Scriptnotes, Episode 661: Screenwriting is a Poorly Defined Problem, Transcript

The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: This is episode 661 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show, why is screenwriting, both the craft and the profession, so difficult? Why are the people who were really good in school not necessarily good at screenwriting?

Craig: Nerds.

John: We’ll take a look at what’s weird about screenwriting and why skills in other areas don’t always translate well. Then it’s another round of the three-page challenge where we look at submissions from our listeners and give our honest feedback. In our bonus segment for premium members, how do you talk about movies and series without spoiling them? We’ll offer our tips and tricks and suggestions.

Craig: We are five episodes away from 666.

John: Now, Craig, let’s talk about this because Drew brought this up. We need to think of something for episode 666, the number of the beast.

Craig: It’s almost going to line up with Halloween. It won’t but it’s close.

John: It won’t. It’s close-ish.

Craig: I feel like we should have Megana on because, A, it’s spooky season, B, 666, it feels like she would have input.

John: Yeah. Should we focus on devil and possession movies?

Craig: That’s a great idea, actually. The Exorcist is one of my favorite movies.

John: Let’s do it.

Craig: Yes. I am not a horror movie aficionado. I like a good horror movie, but I’m not somebody that subscribed to Fangoria when I was a kid and saw all those slasher films like the ‘80s. So Drew, you remember the ‘80s.

Drew Marquardt: Oh, yeah.

Craig: John and I would walk into a video store, not Blockbuster, didn’t exist yet.

John: Our local video store.

Craig: Local video store. There would be a wall, just a solid wall of videotapes of nothing but movies where people slashed each other with blades. They all had great names like I Dismember Mama. There were like twelve Prom Nights. I never saw any of them. Wasn’t necessarily my thing, but The Exorcist had a profound impact on me. I do think it’s an incredible film and well worth discussing.

John: Yes, let’s do it. I haven’t seen The Exorcist probably since it came out. Honestly, I think most of my experience with The Exorcist has been while my parents were out, I would be watching it on TV and get so scared that I have to change the channel.

Craig: That’s correct. The other film that we should probably take a look at is a movie that, and I’m going to get in so much trouble, but it’s too late at this point, right, for me, is The Omen. Because The Omen came out somewhat contemporaneously with The Exorcist, not inspired by, but it existed in part because of The Exorcist. The Omen is the film that made a big deal about 666. I think The Omen is an inferior film to The Exorcist. It would be interesting to compare and contrast.

John: Sure.

Craig: There are some wonderful things in The Omen. It’s still better than most movies that try and do possession stuff now, but not as good as The Exorcist. The Exorcist also, and we’ll get there at episode 666, is a fantastic example of a film that is in a genre where almost every movie is bad and somehow they were great. That’s fascinating to me.

John: Yeah. There’s lots of examples of police procedurals or we’ve got to find the killer movies. Then there’s Silence of the Lambs, which is just like such a cut above–

Craig: Something else, right? It’s not doing anything necessarily overtly different. It’s worth digging into what they do subtly that does make it better.

John: Fantastic. This discussion of the video store we used to go to, it’s reminding me of a conversation I had this last week with my reps. We were talking about how the business was overall. We’re saying like, “Okay, well, streaming has never come back to what it was before. There’s never going to be as many deals as there were.” They were referring back to, oh, but we’re now never going to get back to the era of made-for-home video and the ability to make a zillion movies because you knew you could make a profit off of them on home video.

Craig: Unless something happens. That’s the thing.

John: Unless something happens. It totally could happen.

Craig: Yes. I don’t think anybody saw home video on the horizon in the ‘60s, for instance. Maybe some engineers at early Sony and their Betamax experiments, they were thinking, “Oh, maybe.”

I always think of that moment in Men in Black where Tommy Lee Jones shows Will Smith how the aliens have figured out how to make a tiny CD and that he’s going to have to buy the White Album all over again. The entertainment business is really good at figuring out ways to get us to buy the same thing we already own over and over and over. Some new format, some new thing. It’s almost inevitable. We all figured like, “Oh, streaming, I guess, one day would be–“ We just didn’t realize how fast and how intense it would be.

John: I think we all assumed that, okay, well, this is going to kill home video because you’ll just stream stuff. We didn’t realize there’d be a made-for-streaming boom that would change the industry, but then it would contract again and leave a lot of people– there’d be a musical chairs quality of it.

Craig: We had a bubble. I think that’s fair to say. What did Landgraf call peak television, peak TV? 600 and some odd, maybe 666? It was possibly 666 streaming television series. That’s obviously the work of Satan. What it’s back down to, I think a lot of people are thinking is some abnormally small number. I suspect we still have more television shows available now than we did, say, in the ‘90s. It was networks and some basic cable.

John: In addition to things that were made for streaming, we have things that were made for international audiences, made for global audiences that are available now. We’re watching series that are in English or other languages from other places too. There’s a lot more content still.

Craig: There is. There’s a ton of stuff. The contraction, I think the absolute number of television shows is it’s not something that’s going to make anyone feel better if they were employed within that bubble. I don’t think they’re going to sit there and go, “Well, but there’s still a few more than there were in the ‘90s.” It’s not exactly a relief. Contraction is difficult, even if it follows expansion.

John: Talking with my reps this week, we had a dinner. I’ve got a sampling of what they’re experiencing because you and I, we all have our own experiences and our friends we’re talking to. Reps, they’re making a bunch of deals all the time. I was asking them what’s happening? They say there are a lot of deals being made and pilots are selling, and stuff is selling, and pitches are selling, but there’s not flow. There’s a lot of one-off things that are happening and it’s busy, but not in a regular way and it’s not a predictable way. You can’t say, “Oh, this is how it’s building up to this thing.” The machine is shuddering.

Craig: It’s trying to figure itself out.

John: Which feels accurate.

Craig: That’s right. We have one predominant streaming service that is very successful at what they do, which is obviously Netflix. There’s Apple, who I don’t think care necessarily because they have more money than most nations. There’s Amazon, who I think presents their streaming service probably as some loss leader to make money off of their core business.

John: They want to make a lot of movies.

Craig: They do. I’m thinking about what your representative said about the flow.

Amazon and Apple probably aren’t going to create this rhythmic vacuum that you need to fill. Obviously, Netflix has that machinery. How Max and Peacock and Disney Plus function, am I missing one? Hulu? Hulu is Disney Plus. Paramount is Peacock?

John: No, Paramount is Paramount.

Craig: Oh, they’re their own?

John: Paramount CBS.

Craig: Paramount Plus. Paramount CBS. Right. Of course. How could I have possibly confused these? All of them, I think, are still trying to figure out how much, how frequently.

John: What’s the right number?

Craig: What’s the right number? What’s the right rhythm? That makes complete sense to me.

John: On the feature side, what I was hearing from them is that studio sides are saying the covers are bare for right now. There’s not the next thing to put into production. Summer 2026 is going to be super jam-packed, every weekend is full, which is great. Good problems to have.

Craig: The strike.

John: Yes, exactly.

Craig: That’s bottom line, right? It’s going to happen. It’s a really interesting thing. When I talk to people, what I often hear is, “We need stuff, but it’s hard for us–“ This is them talking about their own internal process as buyers. It’s not as easy as it used to be to get your bosses to agree to buy something.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: So you are responsible if you’re on a certain level at one of these places. I’ve talked to people, streamers and everywhere, and they’ll say, “I need to get five shows on the air next year. I don’t have them. I can’t get them to pay for the things I want. I can get them to pay an insane amount of money, but only when the algorithm says that it fits their thing. But I know that we already have those–“

It’s almost like we have a bunch of people making a lot of food on the street, and we have a bunch of hungry people driving around, and there’s somebody next to the hungry people going, “No, just keep going, or try something else, or go somewhere else.” I can see why it’s difficult. Yes, the machine is not functioning particularly efficiently right now.

John: It’s like a dating app where the algorithm is wrong and swiping one way or another way. You’re not matching up with the interested parties.

Craig: Yes. Yes. That’s actually a great idea for a dating app, where if you swipe right or left, it has to go through an intermediary who considers whether or not you’ve made the right choice.

John: Yes. I like that.

Craig: Maybe changes it.

John: Yes. Maybe you designate a friend who is actually a serious concierge there who’s like, “No, I don’t think that we want this.”

Craig: “Actually, you really should give this person a shot. It’s a bad pick, I know. Give them a shot.” I think that might be nice.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: Let’s get into that.

John: You don’t do app development, but my company does do app development. This is my segue into saying that we’re actually hiring a new person. One thing I’ve learned over doing 12 years of this podcast is our audience are the best, smartest people in the world. If we need to hire somebody for somebody, this podcast is the first place to start. That’s how we found the person who fixed our WordPress plugins, the video game that we’re doing. Let’s do this.

We are hiring a person to do marketing for us, for Highland, Weekend Read, Bronson Watermarker, Writer Emergency Pack, AlphaBirds, and we need somebody who’s more of a manager than a creative. Somebody who can oversee Instagram ad campaigns, app store search optimizations, really be able to tell us what’s working and what’s not, because it’s not in our skill set. We need somebody who just does this stuff that we don’t do especially well.

Craig: Where in the world will you find somebody that knows anything about social media optimization, SEO?

John: SEO.

Craig: Yes, I’m going to guess 89% of our audience is like, “I can do that. I’m already doing that.”

John: We should stress, you probably already are doing this. We don’t want somebody who’s like, “I could learn something.” No, you need to show that you actually have done this.

Craig: Some experience here.

John: Oh, we’re pretty flexible on what the position looks like. It could be part-time or full-time. It could be fully remote. It could be a Los Angeles person. You’re probably based in the US, but if we could hire you or contract with you overseas, this may be doable. Crucially, we need somebody who already knows and is in the Mac and iOS ecosystem, because that’s what we make. You need to be part of that space. You need to know what you’re doing here in this.

Craig: You need to be good.

John: You need to be good.

Craig: Do a good job.

John: We’re going to put up a link in the show notes to a webpage that talks through what we’re looking for. If you are that person or you know that person, take a look at that. If you are the candidate, submit your stuff.

Craig: This is exciting. Does the job pay $850,000 a year?

John: It does not. It pays an amount commensurate to what the job is.

Craig: That’s fair. That sounds fair. Yes.

John: We have some follow-up. Last week, we talked about Moneyball.

Craig: Moneyball.

John: It was such a good episode. Everyone completely agreed with everything we said on the show. There was no feedback whatsoever, right?

Drew: No, my inbox has turned into an AM radio call-in show.

Craig: That’s weird. Do sports fans have any opinions?

Drew: Oh, yeah. I get stats on Johnny Damon and his–

Craig: Johnny Damon. Great. Let’s have the Johnny Damon argument. I want to.

John: Craig, you were wrong about baseball. For one thing, there is a clock because now there’s a pitch clock.

Craig: Let’s talk about the pitch clock. We actually got that note from, I believe it was a scout with the Tampa Bay Rays organization, which is awesome. I stand quasi-corrected. One of the rules changes that I referred to, I referred to a bunch of rules changes in that episode. One of them, most importantly, is the pitch clock, which makes the game go faster. The word clock there, I think would better be described as timer.

It’s a little bit like the shot clock in basketball. You have a certain amount of time to do something, or there is a, in basketball, the foul or turnover, or in baseball, it’s a strike, or it’s a ball, depending on which side of the– but the game itself has no timer. You can have an at-bat that lasts one pitch long. You can have an at-bat that lasts zero pitches long. If there’s a guy at the plate and there’s a man on first, there’s two outs, and the pitcher picks that guy off first base, inning over, man at home didn’t swing, got no pitches.
You can have an at-bat that lasts 18 pitches, all within the confines of pitch clocks.

So yes, there is a small element of a timer, but the game itself, no one can tell you at the beginning of a baseball game how long that game will last. Everyone can tell you how long a football game will be in terms of game time play, or a hockey game, or a basketball game.

John: The larger point, in terms of being a clock and not being a clock, most sports are frantic. There’s just a lot of activity suddenly all at once. Baseball, yes, there are bursts of activity, but most of it is very open and people can take their time to do a thing.

Craig: Absolutely, and innings last as long as they last, and there are nine of them. In football, a series of downs, you can have possession of a football and you keep getting a new first down, that’s great, but the clock keeps getting eaten up.

John: Yes, so unless you’re able to stop the clock by doing the thing, yes.

Craig: You can stop, but when you stop the clock, there’s no more playing, right? Then everybody talks, and then they get back and then the clock restarts. While that is a good point from the scout that there is now an element of time, where there used to be no element of time– the only element of time that there used to be in baseball was, if there’s a visit to the mound, let’s say the pitcher is in trouble or there’s a situation that requires discussion, either the pitching coach or the manager would go out to the mound, bring in the infielders, and they would all have a huddle on the mound and chat.

The umpire, at some point, will mosey on over and go, “All right guys, it’s enough. We got to go get back to playing baseball,” When? Uhh when he feels like it. Like, “Ah, it’s enough.” That’s the only thing I remember prior to the pitch clock.

John: All right, more follow-up, we talked about residuals in 658 and the fact that they are now digitally depositable.

Drew: E&A writes, “While I appreciate the greater efficiency of having residuals be direct deposit, I would like to stand up for the joys of the home-delivered paper residual. It is always a cheery surprise, a bright spot in the day, the flash of green among the mailers, the happy announcement to the household, the ritual chant of, “Big money, big money, big money,” and finally, the reveal of a quantity which may range wildly, but which is always better than nothing.

Additionally, there’s the hopefully fond memories evoked by the source of the residuals, gratitude for the achievements of the WGA in securing these residuals, and sometimes even a sense of abundance in the universe. So until paper cuts or affluence dim our delight in the little green envelopes, this house will never direct deposit our residuals.”

John: I’m completely in agreement with E&A. I loved the green envelopes, and I loved opening them and I loved having– predict how big a check would be. I would say, “Oh, it’s from Sony,” and he would nail it within 1%. He was so good at it. It’s great. It just feels like found money.

Craig: A weird carnival skill.

John: It’s like, “I don’t deserve this, but it came and it’s great.” For the last three years, four years, they’ve all been going to my business manager anyway, so I haven’t seen them.

Craig: Yeah, I completely salute this person and the love of the green envelope and the excitement of that. No question. Partly it’s also just a function of age because I started getting green envelopes, I don’t know, in 1997? Yeah, after a while, you’re like, “Here’s another green envelope again.”

John: Here’s a proposal. The green envelopes are inefficient because those checks get lost and sometimes, they did get lost. It’s a good reason not to send them to people’s houses. Maybe we still do the green envelopes and inside it says like, “This is how much we just direct deposited for you.” Then you still get the feel, the joy of it, but you don’t have to deal with the check.

Craig: Sure. If they could maybe do that, that’d be great. What if there was an email that said– the subject header was, “Green envelope.”? You’re like, “Okay, when I open this email–“ Then there’s a bunch of texts just in case your email program gives you a little– no, it skips it. Then you open it and you scroll and there’s the number. That would be fine.

John: A little joy.

Craig: Yes. Why not?

John: All right, well, I’m going to propose that to the WGA. More about capitalizing off of a short what we talked about in episode 658.

Drew: Erin writes, I want to build on the excellent advice you gave Michael in episode 658 in which he asked what’s next after a short film he wrote won an Oscar qualifying award. If he wants to capitalize on the success, I would encourage Michael to write a feature version of his short film. Even if his short wasn’t initially meant to be blown out into a feature, there will be something, a theme, a character, what have you, that will make for a compelling feature script and he already has an award-winning short as a proof of concept.

The first question I’m asked when somebody sees and likes my short is, do you have a feature script? My answer is always yes, and because I always have a draft ready before attending any festival, it’s led to my scripts being read by reps and producers. I guarantee the director and/or producers are being asked this question, so he should also reach out to them to let them know he’s getting started on the feature so when they’re inevitably asked, “Is there a feature script?” they can reply, yes, Michael is working on it right now.

Craig: If you can. Not every short is expandable into a feature. I imagine many aren’t.

John: I think it’s good advice in general. Even if you can’t take this exact concept, something that’s in that space feels right because they like the short, they want something that’s like that but is a feature. That all tracks and makes a lot of sense.

Craig: Whiplash.

John: Yes, 100%.

Craig: It’s the theory of Whiplash, worked for Damien Chazelle, could work for you at home. I think that makes sense.

John: Totally makes sense. More on how to be a script coordinator. We’ve talked a lot on the show about the value of script coordinators.

Drew: Joshua Gilbert writes, I’m a long-time listener and a mid-level TV writer. Prior to staffing, I did all the writer’s office assistant jobs, writer’s PA, showrunner’s assistant, writer’s assistant, and script coordinator, the gig I did the most. As such, it occurred to me that if a YouTube video can teach someone to fix their sink, they can learn to script coordinate the same way.

So I created a two and a half hour training video in eight sections that gives step-by-step instructions for taking a script from first draft to shooting draft.

Craig: That’s interesting. Two and a half hours? There’s really two and a half hours of stuff to say?

John: There was two and a half hours of stuff to do to explain about how to do Roll20. You and I put those videos together.

Craig: That was extraordinarily efficient. Roll20, especially the old Roll20, they’ve streamlined it, was so unuser-friendly.

Listen, it may be that he’s just very patient in his explanations. Ally Chang, who’s our script coordinator on Blast Bus, I walked her through it. It was only about 30 minutes.

John: You’re approaching script coordinating from one point of view. You’re also a single showrunner who’s doing stuff and a single writer. People who are on more complicated shows, I think it probably is more complicated stuff. You’re integrating multiple things from different writers.

Craig: Yes. I could see that. There’s a little more traffic.

John: I’ve watched through it, too. He leaves no stone unturned.

Craig: Okay, so it’s an incredibly thorough, too. Thank God. I was just hoping that you weren’t like, “I watch it and–“ No, okay, if it’s super-duper thorough, then great. Look, either way, I just like complaining about things. He put it on there for free. It’s a free class. One more reason to not go to film school.

John: Yeah, film school doesn’t teach you how to be a script writer, though, either. It’s one of those– just someone shows you.

Craig: Yes, but that’s one of the jobs that we have.

John: It’s a job. It’s a job. It’s actually a union cover job.

Craig: Film school just teaches you the job that no one has to give you. Just why? Anyway.

John: All right, last bit of follow-up here is from Lori, and she’s talking about, Craig, you use this word calculating a lot. “You need to stop calculating.” You actually use it in a Scriptnotes book. A little follow-up on this.

Drew: Yes, she says, “What exactly does Craig mean by that? Does he mean that writers shouldn’t have a strategy or pursue a set of goals other than writing good screenplays? If so, how do those good screenplays ever get into the hands of someone who can do something with them?”

Craig: Here’s what I mean. Calculating means figuring out how to game the system. What do people want? What does the market want? If I did this and this and this, then maybe this and this and this. There’s so much effort that you can put into that kind of thinking. “Everybody knows that if you write a such and such story that they want it, they don’t want these unless there’s a this in it. I’m going to do that.” That’s calculating. Not calculating is writing something that you love, that you believe in, that is personal to you, that nobody else could do, or that just expresses your unique creative talent and then putting it out in the world. Then other people work on the calculating part.

In fact, part of our jobs as individual writers in our careers is to resist all of their calculations when their calculations go against what is the beating heart of the work. Otherwise it will turn into crap, which happened to me repeatedly in my career because I didn’t understand that part of my job was to defend against their calculation. I thought in a somewhat humble way, all these calculations must have value. These people are paid for these calculations and the emperor has no clothes.

It’s not about being strategy-less. You write something great, then you’re like, “I wrote this, and I need Renée Zellweger to be in it. It was designed out of my heart for Renée Zellweger. I need to get this to Renée Zellweger somehow.” That’s not calculation. That’s just makes sense. That’s creative desire. Saying, “I wrote this for Renée Zellweger, but what I’m hearing maybe is that Sabrina Carpenter is looking to do something in a movie like this. If I just change the age and change the this and make it more Sabrina Carpenter, then get it to the person that I know who knows her friend, then da-da-da–“ What have you done? No offense to Sabrina Carpenter. If you write something for Sabrina Carpenter, truly–

John: Yes, fantastic, love that. All right–

Craig: I know who Sabrina Carpenter is.

John: I was going to say, nicely done. Weirdly, a Sabrina Carpenter, Renée Zellweger axis, it’s clear. There’s a vector that connects the two.

Craig: I actually am proud of what I just did. I really am. It would have been a very old guy thing to be like, “No, instead I’m going to make it for Reese Witherspoon.” Eh, contemporary, doesn’t work. It wouldn’t have worked. It would not have been as cogent of a point.

John: I like this. This discussion of calculating actually ties in very well to our main topic today, which is about screenwriting being a poorly defined problem. This verbiage I’m taking from this blog post by Adam Mastroianni, which is about why smart people aren’t happier. I think it also really resonates with last week’s episode where we’re talking about how we measure and quantify talent.

In this blog post, he’s talking about how it’s not just physical attributes that we try to measure and quantify. We do it with intelligence too. If you Google the smartest people in the world, you’re going to find physicists, and mathematicians, computer scientists, chess masters.

Craig: Donald Trump by his own admission.

John: 100%. You’re going to do that because if accomplished things that you can point to and say like, oh, it was your intelligence that did that. You can measure that. But a couple of weeks ago, I went to this event with Hillary Clinton who spoke and, Jesus, that is a very smart woman.

Craig: Just a little.

John: Her intelligence is not quantifiable in that way. She didn’t invent a thing. She didn’t solve some mathematical problem. She ran the state department.

Craig: She ran the state department of the United States of America.

John: Not a small thing. The things that I would say, if I could point to her intelligence, she can take a question and then pull it into its parts and come up with, on the fly, this seven-minute answer that goes from the personal to the political to everything. That’s experience. And it’s honestly the difference between what we’d say in D&D terms is intelligence and wisdom. She has the ability to take this whole thing and pull it apart.

Really what it comes down to, and this is from this blog post, is that we tend to value and aim towards these well-defined problems. A well-defined problem– he defines in four things.

That there is a stable relationship between the variables. You can see how everything connects. There’s no disagreement about whether the problems are problems or if they’ve already been solved. There are clear boundaries. There’s a finite amount of relevant information and possible actions. And the problems are repeatable. So the details might change, but the process for solving the problems does not.

Craig: Science.

John: Science is exactly that. It’s the scientific method.

Craig: The results needing to be robust, repeatable. What a joy it would be to work in something where you could actually go, “The answer to this question is yes.” That would be lovely.

John: A lot of us, and I suspect you were as well, Craig, we were good at doing those well-defined problems. All standardized tests, the ACTs, the SATs, they were those things. We were rewarded for that. We’re told we are smart because we’re good at these things. Unfortunately, the career we’ve chosen to go into does not reward that thinking at all.

Craig: It does not.

John: We’re dealing with these really undefinable things. We don’t even know what the edges of this is. What do they really want from here? How am I supposed to do this thing? Am I making the right choice to go, “Should I move to Los Angeles?”? These are not questions with single answers. Many of the questions we get from our listeners are grappling with this. When we say, “Don’t be so calculating,” I feel like so often we see people trying to take these difficult situations and boil them down to well-defined problems.

Craig: Yes, because it’s comforting. You probably remember in math class, there was somebody that was sitting next to you who was struggling with a process. Let’s say quadratic equations.

John: Do you remember the first time your teacher did the quadratic formula or showed how you discover the quadratic formula? There’s no way you end up with such a messy formula. It’s so ugly.

Craig: And so beautiful.

John: Beautiful. It works but it looks so awful.

Craig: We are used to science boiling things down to elegance. E = mc² is so absurdly elegant. It seems like a joke. Most things are not that perfect. The Pythagorean theorem is so gorgeously a² + b² = c². But there was always a kid that didn’t understand the concepts and would turn to you at some point and go, “Just tell me what to do. Okay, so now what do I do? Then what do I do? Then what do I do?”

Meaning, break this down like I’m a computer, code it for me, so that I don’t have to understand what I’m doing. I just follow steps, which are certain. Therefore, I can’t get lost. It’s not actually a bad way to teach certain people certain things that they are struggling to grasp conceptually. However, if they need that, it’s probably not really worth it for them because ultimately, they’re not actually learning anything. They’re merely just obeying steps.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: What we have here in our business is a very– there’s an analytic way of doing things, and then there’s synthesizing things. We have to synthesize stuff. We have to make things out of nothing. It’s art, so it’s all objective, subjective at the same time. There are things that just we all agree on, then there are things that we cannot agree on, and then there are things that we find out most people agree on. There are things that no one agrees on, except 10 years later, they do.

Nobody can really teach this. Yes. What we’re taught is how to analyze, which is fair, and what we can test is analysis and memory. There is this concept, when we were learning about the SAT analogies, we were taught about this thing called the triangular non-relationship, which is that this– and these two things are only related because they both relate to something else, but they don’t directly relate to each other. I think that for people that are good in school and good at SATs, and also are good at screenwriting, those two things are not connected to each other, they’re connected back to one thing, which is a certain mind.

John: Yes, absolutely. Let’s think through some of the stuff that we’re dealing with as screenwriters that are these poorly defined problems and that we’re constantly grappling with.

What is this movie about? This movie I’m writing, what is it about? No, what is it really about? We know it’s not actually about the thing on the surface, it’s actually really about something else.

Who is this character? How do I show that to the audience?

What does this moment look like from the character’s point of view and from all the other characters in that scene’s point of view?

What do they say next and why?

What is the right title for this movie?

Am I using the word “being” too much?

How is this movie I’m writing different from every other movie ever made?

But how is it similar enough to a genre that people can relate to what the hell it actually is?

Then, completely independent of what’s happening on the page, the actual career of being a screenwriter is, how do I describe this thing to an executive? Who should I pitch this to? Should I be focusing on Sabrina Carpenter or Renée Zellweger? When should I send the follow-up email? Should I send the follow-up email?

I see this with my own daughter. She’s a sophomore now, and super smart, so good at so many things. She’s texting me, and it’s not about schoolwork, it’s about, what should I put in this box on this form for this internship I’m applying for? They ask me, “What is your desired hourly salary?” She says, “Should I put 15?” I’m like, “I think 20?” but there’s no answer here. I don’t even know what comes out of this. You’re nodding, because this is exactly what– you do it too.

Craig: We occasionally get these. It’s funny, Jessica is so independent and so much a force of nature. She reminds me so much of me when I was her age. Just all these things that a lot of people consider difficult that she’s just doing. But kinda had a little bit of a meltdown over figuring out how to pay the utility bill for her apartment.

John: We’re on the same page. We got a bill for power, but with some from the previous tenant, and it’s like, “What do you do?”

Craig: Actually, as it turns out, nobody likes doing that stuff. Everybody has to learn. I remember this as great, but it wasn’t great. It was stupid, but I still remember because this is one funny bit where Mike Myers on Saturday Night Live played a character maybe only once called Middle-Aged Man. He’s a superhero. He’s asked, “What are your powers?” He goes, “I can’t fly and I don’t have super strength, but I can explain what escrow is.”

These are the things that you sort of accrue. When you are in your 20s, you’re like, “What do I do with a utility–“ Those are all learnable things. That list of stuff that you put there. The other one that came to mind was, what is the tone of this? Also what is tone? What are we even talking about? These things are only defined by a strange passion and a confidence that comes from feeling good about it. It is all about feeling. When you look at people who are composing, why that note? Why not this note?

Feels wrong, feels right. For us, we have no choice but to actually find some genuine feeling. That feeling then we have to convert into some explanation to either get people to resonate with our same feeling and feel it or get them to hear a rationality that allows them to go along with it.

But for everybody else in our business, that area of what is it and I’m going to feel it and I know what’s wrong and what’s right allows for so much chicanery, charlatanism, fraud, confidence masquerading as knowledge, just bad faith, baloney, gaslighting, because it’s not science. Because I can’t just go, “Stop. Everything you just said is provably wrong and has been proven wrong.” Can’t do it.

John: Of course, we’re talking about this in a context of there’s now more data than ever and more data being used against us about the choices that we’re making. As we’re pitching to Netflix, they will say our metrics show that we need to have– we cannot show a dog in the first three minutes of the show or else, or there’s all this stuff. They have data. They can show that scientifically this is true, but of course, that doesn’t have anything to do with the actual feeling of what it is.

I love to contrast that development process to a film festival where they’re buying a film at a film festival. In that case, they’re emotionally responding to the thing they saw and it’s like, “Oh, this works for these reasons.” We want this movie and we are going to put this on our streamer.

Craig: I think our business has shifted, especially the feature business, very much in favor of that vibe in a way, there is more humility on the side of the buyers because they’ve almost finally admitted they have no idea. Therefore, instead of the old method, which is really– if you want to talk about something that changed our business, the old method of making movies was have a bunch of writers come in, hear pitches, buy scripts, have ten things in development that one of them eventually will be worthy of a green light and be made.

That’s gone away. Now it’s more like, hey, we’ve shown up with a script already, an actor, a director. Everything is here and we also have a budget. All you have to do now is just flip a lever, but all the components are in place. We basically cook the meal for you. It’s a frozen TV dinner. Just put it in the microwave, right? As opposed to, we would like to cook you a meal. We’re going to go gather ingredients. We can discuss if you want chicken or fish, right? And they like that.

John: The episode that Marielle Heller was on that you weren’t able to come for, we were talking–

Craig: Passive aggressive.

John: Sorry. It was a good episode.

Craig: I bet. Jeez.

John: We were talking through this new research study that showed that almost none of the movies that are greenlit came out of studio development.

Craig: Exactly. Which was all you and I knew. All we knew was studio development. In fact, the thing that we would complain about in the ‘90s was studio development and development hell and how we all knew we were going there and getting paid something and then we were just going to be strung out for a while and eventually it probably would just die on the vine like everything else.

John: We were getting paid during that time, which was important.

Craig: Important that we were getting paid. Now what has gone away is all of the money being spread around, but there is a little more certainty. It used to be, if you made a deal, there’s a 5% or 10% chance they would make your movie. Now it’s like we’re making a deal, it’s kind of a green light.

I remember the first time this happened to me, it was at Universal, and I think it was maybe Identity Thief where I came in to pitch the rewrite because it was a page 1 rewrite. There was a pre-existing script. There were two pre-existing scripts, I believe.

I came in with Jason Bateman and Scott Stuber and normally you would go in a pitch meeting, you would pitch to the head of the studio. Everyone was in that room, from Peter Kramer, who’s the president of production, but then Donna Langley also, and then Adam Fogelson?

John: Sure. That feels right.

Craig: Is that right?

John: Yes.

Craig: The guy that was the top of it. I’m like, “What the hell is going on?” When I walked out, I remember I was like, “Why are all these people in a pitch meeting?” He goes, “That was a green light meeting. The deal is if we’re going to pay you to write this, we’re making the movie.” That blew my mind. That was the first time I’d ever experienced that where that’s the deal now. Either no development or make movie. That in a way expresses humility on their end, I think. We don’t know. If you bring us all this stuff, fine.

John: What can we take from this is that, listen, I think there’s going to be moments where you’re going to have this instinct to reduce these difficult problems, these poorly defined problems, and you’re going to try to find edges of things that you can clean up and solve. I see people doing that with the obsession over like, “Oh, I need to get rid of all the widows and orphans in my script.”

Craig: Control.

John: Control. You’re trying to exert control over a thing that fundamentally doesn’t want control. You’re going to submit to a bunch of film festivals and screenwriting competitions so you can get scores and so you can be graded the same way you were graded when you were–

Craig: People love grades.

John: Yes. I miss them. Listen–

Craig: It’s validation.

John: I’m 30 years out of college but I miss that validation.

Craig: Absolutely. It’s validation. When I do see a lot of people on social media saying, “Congratulations to me. I was a semi-finalist,” and blah blah blah, I’m like, “I’m so sorry. It’s actually not relevant at all because there’s somebody who didn’t make it past the first round who has written something much better.” The people who judge these things don’t know either. Nobody in that world knows because the people that are at the highest level of our business also don’t know. They are constantly being surprised. Everybody agrees that this kind of movie doesn’t work until somebody makes one that does. Listen, if there was one genre we knew would not work, it would be to adapt a video game. That was the law. That’s the thing.

John: Two good series.

Craig: There you go. Superhero movies were just dead in the water forever. Musicals keep coming and going. I think Wicked is going to bring them back. Westerns disappear. Probably they’ll come back. That’s the joke. That’s the big joke. So why calculate? Just follow your heart.

John: Absolutely. All right, let’s take a look at some pages from our listeners. For folks who are new here, every once in a while we do a three-page challenge where we invite our listeners to submit three pages from something they’ve written, generally the first three pages. We give our honest feedback.

As a reminder, people want us to be reading this stuff. They’re soliciting this feedback. If we’re mean at any point or harsh, they asked for this.

Craig: That’s a weird phrase. They permitted this.

John: They permitted this. We’ll say that. If you would like to read along on these pages, you can follow the links in the show notes and click through. There’s PDFs for those. You can take a look and maybe stop this podcast, read first, and then listen to what we’re going to say about them. Let us start with Flunge-

Craig: Flunge.

John: -by J Wheeler White.

Craig: I apologize. If you guys hear a page flipping, it’s because I like a physical page.

John: Likes a physical page.

Craig: Forgive me.

John: Drew, for folks who are not able to look at the pages, can you give us a quick summary?

Drew: “In the middle of a fencing match, with seven seconds left on the clock, 17-year-old, Will Stetson, ignores all the onlookers and focuses on his opponent, Alexander. They stare each other down. We then cut to six months earlier where Will is elbowed in his high school wrestling match and starts punching his opponent in the face. Coach Vargas tries to hold him back, but when his opponent calls him a psycho, Will lunges at him and crashes into the scorer’s table. Later, in a school hallway, Coach Vargas kicks Will off the wrestling team. Will punches a locker. Outside the gym, a Mercedes pulls up in front of Will, driven by Alina, another teenager who is currently very angry.”

John: All right. Let’s start with this title page. I love this title page.

Craig: Flunge. Yes. It’s got a nice graphically designed title with negative space fencer in the middle.

John: Absolutely. Craig, do you know what a flunge is?

Craig: I absolutely do not know what a flunge is. A flying lunge?

John: Close to a flying lunge. It’s a combination of a flèche and a lunge. Flèche is where you’re racing up to your opponent, you’re running up to the opponent.

Craig: Oh.

John: The illustration in there is actually what a flunge would be.

Craig: It’s a flunge.

John: It’s a daring stab forward.

Craig: Flunge is going to be changed. That title is not going to last.

John: No.

Craig: Just going to be honest.

John: It looks great.

Craig: It’s fun for now.

John: Fun for now. Page 1 opens with, “Time left on clock, 7 seconds, score 14-14.” I think this is crucial information. I like having it here. I’m wondering how it’s going to be shown on screen. I don’t need it to be shown on screen on the page in a certain way, but I was wondering about that. I like that it’s 14-14. That you know that this match has been going on a while. You know that you’re near the end of this.

This setup reminds me of Challengers, and I don’t know how this is all going to be structured, but I feel like we’re going to be moving back and forth into this this match, which I’m excited to see. It may not be a true Stuart Special where we start at one point and then flashback in time. I think it is a back and forth.

Craig: This does feel like a Stewart Special, though.

John: Well, it’s a Stewart Special in the sense that it started at a time, and we can catch up to this.

Craig: Only because he’s a wrestler and then he becomes a fence– I doubt we’re going to go back and forth. I could be wrong. Also, it’s a television show.

John: Oh, a television show. Pilot, yes.

Craig: It’s possible, but I agree with you, the setup felt really exciting. First of all, I got excited by fencing because– listen, at this point just show me something, and fencing is fun. It’s swordplay and it’s exciting.

John: I had fencing in a movie that didn’t shoot, which I was really sad about.

Craig: Oh, you had a fencing movie?

John: I had a fencing movie.

Craig: Ugh. Do you want to sue this guy? John, that’s what people do.

John: Yes, absolutely. I had fencing in my movie.

Craig: This guy stole your idea.

John: Yes.

Craig: Jesus.

John: I’ll say that if there’s a contract lens that plays an important role in this movie, I’ve won. I’ve won the lawsuit.

Craig: You’ve won the lawsuit. It’s an interesting thing. We have a guy– this is how it opens. “William Stetson, 17, catches his breath. He’s in a full electric saber kit.” I assume that means that-

John: He’s wired up.

Craig: -fencing outfit. “Fencing mask pulled up, a single curl of light hair glued by sweat to his forehead.” Just be aware, that’s the kind of thing that they’re going to have a meeting about, and it’s going to probably look stupid. Maybe just say sweaty.

John: Yes.

Craig: “His eyes, consumed by a deep indecipherable fervor locked with his opponent’s, Alexander Sasha Su, 18.” Now, why do they both have their masks up? Is that a thing that people do?

John: Yes, between parries.

Craig: This is exciting to see on page, but just want to think ahead here. This is J Wheeler White, which is a fantastic comic book name, by the way. J Wheeler White, he owns a newspaper in Gotham, not in New York. They’re just staring at each other. If you’re staring at somebody, and they’re staring at you, the two of you are in a staring contest, that just feels a little weird.

If you’re staring at this guy, and he’s drinking some Gatorade, or doing something, and then he turns and sees you, and expresses something back, whether it’s hatred, jealousy, I’m going to get you, you lost, whatever it is, that creates a moment. I think, here, what’s happened is, they’re just staring at each other, which feels a bit odd.

John: I get that. Again, the reason why I would say Challengers is challenged. Have you seen Challengers?

Craig: I have.

John: Challengers is all stares across on that between people-

Craig: It is.

John: -doing stuff. I love it for that. In this first page, fans, teammates, former opponents, uppercase those. Those are other groups of people that we’re going to see. There’s a thing that J Wheeler White does where it’s a word then a single dash rather than a double dash. It’s consistent. It’s fine. It’s not what I would do.

Craig: I don’t do it either, but it doesn’t matter. I get it.

John: It’s consistent.

Craig: It’s consistent. As long as it’s consistent. It would be nice to know how big. It says hundreds of fans. Hundreds of people– that’s another thing you learn when you’re making stuff is, hundreds of people look like 12 people. Thousands of people look like hundreds of people.

John: I need a sense of– is this State Championships? What is this? That would tell us.

Craig: Olympics. State Championship. Is this a gymnasium? Is this Madison Square Garden? Just give me a general sense of the space. I think it would be helpful. What I really enjoyed was how this just flung us — flunged us — into a different thing, but this is way easier to do on page than it is to do– because the problem is match-cutting from eyes, especially when there’s a mask, even though it’s pulled up, it’s going to be visible. Eyes to eyes of a person that’s in motion, wrestling, it’s just not possible.

John: It’s not possible. There’ll be a sound pre-lap, there’ll be a thing, and then you just have to cut into it.

Craig: Exactly, so probably not– it’s exciting to read, but this is something that I actually think is fine, but later you’re going to have to fix it.

John: Absolutely. It’ll be on a foot and a step will go forward and you’ll realize you’re going to do a different space. There’ll be different ways to get there.

Craig: Exactly.

John: I’m loving everything on page 1 and on page 2. I thought the actual descriptions of what goes wrong in the match, and how it builds, I believed. It felt visceral and it’s funny.

Craig: Yes. I think the only thing that I would suggest here for this, because the point of this wrestling match is Will goes too far, right? He goes too far. He’s wrestling a guy, and he chokes him in a way that’s illegal, and ruins stuff.

John: He chokes him and then he starts beating him.

Craig: Well, because the guy fights back. Then he fights back again. It’s all precipitated by the fact that he’s choking this guy out, which is not legal in high school, or anywhere. That’s fine, but what I needed was something leaning into it. I think part of my issue was it just starts with this guy killing someone. That’s what he’s doing basically. How did we get to that? If you start leaning on someone’s throat– this is just logic stuff, and it’s important for tone. You’re in high school, you start choking this guy out.

Nobody says it– they’ll run in there and pull you off. You can’t kill somebody, and why would you think you could? The problem is this guy goes too far. I need to see him going too far, not already too far. Something leading into it would have been helpful.

John: Yep, agreed. Page 3, the one thing I want to scratch out here is mic drop. Vargas, the coach, says, “You smell like an f-ing litter box.” Mic drop. We don’t need the mic drop, he walks off. And at the bottom of page 3, we’re introduced to Alina Matero, 17, dark hair, clean girl aesthetic, currently very pissed off. That’s all we know about her. I liked that as the next thing we’re seeing.

Craig: I like that she seems rich. I’m guessing that he’s not. I don’t know what their relationship is, but she seems like she’s already heard about the wrestling situation. Again, tone. Page 3, Vargas, his coach says, “We were all watching Stetson,” which I think you need a comma there because it seems like we’re all watching Stetson. “We were all watching, Stetson,” that’s Will, “and good thing too, or that kid would be in an ambulance right now. Incorrect.

They watched him choke that kid out until that kid punched him to get him off of him. They didn’t do anything. And then, good thing you don’t know him.” I don’t know him either, and just because he goes to New Trier, I’m guessing that’s the school for rich kids?

John: Yes.

Craig: It doesn’t justify murder. This is so important. I need to understand why Will was trying to “kill” this kid. Why he was suddenly so vicious and so relentless that he would injure this kid and possibly render him unconscious.

John: Yeah so, thinking about that moment, if you switch it around and Will was the one who felt like he was threatened, or he was getting choked, and that he was the first person who blew up, and it was ambiguous whether the referee should have stepped in, that could have made sense.

Craig: This scene is broad. For me. This is what happens. The coach goes, “You did a dumb thing.” Will says, “No, I didn’t.” He says, “Yes, you did. You’re fired. You’re off the team.” “You can’t do that. Darn it.” Everybody deserves to be a character. Everybody deserves to be interesting. How does this really go down in life? I don’t think it’s like this. I don’t.

I think there is a possibility that as a coach you sit down with this kid– and there’s a scene where he says, “Just walk me through what happened. I want to understand why this happened.” Let Will explain. Just keep asking questions so that we start to understand Will, how his mind works, what the real problem was, and we’ll feel like maybe this coach is sympathetic, understanding, and the coach will listen to him, hear, get to the truth, and then say, “So you’re off the team. Sorry. Based on everything I understand, I appreciate it, I get it. You can’t be on a wrestling team.”

John: I hear you, and that is a version of the scene. I think there’s a way to keep the energy up the way that this scene currently does, but just with a little bit more finesse.

Craig: Actually, that was my problem.

John: That the energy was still too high?

Craig: Yes. We started with this exciting, flunging match, and then we go into an equally exciting and violent wrestling match, both of which it’s feeling like at fever pitch tempo, and then we get into this quick argument. The movie is going so fast, I felt like it’s a television show, it’s a pilot, you can breathe. If you look at Breaking Bad, everybody uses it as a great example because it is a wonderful pilot episode. It starts with, blah! And then it’s like, hmm.

John: It’s quiet. Yes.

Craig: It’s quiet.

John: There’s a description on page 3 that I did like. “Will tries to make himself big, arms out to his side, chest forward, steps to his coach, Vargas sighs.” That does a lot.

Craig: It does. Again, it’s a tone question. Will seems like an idiot here because you can’t big-guy your coach. What are you going to do? Beat him up. The coach isn’t buying it, but then I feel like, why would Will think that the coach would buy it and why is Will do–

John: I believe that’s a dumb high school character move.

Craig: To me, dumb high school characters are different to coaches that control their fate. Those are the people they don’t do this to. Those are the people that they get all solemn with because those are their father figures that they have daddy issues. Again, that’s part of what I’m saying here to J Will writers. The character right now of Will and the character of Vargas is angry coach, angry kid. I think we need to go a bit deeper in that, even in one page.

John: Great. Again, these are not well-defined problems.

Craig: No.

John: They’re all opinions and how it feels.

Craig: That’s right.

John: Before we move on, Drew, can you tell us the logline for what the actual–

Craig: For Flunge.

John: For Flunge.

Drew: “After being kicked off the team for one too many violent outbursts, a high school wrestler reluctantly joins the fencing team to keep his scholarship, unearthing a preternatural talent that may redefine the course of his life. An anime-inspired live-action sports drama series.”

John: Great. I don’t know that it’s a series. I think it’s a movie, but I’m curious–

Craig: It feels like a movie to me.

John: Feels like a movie to me. It feel like there’s a beginning, middle, and end, there’s a victory, there’s a thing.

Craig: It’s a classic. It’s like– What was that movie where Matthew Modine is a hockey player and then he becomes an ice skater? What was that one called? Look it up. It’s such a great idea. He was a hockey player who was like this, undisciplined, got kicked off, whatever personal problems, and gets stuck being paired up with an ice skater for figure skating.

John: It’s not Matthew Modine. It’s somebody who’s like Matthew Modine.

Craig: Oh, it is?

John: Yes.

Craig: It’s not Matthew Modine?

John: Oh, shoot.

Craig: Who was that?

John: He looks like Steve Gutenberg, but it’s not Steve Gutenberg. We’ll find it.

Craig: That’s why we need our search engine optimization person.

John: Hey, can you tell me about a movie where a hockey player then becomes a figure skater? He gets partnered with a woman who’s a figure skater.

AI: The movie is The Cutting Edge. It’s a romantic comedy from 1992 where a former hockey player teams up with a figure skater.

John: Who were the stars of that movie?

AI: The stars of The Cutting Edge are D.B. Sweeney, who plays the former hockey player, and Moira Kelly, who plays the figure skater.

Craig: D.B. Sweeney. D.B. Sweeney and Matthew Modine were odd– My guess is that they bumped into each other at a bunch of auditions back in the day.

John: 100%. Absolutely.

Craig: What a great idea. Anyway, this reminds me in a way of like, okay, an athlete has to transition from one thing to another. It’s actually been quite a few of these. It’s not merely The Cutting Edge. Although what a great title and D.B. Sweeney. Anyway, I agree with the feels feature. What are we doing in Season 3, episode 7 for this? That’s my question, but meh.

John: Let’s move on to our next one. This is Cows by John and Mark DiStefano.

Drew: “In a bar for cows, Callie, a black and white spotted cow, and Wade, a bro-y bull, sit drinking milk. While Wade tells her wild stories about his recent trip to Moodrid, Callie stares at the bartender Jade who is also a cow, they’re all cows. They’re joined by Astrid, a Highland cow who makes fun of Wade from making his trip to Europe with his entire personality. They give Astrid a hard time because her new boyfriend is on a reality dating show, Udderly Single. Astrid wants to throw a watch party for the show, and Wade offers to organize it.”

John: This is an animated, televised, or it’s a pilot for an animated series. Let’s get into it. For what it is, it’s a good version of what it is, but I also think it’s not the pilot episode, or it’s not the first scene of what this should be. This is a Zootopia situation where these are anthropomorphic animals doing a thing. While this conversation tracks, it basically feels like it’s maybe a Friends-like sitcom, but with a lot of cow puns thrown in. It’s probably not the best way to setting up this world for me.

Craig: Yes. What I was struck by primarily was how mundane this conversation is. If you took away the fact that they’re cows, this is a pretty boring scene, unfortunately, because it’s just banter. It’s mild banter, it’s quippy. I don’t believe any of these people. The things that they’re saying to each other feels very canned, Disney television canned conversation. It doesn’t feel real. I have no idea who I’m supposed to be following here.

John: Yes. I don’t know who the central character is. I don’t really understand what the relationship is between the three of them. They’re all there.

Craig: They’re just talking. They’re just talking about something. There’s a lot of page time dedicated to the discussion of where he went to Moodrid and they’re like, “You’ve told us already.” This is not a good use of the first three pages of anything.

John: It’s just one scene also, it’s just like one continuous scene. There’s not a lot of story is happening here.

Craig: It says “Interior bar.” Now these are cows, so we’re in a cow world. “Bulls and cows mingle, dance on two legs”– I don’t know how that works. I’m just thinking about physics. I guess they’re just animated people but they’re cows. It would be nice if they made that clear– “And swill large quantities of milk. Callie sits on a bar stool next to Wade. This bar, where is it?

John: The scale of things also would feel strange.

Craig: What is the scale? What is the decor? What is the music? It says they’re dancing. To what? Can you help me feel like I understand where I am? Because all they’ve done really is, this just feels like a scene from the middle of a middle-grade sitcom where people are talking. Not an introduction to a new world where it’s about cows.

John: Yes, exactly. Here’s where I think writing the scene is useful for you. It’s like this might be a chance to say, “What does it even feel like to have these characters talking to each other? If you just do this as an exercise, it’s like let’s have a conversation where they’re talking. You get some sense of what their voices are. I can’t tell you individually what the three different cows’ voices are. You get a sense of what their banter feels like and what the kinds of cow-related jokes and puns you’re going to be throwing in here a lot would feel like. As an exploratory, let’s crank out some pages. Great, but it’s not the first three pages of this pilot.

Craig: No. If for instance, your hero is a cow named Vanessa and Vanessa works at this bar. Vanessa has to go from the kitchen, around past the bar, past the dance floor, over to cross a few booths, get to somebody, it’s bottle service, or she’s bringing them whatever grass tenders and whatever they eat. As she’s walking by, she’s catching snippets of conversation.

These things are only valuable as background snippets. I don’t buy that we would want to focus our camera and our attention on them because it won’t hold our camera and our attention. What I would understand is, okay, I’m meeting somebody. She’s tired, she’s cranky. Oh, but she has to be nice to these people. Maybe she knows somebody who’s like, “Oh my God, when are you getting off? We have to get out of here and we need to talk about this thing.” She’s like, “Yes, I will. I promise.” Then someone’s like, “Hey, blah, blah, blah, give me a, blah–“ whatever, it didn’t make a scene. This isn’t a scene, this is just people– We’re just like, talking.

John: All that said, there’s nothing objectionable or wrong on these pages. Everything flows right, and it has the jokoid feeling that feels–

Craig: You said jokoid.

John: Jokoid.

Craig: That’s a problem.

John: Yes.

Craig: That is a problem.

John: It’s a problem, but what I’m saying is you don’t look at these pages and they’re like, “Oh, this is incompetent.” It’s not that.

Craig: No.

John: I feel like these brothers– I assume they’re brothers-

Craig: Yes.

John: -they can do this. This just wasn’t a very good example of the top of their craft.

Craig: Yes. I think they need to raise the bar a little bit on themselves because it’s in the form of. By the way, when I started, the very first stuff I wrote was exactly like this. It was exactly like this. It was in the form of, but it wasn’t. That’s part of the normal progress. Somebody needs to go, “Okay, it’s in the form of, so that’s good news.” You actually have internalized rhythm and general– like the idea of how to get information out without reading it off of note cards.

Now we have to think bigger, think better, and be more creative. Just always ask yourself, is the job to do the stuff I’ve seen, or is the job to do something that’s better, or different, or just truer to me that feels like it’s something that came out of me and not an imitation.

John: Drew, what was the logline for this?

Drew: “An ambitious cow and her cattle friends navigate careers and relationships in the cow-centric city of Bovine.”

John: Okay. So it’s either Friends or Sex in the City, and there’s actually a pretty wide range between the two of those.

Craig: Then I would love to– I actually don’t know the answer to this, but what was the first scene of Friends? What happened?

John: The first time in the scene of Friends is at Central Perk and Rachel is fleeing from her marriage. She shows up in a wedding dress.

Craig: Okay. There you go.

John: That’s a scene.

Craig: That’s a scene, there’s a situation, it’s on. That’s not happening here.

John: No, it’s not.

Craig: It’s not enough to say, “And they’re cows.” That’s the other thing. You can’t just say Friends, but they’re cows. What about cows? Look, I’ve written a movie about sheep, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: I’m obsessed with the things that make sheep sheep, but also make the individual sheep different from each other. What can sheep do that we can’t, and what can’t sheep do that we can? Why cows? What is that getting me other than, “Ha, ha, ha, they’re cows?” It’s got to be more.

Actually, that’s almost something that needs to happen in these first three pages, too. That a burden that Friends didn’t have was, why humans?

I need to know why cows.

John: The audience demands a certain amount of world-building and rule-setting in cow Friends that they’re not expecting in a friends-Friends.

Craig: And justification, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: What do we get, because they’re cows?

John: Let’s move on to our final three-page challenge. This is Never Die Alone by Yeong-Jay Lee.

Drew: A storm rolls in over a barge on Lake Superior. On the deck, men dig through their cargo of coal and pull out a gaunt young man with a neck tattoo. They chain him to an iron ball and push him overboard. We follow the body down to the bottom where the iron ball crashes through a sunken colonial boat, releasing a glowing sapphire, The Eye, which begins to float to the surface. Behind it, we see hundreds of bodies on the lake bed.

In the neighboring Sault Ste. Marie, a shabby car pulls up to a trailer home. Inside, Adam Withers, 17, asks his mom, Sarah, 37, if he can go and hang out with the new girl, Jenny. Sarah’s reluctant and sets a curfew for 12:00. Adam admits he’s lost his phone, which upsets Sarah, but she still lets him go. When he’s gone, Sarah returns to her phone call and cigarette.

Craig: You left out the fact that it’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

John: What’s this?

Craig: Gordon Lightfoot.

John: Gordon Lightfoot, right.

Craig: One of my favorites of all time. Love Gordon Lightfoot. One of my favorite Canadians. Never met him.

Drew: This is my neck of the woods.

Craig: He’s a genius, though.

John: Let’s start with the title page. I’d love to see contact information and a date. Just useful. People can find you.

Craig: Or at a minimum contact information.

John: I circled a lot of things here, and I want to talk just a little bit about stuff that got me tripped up on this first page. “I barge traversing the Stygian Lake in pouring rain.”

Craig: Stygian.

John: See, I didn’t even know how to pronounce that word. It’s a thing I’ve seen, and never actually pronounced it out loud.

Craig: The Stygian decks.

John: Yes, we’ll need the word Stygian. It’s dark.

Craig: It’s a bit ornate for this.

John: Also, because you’re saying barge, I know it’s the River Styx. Wait, so are we on a barge of the dead? I didn’t know if we were going to shore or away from shore, it’s traversing. I didn’t know where we were at, which becomes important because it’s clear that they’re headed away from shore because they’re going to dump this body.

Next two sentences, “A few men wearing raincoats pace the deck as the barge slows to a stop. Lights from a town dot the horizon. They unfasten a large tarp–“ Wait, they unfasten, the lights unfasten? It’s the men. This is one of those little small things where we’re reaching back, what is this pronoun referring to?

Craig: Yes. In the prior sense, we have a little bit of an issue here, too. Yeong-Jay, I think, you don’t have to use your full vocabulary-

John: No.

Craig: -which is impressive. When you say, “Lights from a town dot the horizon,” the way I just read that makes sense. What we read is, “Lights from a town dot the horizon.” Town dot. It just doesn’t work. You don’t need that so much. Lights dot the horizon or the distant lights of a town are seen on the horizon, if you want. Horizon isn’t a great word for night. We don’t really see the horizon at night. We just see lights in the distance. We don’t know if it’s the horizon.

More importantly, information. “Two dig through the coal.” You just want to say two– Again, what? Two? “Two dig” is not a strange one, T-W-O dig. “Two dig through the coal to reveal a face buried within. They extract a gaunt young man from the pile. He bears a neck tattoo, “Beloved.”

John: Is he already dead or not, important?

Craig: That’s my problem. I couldn’t tell if they were murdering a guy or they were just dumping a corpse. I think it’s a corpse. I hope it’s a corpse.

John: He’s unconscious, he’s not protesting.

Craig: Generally, we don’t describe corpses as gaunt young men. We say-

John: The body of a gaunt young man.

Craig: -they extract the body of a– Exactly. It’s important information because I just presume they were killing him.

John: Now, what happens after this is they are going to attach to the body, this heavyweight, it’s going to sink down, and they were going to follow this down. In an unlikely way, but in a way, that is very elaborate, it’s going to crash through the sunken thing and let loose this stuff. It felt like an opening title sequence. It felt very heightened in a way. It’s like, okay, is this whole thing super heightened? Great. If it is, but then the scene after this is not heightened. This is a very plain scene that made me wonder.

Craig: I’ve seen this transition before where you see something insane happen, and then we cut to many years later, which I assume this is many years later.

John: Oh, no, I thought it was the same time, but we don’t know. It’s end of music cue on page 2, but then we’re in a kitchen, and–

Craig: I don’t know what time. I need to know if this was earlier or later. I don’t know if this was the 1960s or ‘70s. When you play The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, it implies– When was that? The ‘70s? ‘70s. It implies that’s the timeline, even though this body doesn’t crash into the Edmund Fitzgerald, he crashes into an early colonial trading vessel.

Now, I will say that what happens here is awesome. The problem is it’s overwritten. I got lost in all the words. I’m just going to read it. “The iron ball carries him, the corpse, through the sundered wooden hull and into the captain’s quarters festooned with the trappings–” Two things. “Of a wealthy and worldly trader. The ball crashes into an ornate glass cabinet, scattering the antique curiosities within. Among them, a black leather coffer–” a lot of people won’t know what that is, “Imprinted with a cross. As it tumbles through the water, it unlatches–” I’m not sure–

John: What is it? Is it the ball we’ve been following or is it this coffer?

Craig: It’s probably the coffer, but opens, I think, would be fine there. “And The Eye drifts free. It is not an impossible sapphire–“ It is not an impossible sapphire. It is a sapphire “Glowing uncannily in the darkness.” I have a problem. Until that thing comes out, how the hell am I seeing any of the rest of this? I’m in the bottom of a lake at night.

Now, you may think, “Oh, magic light.” If you then do a light trick here, that’s part of the problem. Just like, “How do we actually do this?” Then it says, “It,” meaning the sapphire, “Floats toward the surface. As it rises, pull back to reveal hundreds of bodies scattered across the lake bed.” That’s cool. That’s a cool image to see all those bodies. Do they move?

John: Yes.

Craig: Does one of them twitch? Does something happen to make me go, “This was worth watching all that?” This is actually exciting stuff. It feels very Pirates of the Caribbean or Caribbean if you will. It’s your choice, but it’s overwritten, so actually I got lost.

John: Yes, I got lost, too. Now, I was missing a cut, too, at the end of this thing because we’re about to go to Sault Ste. Marie night, but it wasn’t clear that this was that we were leaving this sequence and going to a new thing. That’s where I thought I needed a transition.

Craig: Looking at it, I think maybe it’s not. That’s why I’m so confused because it says “Exterior Lake Superior – Night,” and then you’re right, it goes “Exterior Sault Ste. Marie – Night.” Maybe it’s at the same time. I generally don’t think that in the early 2000s, guys on boats who find buried bodies in coal, which is a weird thing to have on a boat in the 2000s, would just dump the body. It feels more like something that happens in the 1800s. Something feels– I’m confused.

John: I’m confused about times, too. We have two scene headers back to back that are both exteriors Sault Ste. Marie. Don’t do that. You need to–

Craig: Yes, that’s problematic for everybody.

John: Then we’re ultimately getting into this kitchen of a trailer home. We’re meeting Adam and Sarah, who’s apparently his mother. They’re speaking with a distinctive Yooper accent.

Yooper accent, for our international listeners, is the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and it is a Finnish-Canadian thing. Just imagine it has a Finnish quality to it and the oo’s are different.

Craig: That’s why it’s Sault Ste. Marie?

John: Yes.

Craig: That’s just wrong. You’re just abusing the French language. Sorry, U.P.

John: Adam asks, “Can I go out with Jenny?” He’s 17 and he’s asking a can question, which is, sure possible, but I didn’t understand the relationship based on this can–

Craig: He’s 17 years old.

John: “I’m going out with Jenny.”

Craig: Yes, thank you. You have a driver’s license. Good. What is going on here? Why are you asking your mommy if you can go out?

John: Is she on a sex line? What is she doing? We don’t know. You’re setting up that we should be curious, and I actually need to have a little bit more information because at this point, I don’t know if she’s just customer service.

Craig: I think she’s in a meeting is my guest. I like that you were like, “Is she a sex worker on the phone?”

John: It’s night, though.

Craig: Oh, it’s night. There’s also a fawn drinking from the lake at night.

John: We don’t know if this is the same night where this body was thrown over or if it’s 20 years later.

Craig: We don’t know. Also, how late at night is this?

John: Yes, no idea.

Craig: I don’t–

John: We need this information. We know it’s before midnight because he has to be back by 12:00.

Craig: Right. Oh, yes, also 17, I guess, maybe.

John: He’s lost his phone. I don’t know.

Craig: You’ve lost your phone. What year is it again?

John: We don’t know what year it is. It’s an early 2000s Fleetwood trailer home, but it could be an old– Is it a brand new– 2000?

Craig: That’s right. We don’t know what year it is. If, for instance, it was back in the Nokia days, yes, you’d lose your phone and whatever. It’s fine.

John: It doesn’t matter much.

Craig: It doesn’t matter. I need to know. That said, look, Yeong Jay, this actually feels like there’s something awesome happening here. I love stuff like this. I love the use of the Edmund Fitzgerald. You’ve given us moments that feel like they’re from the 1800s, moments that feel like they’re from the ‘70s, moments that feel like they’re from the 2000s. We don’t know what’s going on. Pull back on the adjectives, there’s just a lot. Maybe if the other things were clearer, they would be more enjoyable, but when you have something awesome happening, let it be awesome. You don’t need to put as much ketchup on it.

John: Agreed. Drew, can you tell us the summary of what happens in this?

Craig: Never Die Alone.

Drew: “A despondent boy seeking a new lease on life discovers an eye of necromancy that grants him dominion over the dead and plunges him into a battle for his soul.”

Craig: A Necromancy of Thay. Obviously, he’s going to become a red wizard. Listen, necromantic magic is very powerful, as we both know. There’s a lot of great spells to use there. A couple of interesting cantrips. Chill Touch.

John: Toll the Dead.

Craig: Toll the Dead. Classics.

John: Classic.

Craig: Nerd.

John: It’s a–

Craig: But I like stuff like this. I see it’s a movie?

Drew: It didn’t say but I’m–

Craig: The idea of a teenager becoming a zombie lord is awesome.

John: Sure.

Craig: That could be awesome but who’s the villain? We need a little bit more of a sense of just read that again. It said what happens to him after–

Drew: “A despondent boy seeking a new lease on life, discovers an eye of necromancy that grants him dominion over the dead and plunges him into a battle for his soul.”

Craig: The last bit is the problem. Plunges him with whom? That’s the most important thing to know from that logline. Plunges him into a battle with a mysterious visitor for his soul, with Satan, with the spirit of his own grandfather, whatever it is. That just sounds existential, which feels boring. I think this could be cool.

John: Yes, it could be cool.

Craig: Yeong-Jay got a good vocabulary, I’ll give you that.

John: All right. I want to thank our three entrants into the three-page challenge this week.

Craig: Brave people.

John: Brave people. Thanks to everyone else who sent in your pages. If you would like to send in your pages, you go to johnaaugust.com/threepage, all typed out. There’s a little form there that you read through and click, and then you attach your PDF to it. If you’re a premium member, we will often send out a little email saying, “Hey, we’re about to do a three-page challenge, and we’re looking for things in a certain space,” and so that’s a benefit if you’re a premium member.

We really want to thank everyone who applied because you guys are heroes and let’s talk about the actual words on the page.

All right, let’s do our One Cool Things. Craig, my one cool thing is a movie I watched over the weekend called Strange Darling, and it is terrific. It is written and directed by JT Mollner. Everyone says– Which is true, that the less you know going into it, the better because it’s full of surprises, which is great.

That said, you need to know that it’s bloody because if you don’t like a bloody movie, you’re not going to want to watch that. Also, you’ll know from the very start that it’s in six chapters, but the chapters are not in order. What I think is so good about watching this as a screenwriter is you recognize, “Oh, that’s right. A story is told by the way the audience receives it and the order the audience receives it, not chronologically.”

The choice to put the chapters in this order is an incredibly important screenwriting decision, and you could not reverse it out of this. The story doesn’t work if it’s told chronologically. It’s such a great example of knowing what your audience is thinking and then being able to subvert those expectations by–

Craig: Putting things–

John: Putting things back.

Craig: Being intentional. That sounds awesome.

John: Intentionality.

Craig: I also have a movie.

John: Please.

Craig: My winkle thing. I think it’s a A24 movie, possibly, called My Old Ass.

John: Oh, yes. I think people love it.

Craig: It’s lovely. It was written and directed by Megan Park, Canadian. In my list of Canadians, it’s going to be hard again, to get past Gordon Lightfoot, but she has moved up the list. What I really like about it, it’s a comedy, but it’s like a weepy comedy. It’s a coming-of-age story. It’s very simple. It is simple, short. It’s a formula without being a formula, which I love. It follows the stuff about the formula that connects to us on a deep level, which is why the formula became the formula, without just feeling like it’s walking along a similar path.

It does its own thing. It felt to me incredibly current. It was easy for us when we watched John Hughes’ movies in the ‘80s to go, “Oh, this older person gets us. He’s generally speaking, in our world.” This felt like that for 20-somethings now. It just felt correct, felt true. It stars Maisy Stella, who was fantastic. She’s opposite two people. One is Aubrey Plaza-

John: Iconic.

Craig: -who was great. One is this guy, Percy Hynes White, who I wasn’t familiar with, but I think he was in Wednesday, and I think he was briefly canceled and then got uncanceled. I thought he was spectacular. The two of them together, I just thought it was just fascinating. It was really, really well done. There’s a high concept at it that they treat as low concept as possible. There’s no spoiler here, it’s in the trailers. I guess she’s 22 or whatever she is in the movie?

Drew: She’s 19.

Craig: 19. It’s all the same to me, I’m 53, it doesn’t matter. 19 years old. She’s about to leave home. She lives in Canada, which took me a while to figure out, but Maisy Stella is from Canada. She takes mushrooms with her friends, has a psychedelic experience, but the psychedelic experience is merely that her 39-year-old self shows up and just has a conversation with her, and starts telling her things. That high concept is played as low concept as possible. It’s almost like they saw a looper and went, “We could be even less invested in the who cares how this worksness of it,” which I thought was really smart. It was just very beautifully done, well written. Really well written.

John: Yes, I love that.

Craig: Also, well directed. I really appreciate directors who don’t make me look at how they’re directing so damn much and just let the story lead us and just get out of the way. It’s like invisible directing, my favorite kind.

John: That’s great. That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilleli. Our outro this week is by Nick Moore. If you’re an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send questions. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for a weekly newsletter called Interesting, which is lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts and hoodies. They’re great, you’ll find them at Cotton Bureau. You can sign up to become a premium member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments. Craig, thanks so much.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus Segment]

John: All right, so I was just describing this movie that I like so much, Strange Darling, and I didn’t want to spoil anything about it. So I wanted, in our bonus segment here, talk through how we discuss and convince people to see movies or talk about movies without ruining what’s actually in them. For example, I saw the new Joker movie, and there’s things I really liked about it, but things that I think didn’t work about it. It’s tough to discuss those things without revealing big stuff that happens in it.

Craig: For starters, I think, we overestimate our ability to convince people to do anything.

John: True.

Craig: We get excited about, I’m going to convince you to see this because I liked it. I see that you’re not leaning in hard enough. Let me give you another bit, or let me tell you that something happens that completely flips you out. When you get there, you’re going to be so happy. Then maybe you won’t because that’s how that goes. So I think we start to tread towards spoilers when we’re worried the people are going to do what we want them to do.

The easiest version would be to say, you’re describing this movie and you’re like, “You should see it. I think you would love it. If you don’t, I’m sorry. I think you’re going to love it. You just look in them like stuff happens that you will like.”

John: I also feel like anything that shows up in the trailers or shows up in the first three minutes of the movie, that’s–

Craig: Fair game.

John: Yes, it’s completely fair game.

Craig: Like My Old Ass. There’s not this moment– Obviously, in the movie, it’s like, “What? Who? You? What? What do you mean?” The characters can experience that. We all know from the trailers that’s what this thing is about, so that’s fine for us because it’s in the first, 10 minutes of the movie. It’s all the stuff that happens after. Yes, there is something big that happens that if I mentioned it or even refer to it obliquely, would be a massive spoiler. Even saying there’s a massive spoiler in a way is a spoiler.

John: That is one of the challenges, too. That’s what I was running into with Strange Darling, it’s like, if I say things about the performances or the surprising things in the performances, as you start to watch the movie, then you start looking for, “Oh, when is this surprising revelation going to happen?”

Craig: I had this wonderful experience– I think I might’ve mentioned on the show, of showing Bella Ramsey The Matrix. Not only had she not seen it, she knew nothing about it. That was so glorious. I was like, “So you’ve never–“ She’s like, “I’ve heard of it, but I don’t know anything about it.” I’m like, “I’m going to tell you nothing. Let’s just watch.”

And the delight– And it was experiencing it again in the best possible way, as opposed to, ”Oh yes, The Matrix, man, it’s going to blow your mind. It’s got this mind-blowing thing in the middle, it’s going to freak you out.” Then everything’s going to be, “Don’t worry, you won’t know what’s going on, you’ll be confused, but then you won’t be–“ None of that, just go ahead.

John: My experience with this recently was showing my daughter Too Many Cooks. It was fun watching it with her, because it was like, “Oh, okay, I sot of get it.” Then in the end it was like, “I did not like that,” because it goes to this incredibly dark place.

Craig: You shouldn’t like it, you should appreciate it.

John: Yes, absolutely.

Craig: Exactly. Sometimes you just want people to have the same experience you had, but by telling them anything about your experience, you’re ruining their chance of having that experience that you had. It’s hard.

John: There’s a movie that I’m talking about doing a remake of, and so I described it to Drew, but I had Drew watch it. I was talking through, “Oh, these are moments that I think are really good, but there’s something coming out that you haven’t hit yet that’s actually a really good version of this scene and this moment.” It’s that balance between you want to provide a framework for why it is you’re liking this thing, even if the movie is not necessarily great. What the potentials are there, and still not spoil the experience of actually getting there.

Craig: Then burdening the person with pleasing you. I just want them to watch something, I don’t need them to turn to me and go, “Oh, you were right, that is awesome.” I don’t want them thinking about me at all, just watch it. I always say to people, “Listen, I love this, you may not.” I say, “If you feel, as you’re going through, “Okay, I’ve seen enough of this, I get what’s going on.” Just stop. It’s fine, just bail out.

Drew: What do you do if, so I feel like I’m at a lot of parties or get-togethers where maybe one or two people haven’t seen a movie, but then like, you brought up My Old Ass, and there’s a thing I want to talk to you about, but John hasn’t seen it, so I don’t want to– Do you just say like, “Oh my God [beep].”

Craig: No, don’t say that.

Drew: Okay.

Craig: Also, just be patient. You’d be like, “Okay, at some point, when it’s just the two of us here,”–

John: Absolutely, when he goes off to get a beer then we’re going to talk about this.

Craig: Yes, I just want to talk real fast about this. I don’t want to pull you away from them or anything like that, but if you love it and you want to have that moment where you love something with somebody together, just be patient. If you do the thing, what happens is, I think people resent it. They resent it because they feel like, “You know what? Then I’m not going to see it, actually.” Fine, you love it so much that you need to talk about it, I don’t want it.

John: I listen to Slate Culture Gabfest, and on that show, they will often do a segment about a movie, but then if they need to, as their bonus segment, they’ll do like, “This is the spoiler part of this stuff, and then we’re going to talk about all this stuff.” That’s also another good approach. It’s just like, there’s the conversation you have going into it, and then the expectation that behind a paywall or behind a little divider curtain, “Here’s where we’ll talk about the other stuff.”

The same thing could be true for online posting. It’s like you put it in a place that is spoiler forum or you use the spoiler tag on things so that people don’t see the stuff that they don’t want to see.

Craig: So much easier in that format. Spoiler tag is great. Sometimes I’m looking for something about, let’s say, it was Baldur’s Gate 3, and I’m like, “Okay, I know this thing is supposed to be here, I can’t find it. Let me go and see what the answer is.” Then it’ll go on Reddit and someone will be like, “Oh, here it is.”

Then there’s all this other discussion, and people are really actually pretty decent about spoilers. Then you’re like, “I don’t actually want to know that, so I won’t click on that. I won’t click the fog of war there and reveal it.”

John: Yes, which is crucial. And the fog of war is actually the right, I think, metaphor for that. Because in fog of war, in gaming terms, is that as you pass through a space, you expose the stuff around you, and therefore you can start to see those things. Going in, you’re not supposed to know what the geography of a place is.

Craig: Right, sometimes there are movies where I’m like, “Look, I have no interest in seeing that movie. It’s not my genre, it’s not my thing.” People are talking about it, it’s annoying. I’m just going to go see what it is so that I don’t have to be annoyed and walk away from people. As if I’m going to see that movie one day, I know I’m not.

John: Mike’s thing is he’ll just like, “I will look up the Wikipedia article on it and just read it because I know I’m never going to see that movie, but I’ll know what actually happens.”

Craig: At least, I just don’t have to walk away from people. Sometimes people say, “Do you care if I spoil it?” I’m like, “Absolutely not. Just spoil away.” Never going to see it. I think the real problem is when we’re trying to convince people to do something that maybe they don’t want to do. It’s like we make a trailer that gives away too much with our mouths.

John: Yes. And I’m sure you’re constantly grappling with that on your show. It’s like in your ideal world you would love for everyone to come in completely clean and not have a sense of what– I haven’t watched the trailer for your show because I don’t want to know anything about how it’s going to be this season.

Craig: You don’t get hard information but you definitely learn things. It’s an interesting thing, adapting something that exists.

John: Yes, that’s true.

Craig: I don’t worry so much about the spoiler stuff because, to me, if you’re not in for the journey and the interesting things we do in a different format, then if you’re just watching it to find out the– It’s not Lost, right?

John: Yes.

Craig: I don’t need to know what happens. What is the island? There is none of that for us really. It’s not about that. It is why I had the nuclear reactor blow up instantly in Chernobyl because I’m like, spoiler, it blows up. Let’s just get that out of the way. It blowed up.

John: Yes, absolutely. Cool, thanks.

Craig: Thanks.

Links:

• Quote-Unquote Marketing Director – Apply Here!
• Veteran Script Coordinator on YouTube
• Why aren’t smart people happier? by Adam Mastroianni
• Middle Aged Man – SNL
• FLUNGE by J Wheeler White, COWS by John and Mark DiStefano, and NEVER DIE ALONE by Yeong-Jay Lee
• The Cutting Edge
• Strange Darling
• My Old Ass
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Check out the Inneresting Newsletter
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Threads and Instagram
• John August on Threads, Instagram, Twitter and Mastodon
• Outro by Nick Moore (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Drew Marquardt and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.