The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: Oh. My name is Craig Mazin.
John: This is Episode 534 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.
Today on the show we’re looking at midpoints, that murky middle of the movie, where writers and audience both ask where are we, where are we going, and how soon will we get there.
First we have a ton of follow-up from listeners about previous topics, and new questions that will no doubt prompt more follow-up. Craig, we will never escape. Caught in a loop of provoking and responding.
Craig: Good. I think that that’s a good sign. You’re right, the more we talk, the more follow-up and, I wouldn’t call it push-back, but people have interesting things to say. People respond and react because they are … I don’t know if I’m going to go so far as to say they’re all in a parasocial relationship with us, John, but they are in a parasocial conversation with us.
John: That’s absolutely true. I like that you’re working that parasocial, keeping it up. I don’t know, at graduation, did anyone launch a beach ball at your high school graduation, and the beach ball bounced over the top of it?
Craig: Yeah.
John: I feel like that’s what you’re doing with the word parasocial. You’re just keeping it up in the air a little bit longer.
Craig: Keeping it in the air and trying to just stay connected to the Millennials, even though the Millennials are now, I must say, old. That’s how old we are in Generation X. We think the young people are who Generation Z thinks of as the old people. Hey Megana, did you know that, that you’re old now?
Megana Rao: I identify with Gen Z.
Craig: You can do that if you want. You can identify however you want, but factually …
Megana: I’m old, I get it.
Craig: Do you? Because I don’t think you do yet. You’re going to get it. It’s actually super freeing, Megana. You should really embrace this. It’s amazing.
Megana: I spend most of my day complaining about neck pain, so I get it. I’m there.
Craig: Yeah, but when you get a little bit older, that will be totally justified. You won’t feel weak about it. You’ll be like, “Yeah, like all of us, my neck hurts.”
John: My gift for Megana this … As we’ve established on the show, I’m not a good gift-giver, but I did give Megana a blanket thing to keep her warm. It feels like a gift you give not to a young person, but to an older person.
Craig: Young people don’t want wraps to stay warm. That’s absolutely true.
Megana: Yeah. My cold bones.
Craig: You’re going to be the best old lady. Fun.
Megana: I already am.
John: In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, I want to talk about NFTs, because I always want to talk about NFTs.
Craig: Oh my god.
John: In particular, these three really great articles that really shine spotlight on what is so dumb about NFTs.
Craig: So dumb.
John: We’ll get into a little bit of that. We’re going to put it in the Bonus Segment so when people come after me, they’re going to have to actually pay for the Bonus Segment to hear about it first. Actually, we’ll profit from-
Craig: You should sell it as an NFT. That whole segment should be an NFT. Just for fun.
John: Going to be great.
Craig: Just to get meta.
John: First, Craig, we have to establish the Chekhov’s gun on this podcast, because about 100 episodes ago we started talking about COVID. It was actually in a Bonus Segment talking about COVID. Chekhov’s gun finally went off this last week for us on the show.
Craig: Boom, right in my face. Yes. I had COVID, or really COVID had me. I test constantly, because I am in a production. I tested positive for COVID, and my symptoms were nothing. I have to just take a moment to salute the scientists and researchers and everyone, honestly everyone who worked to create the Moderna vaccine, which is the only one I’ve taken, but I’m sure that everybody at Pfizer deserves the same, and all the other places that have worked so hard to do this, because I’m not going to bother with the anti-vax people. Basically eff off. For the rest of us who are normal and smart and understand facts, this is miraculous. It’s just an incredible thing. This was a disease that was indiscriminately killing people. Now it mostly discriminately kills people. If you are vaccinated, and particularly boosted, especially with Omicron, which I suspect is what I had, as it is incredibly-
John: 99% of all COVID in North America is that.
Craig: It really was a nothing. It was a big nothing. I’ve had mosquito bites that were more vexatious than this bout of COVID, if I can call it a bout. I just followed the rules, isolated, which was for me not a big deal, because I like staying inside. I really do. That was fine.
John: Craig, let’s talk about how you run a show that’s in production while you’re doing that. Let’s be a little practical here, because you actually had tools at your disposal which a couple years ago you wouldn’t have had.
Craig: The primary tool that we use now for remote viewing is called QTAKE. QTAKE is tied into the video playback system. On a set, all the cameras are sending a signal to the video playback system, the video playback operator. Ours is named Amanda. She is wonderful. Manages the signal from all the cameras, and also has the functionality to broadcast that signal via WiFi or network to stream it to whatever the QTAKE, that is the brand that does this, the QTAKE server, which then sends it right back out to anyone who has the username and password and has been invited, and I can watch. I can watch on my monitor at home or on a laptop or even on a phone if I wanted to, although I don’t, all three cameras. I can select one camera to zero in on if I’m really interested in A camera or B camera. I can of course hear everything. In this way, I was able to do pretty much the job I would’ve done there.
The part that makes it harder is, when you’re present you can be there for the parts that don’t include the camera, blocking rehearsals and things like that. It’s more efficient. Right now Liza Johnson is directing this episode. She’s fantastic. Liza and I were able to just text each other. Jack Lesko is there as well, so maybe we’ll text with Jack and then I can call them on a phone if I want to go over a specific thing. We absolutely managed it, no real problem. It was nice. It was nice to be able to do that and not have to put pants on.
John: Perfect. I’m glad it worked out. That system you’re describing reminds me of conversations I had with Dana Fox about her season of her show, which is shooting up in Canada, which she could not be there, because it’s the lockdown. Phil and Matt also came on to talk to us about the systems they were using when they had to shoot the first season of their show without being present on their set. It’s not ideal, but it’s possible now, which I think is fantastic. You were able to be safe and keep your crew safe by staying home.
Craig: It’s a strange thing to be like the eye in the sky. Obviously you want to be there. No major issues. It was a terrific week, honestly, of shooting. It was some really cool stuff. I’m excited for folks who have not experienced the story The Last of Us to see what we shot this week. I know that the people who have seen it will appreciate it a lot, and people who haven’t seen I think will also really, really enjoy it. It was a good one.
John: This past week, Craig, I got to do something that I know you enjoy almost as much as playing D&D, which is to tell writers to fire their representatives, to fire their agents.
Craig: Of course, that’s the rule.
John: That’s the rule. I was talking with an upper mid-level writer, so a guy who’d staffed on TV shows, had a good career going, but had about a year break where he just could not get staffed on a show and was having a hard time getting stuff set up. As I was having this phone call with him, he was doing all the right things. He was writing new stuff. He was finding new ways to generate his own material. He was getting stuff in development, but just couldn’t get a thing to land.
I asked him, “I think it’s probably your agents. I think there’s a real problem here.” He was already going to probably fire his agents. When you do, and you’re going to go to the next place, talk to the people you’ve been dealing with and ask them what they think of your reps. He did, and everyone hated his reps. That was actually part of the problem. Now he is staffed on a new show that he loves. He’s a co-AP. I was just very excited for that advice to pay off and for him to have done the work to actually say, “My reps were not helping me. They were actually hurting me,” which I don’t think we talk about enough on the show.
Craig: I think we have said in the past that a bad agent is worse than no agent. They can do harm. When you have a bad agent, but you don’t know they’re bad, you are trusting that someone is taking care of something, and they’re not. There is a natural thing that can happen I think for some writers with their agents, where over time you can be taken for granted. You’re the person that they have, so they don’t have to worry about you. They’re worrying about signing the new person, or they’re worrying about getting the next thing for the person that makes more money than you do. When you have a new agent, it’s new, and romance is in the air, and everyone’s trying hard. The new agent has never gotten you a job before. They really want to get you a job. That’s embarrassing if they don’t.
I don’t think you should ever feel like it’s a massive, major career thing to fire your agent. It’s really not. It’s not. Getting a great agent is a massive career thing for you. Getting the right agent, that’s the big career change. Firing a mediocre or bad one is meh. As long as you have a new port to steer into, you should be fine.
John: Agreed. Also this last week, there was a tweet by Bo-Yeon Kim. She’s reading Bong Joon-Ho’s Mother script and marveling how different Korean formatting is from the US. We’ve talked a lot about script formatting on the show and had a special episode about it. It’s fascinating looking at this. Craig, as you open up this tweet, you’re seeing two pages, probably essentially the first two pages of the script. What do you see when you look at these pages?
Craig: It’s in Korean, so even if we spoke Korean, but didn’t read Korean text, we would still not know what’s going on. It looks really similar. It’s not wildly different. When they number their scenes, they put the number there, and it’s a very short scene header. Incredibly short. Then there’s a bunch of action, which doesn’t look too far off from ours. The character and dialog blocks are combined. Instead of a character, and then underneath, dialog, they do, in the dialog, what we would call the dialog block, character colon, I’m assuming, dialog, including a parenthetical. Occasionally there are two exclamation points, which may have a meaning in Korean that is different than one. I do not know.
John: We shared this with Bo Shim, who works with you, who verified, yes, this is just a thing you would see in a Korean script. I think it looks beautiful. It looks like our Western format, just in Korean. A lot of white space. A lot of white space on the right-hand edge. They look beautiful. It’s fun to see stuff that you can’t read, so you’re just appreciating it as the form of it. I was surprised it was actually as recognizable as a script.
Craig: I’m not super surprised, because the modern film business was invented here in the United States. The modern screenplay format was invented here in the United States. It does stand to reason that other nations, as they begin their own industries, will probably look to the very successful original one as at least inspiration, if nothing else. This script format, for all of our gripes, has functioned extraordinarily well for over a century, so makes sense.
John: Makes sense. That’s a perfect segue into an email we got from Richard. Megana, do you want to share this Richard email about Casablanca and early screenplays?
Megana: Richard wrote in, “Like you two, I enjoy giving back and sharing as I try to be the teacher I never had. Honest, Craig, all film schools aren’t the same, as I’ve actually taught in the John August Room in the Writing Department at USC. Plus, I would never advise my students not to use we see in their action lines.
I’m writing in regards to Episode 531 that dropped January 4th. In it you discuss the history of screenwriting and screenplay format and mention that Casablanca was one of the first scripts to use a format that’s close to what scripts look like today. Actually, that format had been in use in Hollywood for much longer, at least a decade. As a movie lover and film nerd, I’ve read quite a bit about writers of the Golden Age, and have read their screenplays. Those screenwriters, such as Samson Raphaelson and Oscar winners Robert Riskin, Ben Hecht, and Frances Marion, all wrote in a style we’d recognize today. I recommend checking out classic screenplays at the WGA Library. There’s also a terrific book, Six Screenplays by Robert Riskin, for an example of how the Capra Touch started on the page.”
John: I love when someone writes in to say, “Actually,” but then actually provides the details. Yes, there were scripts like this before Casablanca. I just didn’t know about them.
Craig: I didn’t even know what Casablanca looked like. I didn’t even know what that script looked like. Thank you, Richard. Yes, all film schools aren’t the same. Certainly NYU and USC are the ones that people aspire to the most. In theory, if there’s going to be good film school experiences, it will likely happen at one of those two places, or certainly at least in the John August Room. I can’t imagine anything untoward happens in the John August Room, the worst room at the strip club.
John: Don’t get champagne in the John August Room.
Craig: No one ever goes into the John August Room in the strip club. That’s always a good idea to check out classic screenplays if you’re interested in how things have evolved over time. Robert Riskin’s certainly one of our greats. I note that Richard put Capra Touch in quotes, no doubt because he is implying, as I will state overtly, that directors have been credited with things that screenwriters have been doing for decades. The Capra Touch is the thing where Frank Capra shot the script that Robert Riskin wrote. That’s the Capra Touch.
John: What we talk about with a modern screenplay is that sense of there are scene headers and you move into scene description that’s actually very full, very full compared to what you find in a play, that the dialog is important, but it’s not the only thing you’re seeing in this. When people read plays and they read screenplays, they’re like, “Oh, there actually is a big difference here.” That difference is how full the scene description is, how important it is that we are moving from location to location, just because film is a different medium than a play. You’re not just in one space and you’re not going to have these 20-minute scenes in general in film. You’re going to be moving from place to place. You have to have a vocabulary for what that looks like on the page.
Craig: Indeed.
John: All right, let’s get back to more follow-up here. Matt wrote in about QR codes. He says, “While listening to John and Craig’s discussion of updating the screenplay format, I was reminded of this tweet I saw earlier in the week about a writer who included a QR code in their script. How do you guys feel about the inclusion of a QR code that links you out to additional material?” I guess like songs or images. “I only fear that the reader would go into their phone, would disrupt the flow of the read, and potentially end it with distractions from the phone entirely.” Craig, a QR code in your script?
Craig: That is an odd-looking thing. My concern wouldn’t be that the QR code would disrupt their flow of the read. If it led to something really cool, then I think it’s fine. It only takes a second or two to grab your camera, see it, click on the link, and look. My problem about the inclusion of a QR code is that the QR code itself aesthetically is such a downer and it’s ugly. It’s just this big ugly blob on the page. I would so much rather that there was something where people could read and just simply tap on something and understood that it would take them to a little image, then they could tap it away. It’s ugly, ugly thing.
John: Here’s where we need to introduce Megana’s innovation, because she’s working on a musical and she’s including the songs in the script. Megana, talk to us about how you’re doing that.
Megana: I just included them as a link, which is something that’s very easy to do in Highland. I reference these songs that are on YouTube, because the song’s told in the same style, and so it’s like, click here if you want to listen. Then it just takes you to Safari and opens the link in YouTube.
John: I think what’s smart about this is it’s recognizing that most people are not going to be reading this screenplay printed out, the way that screenplays used to be. They’re going to read it as a pdf, and pdfs can include links. Just make that clickable and it’s a good stopgap. It doesn’t give you all the way what Craig wants, where it’s actually embedded within the document itself, but it’s pretty good.
Craig: That sounds like a perfectly good solution. I think that that’s a really smart way to go.
John: Craig, you use Fade In. Does Fade In allow you to put active links in your documents?
Craig: It does. Fade In, actually at my urging, there’s quite a few things that you can do in Fade In that are really cool. You can embed alts, which is a really interesting thing. You can create links. Because I’m working on something that’s proprietary, I don’t do that, but yes, Fade In does have the ability to do that.
John: Here would be my argument for maybe a QR code is, we always talk about the title page and then you can stick a dedication page or a first page before the actual screenplay starts. That might be a page where you could say, if you would like to see images related to this, or this thing, click here or scan this. I could understand why you might want to do that, because that way if someone is looking at the script in a way that didn’t have the clickable link, that QR code would be a way for them to get to it. I wouldn’t put a QR code in the middle of a script page.
Craig: It’d be a bummer.
John: That’d be bad. Hattie wrote in to say that, “I find Celtx is great for editing between multiple people. I use Celtx Educator, as I’m studying for a master’s in screenwriting. You can share your script with anyone who has Celtx and an email address, and those people can edit the doc.” We’re talking there about shared screenwriting experiences. I still have an old Celtx T-shirt from a zillion years ago, because I never throw out T-shirts. I never really dug Celtx. It was just web-based, and I found it kind of janky. The advantage of a web-based ting is it’s very easy to do that multiple user thing. If it’s working for you, great. Craig and I know nobody who actually uses Celtx in a professional way.
Craig: I have not heard the word Celtx in, I don’t know, a decade. WriterDuet I think does a very good job of this. There is a free version of WriterDuet, so definitely take a look at that. Celtx, it’s like Movie Magic Screenwriter.
John: This last week I had a run-in with Movie Magic Screenwriter.
Craig: A run-in?
John: I did have a run-in. I had a dark encounter with it. This last week when I posted the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory script, that was an old FDR, Final Draft, old format, that is able to reformat and put it on a proper pdf, so it’s up there in the John August Library. I had these other scripts that I was like, crap, these are so old. They’re Movie Magic Screenwriter things, because you used to ping-pong them back and forth between Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter. There’s not an app to open these. I didn’t have Screenwriter. It wasn’t even clear that the build of Screenwriter, which works on a Monterey system, because you can open these old files. I was involving nerd friends to help me crack these things open.
What was so embarrassing is that there’s a Barbarella script that I was trying to open up, was that I spent maybe three hours wrestling with this file, only to realize that it actually was a Final Draft file, that if I just actually added dot FDR, it would just open, because you remember back before OS X that files did not have extensions on them, so you had no idea what that file was. I just assumed it was a Movie Magic file, and actually it was a Final Draft file.
Craig: I remember when OS X came out that there was this hullabaloo about the fact that these file extensions meant that Mac was turning into Windows, and no, it was turning into Unix is what it was turning into. There were always file extensions. They just didn’t show them to you.
John: All that meta data was buried into the file system.
Craig: You have the option now of automatically seeing file extensions or not, depending on the kinds of files. I tend to want to see the file extensions myself.
John: I do too. Here’s an example. It’s that if I have Barbarella first draft dot fdr versus dot pdf. It’s good to see, oh, the one that ends in dot pdf is the pdf. That’s just good to see, if I see it in a list view. I could see the icon would be different, but that’s not the point. You just want to see in the list which one is the pdf.
Megana: When you click in to look at your files, it would give you that information, even if it wasn’t …
Craig: You can always Command I, but I don’t want to Command I.
John: I don’t want to Command I.
Craig: Command I means something’s gone really wrong, as far as I’m concerned.
John: Megana, I hope you have some stamina in you, because this is a long email, but I think it’s actually pretty good. This is the one from Jules.
Megana: Jules says, “I enjoyed listening to your discussion in Episode 532: Mistakes of Yes, about the importance of suffering and seeking meaningful work, rather than signifiers or supposed hallmarks of success in the path towards happiness. Your conversation made me think about a statement written by Albert Camus, ‘One must imagine Sisyphus happy.’ When we think about mythology, Sisyphus epitomizes infinite, unrelenting torture, pushing a boulder up a hill, only to have to repeat it again once he gets to the top. Camus in this essay, The Myth of Sisyphus, posits that life is inherently absurd and filled with bizarre routines and habits. We could be distressed or discouraged by how little anything really means or not want to live as a result, but Camus says we must revolt and not let that get us down. Sisyphus is constantly completing a task that challenges him greatly, and he achieves it, all while knowing that it will not get him anywhere, but he can find meaning and purpose and joy in the struggle. He could be happy.
“Sure, life can suck sometimes, even if you aren’t Sisyphus, but we can choose what we focus on as motivation. For any of us with ambitions, that applies that any striving to achieve comes at the expense of our happiness. I think the solution is to learn to love the struggle, no matter how successful you supposedly are, or even if by all accounts you’ve achieved nothing. No one can stop you from struggling and striving. If you truly embrace and enjoy the struggle and process of creating a script, a story, a book, a podcast, etc, I think that may be the best path towards happiness for those of us cursed with ambitious goals. If you can love writing when it’s the worst, then writing can make you happy.”
Craig: Yes. Amen, Jules.
John: Yeah. It struck me because this was also the week that, I’m going to butcher his name, so I apologize in advance, Thich Nhat Hanh, who was a Buddhist monk who died this past week, but who often wrote about the struggle and being present in it, and not putting off to later to be happy, but being present in it. That’s what I think Jules is writing here, is that it’s about understanding that the work you’re doing is not about the end goal, but about the actual work itself.
Craig: Yes, and that the struggle, and pointless struggle, is not a problem, because it’s all you’re going to get. I’ve always identified with the existentialists, but probably more Camus than Sartre. Sartre was such a downer, because Nausea. Camus, The Plague had a huge impact on me when I read it as a young man. Boy, if you want to read a book that drives home what we’re dealing with now, read The Plague again. What is the point? Especially if you’re a doctor and you’re working so hard, and there is an inefficient or stupid government and there are people who are moronic, and there is a disease that is destroying innocent and evil alike, and all you can do is stem the tide slightly until you just inevitably fail and also everyone dies anyway. Now what?
The answer is that’s where the human experience is. That’s the point. The point is the experience. The more we can disconnect ourselves from some notion that there is an answer to all of this, that there’s a right way, and that you’ve done it and you’ve achieved something, and therefore you have arrived at the end goal of all this, then the better off we’ll be, because none of that’s real, none of that’s true.
I think our culture, particularly American culture, is so goal-oriented. Everyone’s walking around feeling rather bad about it all, because what is the goal? Is the goal to be Jeff Bezos? You couldn’t pay me to be Jeff Bezos. You couldn’t pay me what Jeff Bezos owns to be Jeff Bezos. I don’t need, what, I’d say about $14 billion, probably 80 billion. I don’t know what it is.
John: It’s a lot of money.
Craig: I don’t need any of that. Honestly, the guy, I look at him and I just think, I don’t understand you at all. At all. I don’t know what you’re doing. I know what his ex-wife is doing. She’s doing good. I don’t know what he’s doing and I don’t know why and I don’t care. People show us who we’re supposed to be, and I don’t want to be that person. I’m stuck in my meat suit. I’ll just try and do this as best I can. I think that was a great thing to write in about, Jules.
John: The thing I want to distinguish between though is there’s suffering and things being difficult and needless suffering, or suffering that’s pointless. I do find people who are torturing themselves for no good reason. If it’s torture for you to write and you cannot enjoy writing and you don’t enjoy the end results of writing, I think it’s okay to stop writing. I think one of the things we try to be honest about in this podcast is there’s people who it’s just not going to be their thing. I see people who struggle to do it for no good reason. There’s no joy that they find in it. If you don’t find any joy, maybe look for something else that you can find joy in the actual process of doing, because that’s going to be more rewarding for you in the long term.
I just worry sometimes that people misunderstand. It’s like, enjoy the suffering, and they’re like, “Oh, then I have to suffer. There’s some reason why I need to beat myself up.” That’s not what this is saying.
Craig: I think we got into the notion of satisfaction, as opposed to happiness. I brought up Professor Scott Galloway and this thing about not following your passion, but rather finding your passion inside of the thing you’re really good at, that’s what makes you passionate about it. If you feel a sense of obligation, you’ve made a promise to someone that you’re going to be a great writer, or you’re supposed to be a great writer, and you’re not enjoy it at all, then no, you are not doing what you want in any way, shape, or form. That’s not even real struggle. That’s just a general sense of pointless obligation. If there is no sense of satisfaction in what you’re doing, then yes, absolutely, move on to another thing. You will not find something truly existentially purposeful to do, because there is no such thing. You will find something, I think, that is satisfying to do. Look for that.
John: Agreed. On the last episode we asked our listeners to write in their suggestions for read-aloud software, so software that could read a screenplay aloud and do a good job with the screenplay format, opposed to other things. We have a couple suggestions. People mentioned an iOS app called Tableread, which I’ve played with and I didn’t love, but it may be useful to some people. VoiceDream was an often suggested app. It does a pretty good job. It doesn’t know what a screenplay is necessarily, but it does a pretty good job of reading things aloud. Obviously most of the Mac and PC software programs can do some version of reading stuff allowed. On Windows and on Mac, you can find ways for your screenwriting software to read what’s on the screen aloud to you.
The most classic things that are designed specifically for people who are blind or have vision issues are JAWS and ZoomText. JAWS is having challenges with the current version of Final Draft, which is why Ryan Knighton and other folks are looking for better solutions for screenwriting software for blind users. These are all things that are out there that are helpful for people.
I think it’s always worth remembering that when you create things that are accessible for people who have specific issues, generally it ends up helping everybody, because just the same way that closed captioning was specifically designed for people who couldn’t hear, and it being tremendously useful for everybody around, especially when you just have a TV that didn’t have the sound turned on. I think as we look for solutions that are good for specific audiences, they tend to generalize out. Let’s just keep looking for ways to read scripts aloud and also make the work we do more accessible for everyone.
Craig: I did hear from Guy Goldstein, who is the founder and CEO of WriterDuet, which I mentioned just a few minutes ago. They have a new app called ReadThrough. It’s free, or there’s a free version. I watched their little demo videos. Rather impressive sounding. Another thing to throw on there. It is free. At the very least, if you are interested in text-to-voice, check out ReadThrough for free and maybe write in and let us know what you think.
John: Great. Megana, do you want to take Nicholas’s follow-up here?
Megana: Nicholas wrote in and said, “I really enjoyed the script breakdown this week of the select scenes from awards contenders. I had a question as I was going through them myself. Do you think the script is manipulated after the film is completed in order to ‘match’ the final product more perfectly? The reason I ask is because back when Borat’s subsequent movie film came out, the script was released as best adapted screenplay, and the dialog matched up perfectly, despite it being an improvised film that was made without a script and with real people. What’s up with that?”
Craig: What’s up with that?
John: What’s up with that?
Craig: What’s up with that? I wonder, do you think that just happens magically, or maybe there are-
John: It’s a magic thing.
Craig: Maybe there are people that work really, really hard to do that.
John: We could tell you that we actually know people whose job it is to match the final official script with the film as it is released. Generally when you’re getting those FYC scripts, someone has gone through that process and made all the dialog match up and stuff, taken out the scenes that got cut and that kind of stuff. I think Borat would be the most extreme example of that, where they basically had to write a screenplay that could encapsulate all these things. There was a script for Borat before it was filmed, but there was so much improvised stuff in the middle of it that they were writing that stuff after it had been actually filmed.
I do think that the For Your Consideration scripts are useful to read, because you’re seeeing what the author intent was, but you should always be mindful that you’re seeing the highlight reel, you’re seeing the perfected version of it. You’re not seeing the stuff that’s changed along the way. That’s why it’s also great if you can get early scripts of things and then compare them to the final shooting script to really see what drifted and what changed. I know reading Cameron’s original script for Aliens and then seeing the final film, you really can see, oh, this is how it shifted and expanded and changed to get to where we got to. When we did Big Fish, the Big Fish For Your Consideration script was actually the script that we went out with, we started production with. Not a lot had changed, but there were scenes that were different and things like that. I liked that. I think it’s always great to see small changes between what was on the page versus what was filmed.
Craig: Same with when we had to send in the scripts for Chernobyl. It was the same way, just sent the scripts. They were pretty close. They were very close. They were extraordinarily close. In fact, there was a couple of moments here or there where I was like, “Oh, that’s really, really cool,” and I don’t think I put them into the script. When the soldiers are walking along and we hear that eerie Russian tune, Black Raven, that was an improvised moment by that actor, who was Russian and had remembered that song. He just sang it and Johann recorded it, and then he put it over that little moment of those guys walking. I don’t think that’s in the script, because it wasn’t in the script. I agree with you. That’s interesting to see what’s new and created and what’s not.
John: Yes, those scripts tend to be a little bit optimized, but even looking back at the Sorkin script, that had weird page breaks. I think that really was the script they shot, because there’s no reason why they’d leave the A and B pages. They would’ve just taken that stuff out. If you see stuff that looks like leftover things from production, if you see stars in the margins, that’s more likely to be the script that was in production.
Craig: A and B pages, weird page breaks, and omitteds are a sign that you’re looking at an authentic, unadulterated production script.
John: Last week we talked about we see and we hear. Phil wrote in to say that, “John and Craig were right. The we see rule is number 15 on this list from Screenwriters University.” Let’s look through here, Craig, because that was 15, so that’s got to be a few other rules that really are-
Craig: Let’s see if they got anything right. First of all, sorry, I got to know, what is Script University? What is this?
John: We should look and see what they are. They have testimonials. We Have Questions. Click on We Have Questions.
Craig: Yeah, we have questions.
John: First question is, what is your refund policy?
Craig: Oh boy.
John: Oh boy.
Craig: What is this? It’s an online screenwriting university featuring affordable instruction from well-known film industry professionals. Basically you pay for it. It is what it is. Let’s take a look at those rules.
John: This is just all-
Craig: It’s all bad.
John: It’s all umbrage bait.
Craig: Great.
John: Here’s the thing. It’s not worth going through.
Craig: Aw. Come on.
John: Slug line versus scene header. Craig, what do you call the thing that starts with INT or EXT? What do you call that?
Craig: I call it both, slug line and scene header.
John: It’s a murky, middle ground thing. A slug line can also be the thing that doesn’t have that, that is breaking up inside stuff within a scene that’s like, “Over at the corner,” and that kind of thing. Slug line, scene header, sure, they’re both the same thing. This has a lot of rules about what you can put in a scene header and what you can’t put in a scene header. I think you figure that out in context, don’t need all these rules.
Craig: Slug lines have no times of day. Did you know that? Because I put that in all the time. I put in afternoon, morning, mid-afternoon, evening. I put in all of it. It says, “Writers do it all the time.” You say, “Yes, we do. Before a script gets shot, someone has to change it to day/night.” No. I do that, and they don’t change it to day/night. Idiots. Script University, idiots. “Don’t put years, detailed locations in the slug line.” I do that all the time. Idiots. What is wrong with these people? Why would they dare do this?
John: “Dialog never follows a slug line, not ever. Action always separates the two.”
Craig: It’s rare, but I’ve done it.
John: It’s rare, but it’s done. Here’s why you do it, because if you’re ping-ponging back and forth between places, then there’s a reason why we’re shooting in a new place, then you could do it. It’s not a not ever. It’s rare.
Craig: “Don’t use cut to.” Normally I don’t, but sometimes I do.
John: Sometimes it’s really helpful.
Craig: Because I want to. “Don’t use we see or have strange reveals.” Screw you. Screw you, Script University? Script University, oh Lord. Ridiculous. Ridiculous. What is this nonsense?
John: Someone actually just put this page up to annoy us. That’s really what it is.
Craig: “On sound effects.” Whatever. I hate this. I couldn’t hate this more. Script University, shut it down. Shut it down. You’re bad. You’re bad and you should be ashamed of this. It’s stupid.
John: Craig is requesting his refund.
Craig: I hate it. What is wrong with these fricking people? What is wrong with them?
John: Hey Megana, help us out of this tailspin here. What did John write in here?
Craig: Yeah, help us out.
Megana: John says, “After I wrote my first script in 1999, I went starry-eyed and fresh-faced to the internet for help, and boy oh boy, there were a lot of those ‘never write we see because whoever’s reading it will literally throw your script across the room and furthermore it means you’re a terrible writer’ kind of people. There’s an attitude so many aspiring writers have of, you’re not allowed to write like a professional until you are a professional, but in my experience when you’re dealing with professionals, they don’t care at all about any of those things. I’ve never had a TV writer, showrunner, producer, or rep who have mentioned any of those things ever, and I do them all the time, and I’m still aspiring. Write for the job you want, not the job you have.”
John: Exactly.
Craig: We don’t care, and we never cared. I never cared. I never cared about whether or not I should say we see, ever in my life. I had never heard of anyone caring about it until the internet came along to explain to me that I was doing it wrong. Where? How? Why?
Megana: I just don’t understand who all these people are who are throwing scripts across the room.
Craig: Script throwers.
Megana: They just have to pick that back up.
Craig: Do you know how fast you’d get fired if you throw a script across the room and then one year later they’re like, “That script just won an Oscar.” You’d be like, “Oh, but it said we see.” “Okay, let me eject you from our life.” That’s crazy. One last thing.
John: Please.
Craig: One last thing that I think people need to hear. You need to hear this, people, because there’s a lot of Script Universities out there, but there are even more people on the internet doling out advice, for whatever reason. I guess it makes them feel good. People love to deal out advice as if they have achieved something worthy of advice dealing. I see this on Twitter constantly. People that I literally have never heard of, and no one’s ever heard of, and have accomplished almost nothing, almost nothing of note in our business, are cross-legged, floating in air, like an elevated yogi, delivering the wisdom of the ages to us. They don’t know anything. Who are they? Don’t listen to any of them. You don’t even have to listen to us. If you’re going to listen to somebody, you should pretty much start with us. We at least know what we’re doing. We’ve done this before.
John: We do know what we’re doing.
Craig: Come on.
John: Craig, I think we’ve reached the midpoint, but also you said that perfectly, because exactly what you described there was in a midpoint tweet that actually prompted this whole conversation. We’ll link to this actual tweet. It’s not actually that important. Adeep tweeted, “For newer writers, these can happen at the hashtag #midpoint. A false victory/defeat, a story reversal, new tactics, full commitment to the journey, the stakes are raised, discovery of new key info, a major ordeal, main character switches from reaction to action, the story’s most significant emotional moment.”
If they’re talking about the midpoint, I’m sure we’ve talked about the midpoint on the podcast before, but I don’t think the midpoint is as much of a thing as this tweet might make us believe that it’s a thing, because I understand the end of a first act, I understand the change that goes at the end of the first act. I understand the worst of a worst for a third act. The midpoint is not really a thing to me. In most of the scripts that I’ve written, I couldn’t point and say, “That’s the midpoint.” It’s not a thing that I’m writing towards or even necessarily mindful of as I’m putting together a script. Are you?
Craig: No. I don’t agree with any of this. How about that? Or rather, I agree with all of it. This is like, “For newer chefs, the following can happen while you’re cooking: food can get hot, food can get cold, things can boil, stuff can congeal, dough happens.” All of these things can happen. Yes. Congrats. What does any of it mean? This is what I talk about when I did the how do you write a movie. So much of this stuff is from the point of view of, it already happened, let me look back at it, not it has to happen, how do I write it.
John: Yeah, because there’s so many movies I can think of I would have a hard time pointing to the midpoint. Here’s a movie that has a midpoint. Gone Girl. I know what the midpoint is, because we have a dramatic shift of POV in the story. That’s the midpoint of the movie. I got that.
Craig: There’s a wonderful midpoint in Monty Python’s Holy Grail, where they have an intermission. It’s wonderful. I talk a little bit about the midpoint in that episode, whatever it was. It doesn’t have to happen in the middle. It’s rather I think what people often point at. It’s just that at times the character begins to question how they’ve been living and start wondering maybe if they ought to change. That is a very subtle thing. It can be a line. It can be a word. It can be a look. It can be a moment. Or it doesn’t have to happen at all. That’s the thing. It doesn’t have to happen at all.
John: I would say main character’s journey, somewhere around a midpoint would be there’s no going back, or we’ve crossed so far that there’s no way to get back to the earlier point, which is a little bit different than having your village burn down at the end of the first act. We’ve gotten to a place, only way out is forward. Sure, but that’s not going to be for all characters and all stories.
Craig: No. Some of the things, like main character switches from reaction to action, if your main character’s been reactive for the first half of your movie, oy vey. “Story’s most significant emotional moment.” If the story’s most significant emotional moment happens in the middle of the movie, can we walk out after that point, because what are we waiting for? Story reversal, new tactics, all of that should’ve been happening anyway already.
John: This week I dusted off an old stage musical that I’d been working on 10 years ago and then took out and updated. I’m really, really happy with it. It has two acts, because it’s a stage musical. I absolutely love the midpoint. I really love the act breaks in stage musicals, because they have a very specific form in terms of closing up some things and asking really big questions that you’re going to be discussing during the intermission, and you’ve obviously been drinking your drink, and you come back in the second act with new energy. There really is truly a midpoint that’s so important in a stage musical. That just is not a thing that happens in most movies, in most normal screenplays.
Craig: Maybe, if I may, let’s just stop talking about the midpoint. Let’s stop talking about the midpoint the way we should honestly stop talking about first acts, second acts, third acts. Really? Everything’s integrated. Generally speaking, also, just stop making lists on Twitter. Stop. Stop making lists on Twitter.
John: I get it. I probably won’t give up first act and second act breaks, just because they are useful in terms of thinking how it starts and how it ends, because every movie has a beginning, every movie has an ending, so you’re talking about how does all the beginning work, how does all the ending work. You’re going to have those things, but what the middle of it is going to be, eh.
Craig: It’s really interesting how liberating working in the hour-long drama format is when it comes to that stuff. Now the substantive difference between one hour of drama and 90 minutes of drama is, drum roll please, 30 minutes, but for some reason those extra 30 minutes require us to have this intense structural conversation about what happens in the middle and what happens at the end of the first act and what happens at the pinch point leading to the first act and what happens halfway through the third act. When you’re writing for 60 pages instead of 90 pages, none of that is discussed, ever. Ever. There is no first, second, third act discussed in an hour-long drama. At least I don’t discuss it. Maybe other people do. Maybe commercial break folks do, but I don’t.
John: They do. I would say in one-hour procedurals, they really will talk about this kind of stuff, but that’s not what you’re doing.
Craig: At this point I think it’s become the standard in our business, a streaming style or cable style, one-hour-long, uninterrupted drama. No one ever talks about any of that, ever. They just talk about the totality of the story you tell. I think that’s a nice thing. I think that all of this crap that gets pumped out there into the world is pumped out there generally by people who are trying to charge you money for something. They’re after something. I really do. In the end you scratch slightly, and underneath is a chart showing you how much money it costs per these services offered. It bums me out, because it’s unnecessary.
John: We’ve been addressing some follow-up and addressing previous things from our listeners. Let’s bring in some new stuff so we can keep the cycle going.
Craig: Yeah, new stuff.
John: Let’s start with a question about omitted scenes. Megana.
Megana: JP asks, “At which point in a script’s life do scenes start getting marked as omitted? Is it only after it’s entered production when scenes have been numbered? Is it when conforming the script to the final product? Otherwise, why leave a bread crumb trail saying, hey, there used to be a scene here, but now there isn’t, instead of just cutting all evidence of the bastard scene and letting the story flow?”
John: What a great question. I love a question that actually has an answer.
Craig: Yeah, this one is answerable.
John: Here’s the answer, is that once you have a production script that has numbers in it, if you need that omitted there, just make it clear to everybody else that there was a scene here, that scene no longer exists, let’s not talk about that scene, because that scene is not there and we’re not going to shoot it. It’s gone. It’s erased. We still have some evidence in the script that we really did cut this out, we’re not forgetting to shoot it.
Craig: JP, you’re absolutely right. It only enters into play once production’s begun and once scenes have been numbered and a white script has been issued. The white draft is the first draft. The pages are locked. The scene numbers are locked. At that point forward, if you do delete a scene, yes, you have to say omitted. Maybe the biggest reason is because if you don’t, then at some point, a thousand people are going to email you saying, “Wait, what happened to scene 83? Because it goes from 82 to 84.” You have to say, “It was there.” Because people show up after that happens. It’s not like everybody that works on the movie or the show was there when that white draft was issued. It’s a smart thing to do.
One nice thing also, I assume they have this in Final Draft, they certainly do in Fade In, and I bet you have it in Highland, if you omit a scene, there is a special thing to say Omit Scene, which turns it into an omitted but keeps everything. If you have to un-omit it, or if you just want to peek and see what was in there, it’s easy to do.
John: We have a whole format for doing that, which is basically commenting it out, which is helpful. Now a thing also about omitting scenes, and also sometimes the meat of what happened in that scene is still there. The story point is there, but the scene has changed so much. There’s a different location. There’s different characters in it. There could be a discussion about, are we just going to change the scene or are we going to omit that scene and put a new A scene in there to replace it? That’s a discussion writers and directors and first ADs might have. Craig, where do you come down on that? If the scene changes so radically that it’s really a different scene, will you keep the scene number for it, or will you omit it, put a new scene in there?
Craig: I just talk about it with the first AD, script supervisor. Because scene numbers are really there for everyone else, I just will do whatever they ask me to do in that regard. I’ll ask them, “Would you want this to be a new scene or do you want me to just change it around inside of the scene?” It seems like the general rule of thumb is if we’re changing a location, absolutely it’s a different scene. If we’re staying in the same location, but we’re changing a bunch of things, or the location is sort of the same, but not the same, then I just ask them, “What do you want me to do with it?” Then they tell me.
This happens all day long, by the way, when we’re shooting and it comes to lettering up. When you’re shooting a scene, every new angle and size gets a letter. You’re shooting scene 12, okay, the first shot is shot 12-A, and so on and so forth. Sometimes if you change a lens, but you keep things exactly where they are, and the lens doesn’t change dramatically, the camera system folks will come by and ask the script supervisor, “Are we lettering up or are we just calling this take 6?” Then the script supervisor will make that call. It’s all about, just generally speaking, what’s going to help everybody else down the line.
John: While we’re speaking about letting up, on your show, if let’s say there was a scene 19 and a scene 20, and there’s a new scene being entered between the two of those, is that new scene A-19?
Craig: No, it’s 19-A.
John: That’s a difference of opinion between different productions, because 19-A makes a lot of sense. The problem with 19-A is it gets confusing then on the slate. It’s like, “This is scene 19-A, take A.”
Craig: We just call it 19 Apple Apple.
John: Apple Apple.
Craig: That generally isn’t a problem for us. They do it differently in England. I think it’s the other way. I can’t quite remember theirs. There are different methods for that sort of thing. I don’t tend to have a lot of those, to be honest with you. I don’t.
John: Because Craig writes everything perfectly the first time and it just happens.
Craig: Yeah, or at least I get my scenes generally. I have some A scenes, I have some B scenes, but there’s not that many. Honestly, because I am in control of the flow of the screenplay, when you’re getting into production on movies and 15 different writers are coming in because Frank Capra needs 15 writers to give him the Frank Capra Touch, then yeah, you can get a big ole mess. It can get really weird. There are things like what happens when you’re putting a scene between 19 and 19-A? Then that does become 19-A or whatever the hell, I don’t know what they call it, or 19-a-A I think is what it would be. They start using lowercase versus capital. You can customize all that. The only real thing that I think is important to pay attention to is to not use I or O, as those look like one and zero.
John: Exactly. In the memo that I put out for Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, if you want to look on the pages for that, I actually call that out in the memo, because it’s a natural question for why we’re doing it, is that’s why we’re omitting those things. Another thing you should keep in mind is that it’s not unheard of to put out a new white script. If a lot has changed between the production draft and the draft we thought we were going to production with, and then a bunch of stuff changes, a production might choose to say, “This is the new white draft, basically. Throw out your current script. This is the new script and this is what we’re using for the numbers.”
Craig: What we don’t want is every single page to be not a full page and 5,000 colors and we’re into salmon 8 and whatever it is. Yes, at some point, if it’s changed super dramatically, everybody just … There’s a point of no return. The point of no return really is when people get married to scene numbers. Crews and production teams really do talk about scene numbers constantly. I have to remind people all the time, I don’t know any scene numbers. I don’t remember any of those. I’m like, “Can you just tell me what that is? Because I don’t know what that is.” That’s the danger point is the scene numbers.
John: I have found my experience, especially on more complicated productions, some story stuff does get messed up when things go through multiple rounds. It’s not just bad writing happening, but when there have been so many revisions and so many colors stacked up on top of each other that a scene is being split between four different pages of different things and it’s just not clear, it’s hard to really focus on what is the point of the scene and what is actually happening in the scene, because it’s split across so many pages. That is a real thing that happens, because of production drafts and I think sometimes just bad choices from other people. I’ve been in circumstances where trying to do arbitration on a project that we were looking at the final shooting script, and you couldn’t even parse what the scene was, because it was divided between so many different things. That really is a challenge.
Craig: There’s a little trick that you can use sometimes. When it gets really bad with a scene, you can just say, “Okay, I’m just going to cut all the stuff from page 20-A, page 20-A-a, page 20-B, and just re-paste it into page 20 and just get a nice 20 and 20-A, and get rid of the other ones.”
John: Absolutely. Especially back in a time when we were putting out physical pages to production, you will have made some decisions about what’s going to make the most sense for a person reading this thing. It’d be better off to delete some pages and combine some stuff. Often it is just so people can actually see this is a scene, rather than a couple different paragraphs on a couple different pages.
Craig: Yah.
John: Yah. Let’s end on a question that you and I will actually love to discuss. This is Lydia’s question.
Megana: Lydia from New York writes, “My almost-10-year-old son has a great immersive imagination. I would love to introduce him to Dungeons and Dragons. I don’t know how I never had any friends who played it growing up, but I’m thinking it would be amazing for us to do it together. Where do I start?”
John: Oh Lydia, you are just the best mom.
Craig: Best mom.
John: That’s mom of the year. Best mom.
Craig: Best mom.
John: It’s awesome that your son has a great imagination. He would probably dig D&D. I’ll put links in the show notes for ways to get started playing D&D with your kids, because there’s good starter adventures that build upon each other and get their feet wet, without overwhelming them with too many stuff about the character sheet all at once. I’d also say keep your sessions short, keep them fun and involved, but not overwhelming. Try to find some kids his age who could play with him also, because you as a mom is fantastic, but it’s more fun when the kids are playing with their own age.
Craig: Yes. Sometimes 10-year-old boys who have great immersive imaginations also don’t have a lot of friends. These can go hand in hand. If your son is challenged in that area, if he has some social issues or has just a limited amount of friends, then just know there are a lot of 10-year-old boys just like him who are also limited and don’t have a lot of friends and would love to get to know him. My guess is that there are a lot of really good resources out there for parents. Maybe his school can help. There might be some guidance counselors who can identify some other kids like that, or if there’s some local neighborhood community organizations. You’re in New York, so there’s everything everywhere. Check out some online resources and put out the word. Put out the word on, I’m not on Facebook, but if there’s something like that or if you are on Facebook, to just say, hey, if you’re interested in putting together a group.
There are also some professional dungeon masters out there. They know exactly how to pitch and tone a session to the kids who are playing, and they might be a great way to introduce a group, because they will know everything, and they’re also really good at teaching. That’s part of what they do is teach kids how to play. The goal, Lydia, is for your son and the kids that he enjoys playing with to then not need that guy and to move on and one of them DMs and they do it themselves, which they absolutely can do.
I think it’s really important, Lydia, actually that you don’t play with him. I know. I know. I know you want to. I know you want to, but I think John is absolutely right. I’m just saying, as a former 10-year-old boy, and as somebody who raised a former 10-year-old boy, that there’s something that is irreproducible and magical about four or five 10-year-old boys with great, immersive imaginations doing it themselves, without parental supervision, and being free to explore and enjoy themselves and to find their own identities in that way. It’s really important. You can host it in your apartment or your home. Like I said, there are some really cool people out there that do these things professionally. That’s probably a good place to start poking around and looking.
John: I started playing when I was 4th grade, 5th grade. The DM was Diego Rodriguez, who had an older brother who played, and so we had picked up how to play from him. It’s going to be one kid or someone who has a little bit more experience about how it all works who is going to DM, but eventually you’re all going to get into it and get going. I think there’s a natural tension between people who are obsessed with the stats and optimizing the characters’ numbers and the players who are really focusing on role-playing the characters. That’s fine. That’s going to be a natural tension between the two of those. Whatever gets them wanting to sit down at the table is great. Just let them have fun.
Craig: Let them have fun. I think it’s a really great thing. Dungeons and Dragons, and role-playing games in general have always been a terrific, I’ll say safe space. Why not? Safe and nurturing space for kids who otherwise don’t have that elsewhere, whether they’re neurodivergent or they’re just a little nerdy or shy. That’s a place where they blossom, and where a bunch of them together can blossom. It’s a beautiful thing.
John: Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. I have two One Cool Things. The first is Flee, which is an animated documentary that is up for all the award considerations this year. I watched it yesterday. It’s fantastic. It’s just really, really great. It’s the story of an Afghan refugee who’s trying to get out of Afghanistan as Afghanistan fell, and ends up on this wild expedition to try to get to safety. So well done. The reason why it’s animated is because to protect his anonymity, they animate all of his stuff. There’s live-action stuff in there as well, but he’s always an animated character, which works so well in terms of being able to move back into his childhood. It’s flawlessly done. I strongly recommend everyone check out Flee.
My other One Cool Thing is the Wikipedia history timeline game, Craig, which I sent to you earlier this week. Did you try playing it?
Craig: No.
John: It’s really good. What it’s doing is it gives you a card at the top of the screen, which is some event in history, so either a famous person’s birth or death, or a company being founded, and you have to drag it into this timeline. It just keeps putting up new things for you to drag into the timeline. At first it’s really easy. Something happened in the modern era or it happened in BC times. Then it gets really tough. It’s basically how long of a streak you can keep going of getting these things right. You can play it endlessly. It’s not like a Wordle where it’s just one thing a day. It could be a giant time suck, but if you like history and organizing things, it will be great for you.
Craig: I do like history. I don’t love organizing things.
John: I think that question of, did this happen before or after this other thing, it’s not organizing. It’s just putting stuff in order.
Craig: This game is a nightmare for the kids who would be like, “Do we have to know dates on the test?”
John: Yeah, you have to know dates. You have to know dates-
Craig: “Do we have to know dates?”
John: … for this to work.
Craig: My one cool thing is ancient. It’s a game called Papers Please. Have you played it, John?
John: I recognize the title. I’m looking through here now to see what this actually was.
Craig: Papers Please. It was the first game by Lucas Pope. Lucas Pope is the guy who also did Return of the Obra Dinn, which I think was a One Cool Thing as well. This was his first game. It’s been around since 2014. At least on iOS it’s been around since 2014. It is the weirdest, most addicting and depressing and interesting game.
The functionality is very simple. You are a border patrol officer for some kind of obvious Eastern Bloc, Soviet era country. Your job is to decide whether or not to let immigrants in. The mechanics are you have some rules and then they give you documents, and then you have to check their documents, make sure that the documents comport with the rules, and then you either reject them or accept them. The rules get more and more complicated as things keep happening. It functions on days. That part is fun and tricky. The more people you process through accurately, the more money you make, which means your family will live, because they keep reporting on, you have this much money for gas and for food and for medicine. Also, interesting things start happening. People start begging to be let in, and they make really good cases, but their papers aren’t right, or there’s some sneaky spy people that want to overthrow the government. It’s all set against this very pixelated, brutalist background. Very simple, very fun to play. Gets really tricky really quickly. Strongly recommend. Works excellently on an iPad.
John: It feels like a perfect device for it.
Craig: It’s a weird one. I really enjoyed it. It’s old. It’s ancient, in terms of the internet. Papers Please.
John: Actually it’s a very good matchup with Flee, which is all about papers and documentation and fake passports.
Craig: There you go.
John: Perfect. That was our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli. Actually this week it’s by William Phillipson. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For shorter questions on Twitter, Craig is sometimes @clmazin. I’m always @johnaugust. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Interesting, which has lots of links to things about writing. You can sign up to become a Premium Member at Scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the ones we’re about to record on NFTs. Craig and Megana, thank you so much for a fun show.
Megana: Thank you.
Craig: Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: I am the person who talks about NFTs on this show. I think my first conversation about NFTs was pitching that Disney should absolutely do NFTs, and they have not done NFTs yet.
Craig: Good. Has a technology ever had a heel turn quicker than NFTs? They are loathed out there.
John: They are generally loathed. This last week Twitter announced people who have NFTs can use those as an avatar profile. They’ll have hexagons around them. Then obviously people writing scripts would block anybody who has a hexagon thing. They’re not well-loved.
Craig: No, they’re loathed. There’s a couple of reasons why. The first reason is I think an incredibly reasonable reason, which is that any of these things that require blockchain technology are prone to causing environmental disasters, because an enormous amount of energy can get used up by people who are trying to basically game the system. They want to mine a whole lot of Bitcoin or they want to process a whole whatever fricking NFT crap.
John: Ethereum.
Craig: China has just banned it all entirely. They just banned all that stuff, because it’s sucking up a mass amount of energy. Russia is about to get involved. Even Russia is like, “I don’t know, this feels janky as hell and also bad for the environment.” The other reason of course that NFTs are loathed is because fundamentally they’re stupid. At this point, what are they buying? They’re buying something that says, “I own a thing that everyone else can appreciate and experience in the exact same way that I, the owner, can.” That’s just stupid.
John: I’m going to link to three really good articles that came out in the last couple weeks that were talking about NFTs and bring up these criticisms. What I like about these articles is they point to these are the things that are more promising about them, and these are why the promises are not actually being kept.
One of the things that NFT or crypto proponents will pitch hard is that it’s decentralized, no one can shut it down, no one can stop it. The thing is, it’s actually not as decentralized as you would think it would be. Everything still is funneling through these different small deciders of OpenSea, which would say we’re going to show this piece of art or we’re not going to show this piece of art. It runs into all the libertarian issues of just, what are you going to do about child pornography, what are you going to do about actual criminal behavior that happens on here, what are you going to do about actual theft. When there have been thefts, they’re like, “Oh, we’ll cancel that thing.” Then was it really decentralized? Was there really no authority behind things? It’s trading on people who cannot be held accountable on some levels, but are very accountable on other levels.
Craig: All of it is nothing. No one’s even pretending it’s something. Just so I’m clear, if someone sells an NFT of a photo that is online, it’s a digital photo, and I buy that NFT, I now own that digital photo, or I own the file of that digital photo. That digital photo’s out there and everybody can look at it. The thing like that, a piece of art that Booble made, or whatever his name was. Was it Booble?
John: Yeah.
Craig: Boogle?
John: Yeah.
Craig: Is that it, Boogle?
John: Beeple.
Craig: Beeple.
John: Beeple.
Craig: I like Boogle better.
John: He was a previous One Cool Thing.
Craig: Booble, I’m just going to keep calling him Booble, because it’s funny, somebody paid, whatever, $14 trillion for his picture, but I can look at it. It’s the same thing. It’s literally the same thing. I’m looking at the same thing.
John: Craig, yes. I think we need to acknowledge that all art has similar kinds of issues there, because I could sell you a painting, I sell you a van Gogh, and you’re like, “Okay, I own the van Gogh,” but you can also own a picture of it.
Craig: That’s different. That’s different.
John: It is different, but then the question of, how about a photograph, if I sell you an Ansel Adams photograph. There’s a limited number of them. There’s only a limited number because Ansel Adams chose to put a limit on things. Art is always this conflict between artificial scarcity and-
Craig: The problem is it becomes instantly different when you’re dealing with digital stuff, because digital stuff is reproducible flawlessly. If there was a technology where I could go into the Louvre, point my ray gun at the Mona Lisa, and have a copy of the Mona Lisa, a physical copy that was exactly the same, down to the atom, then I have another Mona Lisa, without question. That is exactly what’s going on with NFTs, so I don’t get it, and I’m never going to get it, ever. I’m old.
John: Can we think about another system that’s been designed to deal with the problem of reproducibility and artistic worth?
Craig: Copyright.
John: Copyright, yeah. Also this past week, a thing that happened, or it’s two weeks ago, some folks bought a copy of Jodorowsky’s Dune book.
Craig: No, these guys. They don’t listen to our show.
John: They set up a DAO, which is basically a collective financial organization to purchase this copy of the book. It’s like, okay, you bought it, and then they had these plans for what they were going to do with it, including develop spin-off merchandise and a TV series and stuff like that. Craig, is there any problem with that? I think they could see there being an obstacle there.
Craig: There is. There is.
John: What’s that?
Craig: The problem is that what they purchased was a derivative work. That derivative work was theoretically licensed by the Frank Herbert Estate to create a derivative work of his copyrighted original work, Dune. However, purchasing a book does not give you any underlying rights to anything in that book, much less anything in the books that it was based on. What they have is a book.
John: Craig, I have a copy of Harry Potter on my shelf, so I should just be able to make a new series.
Craig: JK Rowling, she has one handwritten copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. It’s out there, and I paid a billion dollars for that handwritten copy, which in and of itself would probably be worth something, but now it means we’re going to start now creating our own new stuff based on the handwriting. Oh my god. How? You said that this was an organization of people, so more than one idiot?
John: Basically it’s a bunch of people who came together to form this organization called a DAO, which could then go out and make this acquisition. They’re all putting in money basically to buy this thing together, and then they all have a share in it. It’s like a corporation. It’s like the closest equivalent to what a corporation would be in a purely NFT crypto space.
Craig: Nobody in that organization had even the slightest understanding of how copyright works? No one?
John: Apparently not.
Craig: Oh my god. Tell me, John, surely they didn’t spend more than $100,000 on this.
John: We can Google this now.
Craig: It’s $3 million.
John: $3 million.
Craig: They spent $3 million.
John: Whoever owned that physical copy of it in theory made $3 million, and good on them. We should also point out that Jodorowsky also has copyright on his unique interpretation of that underlying material too. Even if you bought the one copy of the thing that he did, that’s not necessarily granting you the right to reproduce it, just to do any other things to it, so that’s all done.
I was having a good, long conversation with a guy who’s in the crypto NFT space who’s also developing original story material. I was just really curious where he saw the opportunities here and what he thought could happen. What [inaudible 01:08:32] he thinks this is basically just a form of wealth transfer from really rich people to artists and writers. It’s like, oh, okay, on that level I kind of get it. The same way that MoviePass was a wealth transfer from venture capitalists to people who wanted to see movies. That’s basically assuming that it’s going to be failure. It’s assuming that it’s going to be a MoviePass 2.0. That’s all it is.
Craig: It’s going to be MoviePass 2.0. What am I missing, John?
John: I think what you’re missing is that there is enthusiasm and exuberance from people coming together to do a thing which feels exciting. I saw this when I was doing Kickstarter stuff. It’s like you get people together like, “Let’s make this thing happen.” It’s like, yeah, that’s really cool. The thing about a Kickstarter is at the end you have the thing. You have these really cool books that you and I have, like D&D books that we’ve gotten off Kickstarters, or cool figurines. There’s a thing I wanted that I actually got at the end of it. Here it’s just not clear whether people are enthusiastic about it because they want the thing to exist or because they want to speculate that it’s going to be worthwhile at the end.
Craig: I think it’s pure speculation, because how could you possibly be excited about any of this, properly excited? Is there anybody really that is getting a thrill, a tingle down their spine from the availability of an NFT? All those financial things, like whatever, credit default swaps, where somebody has to take time to explain to you how it works, and really what it comes down to is people are just betting money on money to see if money happens in a money way. It’s just math. At that point really the only excitement is purely financial. It’s just purely financial. This is all nuts and weird and empty and soulless. I honestly do hope that the general anger that is fire-hosed at people who announce that they’re now involved in NFTs will work, that people will just go, “Okay, yeah, sorry, I’m not … “
John: Here’s my last challenge for people. If you’re going to come to me with a thing saying it’s this great, innovative thing that’s going to be using NFTs or crypto, I want you to tell me why it needs to use NFTs or crypto, because in so many cases I see, oh yeah, it’s exciting to build this community, to do this thing, but couldn’t you do this in a web 2.0 way that doesn’t involve crazy servers in Malta to do this thing? Ultimately, I can’t find those reasons. I just feel like we’ve built out a web that works. We’ve built out copyright law, which is crazy, but works. You’re trying to reinvent something for no good reason other than there’s ways to make weird money on it.
Craig: It’s like they said, “We’re going to recreate the tulip market of old Holland,” which as we all know, was a speculative bubble that ended up crashing and destroying people. That’ll happen, but along the way you might be one of the people that makes a lot of money off of these fake tulips, that they’re just saying it kind of. Oh god.
John: You were ranting about Jeff Bezos earlier. Jeff Bezos, to his credit, he built a thing. He built a thing that works really well. There’s actually a company that the world is different because of the thing he was able to build. He built something with the money that he was able to raise.
Craig: It exists. It employs a whole lot of people. It does a thing. It is an integral part of our economy. It has purpose. We can all debate whether or not it has changed things for the better or worse, and probably has done both, but it is not just a shell game of nonsense. I think people hear NFT and blockchain, and their minds go somewhere. I don’t know what it is. They start to just go, “Yeah, blockchain.” Blockchain’s a great phrase. It sounds great. It’s got the word block and chain.
John: Doesn’t it?
Craig: Yeah.
John: Both. You have two Wordle words in one combination. Perfect. Love it.
Craig: Block and chain. Five, five, as we say in the puzzle business.
John: Thanks, Craig.
Craig: Thank you, John. Thank you, Megana.
Megana: Thanks.
John: Bye.
Craig: Bye.
Links:
- Bo Yeon Kim’s Tweet on Bong Joon-Ho’s MOTHER Script
- Script University’s 20 Common Sense Script Rules, in No Particular Order
- Read Aloud Software Suggestions Table Read, ZoomText, JAWS, VoiceDream
- DnD for kids Level 1 Geek and Being a Dungeon Master for Kids
- Flee animated film
- Wikipedia Timeline Game
- Papers, please by Lucas Pope
- NFT Articles Why it’s too early to get excited about Web3 by Tim O’Reilly, My First Impressions of Web3 on the Moxie Marlinspike Blog, Blockchain-based systems are not what they say they are by Molly White
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by William Phillipson (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.