. And it is called iDo. And the I is lower case and the D is upper case.

**Craig:** Camel.

**John:** It’s camel case, in fact.

**Craig:** Camel case.

**John:** Just like the iPhone, and that is intentional because the subtitle for this is a Silicon Valley Rom.com.

As we get into it, Heather, who is beautifully unaware of her own beauty…oh.

**Craig:** There we go.

**John:** So, most of us is a voiceover. So, Heather is giving her voiceover and explaining “Why do I deserve the Pitkins Grant. Well, I’m so glad you asked.” And so we see Heather as she is getting up. She’s wearing two sweaters, a sweatshirt, and years of therapy. We see her boyfriend. Their cramped little apartment. And then she’s going out for this interview.

And so she lives in East Palo Alto, which is adjacent to Silicon Valley if people don’t know the geography there. Sort of a rundown neighborhood. She’s got a helmet. She’s on a bike with a safety flag. She bikes over the 101 Freeway. At the Stanford Quad she goes in for this interview and she’s describing what the app is that she’s trying to build, or what the system is she’s trying to build, which is basically a quick test to figure out whether two people should get married. Whether they’re going to be compatible for the long haul. “I promise nothing less than to eradicate divorce in our time,” a sort of bold thesis.

The trustees meeting, where she’s trying to get this grant. There’s one trustee who suddenly wakes up in the middle of it. She wants to go and give this speech that we’ve heard her practicing. They don’t care about that. They only care about sort of the paperwork. And we end on a vegan mushroom joke, that looks like a fecal sample.

**Craig:** John, do you think I’m beautifully unaware of my own beauty?

**John:** You are beautiful as James Blunt would want to point out in a special way.

**Craig:** I am beautifully unaware of my lack of beauty.

So, here’s the thing. My general feeling about these pages, Suzanne, is that there’s too much going on. So much going on, I didn’t know where to look, and I didn’t know what to think. You lost a sense of perspective for me. And I lost my sense of perspective as I read because she was saying a million things, and I was looking at a million things. And they were all different.

So, on page one, she is talking about, well, she won’t tell us what she’s talking about. So, part is we’re listening and trying to figure out where is this going. She wants a grant. Imagine a world where you could save $50 billion a year in legal fees? Uh, okay. I wonder how that’s going to happen.

$22 billion in psychiatry bills. Da-da-da end. Da-da-da. All this. Imagine all these things. Yeah, okay. What is it for? Tell me, tell me.

While that’s all going on in voiceover, I see an alarm clock powered by potatoes. I see a woman waking up with two sweaters and a sweatshirt on. I see a boyfriend with a macramé sleep mask. I see a cramped room that looks like a meth lab, including oscilloscopes and back issues of Vegan World. I see what might be a real Picasso on the wall. I see her walk out of her apartment and there’s an enormous image of Garfield the Cat with a 10-foot-long penis. I see her unlock her 10-speed bike with three locks. That’s all one page. All of what I just said.

What am I looking at? What am I thinking? I don’t know. [laughs]

**John:** So, if I had all of those visuals without the voiceover, I might be able to draw a thread about sort of who she is. And it’s hitting me pretty hard, but I might be able to follow that thread. But her voiceover, every time I’m reading the voiceover I’m like, well, that’s a very different thing you’re giving me there. So, I’m having a hard time balancing the two things together. And I didn’t understand that she was practicing the speech at the very start. I found it weird that the dialogue was in italics. And I see kind of what she was trying to go for, but the italics were not helping me there at all.

I felt like there’s a false analogy on page two. She says, “But instead of measuring sexually transmitted diseases… My test will predict with 100% accuracy if two people will suffer romantically-transmitted diseases. Like boredom. Isolation. Infidelity. Diseases that 52.3% of couples catch during their failed marriages. In short…” It didn’t feel — that logic didn’t feel like the logic I heard three sentences before. So, it was tough.

I think you either need to show me the character, or you need to establish the premise, but trying to do both at the same time didn’t work for me.

**Craig:** I agree. It was all over the place. I didn’t find her — first of all, when she’s doing this voiceover, we don’t know what she’s doing because we can’t see her. So, I don’t know if she’s talking to someone. I don’t know if she’s practicing. I don’t know.

On page two, I agree with you, that her pitch actually wasn’t particularly compelling. The fact is, it’s an interesting thing, if it’s true, and I feel like this is inspired a little bit like that chapter from Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink, where a marital expert got to just say like, “Oh, after 20 years of this, two people walk in a room and I go, no chance, they’re done.”

So, it’s an interesting point, but I don’t feel this character has any actual passion for her point at all. She seems glib, and it’s not helped by the fact that now on page two, I honestly don’t know what’s going on, because what Suzanna gives us here is now a sort of pushed reality/quasi dream sequence where Heather is being joined on her bike with other — she’s riding a bike, then other people showing up. We don’t understand why.

She gets off her bike and then snaps her bike in half over her knee. The crowd goes wild. What?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What’s happening? I understand that that’s not real, but I don’t know why it’s there.

**John:** Yeah. When we had Tess Morris on the show, she loves romantic comedies. And so a thing I think she would like about this is on page two she’s stating the premise very boldly and directly. “I promise nothing less than to eradicate divorce in our time.” That’s a bold premise. And so I do like that she’s trying to get to that place. And you’re establishing a character who sets that as her objective at the start. And then you can see like, okay, well how is she going to beat and not meet that objective?

Unfortunately the details about the character I learned around her didn’t feel like the person who actually had that thesis, at least what I saw on those three pages.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s something that you hear all the time when you’re writing comedy, any comedy, a rom-com or anything. And that’s grounded, grounded, grounded. Everybody wants it to be grounded, unless it’s supposed to be a spoof, or a parody, or something that’s ridiculous.

So, you want to ground this character somehow. The fact that she’s pitching this thing, and she also has poop appearing mushroom gum, she feels like someone’s friend to me. She feels like there’s this other unseen character named Anne and Heather is like the problem — Anne is doing this and Heather is like her wacky assistant. You know?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Who makes mushroom gum and drinks out of beakers and has crazy — I know she didn’t drink out of a beaker in this, I’m just imagining. Because now in my mind I’m like, oh, actually Heather is a cool crazy assistant character. There is a great idea for a rom-com where somebody actually comes up with something they believe works that predicts whether or not two people who have just met will make it. And she meets somebody and she does the test and it comes out no.

That is so rich for — because there’s a great theme there. Do you try, do you fall in love if you know? Because that echoes to me what life is. I mean, look, you and I are both married. We both know sooner or later, either we’re going to die first, or they’re going to die first. It doesn’t end well. Ever. And we still do it.

And so that’s part of the human condition. It’s a fascinating idea. And obviously that’s, I assume, that’s got to be what she’s going to be planning here. But these three pages need Ritalin. Or something. Guanfacine.

**John:** I agree. I think the character needs some focus, but the overall like how we’re presenting the idea, and is this even the right character to present this idea.

**Craig:** Yeah. I guess the thing is, Suzanna, there’s so much potential for this premise to be meaningful and interesting, that I think you have — you’re not treating it with what it deserves.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. All right.

**John:** Cool. I want to thank all three of our writers for sending in their scripts and being so brave. And congratulations on making it through Stuart’s filter, because Stuart reads everything that people send in, and he deserves a round of applause for doing all that.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** If you have three pages you would like to send in for us to look at in a future episode, you can go to johnaugust.com/threepage, and there’s instructions there for how you send in stuff. You don’t email it. You actually attach it to a form and you sign the little form that says it’s okay for me to include this stuff.

And part of that is because we include these scripts not only with these episodes, so they’re attached to the show notes so you can read the PDFs, but we also stick them on the USB drives people buy, so when the nuclear bomb goes off, people will still have their copy of iDo to read.

**Craig:** And thank god for that.

**John:** Yeah. It’s important. It is time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is delightful. And so I’m going to ask Matthew to include this underneath my talking, because I will describe what this is and you will be moved back through time. So many of you probably were not even born when this aired, but these were fond memories from my childhood.

This is a YouTube clip from ABC’s promo for Still the One. So, each season as the networks debuted their new shows for television, they would do these promos that just talked about how great their network was. And they would use all their network stars in these promos. And ABC’s were fantastic, as were many of them. So, Ricardo Montalban shows up in this. This one that I’m going to include has a bunch of people in hot air balloons celebrating ABC’s great season to come.

So, having just witnessed another upfront season in television, I was brought back to nostalgia for the days when network TV was all the TV there was.

**Craig:** You know, this was my first job in Hollywood was working on these things.

**John:** Tell us about it.

**Craig:** In 1992, I was working at an ad agency that mostly did promos for CBS. And the big job that we had, and I was just, you know, this young kid who started as a clerk, and then worked my way up to copywriter, was the fall campaign for CBS. And so I went back and — this inspired me. I found it on YouTube. It’s called It’s All Right Here. CBS, It’s All Right Here.

And it’s horrendous in all ways. It’s just terrible from top to bottom. But, you know, a slice of its time. It’s bizarre. I mean, and I remember, by the way, I had the experience of going and shooting these people and meeting all of these television stars and shooting them just head-turning and laughing into camera. It’s the most ridiculous thing.

**John:** It’s great. So I want to thank Stylez White for singling out this video and a bunch of other ones, because it’s great because you see Hal Linden just like pops in all these different moments from Barney Miller. And I think what’s weird about them is you’re seeing these actors outside of the characters they’re supposed to be playing. And like those two people aren’t on the same show, and yet they’re interacting with each other. What’s going on?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And my young nine-year-old brain was just like mesmerized by it.

**Craig:** Well, that’s why, what was it, the Network Olympics? What did they call that thing?

**John:** Battle of the Network Stars. Was the best program that has ever been aired.

**Craig:** Because you’re like Gabe Kaplan is wrestling with David Hasselhoff? Okay, so my One Cool Thing is the most mundane thing of all time and I love it so much. Cast Iron Skillet.

So, I’ve become obsessed lately with my cast iron skillet.

**John:** That’s very good, Craig. So, you were the one who mocked me on the first live show for singling out a kitchen knife, but okay.

**Craig:** Listen, I don’t like it when you hold me accountable for the things I say and do. Okay?

**John:** [laughs] I totally understand. Yeah. We should live in a post-accountability age.

**Craig:** I am not accountable for anything other than what I’m doing right now. So, cast iron skillet. Do you have a cast iron skillet? Do you own one?

**John:** Do I not own a cast iron skillet. I have in the past. They’ve rusted.

**Craig:** Of course. Of course they have.

**John:** And I’ve moved on.

**Craig:** So this is the great — cast iron skillet is the most important piece of cookware you can have. It’s the best piece of cookware you can have. And the reason why is because, you know, they’re very heavy. I mean, they’re very dense. They maintain their heat completely. So, you have a regular pan, you throw a steak in there, the pan, its temperature probably drops in half right there that second. Cast iron, no. Stays the same because it’s so hot because it retains all the heat.

Problem with a cast iron pan that people think is, oh my god, it’s so hard to upkeep. It’s not. You just have to know what to do. You’ve got to season it. That means a little bit of oil. And then you get that oil really, really hot. You do that three or four times, the oil bonds with the metal and does something called polymerization. And it becomes essentially non-stick, but not because of Teflon coating, but because of just natural awesomeness.

If you have a cast iron skillet at home and it is rusty and nasty, quarter cup kosher salt, some paper towels, and a little elbow grease, you will scour it right off.

**John:** Very good.

**Craig:** How about that?

**John:** That’s great. So my experience with cast iron, and everything you said is absolutely true, and there’s a reason why chefs love them. I would have rust problems and I would always burn myself on them because I would think like, oh, that pan has been out of the oven for an hour, it should be cool. And, no, it’s still incredibly hot.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. Craig likes it hot.

**Craig:** Sexy Craig loves it hot. Cast iron hot.

**John:** And that’s our show for this week. So, if you would like to write a question for me or for Craig, you can write into ask@johnaugust.com. That’s the questions we answered today. Those long form questions. That’s where they go.

Short things are great on Twitter. Craig is really good at answering questions on Twitter. He’s done it a lot this week.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Our show, as always, is produced by Stuart Friedel, is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Thank you, Matthew. Our outro comes from Paul Barlow. If you have an outro for us, you can write into that same address, ask@johnaugust.com, and send us a link. We have a bunch in the folder to use and they’re just great. So, you guys are so talented. Thank you very much for doing that.

You are probably listening to this in a podcast application on your iPhone or other Android device. But if you would go over to iTunes and leave us a review, that would be fantastic. Because iTunes, pretty much the only way people know to subscribe to stuff is when iTunes features us. And the more people who leave us a review or a rating or a wonderful comment, that helps iTunes notice that, oh that’s right, that’s a podcast we should feature. And it’s been about a year since they featured us. So, it would make me feel good.

**Craig:** It would make John feel good.

**John:** It would make me feel good. Craig, thank you very much for a fun time. And I look forward to playing Pandemic with you on Monday.

**Craig:** You got it. See you then. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [LGBT Fans Deserve Better](http://lgbtfansdeservebetter.com/)
* [The Screenwriter’s Vow of Air Vent Chastity](http://johnaugust.com/2006/air-vents-are-for-air)
* Scriptnotes, 60: [The Black List, and a stack of scenes](http://johnaugust.com/2012/the-black-list-and-a-stack-of-scenes), and [blcklst.com](https://blcklst.com/)
* Three Pages by [Bryan Koo](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/BryanKoo.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Jamie Napoli](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/JamieNapoli.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Suzanne Christopher](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/SuzanneChristopher.pdf)
* [How to submit your Three Pages](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [ABC’s 1979 Still The One TV stars promo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHvW_8W1_m8) on YouTube
* [Lodge 12-inch cast iron skillet](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00006JSUB/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) on Amazon, and [thekitchn.com on cast iron care](http://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-season-a-cast-iron-skillet-cleaning-lessons-from-the-kitchn-107614)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Paul B ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))