Archives for 2016

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/david-mamet-and-the-producer-pass).

**John August:** Hello and welcome, my name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Episode 240 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast, we’ll be answering a bunch of listener questions about the craft, about the profession of screenwriting, and about Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Oh yeah.

**John:** Lots of Craig questions.

**Craig:** I won’t know how to answer any of them.

**John:** It’s one of our easiest types of episodes because we had to do almost no work. We basically pasted a bunch of questions in here and we’ll just answer them one at a time.

**Craig:** Or, it’s exactly as easy as it is for me, always, because you do everything.

**John:** This is the Craig special we’re talking today.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** Last week on the podcast, we were talking about an article on acting by Marcus Geduld, and so we were looking at his article, and we were comparing what would the similar advice be for talking about good writing. And so Marcus listened to that episode and wrote in and said, “Hey, a friend alerted me to the Episode 239 of your podcast in which you discussed my Quora post about acting. I’ve been feeling some qualms about it. But I was very pleased that it sparked such intelligent conversation on your show. You have a new listener and a fan. Forgive me for bringing up stuff you may already know about. It will take me some time to listen to your whole back catalogue, but I wonder if you’ve discussed David Mamet’s memo to his writing staff on The Unit. It was dashed off and contained a lot of typos, but it’s great fodder for discussion.” So he sends a link to this memo that David Mamet wrote in 2005 for the writing staff of this — I think it was a CBS show called, The Unit.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I remember seeing it when it came out, but I don’t think we’ve ever discussed it on the show.

**Craig:** Yeah. Before we started recording, I asked you to go check it because I thought for sure we would have discussed it because I remember reading it and thinking about it and then talking about it, but I guess it wasn’t on this podcast about things that are interesting to screenwriters. So we should talk about it.

**John:** We’ll have a link to this in the show notes, so you can just click through and see what we’re talking about, but it’s about a four-page, just memo, like a single sentences about advice and frustrations and guidance to his staff about what he’s looking for in an episode in their writing. And you know, one of the sort of central tenets behind it is like don’t be lazy, like you know, the stuff I’m asking you to do is really hard, but that’s sort of your job to do the really hard work. And what he’s really looking for is not plot, it’s not story, it’s drama. And he’s sort of railing against those scenes that are so common, especially in procedural dramas that are not dramatic at all, they’re just information dumps.

**Craig:** Yeah. One of the things that I found remarkable about this when I read it was that it needed to be written at all, but I understand particularly when you’re doing a procedural, and there is an enormous amount of plot, because every episode has to be centered around some new bit of narrative, it’s tempting to fall into the trap of letting narrative and plot drive everything else. But what he’s reminding them here is very, very true, and it’s something that I think is a little easier for us to keep an eye on in a movie because it’s just our one story — character drives plot, and character relationships drive plot. Even when it seems like the plot isn’t driven by those things, the plot must ultimately be in relationship to those things. It has to either come out of them or exist to change them. So he’s really refocusing their eyes on that.

**John:** He’s arguing that every scene needs to be about the conflict and discovery of characters within that moment and the scene itself has to have drama, it has to have a spark to it. And it can’t really be the thing that’s connecting you to the next thing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’ll read a little bit from it here. “Everyone in creation is screaming at us to make the show clear. We are tasked with it, it seems, cramming a shit load of information into a little bit of time. Our friends, the penguins, which is what he calls the studio execs, think that we, therefore, are employed to communicate information, and so at times, it seems to us. But note, the audience will not tune in to watch information. They wouldn’t. I wouldn’t. No one would or will. The audience will only tune in and stay tuned in to watch drama.

“Question, what is drama? Drama again is the quest of the hero to overcome things which prevent him from achieving a specific acute goal. So we, the writers, must ask ourselves of every scene these three questions. Who wants what, what happens if they don’t get it, and why now?” Those are three great questions.

**Craig:** They are, and they are questions that I ask of myself constantly and I try and ask them before I write the scene. I don’t like going into a scene without knowing the answers to those questions. The scene must be first and foremost an immediate answer to why now because if the scene could happen later, it probably should happen later, or earlier, or not at all, right? It needs to feel like it must be now, must be. And then the who wants what, this comes up so often, and it’s articulated in so many different ways, but it is the bedrock question of following characters and believing that their people. What do you want? And it changes at times. At times it doesn’t. And it’s static. But when actors say, well, what’s my motivation? That means what do I want? It’s the only way to perform. I think it’s the only way to write a scene. It’s the only way to write a movie.

I think it might have been frustrating for his staff to read this because I don’t know, I suspect that they might have known a lot of this, and they were like, hey, you know, we have to do 26 of these? And it’s not like writing a play, but if you don’t know the answers to these, you are going to end up with that feeling of treading water.

**John:** Yeah, I definitely would feel some sympathy being on his writing staff because like, hey, you hired us to write on your show because we are writers who’ve written on other things, like, we should in theory know what we’re doing. I think where I sympathize again with Mamet though is that sense of when you’re actually in the process of trying to make these things, you’ll reach those scenes where it’s like, there’s nothing — the scene just needs to be here so I can get this piece of information out. And he’s saying, I know you feel that way, but that’s not a good enough answer. You have to find a way to make that scene dramatic. Otherwise, it’s just not a scene, and it’s not worth anything.

Circling back to his question of like what do the characters want, we’ve talked a lot about, you know, wants and goals and wishes and dreams and motivation on the show, and there’s a whole scale, there’s a whole like sort of mountain of want that a character experiences. There’s that overarching, that wish, that dream, that someday want, which is informing a character for like one day I hope to get this thing. And a character on a TV show will kind of never get that thing they hope to get. A character in a movie probably should get that thing they’re hoping to get.

And then there’s sort of more immediate goals, like what are the things we’re trying to do in this section, like what is a thing I can see in the distance I’m trying to get to, that mountain that I’m trying to get to. But there’s also a very immediate goal, and this is I think what Mamet is getting frustrated about is that it is literally like in this moment where I’m standing here talking to you, what am I trying to achieve?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And sometimes you don’t see those things happen. And it’s those questions — what I’m trying to achieve right now — that’s informing each line of dialogue, it’s informing why the characters are interacting with each other the way they’re interacting. And I think his frustration is, you encounter these scenes where it’s, “Well, Tom, as you know, blah, blah, blah.” And then it’s just an information dump.

**Craig:** Precisely. The essence of conflict is each character in conflict, and in one of our episodes we went through all different kinds of conflict, but for all of them, each character in the conflict wants something that is different than what the other person wants. There is no conflict, and thus, no drama in a scene where one character is explaining something to another. That’s a meeting. People go to meetings all day long at work, even if they don’t work at places where you think they have meetings, they do. If you work at Burger King, at some point, the manager is going to be like, hey, guys, we just go these new kinds of fries, and here’s the order that they have to go in. That’s a meeting. That’s boring. It’s just boring. And that’s not why people come to see shows.

So your job, he says, is, you know, information is necessary to make the whole thing work, figure out how to encode that into scenes that are dramatic. Otherwise, why are we watching it, you know?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Like he says, look at your log lines, a log line reading Bob and Sue discuss is not describing a dramatic scene, and he’s right because if they’re just discussing it, there’s no conflict.

**John:** I think it’s really interesting that he’s going back to the log line because as you’re doing sort of like quick and dirty outlines of like sort of what’s going to happen in the show, you’ll see these things which are basically, these two characters discuss this thing and decide to do this thing. And discuss is never going to be a dramatic scene. And so if all they’re doing is discussing, that scene is not going to meet his standards. If they decide, well, then, what is the nature of the conversation that led to a decision? And so if it’s an argument, then that probably could work. If it is a, you know, Tom convinces Mary to do this thing, that is conflict. You can see what the different character’s goals are. But if it’s just discussing, if it’s just like you know they’re passing the ball back and forth while they’re talking about it, that’s not going to work.

**Craig:** There are so many ways to bury conflict in there while this information is happening. For instance, one character can be explaining something, let’s say, I think The Unit was a law enforcement show, correct?

**John:** Yeah, I think so.

**Craig:** So one character is explaining to another what they found and what he thinks they should do next. And she is listening to this, and then her response is going to be okay, let’s go do it. No conflict, right? But if while they’re talking she needs to be somewhere else, or she wants to be on the phone with someone else, or she sees someone through the window, or she just walked out of something that’s pissed her off, or she has a secret. Anything that makes her want to not be there, suddenly the scene is interesting. He can stop and say, I’m sorry, are you not paying attention to me at all? Of course I am. Now, it’s interesting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s about people.

**John:** Yes. So he’s stressing that the scene has to have drama in it. The scene has to be dramatic and again, his words, “It’s not the actor’s job. The actor’s job is to be truthful. It’s not the director’s job. His or her job is to film it straightforwardly, and remind the actors to talk fast. It is your job.” Although Mamet is, you know, weaving in that talking fast, but that’s Mamet, and that’s absolutely true. And I can’t think of any TV shows that are not non-fiction cooking or sort of building thing shows that don’t have that central conflict woven into every scene.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And frankly it’s why there are certain kinds of shows that I never really got into like Law & Order has been on forever and a lot of people are big Law & Order fans, but I always found my problem with Law & Order was that there were scenes where people that just generally were agreeable coworkers would discuss facts. And I found that like I was in a meeting. I just did not like that so much.

**John:** I have never liked that show. And that show is sometimes a nice intricate crossword puzzle, but in general, characters would have scowls while they gave each other information, but that wasn’t actually conflict.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Every once in a while, Sam Waterston would like throw some papers around and he’d get really upset, and there were moments where there generally was disagreement, but those things were rare.

**Craig:** Yeah. So then what you really end up with is living or dying on what I call the prurient interest of the plot. Will they be found guilty or not, which is fine, but kind of not enough for me to watch your show.

**John:** Yeah. He talks about clarity and curiosity. He says, “The job of the dramatist is to make the audience wonder what happens next. It’s not to explain to them what just happened, or suggest to them what happens next. It’s to create that question mark.” And, you know, to the degree that Law & Order succeeds, I think there is a question mark about how are the pieces going to fit together.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s like they’ve shaken up the box of the big puzzle and now you have to figure out, oh, are they going to be able to put the pieces together in time? The answer is yes, but maybe there’ll be some detours along the way.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s a really good outline of how to approach scene work, I think, and a great way to — it’s a nice enumeration of pitfalls.

**John:** I agree. So why don’t you hit our next question?

**Craig:** So Robert writes, “When you’re writing for a first step for a studio, do you give the draft to the producer for their notes, that is to say, do a producer pass before you submit to the studio? And if you do, is there a limit to the quantity or scope of adjustments that you will do for the producer, or will you do as much additional work as the producer desires?” And then he clarifies, “As a young writer, you want to do what’s best for the project and be known as a team player, but also don’t want to be taken advantage of, or undermine the guild in any way.”

**John:** Yes. So Robert is going to be so happy to hear that once you have had a few projects made, this never comes up again. And it’s free and clear to answer your question. So the answer, Robert, is that there’s no great answer for how much leeway you should give to the producer before it goes into the studio, to what degree you should bend to their wishes, to what degree you should be a good team player versus stick to your guns, it’s a really tough thing that you’re going to be wrestling with your entire career.

**Craig:** Yeah, boy, it’s rough for us when we can’t give you a good answer. And look, for me, I’m actually dealing with this right now. And I’m kind of a hard case about this. Frankly, I don’t have the time to do these passes just for the producer because I have other things I have to do. But in addition, my entire outlook on things is I want everyone to tell me what they think, not just the producer. The producer oftentimes is wonderful and has great insight into the movie they want to make. They will convince you that they have the greatest insight to the movie the studio wants to make. But as you go on in your career, you’ll find out they don’t, any more than anyone does, seemingly. And so sometimes you end up in this trap where you’ve done all these work and then work, and then work, and then work, then you turn it into the studio, and they’re like, what? This isn’t what we wanted.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So here’s the uncomfortable fact for every screenwriter whether you’re new, it’s particularly brutal when you’re new, or whether you’ve been around forever: there will always be pain and friction here in this relationship. You will find yourself in positions where you are going to make people upset. You will find yourself in positions where you’re making yourself upset. And all I can say is that if you are involved in a producer that you believe is starting to behave in a way that is abusive or counter productive to the project, you’re not going to want to work with them again.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So you might as well hunker down with your agent and say, “I’m drawing the line here, we’re turning it in here. And that’s it. And if they flip out, they flip out.” But I’ll say this much, if the studio likes it, they’ll be your best friend.

**John:** Absolutely. So let’s talk about the difference between realistically in daily practice and contractually. Contractually, you owe the script to the studio, you don’t owe it to the producer. And so when you turn it into the studio, you are saying, you’re delivering your script, and they’re going to pay you your money, the other half of the money that they owe you for the script. And so there’s one person listed on your contract, you turn it in to him or her, and they should cut you a check.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** In practice, what tends to happen is you show it to the producer first, kind of as a courtesy, but also to get their feedback. And sometimes you will do additional work based on their notes, and then you will turn it into the studio, and they will pay you. The pitfalls that happen: sometimes the producers will come to you with a tremendous number of notes or just like really crazy things, like wow, that’s going to take so much time to do.

Sometimes you’ll agree with them, sometimes like, well that’s just a better idea, I’m going to go through and fix that. Oftentimes, you’ll be questioning whether it’s a good choice to be doing those notes, and then you’re kind of stuck so do you say like, “Yeah, I don’t think so,” and you go into the studio? Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. You also are always wondering where is that note really coming from. Is that note because they think it’s what’s best for the project or because they’re just playing from fear? If they’re playing from fear, that’s not going to be a helpful situation for you.

The real danger is that they actually have shown it to the studio, and they’re actually sneakily trying to get you to do the studio’s notes as their notes, and that’s just the kind of BS that you encounter and you want to throw somebody through a wall.

**Craig:** That happens all the time and is literally fraud that they are perpetrating upon you. The thing that bothers me maybe the most about this is that, you said something that I think would be great if both sides saw it this way. But you do this as a courtesy to the producer. But so many producers don’t see it as a courtesy. They see it as something that they’re entitled to.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And I don’t feel that way. I just had a very difficult discussion with a producer the other day. And I just said, look, I’m turning in the script, and I’m just kind of curious what you’re intending to do forward, how do you want to deal with this because it’s a one-step deal like they always make. And I said, are you the kind of place that does the whole, oh, let’s do another draft now just for the producer, and he’s like, yeah. I said, well, I’m not that guy.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** And it was a difficult conversation. And I will remain not that guy. And here’s the deal, yeah, if there’s something terrific and wonderful and interesting, and it’s a couple of weeks, or a week, yeah, I’ll do it. Sure. If it’s what I consider to be a re-write or a draft, no, I won’t. And they’ll say things like, well, the studio will never go forward with this. Okay, that’s right. You know what, they had a choice of how to structure my contract, this is how they structured it, so you know, I’ll take my chances there.

**John:** Yes. I ran into this situation on a project and the frustrating thing when I sat down with the producers, and things were going great, I sat down with the producers and their notes were just crazy pants like, wait, that’s a fundamental rethinking of the entire thing. That’s actually not the movie I pitched to the studio. And you’re wondering, just like, yeah, as an experiment, maybe I could try that, like the answer is no. And so I just flatly said no, and I left the meeting. And it really messed up my relationship with those producers, but there was just no way I was going to do it. And so we turned in the draft that I had done, and the studio loved it, so great, but it made it for an awkward situation with those producers because I frankly said, “You are insane. I’m in no way doing that thing.” And I thought they were abusing — in the context of trying to like, oh, let’s just like open up all the doors and like really explore things, they were trying to get me to write a completely different movie. And that was not going to fly.

**Craig:** No. And see? So Robert, note what John said. It screwed up his relationship with these people. That got broken. But I would hazard to guess, John, that you wouldn’t be running back to those producers with something else.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So sometimes you got to break things. You can’t be everyone’s friend. If you want to be everyone’s friend, you’re walking around with a mark on your forehead that says, take advantage of me.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you are going to have to judge these things unfortunately on an incident by incident basis and you’re going to have to understand that the people who are telling you that it has to go this way or else are saying that to con you. And they are sometimes also incidentally correct. But their primary concern is to con you.

**John:** Yeah. A mutual friend of ours is very, very hardcore about like, oh, I’m done. Here’s the script, bye. And so if you made a one-step deal with him, he’s done. He’s not going to like fix a comma in the script and he’s incredibly hardcore and I think he’s perceived as being incredibly difficult for that reason. And he’s had a lot of success, but I think he also has a reputation for being really difficult. And it’s the kind of behavior that makes you seem really difficult. I’ve never been that hardcore, and I’ve always been like happy to have the conversation with the producer or even the studio saying like, hey, we have this issue, can we talk about this issue specifically because of this problem because we’re trying to go after this actor, or whatever else, I’m fine and happy to do that.

It’s when they’re asking me to essentially just come back in and do more free work that I do go back to what Craig said, is like, well then maybe you should’ve have made a different deal for me. Or in fact, we have optional steps in the deal that you did make for me, let’s visit those.

**Craig:** Yeah, let’s do them, exactly. Look, I would never recommend to anybody to be the not one period or comma because I think that’s just dumb, you know. And I think that there is great value in doing what I’ll call tweaks to make everybody feel good and invested and whole as they go into the studio with this. But my whole thing is, look, if you want to do more than those tweaks in advance of the studio seeing it, it means this isn’t working for you. If this isn’t working for you, I’m not your guy. So I got to go because I got other things I want to do with my life and what I don’t want to do it just now chase you. I don’t want to chase you and what you want to do. This should be enough for people to go, well, everybody, studio and producer alike, after a week or two of tweaking, we see enough value here that we want you to continue, or we do not see enough value for you to continue. But I think a lot of writers end up chasing somebody who is just running ahead of them flinging fear glitter into the air and they’re just chasing them down this terrible path designed to assuage anxiety to no end.

**John:** I thought experiment it just occurred to me. So somebody says like, oh, can you just do a couple of days at work and my instinct is usually sort of yes, but what if I rephrase it as like, oh, we just want to reshoot a couple of days. That would be free, right? Of course that wouldn’t be free. Like to reshoot a couple of days would be tremendously expensive. So it seems really weird that you expect my labor to be free whereas everybody else’s labor would be incredibly expensive.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, it’s a funny thing actually for me, I brought this up in the conversation with this producer. When I’m in a development phase, I have to be careful about my time, and careful about being paid for the work I do and protecting what I feel is my earned status as a professional writer, to not just do stuff cause. When we’re making a movie, I don’t ask for anything. And what I find a lot of times is, then they’ll call me and they’ll say, you’ve done quite a bit here, we should pay you something for it. And I’ll say, great.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But when we’re making a movie, there’s no teamier team player than me because I love it, but I hate development and I certainly hate wasting my time writing screenplays that aren’t being read by the people that decide to make a movie. Ugh. But anyway, Robert, long answer, difficult answer. You’re asking a good question and I’m sorry we don’t have a great answer for you, we just shared our pain with you instead.

**John:** Right, let’s do a simpler question. Najeeb writes, why does Craig feed the trolls so hard?

**Craig:** So I assume Najeeb is talking about Twitter and the people that occasionally go after me because I’m not a fan of Ted Cruz. And they seem to be breaking down into three categories, there were two, now there’s three. Category number one, people whose Twitter avatar is a flag with an eagle. Category two, people whose Twitter avatar is a flag with a cross. And the new one is, flag with don’t tread on my snake.

**John:** Yeah, very, very important.

**Craig:** Eagle flaggers, snake flaggers, cross flaggers. Why do I feed the trolls so hard? Because it’ s fun for me. I don’t feed them, they’re feeding me. I’m having fun. Now when I don’t like what they say, or if it’s just like a boring thing and most of them are, I’ll just ignore it. Or if it’s really disgusting, I’ll block them, or it’s just like enough already from you, I’ll block them. Like, oh, now you’re having fun, I don’t want you to have any fun.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So there’s this great line from the Watchmen, Alan Moore wrote for the character Rorschach. He’s been sent to prison, and all the prisoners hate him so much and they’re like, now you’re in here with us, we’re going to kill you. And he says, “No, you don’t get it. I’m not locked up in here with you. You’re locked up in here with me.” [laughs] And that’s me on Twitter. They’re locked in there with me. So that’s why, Najeeb.

**John:** I do notice sometimes people put those little hashtags at the end of things and they’ll sort of make up their hashtags but like there’s one just yesterday, it was #MazinBaby. And so I was like, oh, I hope other people are using #MazinBaby but they’re not. It was a one-time occurrence of #MazinBaby.

**Craig:** MazinBaby was pretty good. I like MazinBaby.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah, nice.

**John:** Talking about Twitter best practices, I used to block people. I don’t block people anymore. I just mute them. And so if you’re not using block or mute, I would encourage you to explore the wonderful world of mute because mute, they just disappear. You just don’t hear them again. It’s like you just ignore them and they never show up in your feed again. And it’s really useful because they don’t know that you’ve done anything and that’s a lovely —

**Craig:** That’s a great point. It’s funny. Like without naming names, I’ve used mute many times for people I follow.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Who I don’t want to upset but who are just boring me. They’re tweeting a lot and it’s all boring.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** So I mute them. It’s the little white lie but then you got to be careful because then they’re like, hey —

**John:** Why don’t you ever write me back?

**Craig:** Yeah. Didn’t you see what I wrote?

**John:** Yeah. I’m thinking of some people you might have on mute. Here’s a question for you. If somebody is muted, and I can look this up. By the time you’re listening to this podcast, I will have already looked it up, but if I have muted you and somebody writes to both you and me, do I still see the tweet or does it go away completely? I’m not even sure.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think you see anything that’s got an @ to you. The muting is just basically for stuff that isn’t adding you and it’s just them talking.

**John:** Oh no. Muting does block people. It does keep people from adding you.

**Craig:** Oh, it does?

**John:** It does.

**Craig:** Oh. Oh, well in that case.

**John:** It’s useful for that too.

**Craig:** Then I’m going to stick with blocking for certain people. [laughs]

**John:** John Lambert writes, “A hypothetical, of course, but if your second script is an original one-hour spec, and it’s genius, what would your next three steps be?”

So here’s the numbers here. It’s the second script. It’s a one-hour drama. He wants to know what three steps you should take next.

**Craig:** No idea. What? [laughs] What kind of?

**John:** Yeah, Craig’s not a good person for a one-hour specs but — so you’ve written a spec script and by this I believe you are — I think you’re meaning that it is an original, so that’s not just an episode of you know Law & Order 16, or Chicago Social Services. You’ve written a great episode of television, original episode of TV, a pilot. And people like it. So, I would say — you say it’s great. Well, I think you need some objective measurements about whether it’s great. So, I would say enter it into Austin, enter it into Black List, get people to read it and see whether other people think it’s fantastic.

While you are doing that, you need to write more. Because one or I guess this is your second script, you’re going to need a trunkful of things under your belt before you try to make the move out here. You can make the move out here but before you’re seriously in consideration for a job writing television.

**Craig:** Yeah. That makes sense to me. I get thrown up by the next three steps. I can’t see three steps ahead. That’s like chess.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I got one step, show it to people and see if you’re right. How about this, get it out of the world of hypothetical, and into the world of actual. And then that should be your next step.

**John:** So I actually witnessed Craig thinking a few steps ahead though because last night we were playing Pandemic.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It was your second session, my first session playing Pandemic, which was a former One Cool Thing. This is the legacy version where the board actually physically changes once you’ve gotten through a gaming session. It was terrific. And you were very smart about sort of, you know, as we discussed sort of planning to keep cities from going rogue and falling and outbreaks from spreading.

**Craig:** Well, that’s where my mind is really suited to useless strategic things like playing Pandemic and sometimes not at all suited to what would my next three steps be if I had a genius script in my hand. We all have our strengths. That game by the way, a lot of our One Cool Things just aren’t that cool. That game is so good. I had so much fun. So much fun. I can’t wait. So we — the game is laid out in months. So you play it 12 times assuming that you win each time but if you lose, you get to play it a month over again if you lose. So we’ve only played January and February but we won both times. We’re very proud of ourselves.

**John:** And our funding has been cut to nothing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I know. We were extremely — can’t wait to play it again. So, next question. John Sweeny writes, “Subject, idea.” John Sweeny, I’m intrigued. “You guys should sponsor a screenplay contest.” John Sweeny, intrigue, lost. “The prize, the winner gets his screenplay purchased WGA minimum and produced.” What? [Laughs]

**John:** Because Craig, it’s so easy to make a movie. It’s just ridiculously easy, because you and I, any movie we write, it automatically just gets made.

**Craig:** Well first of all, let’s back up for a second. I don’t really believe in screenplay contests. I’m still waiting for the waves of incredibly successful screenwriters that are pouring out of these contests.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just — even the Nicholls which is like the big one, there’s been a few people over the years. A few. Most, no.

So screenplay contests, to me, are a little bit of like an accomplishment trap for people that are trying to achieve something in a business where the actual achievement is an on-off switch and it’s almost always off, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And the on-off switch is basically get hired, make movie, movie hopefully appeals to people, right? This is a very hard switch to flip to on, so instead, they’re like, you know, you see then people when they write their, “Well, I’m a semi-finalist in this and I was a quarter-finalist in this” and it’s like, what, there’s an Appalachian screen festival where you got fourth round in that? It’s bananas. The last thing in the world I’d want to do is sponsor a screenplay contest.

The prize, the winner gets his screenplay produced. So ladies, you’re out. WGA minimum for an original screenplay I think is $98,000. So that’s a hundred grand for us to split, no problem, and then produce. We have to make it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s like, just because we do a podcast, we should probably spend a few million bucks.

**John:** Well, yes. Probably so. So, Project Green Light was essentially what he’s describing, which is basically it was a competition and they’d read a bunch of screenplays and they pick a screenplay. And they would make it. And so, that was a show. It’s been shown several times on HBO and other places. So you can watch Project Green Light. I don’t think we’re going to ever be Project Green Light.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** The thing which I think, they’re not — you know — John is really not keeping in mind is how much work it is to read through screenplays in a competition setting. So I have friends who read for Nicholls, and it’s sort of their job for like months of the year. All they’re doing is reading scripts. Same with Sundance Labs, like all they’re doing is reading scripts. And that’s just no fun at all.

**Craig:** No, it’s no bueno.

**John:** Circling back to the idea of screenplay competitions because in the previous thing, I said like, “Oh, you should submit to Austin or one of the other things,” I’m saying you should submit to those things because they will get your script noticed, and purchased and produced. I’m saying because they will tell you like, “Oh, you’re a really good writer.” And objectively, other people telling you like, “Oh, you’re a really good writer.” Then that’s a clue that like, “Oh, you know, I should probably go where the really good writers are and just get started in this business.” If they’re not telling you’re a really good writer, maybe you need to work on your craft a bit more.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that that’s pretty much the most you can hope for from those things. And even then, you have to take them with a grain of salt. Sometimes, they say things are bad and they’re not bad. It’s just that they were wrong. And sometimes —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Frankly, more often than not, they’re too easy on you. I mean, I judged — I was a judge, a finalist judge for the Austin Screenwriting Competition one year, a number of years ago. So, it was — I think there were three judges or four of us. And we were judging the five scripts that made it all the way to the finals.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** And I hated all of them. All of them. Hated.

**John:** So right now someone is doing the research to figure out like which year that was and feeling really bad.

**Craig:** I hated them and I was shocked. I’m sorry to say if you were in there and you remember me being involved. But I hated them. And I didn’t think that they were of the quality that, if it had been me running it, I would have — no one wins. This is why I shouldn’t run.

**John:** So one of the things I love most about Sundance Labs is they’re kind of upfront about the fact that like they’re not picking the best scripts they’ve ever read. They’re picking the fast hitting stories that can be great movies that no one else is making. And like that’s such a great mandate. Like they’re trying to get stories and voices on screen that are not usually onscreen.

And so when they’re reading things from that perspective, they can overlook some clumsy writing and things that aren’t as good as they could be because they know they’re going to go through these labs process, they’re going to get these things in their best fighting shape to make a really great movie. That’s such a different thing than having to say like, objectively compare like, “Well this is a really good script or that’s a really good script.”

**Craig:** Yeah. I just don’t like it. I don’t like it and I would never ever in a million years would I be involved in a Project Green Light thing. And I’m not — it’s not a moral thing. I get it.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** I mean they’re making entertainment. And Matt and Ben are terrific guys, great screenwriters also. And they’re entertainers. And that’s an entertaining show. But for me, I don’t want to entertain people that way. That’s not how I entertain people. I would never do it. Like, the Sundance Labs, you know, it’s a shame because I was supposed to go one year and then I had to cancel because we were shooting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But I’d love to go one year. I got to call Michelle and talk to her about that because it sounds like it’s exactly the kind of thing I do like to do.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Which is sit in a very real way with another human being and help them be the best them.

**John:** Yeah. Exactly.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** Kevin writes, “As an Englishman, it’s easy to tell when non-English actors fail to summon a realistic British accent. So, do American audiences and filmmakers care as much about an accurate non-American accent? Is it an area that’s advanced or gone backwards during your careers? And how important do you think it is for maintaining the audiences’ focus on a story?”

**Craig:** That’s a good question. I think we do. I think we care very much when we hear bad accents. I think we know bad accents. Remember that we consume a lot of English language entertainment including entertainment from the UK. And even when it’s not UK entertainment but American entertainment, we employ a lot of English actors.

**John:** A tremendous amount of English actors.

**Craig:** We love English actors, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So anytime you meet an English actor, they kind of giggle about the fact that they get this extra boost for being classy and smart just because of their accent but it’s true, right? So we’re very familiar with that.

So, when Kevin Costner attempts to do a British accent in Robin Hood, the world kind of goes bananas because it’s terrible.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s really bad and we absolutely notice it and it gets called out. Similarly, we also notice bad regional American accents.

**John:** But I will say that most British actors who are doing sort of a down-the-road kind of Middle American accent, they tend to do a pretty good job and like rarely do I hear somebody who is like, “Oh, you’re not concealing your British accent very well.”

It’s a weird thing. I don’t perceive it as being like, “Oh, they didn’t hit like Kansas City accent.” It’s just that I can tell they’re not actually American. I could tell they’re concealing something. We definitely notice when we see people trying to do a very specific regional accent where we actually have the ear for like what that’s supposed to sound like. And when they don’t hit it, it’s really painful.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think it’s more noticeable to me when American actors are doing a bad British accent because I think British actors are just better trained in doing an American accent because if they want to be in films, they know that there’s this enormous other opportunity for them. There’s an enormous market. I’m with you. It’s very rare that you hear an actor from the UK doing a bad, like a bad American accent, or like come on man, I’m not buying that.

**John:** It’s fun when you watch on shows where they’ll ask like normal British people to try to fake an American accent. And they tend to go either for like this crazy Californian thing or sort of a John Wayne. They’ll slow down a lot. They’ll try to do things. And it’s the American bias that it’s just sort of always assumed that like, “Oh, if you get rid of your accent, then it’s American.” And of course, it’s just different vowel and letter sounds for everything. And different phrasing and different everything else. But my incorrect perception is that everyone else’s accent is just a hat they’re wearing on top of a normal American accent.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, I think so. I mean, like ultimately Kevin, I guess the answer to your question is, yeah, we all know when somebody’s not doing it right. Everybody knows and nobody likes it.

**John:** But I think it doesn’t bug us as much as I think it bugs British people when American actors try and fail.

**Craig:** Well, because they have a pride in their language. It is the English language. It’s not the American language. We don’t. Like if somebody mangles an American accent I don’t think, from another country, I don’t think, oh you — you violated the great, what, it’s not the Queen’s English but Washington’s English? It’s not. So we don’t have that pride in our own. The only — we do have a regional pride, so you have some guy from California trying to do a Boston accent and everybody just goes “Ugh.” Everybody in Massachusetts loses their mind because they have pride in that regionalism.

All right. So we have a question here from Avishai, Avishai from Brooklyn. He writes, “In the screenplay I’m currently writing, there is a news montage. It depicts clips of videos sourced from different TV news reports spanning the course of a month. And beneath that, I want there to be truncated snippets of different reporter VOs that overlap and bleed into each other. For each bit of voice over, how do I label the speaker? Do I write Reporter 1, Reporter 2, Reporter 3? Do I write Reporter, another reporter, yet another reporter?” How about just Reporter each time and specify in the description that it’s always someone new?”

**John:** So this is the kind of thing which people freak out too much about. Like what is proper screenplay format and that belief that like every person who speaks onscreen has to be individually credited to get their own block of dialogue. How I would do this, and Craig, I’m curious what you would do, I would say, various reporters, and then just have dialogue in there, the little snippets of things. A little slash and then like the next person keeps talking because ultimately you’re going to do this as just like a crazy montage. So breaking this out as individual people talking is not going to be helpful or your friend.

**Craig:** Sometimes though, you have to, if in between the different reporters talking, new visuals are emerging.

**John:** Absolutely true.

**Craig:** So in those cases, I still would do it essentially the way you’re describing and Avishai, you picked on it, it’s your last thing. How about just reporter each time and specify in the description it’s always someone new. That works.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Reporter 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 starts to feel like a spoof almost. It’s goofy.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You definitely don’t want to get into over describing them like reporter, another reporter, yet another reporter because that sounds like a joke. You don’t want to do black reporter, tall reporter, skinny reporter, small, because then it’s like is that important or do we have to go find a short reporter now? So yeah, I just think various reporters, then just do reporter VO, reporter VO, reporter VO.

**John:** Sounds good. Blake Wrights, “I just finished a feature script and I wrote post credits scene for it. If it was you, how would you let the reader know that this scene takes place after the credits?”

**Craig:** Oh, okay. Great. So for me, I’ve done a couple of things like this. What I’ll do is, instead of writing “The end,” I’ll just put in bold and sort of to the left where, you know, scene header would go, I’ll say, “Roll credits,” and then I’ll just do like a return, return, return and then I’ll say, “Then:,” and then do a little scene.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve done similar things. Usually, I’ll do a page break and make it on a new page and then I’ll say like, “Post credits,” and maybe underline that and then there’s that scene that’s post credits. And a lot of my things recently have had post credit sequences and it’s great. That’s what you have to do. So I have sometimes used “The end” or I’ve done “Roll credits” or I’ll say, “After credits” when the next thing happens.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s fine.

**Craig:** Yeah. Whatever essentially is clear, there’s no — this is another one of those things where just go for what’s clear and what feels — you can use whatever language feels appropriate for your tone and all the rest of it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All right. We’ve got here, we’ll do one more.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** Two more. We have two.

**John:** They’re short.

**Craig:** They’re short. Okay. Mohammed from Iran. So this is great. I love that we have listeners in Iran. Mohammed from Iran writes, “Big fan. Really helpful site. Really funny podcast.” Hey, Mohammed, guess what, you’re right and thank you.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** “But you know what would be a cool idea, if you guys did the book version of the show. The material is there, you just need to come up with a logical order to classify stuff into, maybe sexy Craig — ” Oh, yeah, Mohammed, yeah, “can do a bit of illustrating for it. I’d pay for that. Just kidding.” Wait.

“But please don’t forget the chapter about female reproductive health. That’s what 99% of your fan base wants.”

Mohammed from Iran basically is the coolest dude ever.

**John:** He really is.

**Craig:** Thank you, Mohammed. We will get to work on that right away.

**John:** So I thought about doing the book. So our podcast unlike most podcasts, we have transcripts for every single episode. This is episode 240, later on this week, we’ll have the transcript for this episode that you’re listening to. So we go back and do all of those transcripts partly so I can search for things, like did we ever talk about David Mamet before? But also because have people who are deaf who can’t listen to the show, and so they love to read the transcripts. My friend Steve Healy only reads the transcripts. So that’s great.

So we have all this material and we have thought about, or in the office we’ve talked about like, “Do we do this as a book somehow?” The idea of a book gives me a bit of a shudder just because I hate how-to screenwriting books.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** But if it was just a book that was like, you know, John and Craig talk about screenwriting, I guess I’d be all right with it. I mean, how do you feel about it, Craig, because I really don’t have strong opinions.

**Craig:** I don’t know. I mean, the transcripts are on the internet, it’s like they’re there. I know the book sort of curates it all for people which is nice.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, but like —

**John:** You can read the book in the bathroom or —

**Craig:** Right. Exactly. My problem is the same as yours. I’m so angry about these books and what they do. So I feel like, if we’re going to do a book, it has to be proper and well thought out and done in a way that’s not just throw in the transcripts but that we actually say, “At last, here’s a book that you can buy and don’t — not — you don’t have to buy any other book. Don’t buy any other book ever.” Literally, every store should only have this book. It is definitive. Everything else is crap. Only this book.

**John:** Well, I think that’s — if the book is about how to be a screenwriter, but I think this is probably — our podcast really isn’t about how to be a screenwriter. It’s basically sort of like, “What is it like being a screenwriter?” And so, that’s the kind of thing which —

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** There are multiple versions of it. That’s something that might be better — you know, could be taken from the transcripts in a more meaningful way. Like it’s our conversations, maybe sort of, you know, annotated and highly edited because lord know we ramble a lot.

So as I thought about doing it, it’s just the matter of who’s going to do that. And so, it’s not going to be Stuart. Stuart is already way too busy. So that’s probably another new person and just becomes this other big project — and let’s be realistic — in my life, to have to be on top of it.

**Craig:** Definitely not in mine. Yeah, plus you’d have to learn a new person’s name which is really —

**John:** It’s the worst.

**Craig:** Hard to do.

**John:** Something about this last year, I’m having the hardest time remembering new people’s names. It’s just — like the buffer is completely filled. And so, I have a new agent I’m working with on one project and for the life of me, I keep forgetting her name and it’s been so awkward because they’ll be phone conversations where I need to talk about her and I’m like, “Yes. Yes, I was talking with her about — ” Oh, it’s so embarrassing.

**Craig:** You really need to learn that name.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I like that you’re saying it’s just this random thing and not say the fact that you’re getting old.

**John:** Oh, no. It couldn’t be that at all.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I think it’s just some bad circuit kind of thing. So once I get the memory upgrade, I’ll be set.

**Craig:** We’ll take care of that. Don’t you worry.

**John:** Maxwell writes, “Who do you think would win in an all-out brawl to the death, John or Craig?”

**Craig:** Huh? Normally, I’m not one to toot my own horn, but I feel like I could kill you.

**John:** I think Craig probably could. Craig has weight on me. He’s also just —

**Craig:** Angry.

**John:** He’s determined. He’s angry. He’s determined.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And I think I would have — here’s what it is: I would have that moment of qualm. I was like, “Am I really going to kill him?” And Craig wouldn’t have that moment. He wouldn’t have that pause.

**Craig:** No, it’s the pause is the problem.

**John:** As he’s chocking me out, he would finish it.

**Craig:** No, no. For sure like they would have to — they’d have to do that thing where we’re like, “He’s dead, man, he’s dead. Stop. He’s already dead.” [Laughs]

**John:** They’re pulling you off —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And you’re going back to hit him some more.

**Craig:** Exactly. “No, no. I don’t believe it.” I won’t stop ever until he’s dead.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So I’m going to go with Craig.

**John:** Yeah. We got 100% agreement on this podcast.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a blog post by Brent Underwood and he has a post called, “What does it take to become a bestselling author?” And he’s a guy who does book consulting and he was very frustrated that on Amazon it is so easy to become the number one bestselling author in any given category because they update their lists continuously.

So unlike The New York Times which has like this methodology how they are like polling all these bookstores across the country and figuring out like what the bestsellers are, Amazon is just looking at their own numbers, like, “Oh, we sold three copies of this book in this one-hour period. It’s the bestseller in this tiny little subcategory.”

And so, this guy’s frustration is that people will, you know, legitimately to some degree claim like, “Oh, I wrote a bestselling book on Amazon.”

**Craig:** Oh, my god. [laughs]

**John:** And it’s because you picked this incredibly narrow category that you sold three copies. And so he does this little exercise where he actually does become the bestselling book about free masonry on Amazon.

So an amusing post that I think our readers will enjoy. And it’s also interesting because as screenwriters we’re never really concerned about rankings in a meaningful way. Like when our movies come out, we want our movies to be number one at the Box Office, but there’s no sort of power rankings. But for print authors, getting on that list is incredibly important and this guy is saying those lists are much more suspect than you’d believe.

**Craig:** There’s an internet meme, one of my favorites, I don’t know if you’re ever seen Identifying Wood.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** So it’s a real book and the book is called Identifying Wood and it’s a picture of a man curiously in like a business shirt with a tie and he’s staring at a block of wood through like a jewelers loop.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then, what they’ve added to the bottom is, “Yup, its wood.” [laughs] And I just — like I’m sure that is the bestselling book in the category of wood identification —

**John:** 100%.

**Craig:** Publications. It’s Identifying Wood. Unbelievable. Well, my One Cool Thing is a sad thing but he was so, so cool. I don’t know if I’ve ever talked about Father Ted on the show, I might have. It’s a great Irish sitcom from the ’90s and it ended so — just ended too soon because the star who played Father Ted died very young. It was a brilliant, brilliant show. It was about this kind of morally challenged priest who was always involved in self-aggrandizing schemes, a little bit like Basil Fawlty kind of. Working in this god forsaken parish on some miserable island called Craggy Island off the coast of Ireland.

So it was like he’d be sent to, you know, the ends of the earth and he shared his home with two other priests. One was named Father Dougal who was a complete idiot and the other one was Father Jack. And Father Jack was played by an actor named Frank Kelly who unfortunately passed away this week or this past week. And Father Jack appeared to be a 70-year-old incredibly alcoholic sexually obsessed degenerate who only said four words, one of which was arse, and he’s disgusting, truly just like you take the bad stereotype of the lecherous priest and just put it on roids and it was — that was Father Jack.

Frank Kelly, by all accounts, an incredibly gentle, beautiful nice man and a wonderful actor, played this loathsome character and he was so good at it. So my One Cool Thing this week is Father Jack from Father Ted and we’ll throw a link in the show notes. You can watch episodes of Father Ted on Hulu.com.

**John:** Fantastic. So while you were talking, I was Googling and because we have transcripts, I was able to pull up that in episode 14 that was your One Cool Thing, was Father Ted.

**Craig:** Oh, fantastic. There you go.

**John:** And so you talked about it there. So if you would like to listen to the Father Ted episode, it is available on the Scriptnotes app, you can download that in either of the App stores.

**Craig:** Segue Man.

**John:** Segue Man. The premium episodes and all those back episodes are available through Scriptnotes.net as well. So that’s where you get an account. It is $2 a month for all of those back episodes. We also have a few of the 200-episode USB drives that have all of the back episodes, or at least the first 200 back episodes. If you would like a copy that could survive post-apocalypse probably, you could get one of those USB drives.

**Craig:** It has to survive the post-apocalypse as well?

**John:** Yeah, absolutely. So it’s one thing to survive the initial blast, but once the reavers come through and sort of —

**Craig:** So it’s really designed not for the blast at all [laughs] —

**John:** Oh, no, no.

**Craig:** But for the reavers.

**John:** Yeah, because honestly the initial blast could probably melt the thing. So —

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You want to put it in like a fireproof safe. You want to go to 10 Cloverfield Lane and like — and slide it underneath the bed there and then you’re fine.

**Craig:** See that poster by the way, great poster.

**John:** Great poster. Very exciting.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So the director of that film is I think a listener of our show and I had coffee with him about a year ago when he was going off to direct some movie and it turned out that was 10 Cloverfield Lane.

**Craig:** How about that? Excellent.

**John:** Very nice. If you would like to harass Craig on Twitter, he is @clmazin. I’m at @johnaugust. I won’t mute you unless you say something terrible to me.

**Craig:** You won’t know.

**John:** We are on iTunes. So please go subscribe to the show in iTunes. It’s great if you want to listen to it at johnaugust.com where we host all this stuff, but it’s even better if you subscribe because that way people know that you are subscribing. Give us a nice little review there. That’s always lovely. We have a Facebook page, too, which we occasionally check. So like us on Facebook and tell your friends that we are a show that you listen to.

Our show, as always, is produced by Stuart Friedel. Our outro this week is by Adam Lastname who’s done several of our best outros. If you have an outro for us, you can write into ask@johnaugust.com with a link to it. That’s also a place where you can send questions like the ones we answered today. And that’s our show.

Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** I have one last question.

**John:** Please.

**Craig:** Who edits this show?

**John:** I forgot to mention Matthew Chilelli. Our show is produced by Stuart Friedel, as always, and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Yeah. Okay. Now, I feel good.

**John:** That’s very good. Thanks, Craig.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [David Mamet’s memo to writers of The Unit](http://movieline.com/2010/03/23/david-mamets-memo-to-the-writers-of-the-unit/)
* [Craig’s Twitter feed](https://twitter.com/clmazin)
* [Muting users on Twitter](https://support.twitter.com/articles/20171399)
* Brent Underwood looks at [what it takes to become a “best-selling author”](http://observer.com/2016/02/behind-the-scam-what-does-it-takes-to-be-a-bestselling-author-3-and-5-minutes/)
* [Identifying Wood](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0942391047/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* Father Ted [on Hulu](http://www.hulu.com/father-ted) and [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Father_Ted), and [Frank Kelly](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Kelly)
* [Scriptnotes, Episode 14](http://johnaugust.com/2011/how-residuals-work) and other back episodes are available at [scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/) and [on the 200 episode USB flash drive](http://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/scriptnotes-200-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* The poster for [10 Cloverfield Lane](http://t3.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTzD7J7Y1hiY1rgen9sd__hgFWkRz0wOr1xamo7pZr7PUKLhfEj)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Adam Lastname ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/what-is-good-writing).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 239 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today’s episode is 100% craft, there will be no follow-up, there will be no questions, no discussion of etiquette. We are going to try to answer the question of what is good writing before we take a look at three new Three Page Challenges.

A warning that one of the Three Page Challenges has some bad words in it, so if you’re driving in the car with your kids, you may want to turn down the dial before you get to the Three Page Challenges. But other than that, it should be a pretty clean show.

**Craig:** I’m glad for it. I feel like while it was fun to wander around a bit, we need to focus. We need to refocus on our mission.

**John:** We need to focus on our mission, which is to talk about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** Mm-hmm. So the idea for this topic came up because I read this piece in Slate and which is originally from Quora. It was by this guy, Marcus Geduld. And he was trying to answer the question, how do you differentiate good acting from bad acting? So I’ll put a link to the show notes for his original piece but I thought it was actually a really nicely designed explanation of sort of what he’s looking for in good acting.

And what I especially liked about it is he says, “If anyone tells you there are objective standards, they’re full of crap. This is a matter of personal taste. There are trends — there are many people who love Philip Seymour Hoffman’s acting but if you don’t, you’re not wrong.”

And so, as we get into the succession of acting and writing, I would back up what he says. It’s not there’s a one objective standard, but there’s things that I tend to notice when I’m saying like, well, that’s really good acting or really good writing and it may be useful to point them out.

**Craig:** This is a large philosophical discussion but I do agree with this gentleman as well. When it comes to writing, it’s not possible to say that this is capital G good and this is capital G bad. What you can say is that this is to my taste or it is not and here’s why. We do know that there are certain kinds of writing and the writing of certain writers that tends to be toward to most people’s taste, to a lot of people’s taste. There are some writers who appeal to the taste of those who consider themselves refined. There are some that appeal to the average man or woman.

But I’m with this guy completely. That’s why anytime I talk about a movie, I’m like, “It wasn’t for me.” That’s the best I could do.

**John:** Let’s take a look at his criteria for good acting. He says, “Good actors make me believe that the actor is going through whatever his character is actually going through.” So there’s a believability. You really believe that he has been shot, that he is terrified in this moment. And he singles out sort of like if you can tell they’re faking it, then it’s honestly kind of worse. Like you can sense that they’re acting.

And that’s very true. I mean, the performances that I admire the most, I genuinely believe that they are experiencing — obviously you know there’s artifice, you know that they’re in a movie — and yet the moment feels incredibly real because they’re responding to things in a very real way.

**Craig:** And ultimately verisimilitude is kind of what we do, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** We’re trying to create a fake world that at least seems real to you while you’re experiencing it or is real enough that you can suspend your disbelief. And this advice I think is perfect for actors or writers.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Actors, obviously it’s immediate. We see and hear them and so we know that they’re believable or not. But for us as writers, believability, that probably is my number one problem with most screenplays I read. I read something, I read a character’s line or I witness their choice and I think, “I just don’t believe that that’s what a person would do in that circumstance.”

**John:** Absolutely. You say like, “I don’t believe it. I don’t buy it. I don’t get it. It doesn’t connect for me.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s because you don’t believe that character is performing that way in that moment. But very related to that, Geduld is looking for surprise. The great actors surprise him. So out of all the choices they could make, they are making really interesting choices.

So he singles out sort of like if there’s a bank teller, you sort of want that bank teller just to be believable as a bank teller and not draw any attention or draw any focus to himself. But your main actors in your piece, they should be making really fascinating and interesting choices at times so you don’t know what they’re going to do next. Because if you can predict perfectly what they’re going to do next, you get bored.

I think I see the same thing with writing. If I can tell you what’s going to happen three pages later or three sentences later, then I stop being so intrigued. I’m not curious what’s going to happen next.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s where the boredom happens. And when we see characters doing these things that are sort of obvious, right, there’s the lack of surprise, this is when you tend to hear things like, well, tropey or just sort of, “I’ve seen it before.” The element of surprise isn’t so much about leaping out and going boo at the audience as much as it is delighting them with something that they were not expecting.

All comedy is surprise. You cannot get a laugh if there’s no surprise, right?

**John:** Right.

**Craig:** Everybody knows that. If you tell somebody a joke and they’re like, “I’ve heard it before,” don’t keep telling the joke. There will be no surprise. All actors surprise, all emotion I think is surprise. It creeps up on you. Even when you are not surprised by the thing that happens, the intensity of it surprises you, and thus, the tears come.

**John:** And there’s no surprise without expectation. So the reason why a joke works is because you set up an expectation for what the natural outcome is and the punch line is a surprise.

The same thing happens in drama. You set an expectation for what is going to happen next and the surprise is something different happens or a different choice is made. So you don’t get those moments of surprise unless you’ve set expectation really well.

That’s one of the things I enjoyed most about Drew Goddard’s adaptation of The Martian is he was very clever about setting up expectations about what was going to happen next so that all the calamities that would happen to poor Matt Damon on Mars can still be surprising. You don’t get those surprises unless you’ve very carefully laid out for the audience what he thinks is going to happen next.

**Craig:** It’s remarkable how similar what we do is to what magicians do, because there is no surprise for the magician and there’s none for us. We know how it ends. We know everything. So there’s this careful craft of misdirection and misleading and setting up one expectation only to deliver something else. It’s all very crafted.

You know, if you spend any time reading Agatha Christie, she is just a master of this because in her case, think about what she has to do. She has to surprise the reader at the end and the entire time they are battling her.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They are not surprised that there’s a surprise. So it’s a bit like watching a close-up magician at work. You know he or she is trying to fool you. And then they fool you anyway.

**John:** Yeah. I think the other crucial thing to remember about surprise is if everything is surprising, nothing is surprising. And so if you don’t allow characters to behave in a way that we can have some ability to predict what’s going to happen next, we will stop caring or just stop trying to put our confidence in you that they are going to do something worthwhile. That there’s going to be a payoff to this.

And you see that sometimes in writing as well, where it’s just such a scramble of different things, it’s going in so many different directions. The rug is always being pulled out from underneath you to the point where like, “You know what, I’m not going to stand on that rug because I just know you’re going to pull it out from under me.”

**Craig:** No question. And in acting, we know this feeling when we’re watching a movie and we want to turn to somebody next to us and say, “Do you have any idea what this person is doing or talking about?” I love Apocalypse Now. I love that movie and my favorite book is Heart of Darkness. And I think there’s more great performances in that movie than practically any other movie I can think of.

But Marlon Brando’s performance is essentially surprising constantly to the point where I can’t quite get a handle on him at all as Kurtz. For me at least, that performance, it’s just all surprises and nothing to push against.

**John:** Yeah. It can be the real frustration. And of course, when you talk about an actor’s performance, we really are balancing what was written, what was the scripted performance and what was the actor actually doing. And in the case of Apocalypse Now, that was just a huge jumble.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah. [laughs]

**John:** But there’s times where, you know, you’re trying to look at a character in a movie and it becomes very hard to tell, like, did that not work because it was bad on the page or did that not work because the actor made bizarre choices that made it impossible for that to function? And it’s one of the reasons why it can be so crucial to have a writer around on a set to sort of be that set of eyes to let the director know and everybody else know, like, “Okay, what they’re doing is fascinating but it will not actually add up and you’re going to be in real trouble when you get to the editing room.”

**Craig:** Yeah, there’s no question. I think Brando famously showed up on that set like 100 pounds overweight, hadn’t read the book, probably hadn’t read the script, didn’t know any of his lines. [laughs] Yeah, that one was a disaster.

**John:** Geduld’s next point is that great actors are vulnerable, which is very true. You feel like the great actors are letting you see parts of themselves that they might be embarrassed by or essentially that they’re not embarrassed to show you those things that are sort of icky inside them and they’re not trying to be perfectly put together at all moments. They’re letting you in and showing you the cracks.

And good writing does that, too. Good writing isn’t trying to impress you at all moments. Good writing is trying to explore uncomfortable emotions and uncomfortable feelings.

**Craig:** Yeah. This can be a little bit of a trap for writers who work in comedy because comedy is one of the great defense mechanisms of all time. And there are very funny movies that essentially truck entirely in comedy and they never show vulnerability and they never get you in a moment where suddenly you feel, you deeply feel. You’re there to laugh. And by the way, it’s perfectly fine. I mean, you know, there are a lot of terrific movies that are just there to make you laugh.

But if you are trying to do a certain kind of comedy, you need to be able to access your vulnerable side and put aside your humor armor and just be real. Sometimes, it’s those moments inside of comedies that are the most touching because of the contrast.

**John:** Absolutely. I mean, you obviously had that moment with Melissa McCarthy in Identity Thief but I’m also thinking about Melissa McCarthy in Spy. And I think one of the reasons why Spy worked so well is you definitely see what she is longing for and sort of her obsession with her boss that she doesn’t really want to own up to and her own fears and frustrations sort of bubbling out. And so they find great comedic moments for it but they also really let you deep inside. And that’s why you can sort of identify so closely with her character.

**Craig:** And Melissa’s really good at that. I mean, Melissa, you know, she has one of those faces, like Zach Galifianakis and Steve Carell, these are people that you want to take home and hug, and yet they’re also so funny.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Then there are some really funny people that I don’t want to take home and hug. Like Ryan Reynolds is really funny. But he doesn’t seem to need my emotional support. [laughs] He seems to be just fine, you know what I mean?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Whereas like Zach or Steve Carell or Melissa, I’m like, “Okay, come here, here’s some soup. Let’s talk it out.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, let me take care of you.

**John:** Yeah. His next point is listening, that the great actors watch them when they’re listening to other characters speak, which is a thing I’ve definitely noticed is that there are some people who just seem to be waiting for their turn to act next and there’s other actors who you feel like everything they’re saying is in response to the previous character, that they’re engaged in this moment, they’re engaged in listening. And those actors help the other person’s performance so much because they direct your attention back to what the other character is saying.

It’s such a simple and kind of obvious thing, but if you look at scenes that aren’t working, it’s often because you don’t believe that the other character is actually listening to what the first character is saying.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is acting school 101, you know. Sometimes all you do is just sit and listen and learning how to listen seems weird. Like why would it be so hard for me to do something I’m constantly doing anyway? But in the moment, when you are required to say things that you didn’t think and they are not extemporaneous, they were written down and studied, the act of listening in and of itself is a challenge, because suddenly you’ve lost yourself listening to this other person and you forgot you have something to say. That’s really tricky but what it comes down to is essentially putting your ego aside and not feeling like it’s more important for you to be in command of your moment when you say words.

Sometimes the big moments are the ones where you listen. Film actors, the ones who’ve been around the block a lot, they know that oftentimes the camera is on them more when they’re not talking.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So listening becomes crucial.

**John:** From the writer’s point of view, you are often writing those words that they are saying. And so if you are just batting a ball back and forth, it’s unlikely that you’re writing your very best dialogue for those actors because it doesn’t feel like they had to hear what the previous person said to respond to it, didn’t actually need to process it, but rather is like, funny line, funny line, funny line, funny line, that scene is not going to work or this is not going to work as well as it could. And the actors are not going to be able to bring anything special to it because you’re not giving them any things to hold on to. There’s just no handholds in that kind of dialogue.

**Craig:** There are exceptions. Sorkin is very good at putting lots of dialogue and not giving his characters a lot of time to listen because he demands that they’re fast and smart. So I think of the first scene of Social Network, it’s very ratatat. It’s very verbal. But then in that scene, when there is a moment where somebody suddenly stops, it means something.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You realize that they’ve been knocked back on their feet a little bit. Those are very challenging scenes for actors to do.

**John:** Yeah. Well, you know, if you’re writing things where the point is that they actually sort of aren’t listening, where they are basically two simultaneous monologues directed towards each other, that can be great and be fascinating. But if your whole movie is built of that, you better be Aaron Sorkin.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, and even Aaron Sorkin understands that after a scene like that, you need a break.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. His next point, the great actors use their instruments to their best effect. So by instruments, he means their body, their voice, basically what they came to the show with. And so it’s recognizing what you have and how to make the most of what you have.

So his example is Philip Seymour Hoffman who was overweight and not conventionally attractive but definitely knew how to use his body to best effect to, you know, be that character or sort of provide that character a reality within that world. And I think that’s something we’re always looking for with our own writing and with the characters we’re creating is how do you use who they are and what they bring to best effect.

**Craig:** And also for ourselves, there are things that we know we do well. John Lee Hancock, he always says that when he is sent something, a script for consideration to direct, the first question he asks while reading it or after reading it is, “Is this a pitch I can hit?”

**John:** Ah, yes.

**Craig:** You know, and the truth is, not everyone can do everything. And there are things that sometimes we want to do for a change because they’re exciting, and those are terrific. But there are also things we know we can do. And this is why some great actors have been bad in movies because they were miscast. That’s what miscasting is, right? So for us as well, we have to kind of cast ourselves into what we write to make sure that we’re writing with the wind at our back and not in our face.

**John:** For sure. So let’s go on beyond his suggestions and think of some of our own suggestions for the things we notice about good writing that are sometimes lacking in writing that is not so good. Do you want to start?

**Craig:** Sure. For me, just a few things that came to mind that don’t really apply for the acting model of things. One is layers. Good writing I think is accomplishing more than one thing at a time. Usually, I’m watching plot happen while I’m also watching a relationship change or watching a character grow. There’s just layers to things. I think audiences appreciate those complexities when it’s very — okay, this, now we stop doing and we talk and we have a relationship. Now we do talking again. It starts to feel very simple to me.

**John:** Yeah. And sometimes in procedural dramas on television, you’ll notice this, like they’re just doing the one thing. They’re basically like just putting out information about the next thing they’re going to do. And that’s sometimes how procedural dramas need to work but it’s not sort of the best writing we could aspire to in other forms.

**Craig:** Agreed. The other thing I think is a hallmark of good writing is hidden scenes because, you know, we are trying to create the illusion of something that is whole and of one piece because it really happened even though it didn’t. Of course, that requires us to stitch things together. And sometimes we have to do things in our stories to make them work that aren’t completely organic to what happened before. And I think good writing knows how to hide those scenes so that they’re not even visible at all. It’s like a good tile guy knows how to fit two slabs together so you don’t even notice that it’s two pieces and it looks like one.

**John:** Yeah. You brought up magic before and I think of sort of what David Kwong does in his close-up work. And I don’t ever want to ask him how he does what he does because I’m never going to be able to do it. It’s sort of more fun for me not to know. But I’m sure some of the misdirection is a real vigilance about where the audience’s attention is going to be.

And so when you talk about hidden seams, you’re really basically being very mindful of like what are they going to see and what are they not going to see. And by putting something over here, they’re not going to be paying attention to this thing that I’m doing over sort of down here on the page. It’s being very aware of like where they are at and their experience of reading the story, of watching this movie so they’re not going to see what you’re actually needing to do.

**Craig:** Yeah. A lot of times when people talk about good craft, I think this is a big part of it, is just hiding the artifice and avoiding all those — you know, there’s a common thing people say in Hollywood when they want to say they had a problem with something in a script. They’ll say, “This bumped me.” And bumped means, literally, I felt the seam, you know. Like I was in a car, I was on what I thought was a smooth stretch of road and then bump, right? So those are the things we try and hide.

The other thing that I think is part of good writing is a point of view that unlike a performance which is delivering one character and making us believe that character, the writer needs a point of view because otherwise the story isn’t really about anything in particular. The writer needs something interesting to say and they have to have an interesting way of saying it. It doesn’t need to be text, it could be subtext. And it doesn’t have to be grand. It doesn’t have to be unsaid by anyone else before. But we do need a point of view.

**John:** Yeah. On the blog about two weeks ago, I addressed this article that Michael Tabb had written about — he called it premise and I sort of disagreed with him calling it premise. But what he was really talking about was this idea like what is the point, like what are you actually wrestling with in the story? Even if characters aren’t speaking aloud, even if it’s not even sort of obvious subtext, it’s the reason why you wrote the story, it’s the question you’re trying to answer. It may not even be like the dramatic question that a character is going to ask or resolve. It’s not the plot. It is sort of the point.

It’s like, I want to believe that the story is about more than just the surface plotting of it and that there’s a reason why you wrote this story, there’s a reason why I should be spending my time on it. That even if there’s not necessarily one answer, that you’re going to try to convince me of some point of view.

**Craig:** Yeah. I call it the central dramatic argument. Everybody’s got a different, you know, phrase for it.

Scott Frank told me he wrote a script once and he sent it to, I won’t say who, but a big screenwriter, to get their opinion and that person’s response was, “This screenplay is well-written but it’s answering a question no one is asking.” And I thought that was a really tough love way of saying that whatever the point of view was there, it wasn’t something that would connect universally.

And we talk about this a lot. When you’re writing movies, you are creating the uncommon and the bizarre and the remarkable and notable because those are the stories worth seeing. But buried in there, something that is the opposite, incredibly common, completely universal, applicable to everyone’s life experience.

So that’s where the point of view comes in. And similarly, I think that connects to another part of what I consider to be good writing, and that’s a general unity, that there’s a cohesion of the narrative, the end feels like a proper resolution of the beginning. The phrase coming full circle. A good movie comes full circle.

**John:** Yeah. And when we say coming full circle, meaning both in terms of like story and plot. So like we started some place and we got some place, the characters went through a journey, we actually saw them do something, we saw them accomplish something or failed something in an interesting way.

But also, thematically, that there was like these were the themes we were exploring and we succeeded in exploring these themes through different characters, through different situations and we got someplace. And it all feels like it’s of one piece and it’s not just like a bunch of things that happened and now the credits are rolling.

**Craig:** Yeah. Ideally, the beginning informs what the end is and the end informs what the beginning is, the two of them are yin and yang. And those pieces fit together gorgeously. By the time you get to the end of the movie, you go, “Yes, it had to start that way, it had to end that way.”

**John:** And yet, at the same time, ideally, starting at that place, you should not have been able to predict that it got to that place.

**Craig:** Bingo.

**John:** And that’s the narrative trick. That’s good writing.

**Craig:** That’s good writing. And the way to, I think, your best friend in achieving that trick is having a point of view, because that’s what you’re bringing that the audience doesn’t walk in with.

**John:** Yeah. The thing that I think I’ve noticed about good writing is confidence and that the writer has confidence in his or her words and that his or her story is going to be interesting enough that me as the reader should be spending my time to follow them on this journey. And it’s a hard thing to describe because you don’t sort of see it, you just feel it. You feel like, okay, this writer is confident, I am confident in this writer that this is going to be an interesting journey worth taking.

Some of the things that make me lose confidence at times are simple mistakes. And so, you know, a typo here and there isn’t going to kill you. But a lot of typos makes me wonder like, “Wow, are you really that dedicated to your story? Did you not even proofread this?” And sometimes it’s sort of more they’re not typos but they’re just like things they didn’t think through, like logic flaws that make me question whether this is going to end well.

And so, confidence is a thing I look for in writing. And when I see it, I sort of lean into it. I’m excited to see where they’re going to go next.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, you say that the idea that the writer is in control of the story and that’s exactly right. When you read a well-written script, you’re turning the pages knowing full well that when you turn the page, the next one is not going to be the one that makes you go, “Oh, god, really?” Whereas in bad writing, I’m feeling that on almost every page.

I mean, all of your triggers that you mentioned are correct. The one that always gets me is when I see the writer solving a problem in an evident way. And then I go, “Okay, I get that you had a problem and I get you needed to get out of that problem so that you could do blah, blah, blah, blah, but I don’t want to see that. Now I have no confidence in your story. Now I see the artifice.”

You know, I’ve been starting to create crossword puzzles because I’m not a dork enough, I guess. And when you’re building crossword puzzles, you have your big theme answers and then you’re going to fill in words around it. And sometimes you get jammed in a spot where, in order to make everything work, you need to stick a word in that’s just a really bad dumb crossword word.

**John:** What’s an example of a bad crossword word?

**Craig:** Well, there are so many. Well, there’s the crossword ease words like Etui and Esai and, you know, ero. And then there’s ones that are just like, you know, NGP and then you’re like, “What the heck’s an NGP?” And then it’s like, okay, one person once said it and it’s like this bizzaro thing or some foreign capital no one even knows.

And people do it because they have to solve their problem. But the good crossword puzzle creators, they just go, “Nope, let me undo this section and do it again because I don’t want people to hit that thing where they go, ‘Oh, that’s right, this is fake and you just magneted a solution on here so you could get to the next page.'”

**John:** Yeah. So things that make me lose confidence — typos, those kind of just like hacky solutions to things, and clichés which is a general kind of hackiness where it’s like, okay, that’s a really obvious tropey either plotting device or just a bad phrase that you just didn’t spend the time to think of a better way to say that thing.

And so, cliché can be great if you’re going to explode the cliché or sort of like play against the cliché. And if I have a lot of confidence in your story, in your writing, I will see that cliché and like, “You know what, that’s fine because they’re going to do something great with it. I’m going to keep turning pages because it’s going to be awesome.”

But if I was starting to lose confidence and then I encounter one of those cliché’s, I’m like, “Oh, it’s dipping low.” And remember in our last live show or two live shows ago, we had Riki Lindhome up. She was talking about when they were staffing for Another Period. And it’s like, oh, how many pages of a script do you read before you say yes or no? It’s like, well, about three.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so, if she encounters a really hacky cliché on page three, she’s done. And that’s what you have to be so vigilant about.

**Craig:** Yeah. This idea of confidence in what the writer is doing is going to come up in one of our Three Page Challenges. I think we’ll see it pretty clearly. Part of what happens is when you feel good about the writing and then something comes along that’s a little squidgy, you give the writer the benefit of the doubt, “This must be intentional, it will work out.” And then, in well-written scripts, it does.

Think of like a script as the Titanic and it’s sailing along and it’s got its watertight compartments. You can hit, you know, one or two things and if you fill one or two watertight compartments, you can stay afloat for a while. But when you’re dragging something across all of them, you’re going to sink.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And when I read scripts where characters are, their voices are changing from scene to scene, characters are behaving in the middle of situations that are just bizarre and not realistic at all or inconsistent with what they did before, suddenly, the Titanic is being ripped in half, Jack is drowning, Rose is on the piece of door.

**John:** Spoilers.

**Craig:** Oh, yeah, the Titanic does go down.

**John:** Sorry, man.

**Craig:** Yeah, spoiler.

**John:** It’s good to bring up voices because voice is one of those things — we talk about characters having voices and making sure the voices sound believable. But writers also have voices. And good writing, that writer has a voice. And so I don’t care if it’s a non-fiction piece in Slate or something in The New Yorker or a Hemingway short story or Faulkner, or just any screenplay. You know, you read a Tarantino screenplay versus an episode of Game of Thrones, you read one of their things, they’re all very different but they all have a voice. They all sound like they’re written by a person who is confident about the words that they’re using to describe their world.

And as we get to the Three Pages, I think this sense of voice is really crucial. It’s a thing that keeps you turning pages because like, “Oh, even if I don’t necessarily love the story, I love hearing this person’s voice.”

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And there are writers who like, I’m not actually nuts about some of their plotting but their voices are just so fantastic. You want to talk about an amazing writer, someone we both follow on Twitter, Paul Rudnick.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** What an amazing voice he has.

**Craig:** Brilliant.

**John:** So Paul Rudnick wrote In & Out and lots of other movies.

**Craig:** Addams Family.

**John:** Was it Addams Family or —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah, you’re absolutely right. But he also used to write as Libby Gelman-Waxner. It was a column for Premiere Magazine which was the big film magazine at the time. And it was written for the point of view of this film critic kind of. She would review two movies in every issue. But it was mostly about her life and sort of her daughter and her dentist husband, Josh, I think.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And basically, it was all about sort of her even though she was technically reviewing these films. And it was all just a wonderful exercise in voice.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m just such a fan of his. In & Out is such a good movie. I love that movie. I mean, that’s a great movie, by the way, for anyone to study in terms of structure because it’s structured perfectly. And talk about, it’s loaded with surprise. I mean, you have a movie where someone is gay but isn’t ready to come out of the closet and you’re like, okay, it’s going to end with him coming out of the closet. Yeah, but that’s not where the surprise is, you know.

And then his voice, look, he’s one of the wittiest people ever. [laughs] He’s like Dorothy Parker witty. That guy is, he’s great.

**John:** He’s fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** My last little thing I’ll say about good writing, and this is not an exhaustive list, there’s probably other things you can think of, but I want to talk about finesse. And this is a thing that you maybe only kind of recognize when you have written a lot. But when I see a writer doing something that’s actually really difficult and they make it look so easy, you’re like, “Wait, how did you do that?”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** And that’s the thing that I start to really appreciate. And so, two recent examples I can think of, over the Christmas break I read To Kill a Mockingbird. And obviously the book is great on many levels and that’s why you study it in high school.

But looking at it now, Harper Lee was able to do these things, these transitions where she was in a scene and it was like really a detailed scene and like every moment, every sort of gasp and every, you know, scratch on the floor, and then like within just a few sentences, several months could pass and then we’re off to something completely new. She was able to transition in and out of these sort of close-up moments in ways that were just remarkably subtle and clever and adept that you didn’t even sort of notice. Like, “Oh, wow, just months passed and now Scout’s older and like two sentences have gone by.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s a really remarkable thing.

**Craig:** It is. I think that the idea of making the difficult scene easy is more a hallmark of great writing. You know, the person that confounds me time and time again is Neil Gaiman. I read this guy and I’m like, “How did you just do that? How did you pull that off?”

You know, just reading through the entire Sandman series at least once in every issue, I’d go, “Wow. Wow. How did you — ” especially later on when you’re like, “Wait, did you set up something three years ago and it just paid off?” [laughs] I mean, his mind is just remarkable and he makes it look so easy.

**John:** Yeah. And I had this filed underneath the finesse category but it speaks back to sort of all these things, so maybe my final example will sort of talk about how well she did on all these different levels.

So Gillian Flynn in Gone Girl, both in the book and in the movie, and different ways how she did it in both the book and the movie, there’s this narrative handoff that has to happen halfway through. And when you see what she did, we’re talking about the layers, there was actually much more going on than you sort of thought was going on. There were these hidden scenes that she was just masterful.

She had a point of view as an author about what she was trying to express but also very clearly you could understand the characters’ points of view on this. There was a unity, there was a deeper thing that this was all sort of connected to. And she had confidence and it’s only because I had confidence in her writing and sort of what she was doing that I was able to take this giant leap halfway through the book and halfway through the movie that like, “Okay, everything has completely changed and I’m so excited to see where this is going next.”

**Craig:** It’s such a good feeling knowing that every page you’re reading has been thought out and is part of a larger plan.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you never get that sense of — because I’ve read some novels where — I read one in particular recently where I was so happy halfway through. And then I got into the second half and it just seemed to me that the author had kind of gone, “Okay, that’s enough craft. Let’s just wing it.” [laughs] And it just fell apart.

**John:** I will tell you quite honestly, there was a book I was sent as an adaptation, I had this two years ago maybe, maybe even more than that. And it had sold for a fair amount and then I heard back — so I read it, it’s like, “Well, the first half is really good and the second half is not really good at all.” And the backstory was like, yeah, people only read the first half. They bought it at an auction, they only read the first half. And so no one sort of knew how it ended. And then they got the rest of it and they’re like, “Oh, oh, no. Oh, no.” And it just wasn’t a good ending.

**Craig:** No. And that’s a real challenge for us when we’re adapting these things because, like I said before, the ending must be fundamentally there in the beginning. So it means that the beginning that you like so much, you might have to change that a little bit.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s the frustration. And as we start these Three Page Challenges, we are just looking at the beginning. So we have to be mindful of, the first three pages are so crucial but in some ways they’re so easy because you’re not responsible for like the next 90 pages as you’re writing these three pages and giving them to us. But of course, if you’re writing the full script, these three pages would actually have to set up the things you want to do for, you know, another two hours of the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, they’re crucial. Crucial.

**John:** They’re crucial.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right, let’s get started with this. Which one should we do first?

**Craig:** Here, I’ll do Brewed.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Brewed is written by Joey Perotti.

**John:** So as always, if you’re new to the podcast, you may not know that there are links to the PDFs of these Three Page Challenges in the show notes, so you can read along with us if you’d like to. So these are people who have written in to johnaugust.com/threepages and they said that we could talk about their pages on the air. So these are willing participants in this and they’re all very brave to give us their pages.

**Craig:** Indeed they are. So we summarize them and then we discuss and you can play along with the home game. And for those of you listening and you don’t have the pages in front of you, Brewed is B-R-E-W-E-D, not B-R-O-O-D. Brewed by Joey Perotti.

So we open in the brew house which is a small, moderately busy coffee shop and we’re listening to Chuck, an overweight buffoon and manager, and he’s holding up a journal and he’s basically instructing his employees, it seems. And he’s talking to Henry who’s in his late teens and giving him this information. And then Henry notices Robert, he’s a homeless man. The homeless man is talking to Jude who works behind the register. And the homeless man, Robert, is asking to use the bathroom. Jude says, “No, it’s for customers only.” Robert then walks up to Henry and says, “Hey, can I get some change?” Henry gives him some money.

A customer named Paul tells Henry he’s made a big mistake. That Jude is going to be mad at him. Paul is a regular, he’s been there all the time. He sees everybody and what he knows is the most important thing in the coffee shop is the bathroom key, it’s for customers only. At which point Robert, the homeless man, says to Jude, “I want the bathroom key, I’m a customer.” And Jude is annoyed.

**John:** Yes. So we’re going to have I think two really promising things to talk about next. But to me, I felt like that this was one of Joey’s first screenplay exercises. And there was a lot here that didn’t work for me. So this is going to be one of those things where like it sounds like I’m just going to pick and pick and pick and pick. But I think there’s a lot to pick at here.

So we can talk about sort of the concept but I’ll tell you where I had issues on the page and we can work through those and then maybe other ways he could sort of set up this thing which read to me like it was maybe a pilot or an indie com. I wasn’t quite sure what I was reading.

**Craig:** Right. All right, well, go for it.

**John:** Go for it. So this is going to be some tough love for Joey, but hopefully helpful. So let’s just look at the first page. There’s a fade in, which you don’t need. You can have it, you can let it go. A lot of typos, just a lot of typos. Buffoon is B-U-F-F-O-O-N. We see the Brew House a lot in this first bit. You could take that out. So Chuck tells a joke and then like laughs hysterically and then like laughs bigger about it. I didn’t believe it. So going back to our discussion, like I didn’t buy that. I don’t think I would buy any actor actually being able to do that. Unless there’s like a meta joke about someone doing that, it felt really strange and weird to me.

I also got lost about like, wait, is he giving instruction to a bunch of people or just to this one new guy because it wasn’t clear. Just the geography of the space was not clear to me.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** If we’re going to be in a place called the Brew House, are we behind the counter? Are we on one side? Like I had no idea how the layout of this place was working.

Opportunity is misspelled twice.

**Craig:** Three times.

**John:** Three times. [laughs]

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Opportunity is misspelled consistently.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Slightly is missing a T. On page 2, a few things, parentheticals. Parenthetical, the first letter is not capitalized. And so if that parenthetical is truly that thing that’s underneath the character name, that first letter is not capitalized. OS when it’s like off screen or voice over, those abbreviations, those are different kinds of things. Those actually go up on the line with the character name. So those are two different things.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Page 3, we have the same problem with the capitalization and the parenthetical. I asked Stuart why he picked this and he said that we hadn’t done a lot of things that were just comedy and we hadn’t done things which were just dialogue and that’s why he picked it, which I think is true. So I think it was useful for that reason. But also because there are some things here that people would probably — they might see in their own scripts and fix.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, this is the one I was thinking about when we think about confidence in reading. So we look at this line here, Chuck says, “I want you to jot down any time you size an opprotunity. And then Henry goes, “Size?” “Yeah, is the opprotunity big? Is it small?” Okay, so there’s a joke here that Joey is trying for which is that Chuck isn’t good at talking. But now is opprotunity on purpose? Does he not know how to pronounce that word or is that just a typo like all the other typos on this page? This is the point. I don’t know what you’re going for and I have no confidence in it, so now I’m just chucking it up to a typo.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Since you talked a lot about form and I agree with every single thing you said, I’m going to talk a little bit about content here. I have no idea what a journal is in terms of a manager at a coffee house instructing what appears to be a new employee. Chuck says, “This is your cold beverage journal. And your pastry journal, and your tasting journal, and you’re African coffee journal or as I like to call it, your ‘urban’ journal.” And that’s his joke.

Okay, A, that’s not a very good joke. And not because of racism, it’s just not a very good joke. B, I have no idea what a journal is. So I don’t know what’s going on. Is it an instruction manual? Is that a menu? So journal is a weird word. If I haven’t worked in Starbucks, then I don’t know what that is and I don’t know if that’s a specific word for that.

And Henry isn’t saying anything here at all. He’s just sitting there, so I have no idea who he is, what he’s about, I suspect he’s our hero. This is not good. Chuck ends this conversation on the top of page 2 by saying, “Wait here, I’m going to grab Zoe,” gets up and walks into the back. Great example of not hiding the scenes. [laughs] Character just says, “I have to go away now, bye.”

**John:** Yeah. Let’s talk about character names. All the characters have very similar names and it was very easy to get them confused. And so when your homeless person is named —

**Craig:** Robert.

**John:** Robert. Well, that doesn’t feel like — I’m sorry, that doesn’t feel like the homeless guy to me. I couldn’t tell Robert from Jude from Henry by the bottom of page 2 and that’s really a problem. Particularly if Henry is supposed to be our lead character, he’s not particularly well described or set up. And we don’t see him, going back to our craft thing, we don’t see him listening. We are never given any instruction for sort of what he’s like as he’s listening or sort of how he’s reacting to this crazy stuff that’s he’s being told.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s little bits. He nods his head confused. But who wouldn’t nod their head confused at that?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s something particularly unique to him or his responses. Henry looks at all the journals. I still don’t know what those are. Then Robert is having an argument with Jude. Now, Robert’s had this argument many, many times with Jude.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** First of all, in the parenthesis, apathy on the verge of annoyance, you can just substitute the word annoyed, okay? Just bored, annoyed if you wanted to, right? Shorter. You don’t want to ever have two lines of parenthetical. Just indicates that you’re a failure of imagination basically. So Robert says, “Come on man, I just got to take a piss.” And Jude says, “Restroom’s for customers only.” How many times has he said this to this guy? A thousand? So wouldn’t it be, “You know the restrooms are for customers only.” [laughs]. You know right, there’s got to be some indication of a past life. Talk about acting — one of the things they drill into you in acting class is the moment before. So there’s a whole world before this. So that’s a moment where I don’t believe it.

**John:** So the parenthetical for what Craig is describing could just be in parenthesis, (thousandth time). I mean that gives the actors something to play.

**Craig:** Right, exactly. And that’s what those things are there for, right? It’s to get them something to play. Apathy on the verge of annoyance is rather wordy. This, by the way, is where parentheticals get a bad rap, you know. And people will say, “Never use — don’t tell what actors what to do, blah, blah, blah.” You know, that nonsense. You know, just don’t do it like this.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But yeah, for the thousandth time would be a terrific thing. Then we introduce Paul. And Paul delivers this monologue on page 3 that feels very written. And the way he gets into it is so written. I don’t know if Paul is empathetic toward Henry. I don’t know if Paul is a weirdo. I don’t know if Paul is attracted to Henry. I don’t know if Paul is trying to make Henry stay a little bit better. I know nothing. All I know is that he delivers exposition that feels like an announcement about what this movie is.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s look at Paul’s introduction because there’s potential here. So let’s look at what it says. “Henry turns around to face Paul (60s), a bearded gentleman wearing two sets of eye glasses, drinking from a ceramic mug and holding open a book, Factotum.” So there’s a lot of gerunds happening here kind of. But each of those is sort of individually a good idea. I could sort of see him like as a kind of like he is an NPR tote bag kind of person. And that may be fine. But I don’t know specifically what Craig is going to, like I don’t understand like what he’s trying to do for Henry in this moment.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I don’t understand like what’s the moment he’s playing. You give me sort of a physical description, but I don’t get a sense of who he is.

**Craig:** Yeah. Look, characters always want something. Always, even the littlest things. But they want something. I have no idea what Paul wants when he said — by the way, they’re not gerunds. I actually realized, the gerunds are the noun like the wearing of clothes, right, yeah.

**John:** Yeah, yeah.

**Craig:** But Paul has no motivation to deliver this, so that means the writer is forcing it in there and now I’m aware once again that we have a problem.

**John:** Yeah. Paul’s big block of dialogue — I’ll just read it for people who are not reading along with us. He says, “I’ve been coming to the Brew House for seven years. You see a lot of strange stuff, all walks of life: bums, businessmen, commuters, teens, hippies, hipsters, wanna-be writers, wanna-be intellectuals, druggies, psychos, stressed-out mothers, cat ladies, and creeps. And they all want the same thing.” “Coffee?” “The bathroom key.”

And so let’s get back to sort of the idea of the scene that I think there’s a good idea underneath all of this where it’s just like, okay, no, the most important thing in this entire place is the bathroom key. That’s actually a good comedic idea behind a scene. And so if the scene around it were sort of like, you know, talking about sort of like the training and all the stuff, or like how to do this and how to — the temperature you have to do for these kind of beans and stuff like that, but the most important thing in this entire place is the bathroom key. That’s a comedic premise which I don’t think this achieved.

**Craig:** No. I mean there’s a way of redoing this where we begin with Henry sitting with Chuck, his manager, and Chuck is like, “Okay, so I graded your test and it’s 100. So you scored a 100 which is really remarkable. You obviously studied the manual. So now I’m just going to ask you a question that isn’t on the test. What is the most important thing here in this coffee shop?”

**John:** And so the natural answers you could give is like respect.

**Craig:** Hard work, coffee, equality. [laughs] Cleanliness.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There’s a million things and for him to go, “No.” And then he just holds up this thing. “This is. This is the bathroom key. This is the one thing, this key, that separates this store from civility and success and absolute chaos.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And then you go, okay, there’s a point of view, right, instead of somebody just being this guy that just says, and now a monologue that is unmotivated by anything to a person I do not know for no reason. [laughs]

**John:** What we didn’t put on our list of good writing, but what this describes is you’re in and you’re out. Sort of like what is the first thing we’re going to see in the scene and what’s the last thing we’re going to see in the scene. And what we’re pitching is like how are you going to open this moment? And if you’re going to open this moment with the manager guy, that should get you to the comedic payoff here and that probably is the key.

**Craig:** I agree. And that’s why you can really see the gears turning and hear the metal on metal noise when Chuck says, “Wait here, I’m going to grab Zoe.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s just bad showmanship, you know, as a writer. The other thing is that Paul’s speech doesn’t really tell us anything that we haven’t heard before. We’ve all been to coffee shops. We know who goes in and out of there.

**John:** Also, if you’re going to make a list in a comedy, you have to throw in some wild things there. Like, you know, like Frisbee duelists, you know, something that’s just like really absurd or like, you know, something to break it. Because you’re setting a pattern — and in comedy you set a pattern and then you break it wildly and so break that pattern.

**Craig:** Yeah. So lot of trouble here. And this does feel like early work. This feels like the beginning of something. Maybe Joey’s first attempt at something. There are a lot mistakes here. And I think that you need to — this is one where I feel like you need to do a little bit more homework. You need to watch and think more about how the things that you like are and then ask yourself if you can rise to that standard.

**John:** I think it’s worth looking at your favorite comedies and pulling up those scripts and going through it scene by scene looking at sort of how they work and really figure out where the ins and the outs are, how — the economy of those scenes.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** All right, let’s go to our next one. This is HALCYON by Amanda Mar”n. We are in Gus’s sporting goods store in Dartmouth, New Hampshire. It’s day. There’s a revolving stair-climber caught in an endless cycle climbing to nowhere.

Paul Adam (50s) shuffles in. His preppy, upper class clothes are wrinkled and stained. Goes up to the counter where he talks to a sales woman and he’s thinking about buying a new gun for the hunting season. She says, “Well, hunting season doesn’t start till fall,” but there’s some stuff on sale so she’s showing him options for guns. Shows one that might be a good fit for him. He clearly doesn’t actually know a lot about hunting. He doesn’t know a lot about the geography of the place. He wants something that takes a 3.5, a 3.5 magnum. So she shows him that gun. She’s very clear about like we don’t have ammunition here, so you’re not going to be able to load the gun. She seems suspicious and weary, but is also still trying to sell him the gun.

He ultimately takes the gun, loads it with a single bullet that he has, and puts it to his forehead and he says, “I have not changed the world. I’ve destroyed it.” Steels himself, finger on the trigger, face tight and closed, as we end on the bottom of page 3.

**Craig:** Okay. Well, Amanda, this is I think a good idea for an opening scene. It does all the things that opening scenes should do. I just have major issues with the way you’ve executed it. So I’ll begin with the simplest thing and then I’ll go to content. You begin by saying over blackness. No. Over black, yeah. Unnecessary-ness. But already it’s shaking my confidence because it’s such a clunky word and it’s unnecessary.

But let’s talk about what’s going on here. Paul wants to commit suicide. Paul is walking into a store that sells guns. He has a bullet in his pocket. The store does not sell ammunition. They’re going to give him a gun to look at. He’s going to take his bullet out, load it or in this case, a shotgun, shall load into the weapon. He’s going to say these very creepy things. And then presumably he’s going to die. We didn’t get quite there at the end of page 3. That’s terrific. I really love the idea of somebody going gun shopping, having somebody be nervous and say, by the way, we don’t sell ammo here. And the guy would be like, “No, no. No problem.” And then taking out his own ammo. Very clever, very smart. Here’s my —

**John:** Yeah, it’s a surprise.

**Craig:** It’s a surprise. Here’s my problem. You make way too much of Paul being scary. So this woman knows he’s scary. We all know he’s scary. So all of the juiciness and creepiness at the end you have diminished greatly.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Whereas if this man walks in and is maybe a little bit off but almost a little too chirpy, then suddenly there’s that other thing like, hmm, does anybody in the audience or the people in my row get the same creepy feeling from this guy? Probably not. He’s overtly okay.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There is two pages solid of back and forth about guns. And it’s boring. It just goes on too long. The idea is he would like to buy a gun and he should be talking and she should say, “Okay, what kind of gun are you interested in?” “Well, I was thinking about this or this, but, you know, what about this? Do you have that?” “Yeah, we do. I should let you know that we don’t have ammunition.” “No problem.” Can you just show me how to — how do you open it? Does it like — do you have one with this?” “Yes.” So much. I mean the saleswoman does this enormous chunk of dialogue on page 2 where she’s trying to sell him the shotgun and it just was, it just kept going. So just too much.

Lastly, gun choice. He goes in there to kill himself. He has a shotgun shell and he needs a shotgun. Shotguns are not great ways to kill yourself. I mean they’re long. So it’s really hard to do and it’s very easy for somebody to stop you from doing it because you’ve like got to wrestle it into position and everything. [laughs] Why wouldn’t he just be in there with a 9mm bullet asking to see a Glock and then load it and put it in his mouth? That’s one where I was struggling with his choice.

**John:** I was struggling a little bit with the bullet and sort of the issue of sort of the size caliber of it all. I got confused about that, too. But I felt the idea that like, “Oh, this isn’t for the size bullet I have,” is actually really good. He actually knows nothing about guns at all so he just happened to find one bullet.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That was really interesting to me. So it wasn’t that he magically had the right — he had a bullet and this was his plan from the very start. Like somehow he came across a bullet and decided that this is what he was going to do.

**Craig:** Right. That would be cool.

**John:** So I liked this a lot more than you did. And I agree with you that I think most of page 2 should be greatly compressed because I can imagine filming all this. And if you filmed the scene as written, you would take out most of it because you sort of get it. Like you get like — what I love about the saleswoman is like she’s trying to do her job, she’s trying to sell the gun. At the same time, she’s like, but just so you know, we don’t sell the stuff. The natural red flags are going up for her and I was so happy to see that she was aware of the situation. But there’s just too much of it.

**Craig:** Too much.

**John:** Too much awareness. And so we were ahead of the story and if we’re ahead of your story, that’s not good.

**Craig:** Yeah, I struggled with the saleswoman. There’s red flags and there’s red flags. Somebody walks in, here’s how Amanda describes this character, Paul. His clothes are wrinkled and stained. His hair is matted with something dark and sticky. His eyes are blood shot. He is unblinking. He answers with no emotion each time she speaks. That to me is more than a red flag. And that I think was putting stress on it. It started to make me hate her for like not just going, you know what, I’m sorry, you should probably talk to my manager. Like there’s got to be some way to bail out of this discussion. [laughs] This guy is off, really off, as opposed to curiously off and then we are surprised.

**John:** Craig, as an exercise, on page 1, if we take — so once the dialogue starts, if we took out all of the scene description, I think you actually have a better flow. So, “Help you hun?” “Thinking of a new one for hunting season.” “Well season doesn’t start till fall, but you’re in luck we got a few on sale cause of that.” Like essentially like, if we stop stopping so often for the scene description, I think there’s a flow there that might just give it a little bit more energy there and make it feel like, you know, she’s just not so vigilant from the very start.

**Craig:** I agree. I agree. There’s a lot of — all that I think exacerbated my problem that things were overwritten here. And I’m such a believer that the first 10 pages are precious, precious real estate. There shouldn’t be one wasted letter on those 10 pages. So, you know, your job should be to be ruthless about weeding out the unnecessary.

There’s a couple of other things I’ll mention and then I’ll turn it back over. There are some typos here. Holds it’s weight, I-T apostrophe S, there should be no apostrophe there. Feel it’s cold steel, same there. Its-it’s thing, your-you’re, there’s just no excuse anymore. It makes me upset.

And in the moment, here’s what happens on page 3. He’s looking at the gun and then he says to her, “I’m sorry. I have no choice. Then he pulls his hand out of his pocket, a shell casing gripped in his palm.” Then he says, “I’ve done a terrible thing.” Then he shoves it into the shotgun, closing it with a pump. Then he says, “Without our suffering we are no longer human. We become monsters.”

Then the saleswoman lets out a scream. This is the latest scream in movie history, right? So he says, “I’m sorry. I have no choice.” He pulls out a shell casing. We all go, oh, and she needs to go, gun, gun, right, and just go. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And he can do all the rest of his lines to himself but that was crazy.

**John:** Yeah. Take out all those lines there and I think it’s actually a stronger moment. Going back to sort of typos and other things. On page 1 again. So we’re inside Gus’s sporting goods store. The sound of a revolving stair climber caught in an endless cycle. The sound happened beforehand so if you’re going to show it, then it’s not the sound. I think you probably want to show it because that’s a great image. So take the sound of out of there. Bloodshot is one word or hyphenated. You can make your choice. So this is the fifth sentence of the scene. “A long expired in summer banner exclaims — New Year New You! With a woman in a bikini.” I doesn’t actually make sense. I get what she’s going for but it was very hard to read. And it stopped me three times. So get rid of anything that is hard to read basically.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah. Also, beeline is a wonderful word for somebody that’s walking quickly or running quickly towards something he’s not. He’s shuffling, so you can’t beeline while you’re shuffling

**John:** Yeah. But I do like that he had single focus on something. That’s a great description for where he’s headed.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. So there’s other words you can do to accomplish the same thing so that you’re not confused. Is he running suddenly? We have the same thing where Amanda capitalizes “whispering,” the first word inside a parenthetical, which generally you don’t do. I mean it’s not the end of the world.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** If these were three terrific pages, I wouldn’t care.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, okay, well, John liked that one a bit better than I did. But I love the idea, Amanda. I thought it was really creative, really smart. So, you know, basically even though John and I seem like we’re slightly different on this, I think we’re king of saying the same thing. Just tighter. Tighter.

**John:** Tighter. Tighter.

**Craig:** Tighter, tighter. All right. Well, let’s go to our last one. This one is called Blue Forty-Four. And it’s written by Josh Corbin. All right. So here we go. So this one begins outside a field in morning. And it’s the kind of day that was shitty twenty minutes ago. Gray overcast split open by a blast of early-morning sun. We’re behind a dog. And the dog looks like he’s been beat up a bit and then he hears somebody whistling. He stands at attention and then in audio we hear a phone ringing. Somebody is yelling for Benny, or Benny is yelling over the phone to somebody named Daniel that he needs cavalry.

And then we are now in a chase. Benny Miller is in a car and he’s speeding down the road on the phone with Daniel trying to get help because some guys are chasing him. And each one of them is wearing a monster mask. There’s a wolfman and then there’s a skeleton and a zombie and they’re shooting at him. They’re not cops and Benny is shooting back at them. And then Benny gets a moment where he can actually kill one of the guys but he can’t actually take the shot and kill the guy.

And then Benny’s rear window explodes because it’s been shot by the wolfman character and Benny loses control of the car.

**John:** And we should say that he’s on the phone with Daniel throughout this so it’s a speaker phone we’re hearing this other voice who is not actually in the scene.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** I thought these pages were really strong. There were some problems but I dug the moment. I could see it. I believe that the writer could see it. I believe that it could be shot. I believe that it would probably be exciting. And it read like the kind of action sequence I like to read on the page when I’m going to see a movie.

**Craig:** I completely agree. I have no idea what’s going on with this dog.

**John:** I don’t really either. And honestly, my confidence was flagging from the very first sentence. “The kind of day that was shitty twenty minutes ago.” What does that mean? I have no idea what that means.

**Craig:** Well, I actually understood it because the next sentence — I agree, like when I first read that I’m like, “What?” And then he says, “Gray overcast split open by a blast of early-morning sun.” I’m like, oh yeah, I know what that is. That’s that thing where it was like the sky looks like it was just raining and now it’s not.

**John:** All right. So flip those two sentences and I understand it.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly, exactly. Very good advice. The thing about the dog, maybe I assume it will eventually make sense. And that’s fine. But it was well-written.

**John:** But it was confusing at times. And here’s where I got confused. “Until someone whistles from afar. He stops, alert as we angle on him.” So the dog suddenly was a he but I thought that he was referring to the someone whistling. And so I just got confused. And so either keep the dog the dog. I just felt like it was overwritten for what was actually happening here. And I just don’t even quite know what I was seeing there.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I think you could have just set up the dog staring, looking at something, and then got me to the chase faster. I bet you could have lost two-eighths of this page.

**Craig:** Yeah. But the meat of it is obviously this chase. And once I was into the chase, I was really happy. I believe that we should be allowed to write things to match the feeling we want the audience to feel. The feeling that Josh wants me to feel in this chase is panic. And so even his slug lines are panicky. A cutlass. Moving. Fast as fuck. Day. The car engine working its ass off because Benny is fucking panicking. And Josh is capitalizing. He’s bolding. He’s italicizing. Which, you know, in a scene where people are just moving through a space and talking is incredibly annoying. In a scene where it’s life and death and cars are screaming down a road and people are shooting, that’s right.

**John:** Yeah. This is as good as I’ve seen it. I mean, I’m not a big fan of like crazy bolding and underlining and all that stuff. But this is a really good version of it. He’s using the double dash to sort of keep connecting thoughts together and sort of single out what shots are. And it works really well for it. And it gives a good feeling. He’s also using a lot of onomatopoeia for shotgun in the hand — SHK-RK — wolfman aims at Benny. Some bwooms, the difference between a blam and a blam, blam. It works.

**Craig:** Yeah. No, it works and I really appreciated as a reader that I could identify these three people. It’s creative. Look, we’ve seen movies where guys are in kooky masks. That’s a cliché, right? Bad guys wearing masks. And that’s fine. I mean they actually do wear masks so the cliché is fine. What I appreciated was that there was a wolfman, there was a skeleton, and a zombie. And all of a sudden now I can see what’s happening.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** The fact that those were specified unlocks my visual mind. Otherwise, it’s guys and what am I looking at? Guys.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know?

**John:** Thug one, thug two, thug three.

**Craig:** Exactly. And boring, right? Now, I’m imagining when he says, because he makes a moment here, right? And this is what I also really appreciated about what Josh did. Inside of plot and we talked about layers before, there should be character, right? So here, this is this crazy, hyperactive chase with guys wearing monster masks and then everything slows down for a character choice because he structures this so that Benny is afforded a choice. And the choice is should I shoot this guy wearing a zombie mask in the head and he chooses not to.

So that’s really the payload for this. All of the other stuff is icing. That little moment is why the scene exists in the movie. I assume that is going to be something very meaningful going forward. So I thought that this was done really well.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So I have no idea what the rest of the story is. But I would be curious to keep reading the story. I have confidence that he seems to know what he’s doing. That’s a lot sometimes.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** These were also I think three really good examples because the problems they had were addressable and they were all very different. And they very well illustrated some of the things we’re talking about with like what is good writing and sort of what we’re looking for with good writing and what makes us not think something is as good as it can be which is the moments that stick out in the wrong ways.

**Craig:** Absolutely. By the way, I should add that I really like this title, Blue Forty-Four. I don’t know what it means, but it grabbed me.

**John:** Yeah. So as always we want to thank our three very brave listeners who sent in their pages to let us take a look at them. If you would like to send in your own pages for us to look at, the link is in the show notes. You can also find it at johnaugust.com/threepage. And Stuart will take a look through those and occasionally pick three of them to send for us to read through.

All right, it has come time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a very simple little web game. Not even game, it’s like sort of a demonstration. It’s called Creatures Avoiding Planks. And basically it’s these little AI, adorable, little googly eyed things that will try to avoid running into these planks that keep drifting past them. It’s a very good example of sort of like emergent behavior based on changing environment. So each of the little things is just doing its own thing and has very simple rules. But those simple rules sort of act to help keep it alive. And so because we are all malevolent gods, we will inevitably try to put too many little creatures in a space or like too many planks and then they’ll get crushed. But it’s a fun way to pass a few minutes of time.

**Craig:** Well, that sounds interesting. My One Cool Thing is a substance. There’s no particular product I can endorse here. But it’s a substance I didn’t know existed. I didn’t know why anybody would need it. And now I need it. And it’s very, very good. So John, as you know, I have a beard now.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** A lush, lush beard. And this means now I have to start thinking about hair because like you, not a lot up top. [laughs] So not really that much of a concern for me. But now, it is and beard hair gets really coarse and dry. So there’s this stuff called beard oil. And my whole life, I thought the whole point of hair care was to get oil out of your hair. So the idea of putting oil in your hair sounds gross. But beard hair literally becomes like fire kindling. It’s so dry and nasty. So you put this oil in and it actually is quite lovely. So if you have a beard and it’s getting a little dry, scraggly, scratchy, buy some beard oil. It’s cheap. There’s like a thousand brands. They all have some different stupid smell that’s designed for a man, you know. [laughs] So like what are man smells? This is a whole thing. Like what would you say are man smells?

**John:** Sandalwood?

**Craig:** Yeah, a lot of wood. A lot of wood.

**John:** Yeah. Wood, leather.

**Craig:** Yeah, wood, leather, tobacco.

**John:** But weirdly, Drakkar Noir has that sort of orange peel smell and you often find that in men’s things as well.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s fascinating. Like why do men like the smell of wood and leather? I mean I guess.

**John:** I’ll also put a link in the show notes to the #masculinitysofragile, which tends to be a bunch of photos of like side by side on the shelves they’ll have like toothbrushes for men and toothbrushes for women and they’re like the men’s packaging is always like, you know, corrugated, steel and stuff like that.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** I think there was actually a pack of Q-tips, like Q-tips for men and they’re actually the same, but it’s like a corrugated cardboard/sort of metal thing.

**Craig:** I mean, gendered packaging is so insulting to everyone, to everyone. I mean, you know, like I was standing in the pharmacy like, you know, behind the counter waiting for them to bring some prescription and they had a wall of stuff and I didn’t know — and because it was their, you know, prescription meds, it’s not marketed for consumers, but still there’s packages. And I looked at this wall and I was like this is the wall of either contraceptives or hormone replacement therapy for women or something because every box had some pastel swirl, a butterfly, some tulip opening up. I mean, it was incredible. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And that’s not even for sale to consumers. That’s just for the pharmacist. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And like what do Viagra bottles come in like with like a mushroom cloud on it or a jet fighter? [laugh]

**John:** They come in solid steel packaging, yeah.

**Craig:** It comes in a steel cube.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I mean, like what? Stupid.

**John:** It’s stupid.

**Craig:** It’s all stupid.

**John:** All right. Well, that’s our show for this week. So thank you for joining us for that. Our outro this week comes from Daniel Green who I just saw in New York. And he has a big beard, too, so he can use that beard oil that you recommended, Craig. If you have an outro you’d like us to consider for the show, you can write into ask@johnaugust.com and send us a link. If you have questions for us, that’s also the great address to send questions. Short things on Twitter are fantastic. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

Our show, as always, is produced by Stuart Friedel and is edited by Matthew Chilelli. You can find us on iTunes. Please subscribe if you’re there because that helps people know that we exist. And, also, leave us a comment because that tells people that you like the show. We have all the back episodes available in the Scriptnotes app which you can download on the applicable app store. Subscriptions to the app and to Scriptnotes.net where all the episodes are stored is $1.99 a month. A steal.

**Craig:** Come on.

**John:** We also have a few of the 200 episode USB drives left. And so I’m not sure we’re going to make anymore. So if you’re curious about one those, just go to store.johnaugust.com and get one of those. You can find the show notes for all the things we talked about on the webpage at johnaugust.com. Just look for this episode title. And that’s our show. Craig, thank you so much.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Marcus Geduld looks at [how you differentiate good acting from bad acting](http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2014/09/10/how_do_you_differentiate_good_acting_from_bad_acting.html?wpsrc=fol_tw)
* Michael Tabb on [The Concept of Premise](http://www.scriptmag.com/features/script-notes-where-story-begins-premise), and [John’s response](http://johnaugust.com/2016/the-premise-or-whats-the-point)
* Paul Rudnick’s [Libby Gelman-Waxner](http://paulrudnick.com/secret/libby-gelman-waxner/)
* Three Pages by [Joey Perotti](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/JoeyPerotti.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Amanda Marín](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/AmandaMarin.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Josh Corbin](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/JoshCorbin.pdf)
* [Submit your Three Pages here](http://johnaugust.com/threepage)
* [Creatures avoiding planks](http://otoro.net/planks/)
* AskMen on [beard oil](http://www.askmen.com/grooming/appearance/best-beard-oils-reviewed.html)
* [#masculinitysofragile](https://twitter.com/hashtag/masculinitysofragile) on Twitter
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Daniel Green ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))