John

**John August:** Hey, this is John. So, one of the scripts we’re discussing today has a few bad words, so if you’re in the car with your kids, that’s your warning.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

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

**John:** And this is Scriptnotes, Episode 305, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, it’s another Three Page Challenge where we take a look at scenes written by listeners and see if they follow the rules set forth by the Screenwriters University.

**Craig:** The laws. The laws of Screenwriters University.

**John:** Not mere rules. They’re actual laws.

**Craig:** Law.

**John:** We’ll also be answering listener questions on vintage screenplays, maturity, Smash Brothers, and writing with a budget in mind.

**Craig:** Oh, Smash Bros. Smash Bros, just so you know.

**John:** Smash Bros. Was it Bros?

**Craig:** Well, it is Smash Brothers, but they abbreviate the Brothers “Bros,” which my son’s generation apparently doesn’t realize stands for brothers. So they all – every kid I’ve ever met calls it Smash Bros.

**John:** And that’s actually a good shibboleth for Hollywood. If someone says Warner Bros, then they’re not actually in the industry. Because everything with Warner Bros is always Bros, but you say Brothers. You never say Warner Bros. You say Warners, honestly.

**Craig:** Right. I had a friend growing up whose name was Thomas. That was his given name. But his parents liked to abbreviate it as Thos. Which is the old fashioned way of abbreviating Thomas. And he just started going by Thos.

**John:** I like Thos. That’s a great name.

**Craig:** Yeah, Thos.

**John:** When we get the Three Page Challenges, Godwin actually did pick ones he thought had interesting correlations or challenges to the rules put forth by Screenwriters University, so I wasn’t completely making it up in the intro.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** So, hold tight. Some follow up first. Last week we talked about a new initiative where Sony Pictures would be making available the clean versions of some of its movies. Now, you and I did not have a lot of problem with this. There was minimal umbrage from us. But some people – they had some umbrage.

**Craig:** Predictably, the DGA.

**John:** Yeah. So the directors were not nuts about this. The DGA was up in arms about this. And so Sony backed down. So today as we’ve started recording this, we’ll link to a Variety article, but basically it said, oh, you know what, if the director objects, we won’t do it. So, some of those movies will not have the clean versions released into the world.

**Craig:** They are obsessed, the DGA is, with the authority of the director. And it’s so funny. When I read this I immediately knew it had to be the DGA, because in my mind I thought, well, what if the writer has a problem with it. Nobody cares, apparently, in features. Now, in television, no one would care if the director of an episode had a problem with anything. They’d be like, Piss Off. You know? Oh, my god, but the writer-producer, he doesn’t want it or she doesn’t want it, well, we better not do it.

And in features – this is the most arbitrary, bizarre delineation – it is growing more and more obviously stupid every passing year as I live. I’m just stunned by the, I don’t know, the dumbness of it all.

**John:** So, I have tremendous sympathy for a director wanting to have his or her work portrayed in the way that was originally intended. I totally get that. And yet when it comes time for a home video release, I think there’s by nature going to be some concessions kind of made. So, for example, if your movie is showing on broadcast television, you know there’s going to be an edit happening there. So I think it’s actually not uncommon for some directors to take their names off of movies or use a pseudonym for the TV edit of things. And I get that. But I also get why you need to do a TV edit of things because it’s broadcast television and you’re putting commercials in there. I just can’t work up significant outrage over this affront.

**Craig:** Neither can I. Well, you know, look, I love these directors who take their names off of things. Oh, like now somebody is going to turn it off. Nobody cares, for starters. Unless you’re Steven Spielberg and you took your name off, it’s not a news story. Nobody gives a damn.

Second of all, screenwriters working in the feature business, I mean, the people that are constantly telling us, hey, things have to change are directors. And now directors are just shocked. Hey, it’s the same deal with us. You took a check. You did something as a work-for-hire piece. Shut up. Piss off.

I mean, now I’m just angry at directors. Listen, if they came up with a system where the writer and the director, if the writer and director agreed, then they could do it. And if they writer and director didn’t agree, then they couldn’t. I’d be fine. But I’m just so – just the DGA’s cavalier presumption that half of their raison d’être is to promote the creative primacy of the director in features. It’s just so ugly to me. As somebody who has directed and as somebody who writes, I just find it so dumb.

**John:** Yeah. I’m glad that this topic actually was able to generate a little umbrage from Craig, even if it wasn’t the initial intention of it. Umbrage was found.

**Craig:** Yeah. It was a secondary umbrage infection.

**John:** So, previous umbrage to go back to is everybody remembers Patrick. Patrick was that guy who wanted 75% of this writing teams’ money for this feature idea which never went anywhere and it sat around for like 14 years. And so we advised KB when she wrote in that she could go back to Patrick is she really wanted to redevelop that idea, but honestly she should just focus on something else.

Well, KB wrote in and she sent us an audio clip. So, let’s take a listen to what’s new with KB.

KB: I really appreciate you guys dedicating so much time of the podcast to my question. And to give you just a little bit of follow up, my writing partner and I have agreed to let it be for now. I have a big project I’m trying to undertake and I am fully content to just throw myself into that instead of worrying about this other thing. And in the meantime I may very well try to reach out to Patrick and see if 13 years later he is interested in renegotiating with a much more reasonable rate for the work that we all did.

Again, thank you so much for helping us come to a conclusion on this. And I appreciate everything you guys do. You guys are the best.

**John:** Well that’s lovely. So, I’m glad she’s taking our advice. I’m glad she’s moving on and doing other stuff. And if she reconnects with Patrick, I hope it’s on better terms that are not 75%.

**Craig:** I would imagine it would be. I mean, time generally does put things in perspective, doesn’t it? And people grow up and move on. And there’s an immediacy to ownership in the middle of things. Also, when there is nothing but potential, I think everybody is probably a little paranoid that they’re going to be that guy who owned Apple along with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and then sold it all away for a handful of magic beans. They don’t want to be that person. But now all these years have gone by. OK, it’s not Apple. It’s not Star Wars. So, let’s all keep it in perspective.

But the one thing that she’s definitely right about is that we’re the best.

**John:** No question about that whatsoever. So, let’s see if we can be the best for some other listener questions. We’ve got a whole batch to go through. Craig, do you want to take the first one here?

**Craig:** I do want to take the first one. Daniel, from Los Angeles, writes, “I just finished reading a shooting script of the Sullivan’s Travels screenplay. I noticed the formatting was significantly different than modern production drafts. It was broken down into sequences with each scene heading being a shot description instead of a location. My questions are why did they change old production screenwriting methods into what we have today. And how much can a writer or director manipulate format when it comes to the shooting script?”

That’s a great question, John. And I’m a little worried, because I’m not sure how to answer this one. What do you think?

**John:** So, I’d actually done a little research on this for a blog post many, many years ago. And so my blog post isn’t fantastic, so I’m going to instead link in the show notes to History of the Screenplay by Michelle Donnelly. She wrote it for Script Lab. But basically as screenwriting developed, it developed hand-in-hand with shooting movies. So, it’s about 100 years old. And originally the first screenplays were just a list of shots. And first off, it was just a list of shots for the director to figure out. Like, oh, these are the shots I need.

And then as you started to have sound, you started to have recorded dialogue, they got more sophisticated. It got a little bit more like a play. But there are many different kind of formats for how they were doing this. What we kind of call now the Master Scene screenplay, which is just to you and me it’s just like a screenplay. It’s the only thing we’re used to. That started around with like Casablanca. That’s when you start to see scripts that kind of look like our scripts.

Now, they become more literary over time. If you think about the original scripts, they really were just like plans for making a movie. The scripts that you and I write now are plans for selling a movie. They’re very much like here’s the vision of the movie and in reading this script you’re supposed to be getting the sense of what this movie is going to feel like. But the initial drafts and probably what the Sullivan’s Travels screenplay was like was kind of more minimalist. And it wasn’t doing some of the standard conventions that we just think about with screenplays now where everything was a scene heading and everything was laid out a certain way on the page.

So, the history of it is interesting. I’m sure there’s probably really good books out there. I haven’t read the books. But right now we’re at a place where there’s a pretty standard screenplay format that most people in western countries end up using.

**Craig:** And it’s a fairly enduring format, too. It has essentially not changed since you and I began and now we’re on two decades now. And I don’t think it was vastly different prior to that.

Of course, with individual variations. Some writers are idiosyncratic in the way they approach it. But I think you kind of put your finger on what is almost certainly the truth. That back in the days of Sullivan’s Travels and Preston Sturges, my guess is that what happened was the head of the studios said to Preston Sturges, “I need another Preston Sturges film.” And he said, well, here’s an idea I have. And the guy said, “Great. We’re making that movie. Can you get an actor?” Well, here’s an actor. “Terrific. Make it.”

At that point then the screenplay becomes a very internal document. It does not serve the purpose that we have now. A screenplay now either is something that needs to be bought, or if it’s being developed at a studio it needs to be evaluated and signed off on and approved by many, many layers of people. And then it needs to attract actors. And then it needs to attract directors.

And so the screenplay needs to be fully fleshed out and also universally understood, like a Rosetta Stone of a movie, so that all of these disparate elements can come to it and then agree to participate whether they are financial elements or creative elements. So, that makes total sense to me. I’m going to accept that as the right answer, John.

**John:** Very good. So the second part of his question was are there alternates, or like how much can you push the form. And you and I both see some screenplays that do things a little bit differently. A classic example is some screenplays don’t really use the normal scene headers. Instead they’ll sort of go to slug lines that are a shot or a sequence. And it doesn’t do normal INT/EXT. That’s OK. Ultimately if you do that kind of thing, the line producer down the road is going to assign scene numbers to some of those things, but it will still all work.

As long as what’s on the page is a reflection of what you’re going to be shooting and what people are saying, it’s going to work. But you can’t push it too crazy far. At a certain point, people aren’t going to recognize this as a screenplay and they’re going to have a hard time really understanding what you’re going for. And they’re going to freak out a bit for that.

**Craig:** Correct. And in fact what you start to realize is that all of the stylistic variations ultimately are superficial. They are almost certainly employed to help the writer just do their job. Scott Silver writes in this kind of funky quasi-format format, but really it’s the format. It’s just that there’s a few stylistic differences. And it helps him do his job. It helps him write the way he writes. Everybody has those little quirks and bits and bobs.

But none of it really does ultimately undermine the functions of the elements of a screenplay. Because people are relying on those. And if they’re not there, they’re going to hand it back to you and say, “Can you put them in there.” It doesn’t really matter if they look exactly the way they do in most screenplays. But we do need some version of them because we need the information.

**John:** So I’ve written a fair amount of animation, as have you, and in animation, sometimes the scripts look a little bit different. They will number sequences out. And honestly the process of making animation, the script is really important, but the script goes through another process where it becomes storyboarded and that becomes more the shooting template before you actually get into a production.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** In the bonus episodes, I have a really great article with Justin Marks where he talks about Jungle Book. And for Jungle Book he wrote a script and people read his script. But he also had like all these presentations where they had to show through sequences of what things were going to look like. In our conversation it’s clear that it was a much more interactive process of getting that script and the production and sort of what they’re doing – he was writing little bits and pieces all the time. And that tends to be very true in animation. And the kinds of things we’re making are often sort of hybrid animation.

So, I think you’re going to see a little bit more experimentation in certain kinds of screenplays that are designed for like not traditional point a camera at something and shoot.

**Craig:** 100%. I mean, I’m going through it right now on my Lindsay Doran movie, because it’s a live action movie but it’s Jungle Bookish in that there are a lot of entirely CG-created creatures. And many of their scenes are separate and apart from humans. Those essentially become animated scenes, comped against live backgrounds, but essentially plates.

So, we’ve been doing some previs work there and what I do is I take the relevant pages from the script and I just make a new document. That’s now a sequence document. And I start fiddling around with it, you know. And coming up with ideas and thoughts and adding things in. That’s the freedom that you get from animation. And then that really becomes – all of those sequences ultimately will in aggregate become the screenplay of those sections of the movie. Screenplay is a functional document. And when it ceases to be functional, it’s perfectly fine to transition to a more functional document. There is no need ultimately to worship the original format of that document. If it runs out of usefulness, let it go.

**John:** Agreed. All right, our next question comes from Varune in Pennsylvania. He writes, “I was wondering how important it is to consider budget size when picking a project from a list of ideas to write. I know you often say write the movie you wish you could see, but when you’re equally interested in say four or five ideas, and they vary from being something that would be low budget or higher budget, which is the one that you realistically as someone who is trying to break into the industry should focus on?” Craig?

**Craig:** I wouldn’t get hung up on it. There are really very few exceptions to what I just said to you. The issue is this. You may think, well, if I write a higher budget movie, there is a higher barrier to production, therefore there’s less of a chance that this gets made or it gets bought. Well, I’m not sure that that’s true. In fact, studios tend to now make fewer but higher budget films. So, there is this enormous appetite for tent poles and more importantly most of the jobs that are available at studios are to rewrite or work on the development of high budget movies.

Now, that said, there are certain genres where low budget is kind of a plus. If you are a horror fan, writing low budget is probably smarter because there is this tremendous renaissance in low budget horror film. They do extraordinarily well at the box office relative to their budget, and sometimes relative to any budget. And writing a high budget horror movie will probably raise a few eyebrows in terms of what are we supposed to do with this. We don’t really make these.

But mostly I would say don’t get hung up on it because if it’s terrific, then you have done your job. Far better that you write a terrific blank budget movie then a so-so blank budget movie.

**John:** Agreed. I would also say it’s important to understand what is the kind of budget for the kind of movie you’re trying to make. And so if you’re making a romantic drama but you are writing it in a way that it’s going to clearly cost $100 million, that’s a weird mismatch. So, that’s where you need to be aware of the budget. Likewise, if you’re doing things, the single room horror movie, great. That’s always going to work.

If you have an aspiration to do big comic book movies and you want to write one of those, well, write one of those. Write something that is up to that scale. And it would be a good experience for seeing what it’s like to write that kind of stuff on the page. It’s much less fun than you think it’s going to be. I guarantee. It’s actually really tedious to write those big sequences. But read those scripts and if you want to write one of those scripts, absolutely write it. I think it’s useful, especially as you’re starting out, to not limit yourself to only things you think could get made, or only things that could get you staffed. Write the things that you think you could do great at. Or, you don’t know if you can do great at, but you have the opportunity to experiment when you’re just starting out.

**Craig:** That’s great advice. It is actually quite boring to write those large, noisy scenes. There’s always, hopefully, some bits and pieces in there that are inspiring to you. That’s why the scene or sequence is there. But the actual choreography of things falling and blowing up is sometimes can feel a bit tedious to do.

By the way, you can always go down and stay interesting. For instance, if you want to write a low budget superhero movie, that would be totally fine. You can write a fascinating $1 million superhero movie because it’s genre-bending. It’s just when you’re going up, that’s where because you’re asking people to spend a lot of money, you probably don’t want to get particularly experimental or artistic about it. You want to live within the pocket of stuff that is popular because you’re saying, hey, I’m expecting you to spend a whole lot of money.

You know what movie comes to mind? I don’t know if you ever read the original script for Hancock which was entitled Tonight He Comes.

**John:** I did. And I actually got to help out on that movie a little bit.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** I loved that script. And I absolutely love what Vince Gilligan did with that script as well.

**Craig:** Yeah, so you know, initially Tonight He Comes, it was that kind of strange thing where the script was a big movie, but it was – it had an indie sensibility. And, of course, over time the sensibility was changed to match the budget. And I actually like Hancock quite a bit, but you can do it, it’s just that it becomes a challenge. Whereas writing down towards a budget I think is always a perfectly reasonable choice.

**John:** I agree. Do you want to take the next question?

**Craig:** Sure. James writes, “Do you think it’s easier to write when you are young and stupid?” Ha, James. “In your teens and twenties you believe you know everything. The ideas you have are better than anyone else’s. The plot points are obviously the best way things could occur. In your thirties you realize human behavior is a little more complex. Your earlier plots start to feel a little naïve and unlikely. In your forties, so many of the exciting, interesting ideas become totally implausible. Do you find that your own perspective on writing has changed over the years? How do you make sure that the weight of life experience becomes a launch pad and not an anchor?”

Fascinating question. We have excellent listeners. They’re smart.

**John:** They are so smart.

**Craig:** Yeah. The ones that aren’t in their twenties. They’re young and stupid. [laughs]

**John:** James, it’s less of a question and more of an observation. Naturally, things are going to change over the course of your career. There are things that I loved about being a writer in my twenties because I didn’t – in some ways I was more worried about more things then. I was always worried about screwing up. And I’m much less worried about screwing up now. The advantage of experience is I can recognize opportunities and problems much further in advance. And so I don’t have to write my way into the middle of a scene, or the middle of a movie. And you’re always like, oh wait, that’s just never going to work. Or I should have done this differently.

But I think in some ways, like part of the reason why I went off and did Arlo Finch as a book is because it was a chance to be 20 again and to be like brand new at something. And that’s also really exciting. So, I think there’s no reason why your experience at 40 is going to slow you down as long as you’re continually trying to push into new things and not keep doing the same stuff again and again.

**Craig:** I agree. I think, actually, James, you’ve kind of found the right dichotomy here. There are plusses and minuses to all of these stages of your life. There’s no question in my mind that after 20-whatever years I’m a better writer now than I was when I started out. Certainly the wisdom that comes with experience is greatly helpful. It speeds things up. It’s a bit like – somebody once told me having a pool doesn’t add value to your house when you sell it, but it makes it sell faster. And I think sometimes age is a bit like having a pool. You probably aren’t going to be better at solving particularly intractable problems, you’re just going to see them a lot faster. So, there is real benefit there. I also think that as you go on in time, hopefully if you’ve had success along the way, there’s a certain comfort level that comes with that.

You naturally will begin to accrue an authority, because you’ve been doing it for a while. It’s only – I mean, it’s human nature. If you’re sitting in a room and you’re 22, the people in that room with you are almost certainly older than you and almost certainly have more experience than you. And that will color the way that they read your work and speak to you. And, of course, the converse is true. If you are older than they are and you’ve been doing it longer than they have been, even if they are technically in a position of authority over you, there’s a natural deference that occurs. It’s earned. And it is reasonable. And as you’re older, when you run into trouble you tend to panic less because it’s trouble you’ve been in before. It’s not your first time in quicksand.

Now, the one thing I will say about being in your 20s is that there is a freedom to the way you write that is glorious. Because you do not see things ahead of you. So you are running fast and wild with no concern whatsoever that you’re going to get smashed in the face by, you know, a boulder trap. Later on you realize it’s nothing but boulder traps. The idea of just stepping on a twig, a thing is released, and a boulder smashes you down. That’s kind of what screenwriting is.

Alec Berg I think said once that he was going through some old stuff and he pulled it out and he was reading it and he thought like, well, it’s not as good as what I write now, but there’s a freedom to it. And he said he missed it. Just a certain abandon.

So, you know, you – we are always where we’re supposed to be. That’s the truth. And I don’t think that as we grow older life experience becomes an anchor. If you start feeling the weight of an anchor, I think it’s probably not so much that your life experience and your age is getting you down, it’s that you have now been doing something long enough to know you don’t want to do it anymore. Which is an entirely legitimate feeling. And there are people who just stop. And look at Dennis Palumbo, our Scriptnotes favorite therapist, who was a very successful writer in television and then in film. He got an Oscar nomination. And then just decided I don’t want to do this anymore. And just stopped and became something else.

That is a voice to listen to. But, yeah, every decade of your life comes with ups and downs. Alas.

**John:** Alas. That’s how it goes. Let’s do one last question. This is from Reed. He writes, “I’m currently writing a script that is basically a road trip movie with gamers. Super Smash players go on a road trip to a tournament and play Super Smash Bros really throughout the story. As far as the characters in the story, they are all original, but much of the content they discuss and play I don’t have the rights to. I finished the first draft and am preparing to send it out. I’m wondering what people in the industry are likely to say given the nature of the story. Will they laugh at me because I made a rookie mistake? Or is it something they could potentially work around?”

Craig, what do you think? Is Reed going to be laughed at?

**Craig:** No, he’s not going to be laughed at. I think in this case, though, because it’s so heavily weighted on somebody else’s IP, there’s probably value in acknowledging to people when you send it, hey, I am aware of this. Just so that people don’t go, “Is this guy the dumbest person in the world?” There is a difference between sending somebody a script and saying, “Buy this, make it,” and “Read this, I’m good.”

Reed does need to understand that he has put himself in a very difficult situation. There is no chance that this movie is going to be made without a lot of input and control ceded to the Nintendo Corporation. By and large, they don’t do this frequently. And when they have, it hasn’t worked out very well for them.

So, if he’s aware of that, then I think it’s fine to just sort of say, hey look, this is about the writing.

Now, I have to say, my son went through a Super Smash Bros phase in his life and one of the questions is how necessary is that specific element to this. Can it survive without it? It may not be able to, but it’s something worth at least asking.

The other movie that comes to mind is Fan Boys, which centered on guys on a road trip trying to break into Skywalker Ranch. And it was very Star Wars heavy. But there are so many Star Wars elements that are now essentially doable because they’re part of culture and there’s kind of a fair use thing going on there. So, no, I don’t think they’ll laugh at you. But I think it probably would be good if you somehow acknowledged that you knew.

**John:** A way I might acknowledge that I knew would be the intermediary title page which is like you have the title page to your script and then after that you have what would be like a dedication page in a book where you might say like Super Smash Bros is a worldwide phenomenon, sold this many things. It’s property of the Nintendo Corporation. It’s not mine. And then the script starts. It’s a way of saying like, look, this is a really big deal. I don’t own the rights to this, but you’re going to read this because it’s a really good script. That’s a way of sort of setting up what you’re going into.

I would also say like, Reed, you wrote a writing sample. We’ve talked about this on recent podcasts. You know, you wrote something that you really wanted to see out there in the world, and if it’s good, people will read it and they might hire you for other stuff. And maybe there’s a way you can swap something else in.

What I found so fascinating about Reed’s question is he’s worried what people are going to think and say. He’s sort of worried about his feelings. Don’t be so worried about your feelings. Write the thing you want to write. And if it’s great, people will respond to it.

**Craig:** What are these feelings you experience, Reed? [laughs] Oh, I will say though that you’ve given him excellent advice, by the way, of how you described that intermediate page, because there is something very clever about saying this is what it is, this is how many people play it, it is owned by these people. Not only are you acknowledging that you’re very aware of what you’ve done, but you’re also telling them this is huge.

The issue is somebody might pick it up and go, “Well, this is, A, somebody else’s property, and B, who gives a damn about Super Smash Bros?” Well, 80 million people. You know, whatever it is. That number is going to perk them up. They always get excited about that sort of thing. So, very smart.

**John:** Cool. All right, let’s get on to some new work. Let’s get on to our Three Page Challenges. So, as always, we have a special guest reading our synopses this week. Craig, do you want to set up this guy, because he’s your hero.

**Craig:** He is my hero. Steve Zissis, my sprit animal, my Greek brother from another mother, star of the dearly departed series, Togetherness, on HBO. And Steve has now kind of branched into his own deal. He’s a proper entrepreneur now. He has set up a new series – and who is that with, that new series? Oh, I don’t know if it’s been announced yet. So I’m not going to say. But he’s got something going on. How about that?

He is the partner of friend-of-the-podcast, Kelly Marcel, and they have a child. So he’s a new dad. And we thought since he was probably up a lot at night he could just do this for us.

**John:** So thank you, Steve, for reading the synopses. If you would like to read the full Three Page Challenges, there are links in the show notes, so you can open up the PDFs and read along with us. So let’s let Steve take us off with our first Three Page Challenge.

**Steve Zissis:** Oh Fuck, I’m Invisible, by Wyatt Cain. We open on Vlad and Ilyich, two Russian soldiers, standing guard outside a Siberian military base. They chat about weight loss plans, when suddenly an invisible creature snaps Vlad’s neck and strangles Ilyich. Cut to Dave’s apartment, where Dave watches his roommate, Mandy, through the key hole, waiting for the chance to make his escape. He thinks he’s clear, but then Mandy spots him and regales him with a story of how she finally fucked that adopted chick.

Dave emerges from his apartment, checking the time. He spots, Kalman, his decrepit Polish neighbor. Kalman invites Dave inside to look at his new painting. Dave is too polite to decline. Now, seriously, Dave rushes down the street. He’s accosted by a crazy homeless lady muttering a prophecy about the one who casts no shadow. She follows him. At Leo’s Tacos, Mohammed waits. He sees Dave and homeless lady approaching. Homeless lady in the middle of a prophetic proclamation. With that, we reach the bottom of page three.

**John:** Craig, what do you think of Oh Fuck, I’m Invisible?

**Craig:** Well let’s start with the title first. Obviously it is designed to provoke. Oh Fuck, I’m Invisible. Now, these sorts of things when we started out would have just been like, what? But it’s quite trendy now to do this sort of thing. Obviously Wyatt Cain is very well aware that you cannot release a film called Oh Fuck, I’m Invisible, but Wyatt Cain quite cannily also understands that that’s OK. He’s just trying to get his script read. And in a big pile of scripts, the idea here is, oh, somebody might pick up Oh Fuck, I’m Invisible.

It is quickly becoming overdone. I see a lot of this. The cutesy title. But that in and of itself, there’s no judgment there. There was generally speaking here a very solidly put together three pages. There’s some mystery and there’s some confusion, but mostly tends towards mystery, which I like. So, just going through it roughly.

First of all, just the appearance of these pages is correct. If I don’t read them and I just look at them, they look correct. A lovely balance of action and dialogue and the action is rarely more than three lines long. Only once really. So I love that. Very, very good.

A little bit of a problem right off the top, just always worth proofreading here. It’s not really a proofreading thing, it’s more of a think-o thing. We’re EXT. Siberian Military Base. Night. “Frozen tundra. Just bleak, icy bullshit in every direction,” which is hysterical. That’s funny. “The only dot on the landscape –,” Dot on the landscape, “A Russian military compound. Two RUSSIAN SOLDIERS, Vlad and Ilyich (30s), stand guard outside a heavy bunker door.” Well, if it’s a dot on the landscape, how the fuck can I see Vlad and Ilyich? They are dots inside of the dots across the bleak icy bullshit.

So, you want to like move in there. You can establish your exterior. Really, what I think you want is EXT. Siberia. Night. And then the only dot on the landscape—new thing. EXT. Military Base. A Russian military… So that we know we’re jumping in.

They have a little bit of pointless chit chat and then they are killed by an invisible creature.

By and large, it was exciting. It was fun to read. Lots of underlines and capitalizations and italics, which were reasonable because it was something that was kind of shocking. It wasn’t random. There was an invisible man or woman trying to kill them.

There’s an attempt at a transition, which I don’t think would actually work. Pushing in on Vlad’s bulging eyeball and MATCH CUT to an eye peers through the crack of a door. That’s almost certainly not going to work. But, you know, at least his heart is in the right place. I mean, if you just imagine it, it’s just not – either Wyatt hasn’t written his intention right, or he just hasn’t thought it through. One or the other. It’s not quite right.

And I did have to read a bunch here back over and over, because the geography was a little cluttered to me. He’s in his apartment. An eye peers through the crack of a door. I immediately – I don’t know if you did this – I immediately went to he’s at the front door looking out into the hallway.

**John:** 100%. I got confused on geography quite a few places in here. I’ll just jump in to say like what I love so much about this is Wyatt gets it. From the title forward, like Wyatt understands what he’s doing. And he seems to have probably read a bunch of scripts and sort of knows how this all works. I felt like I was in really good hands tonally throughout the whole thing. Sort of like he knew what we were expecting and he knew how to sort of honor that and push past it in ways that were really smart.

So you start with these Russian guys talking. The first guy is like, “I’ve lost seventeen pounds in six weeks. All I did was cut bread and sugar.” Which is like the weirdest thing to have Russian guards say, but it was just delightful and gave me a really good sense of like what the tone of this was going to be. But then the action sequence with this invisible guy killing them was great. So I loved all of that. Just really, really well handled.

But I had the same kind of like I had to reread a few things that I don’t think Wyatt understood that we could get confused on. So this confusing geography from the front door, but also on page two, Mandy is in the kitchen and Dave is trying to sneak out past. And we hear, “Yo, Dave, you’re up,” and reveal Mandy is in the bathroom, pissing with the door open. But she was just in the kitchen.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So I got – like wait, what? So here’s how you could make that make sense. So if Mandy was OS at that point, basically she’s walked off camera. So he doesn’t know where she is. He’s probably assumed she’s gone back to her bedroom. Then if that’s OS, then we hear this, he turns back, and then it’s revealed that she was closer by than he thought. But that seems so trivial, but if I had to read this three times to understand it, there’s a problem.

**Craig:** I completely agree. Those little things are important. It’s annoying. It’s frustrating. Because there’s actually no creativity involved there. You’ve already done the creativity. So Wyatt has imagined this apartment. He knows. He could draw us a picture of the apartment perfectly. And he might even understand that the time lapse between her cooking breakfast and her in the bathroom is a bit elastic. It’s just that we don’t see it. So there’s this annoying busy work that must be done to protect the creative parts. Think of it that way, Wyatt. It’s just you’re protecting all of your brilliance by doing the annoying parts so that we can see it. It’s as simple as that.

But, yeah, and you know, and Mandy, there’s kind of a fun way of revealing that Mandy is a lesbian, or bisexual. And then we’ve got a great little screenwriting convention here. You’re always looking for some sort of propulsive force through things. You know, we don’t like reading scenes where nothing is happening or people are simply floating through. He’s late for something. We don’t know what it is. Classic simple mini-mystery.

He glances at his watch. It’s 12:07. He’s trying to get out. He gets pulled aside by his neighbor. And now he’s even more late. Now, and this is the part where it’s on that think border between confusing and mysterious, he encounters a crazy homeless lady. He is not taking her seriously until she says something that’s not particularly more crazy than the first thing she said, or the first two things she said. And then he decides, oh OK, you’re coming with. That was one point where I actually wanted to see him react. I needed a moment there where I understood that Dave heard something in what she said the third time that wasn’t there the first two times. And even though we can’t tell the difference, he can.

So, I needed a little moment of recognition there.

**John:** Craig, I think you actually misread that. And I had the same problem here, too. So, Dave says, “That’s great. I actually have to—“

“…about the one who casts no shadow.” So that following, I think it means that she gets up and starts following him.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** And so if you take that, so take that parenthetical and break that out as an action line. She gets up and physically follows him. Because then his line like, “Oh, OK, you’re coming with.” Basically she’s just started walking after him because then he sees like Dave and homeless lady are approaching in the next scene. So this homeless lady is just like following him.

**Craig:** Oh OK.

**John:** And kept talking to him. It makes good scene sense. It just didn’t make sense with the words on the page.

**Craig:** Yeah, no. So that was just executed incorrectly. Because following shouldn’t be in parenthesis. The problem with “following” is it’s an ambiguous word. People follow each other just with speech. They follow by understanding, whatever. So I thought he meant following, like I get what you’re trying to do, but I’m going to keep talking.

So you do need to put that in action. And then when Dave says, “Oh, OK, you’re coming with,” I think then Wyatt means to say that Dave is like, “Oh, OK, you’re coming with, like you’re not leaving me.” That does require a parenthesis of like (oh shit) you know. We need to know what his attitude is there, because those words on their own are far too ambiguously read for me to get what’s going on there. But I mean, overall these were very good–

**John:** Good pages.

**Craig:** Pages. And it’s a fun tone. And certainly makes me want to keep going. I think you put your finger on it. Wyatt seems to know what he’s doing. And we’re in good hands here, so good job.

**John:** Cool. All right. Let’s get to our next Three Page Challenge. Mr. Steve Zissis, if you would please give us our next entrant.

**Steve:** TMU, a pilot by Azhur Saleem. London. 1847. Night at the Tabbard Inn. In a lodger’s room, an oil lantern flickers. A leather case slams on the table. Ervin, a small haggard man, frantically grabs his belongings around the room. He lifts the mattress, retrieving reams of paper – mechanical schematics, machinery layouts, anatomical drawings of human body parts.

Ervin folds the papers away into his carry case. He scrawls a message on a sheet of paper, then doubles over, throwing up a thick tar-like substance. As he tries to compose himself, a burly man bursts into the room. The two men tussle, with burly man going for the carry case. Ervin fights back, rescuing what he can of his papers. In a final desperate effort to escape, Ervin leaps out of the second floor window. Burly man expects to see his [unintelligible] dead on the street below, but to his surprise Ervin is gone.

And those are Azhur Saleem’s three pages.

**John:** All right. I will start off this one. So, I had a lot of notes here. I had a lot of things that I had a hard time following just on the page. I liked overall where this is going. I liked overall the tone we were able to create. It felt overwritten to me. And I felt like every sentence was about one clause too long. And so I want to sort of really just dig in to the words on the page here less than about the plotting that I saw.

So, this starts with a teaser, so this is some sort of pilot for some sort of show. We’re in Bethnal Green, London. First line here: “Hopeless poverty stains the fabric of this borough. Down one squalid street, several silk weavers close up shop.” So those first two sentences we had fabric and silk, which is sort of the accidental parallel and makes it feel like they’re the same thing, but fabric is a completely different thing than silk for how you’re trying to use it. It was poetry doing you wrong there. So, clean that up a bit I’d say.

I would also advise to sort of combine these first two sections. Because it’s meant to be this establishing shot that gets us into London 1847. And then we’re at the Tabbard Inn. But I kind of felt like we were in the same place the whole time. Maybe it’s one tracking shot. Maybe it’s some way to get us to the Tabbard Inn, like follow somebody to get us there. But it was a lot. I had to sort of slog through it.

The other word that got repeated a lot in this opening section was light. So, “The windows glow with a warm light, which peters out on the river of mud squelching through the street.” Not quite sure what squelching means there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Mud doesn’t squelch on its own.

**John:** “Above all the noise and clamor, a second-floor window with a solitary light that illuminates one room.” A light illuminates – it was just a little – again, just a little too much. I felt like there were extra words being thrown in there just to sort of be pretty that weren’t actually helping tell any story or get us moving through the scenes.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yup. Keep going.

**John:** Keep going. So, we get into the Tabbard Inn. “An oil lantern flickers on a wooden table.” God, we’ve had a lot of light here so far. Let’s get rid of the rest of this sentence and finally get to our main guy. So, this guy Ervin, he’s described as being blustering around the room. He blusters around the room. Not entirely sure what blusters means in this thing.

But there’s some actions in the next paragraph that are really helpful. “He grabs his belongings from around the room. Throws them into the carry case.” Let’s let that be our first encounter with Ervin and then give him the sentence that describes what he’s like. I felt like I had to go through a long description of what he was like before I could see what he was doing.

He’s in the middle of action. Let’s see the action first before we kind of get into it.

Then finally we start to have this encounter with the burly man. I like the burly man’s dialogue. “Don’t kick up a shine now.” That felt great. That felt period. And the action within this was all good. I was curious to see that there’s something kind of Lovecraftian/Steampunky kind of happening here. And that was really interesting. So l liked when we actually got into the action sequence. I just wanted to get there a little bit faster.

**Craig:** Yeah. Generally I’m with you. I think that these are good pages in terms of what happens. The character, what he’s doing, and the encounter that occurs is perfectly fine. I agree with you that there’s a bit too much poetry. Here’s the danger with poetry. If it’s good poetry, well, your script has a bunch of unnecessary good poetry in it. If it’s bad poetry, oh boy. And there are things here that are just bad poetry. “The windows glow with a warm light, which peters out on the river of mud squelching through the street.” I don’t know how light peters out on a river of mud. If the windows are glowing with a warm light, they’re glowing. And mud doesn’t squelch on its own. Boots can squelch through mud. It just becomes sort of pointlessly ornate. And it starts to undermine confidence in what’s going on.

My bigger problem with the first half of this page is that it’s boring. If I’m shooting it, I’m so bored. So, I have a shot of a street. I have a shot of an inn. This is London in the middle of a sort of nightmarish, Victorian-ish time. And this is a rough part of town. There must be some better way to do this. Is there a rat running? Is there something – what are we following? Can we follow somebody who is leaving a prostitute and maybe she’s trying to get away and he grabs her and yanks her into the bar. And then we come up to see the light. There’s so many dynamic, fascinating, disturbing, funny, terrifying ways that you can do this and you’ve done none of them. You’ve just shown me a street and then shown me a building.

People and action are interesting. Streets and buildings are just streets and buildings. So, I wanted so much more. And remember, this is the first thing we see. The first thing we see. And you are using this to advertise your creativity here. And if it is not meant to be quiet and soft and small, then it must be somehow invigorating, provocative. And I think that given the tone here you want invigorating and you want provocative.

Similarly, when we get inside the inn, I just was missing a sense of direction. You have this image. He’s going through, he’s rummaging through his room. We’ve seen that a million times, so let’s not imagine that that’s interesting. He’s grabbing up all of these papers. Well, we have a mild interest in what those are. One particular image that we’re going to see – a figure suspended in the air. “Holding him aloft, six mechanical cables IMPLANTED into his back. Man and machine fused together…”

That’s something that could be just sitting there in the foreground. And in the background, there’s this man going around. Somebody lifting up a mattress and pulling stuff out is vaguely interesting because we understand he hid it for a reason. But that’s something that might be more interesting if the show is saying we have more to say than just that. Look at this picture. And then he comes up and then he grabs that picture at the last moment. Or maybe he doesn’t grab that one. That’s the one that he grabs in the fight. But make it special. Make it provocative and bizarre. Give us a moment to look at it so we can be looking at that while he’s doing these other things.

There is some good mystery going on. He’s puking up this creepy black substance. And then, of course, this man appears who is sort of Mr. Hyde-ish. And there’s a good fight. I like the way the fight is spread out. There’s a nice use of white space here, which is all terrific. And then here’s what happens. What happens is we see a street and we see a bar and we see room. We see a guy grabbing papers, and then a man comes in. He beats the guy up. The guy throws himself out a window. And then when the guy looks out the window, that man is gone. There is nothing there that is actually quite shocking to me.

The only thing that is shocking to me is the picture that has been drawn. That is the thing where I got, ooh, what is that? Yikes. Even the puking up black stuff. I’m like, OK, I guess there’s a supernatural thing going on here. Maybe that’s the last thing we see.

But, somehow or another this was well written, it just wasn’t well directed. And–

**John:** I would agree with you. This is an obvious thing to say, but I think the obvious thing might be the appropriate choice here. So, the action of this scene is that Ervin is like panicked and he’s packing up all his stuff to get out of there. So, why didn’t we start with him outside? Like he’s racing back to the Tabbard to get his stuff to get out of there. And so if those opening shots are like we’re following Ervin as he’s frantically trying to get back to his place and get past the prostitute and the guy fucking in the alley. And then get into the place, to get up to his room. He throws open the door. He’s packing up his stuff. And then the guy shows up. Then there’s at least some – there’s a reason why we had those earlier shots. And he’s helped introduced us to the world.

There might have been also just one opportunity for him to say something to somebody, or some other interaction would have happened before we got into this room and started fighting with this guy.

**Craig:** Yeah. I agree. Also I thought that the arrival of the burly man was a bit anticlimactic – or not anticlimactic, anti-pre-climatic, because his arrival is announced by footsteps. And generally speaking, if I’m in a show here where this guy is puking up weird creepy black stuff, and he’s dealing with man and machines, this man that’s pursuing him, there should be some hint of Something Wicked This Way Comes. Even if that man himself is not supernatural, here’s a tinkling. There’s somebody outside. The prostitute who is laughing with a guy. And the two of them, suddenly they’re not laughing anymore. Do we hear a body outside hit the ground?

There needs to be some exciting way to let us know, oh shit, the bad person is coming. And so there’s just more – there just needs to be more creativity here, I think.

**John:** I agree with you. The last thing I want to point out is that in both of the blocks of dialogue it’s starting with dot-dot-dot. But there’s no sort of pre-dialogue to get us into there. I don’t understand why there’s dialogue that’s starting dot-dot-dot. So he says, “…No, not yet.” “…Don’t kick up a shine now.” I don’t understand why the dot-dot-dots were there.

So, get rid of the dots.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’ve never actually done the preceding dot-dot-dots unless there was a trailing dot-dot-dot prior to it. And usually I wouldn’t capitalize the first letter of the first word following a dot-dot-dot because it is a continuation of something. It’s not the beginning of something. So, yeah, but that didn’t – believe me, if everything else was great, I wouldn’t have cared.

**John:** I wouldn’t have cared either. All right, Mr. Zissis, bring us home. If you could please read us the third Three Page Challenge.

**Steve:** Four Nineteen, but Ashley Sanders. The year is 2002. On a street in suburban Manchester, parents and their kids leave a birthday party. Owen Millar drives his four-year-old son, Sam, home. At home, Owen feeds his son, bathes him, then puts him to bed. Later, Owen’s wife, Sara, comes home. Takes off her makeup as Owen reads in bed. Through the course of the night, we come back to the time on the clock. 11:47. Owen tosses and turns. 1:12. Sara gets up to go to the bathroom and checks in on Sam. He’s fast asleep. 4:18. A moan from Sam’s room wakes Owen. 4:19. Owen goes to investigate. He opens the door to find two figures standing over Sam’s bed. One lifting the still sleeping child. That’s when we reach the end of page three.

**Craig:** I really enjoyed this. There is a strange thing that happens I think when stuff is working somewhat well. And that is it can impart a feeling without any individual piece of something telling you this is what you should feel. And overall what I felt was a growing sense of weird, unsettling dread. And I didn’t know why. That’s the best kind of dread. Because that’s actually how dread works.

You start to feel something and you don’t know why, because not one single thing that’s happening in and of itself is demanding of anxiety. And yet anxiety is what you feel.

So, let’s talk a little bit about sort of the first page. We’ll call this the normal life of things. We’re EXT. Suburban Street, Manchester. Please tell us if this is Manchester, United Kingdom, Manchester, New Hampshire, Manchester, Texas. Where are we?

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Manchester in and of itself is not specific enough. Opening credits and music over “4 TODAY party balloons tied to a garden gate.” I understood that, but I think four should probably be spelled out F-O-U-R, because otherwise it’s 4, number 4 today, what is it 4 Today party balloons? It’s weird to start a sentence with a digit.

**John:** Yeah. What did you take that as? Were the balloons printed with 4 Today?

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Or there were four Today balloons. Four balloons printed with the word Today.

**Craig:** Today. Like the party is Today. I think? But hard to tell. Generally speaking, what you don’t need to say is something like, “The cars, clothes and haircuts tell us this isn’t present day. CAPTION: 2002” The caption does it. Also, we don’t really call them – captioning is more of something that is imposed upon a movie to indicate this is what these people are saying in another language, or this is what this sign means in another language. Generally we would say Title.

**John:** Or super.

**Craig:** Or super. Exactly. Not caption.

**John:** Here’s my suggestion for that sentence getting into it. I would get that down to, “The cars, clothes, and haircuts tell us we’re in…,” here’s a good use of dot-dot-dot, “Super: 2002”

So you’re letting the page do some of the work for you here.

**Craig:** Right. I think that’s exactly right. I like actually how mundane this is. It’s so boring, and that’s exactly the right choice. So we have Owen. He’s the dad. And he has his young four-year-old son, Sam. And they’re returning from a birthday party. And now they’re in a – and I like the way also that this was done here. Ashely, our author, has done something that answers a question that we get all the time, which is how do you slug line or scene head scenes that take place in a house but in lots of different rooms and all sort of smushed together. This is how I would do it probably. We’re INT. MILLAR HOUSE. DAY. And then as we move around she just gives us bolded notes for where we are, which rooms we are. And we understand therefore that time is passing. And it is compressed. And there’s no need to over-explain it.

They’re watching dinner. He gives Sam a bath. They’re enjoying it. He reads his son a book. Now he’s alone. Suburban boring life. He’s drinking a beer, standing outside on the patio. His wife comes home. She gives him a kiss. Now she’s getting ready for bed. He’s getting ready for bed. There’s a little bit of a reminder that we are post-9/11. Owen reads a colour supplement in bed. Now I know, by the way, we’re in Manchester, United Kingdom, because it’s colour and supplement.

The front cover is a picture of the Twin Towers, the strap line: One Year On.

**John:** Strap Line. Yeah. So many things in one sentence revealed it. Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s the most English sentence in history. Colour Supplement. Strap line.

So in America we will not know what a strap line is, nor will we know what a colour supplement is. Twin Towers would be capitalized because that was a proper noun. And now they’re sleeping, kind of.

So, by this point on page two, either this is intentional or it’s not, but if it’s intentional I am enjoying how perfectly boring this is. It feels intentionally boring. That’s what we want.

And then what happens is Ashley delivers more intentional boredom, but now the dread begins to grow. There are these elements. Each parent wakes up for whatever reason. As mundane as I need to pee. And then goes right back to bed. Every time they move across the landing, there’s a floor board that creaks. Does it mean something? Maybe not. It happens each time. There is a little nightlight. Sam is sleeping. The clock keeps advancing. Keeps advancing. And then at the end of page three, he just again – repetition – the clock changes to 4:19. Owen gets out of bed. He crosses the landing. There’s the creak again. He steps into Sam’s bedroom. And gets an adrenaline jolt like a brick in the face. Very good.

And two figures are standing over Sam’s bed. One lifting the still sleeping child. This is very exciting. And we know from the title that the time 4:19 means something. I felt like this was expertly done, in my opinion. I really enjoyed it.

**John:** I really enjoyed it, too. So, a few things I would suggest for Ashley. I liked how she moved around the house. I would say for INT. MILLAR HOUSE on page one, rather than DAY say VARIOUS, which gives a sense of like, OK, this is going to be at different times. Or DAY TO NIGHT. Because you ultimately are going into night. So it’s a way of cluing in the reader we’re going to be here for a while, so just go with me.

I thought the Twin Towers stuff was on the nose when I read it, but it totally could work. I mean, nothing else bumped me, so I would totally forgive the Twin Towers stuff. And it does let me know that something bad is going to happen, probably, so that’s useful.

I loved near the bottom of page two, “Sam is spread-eagle in bed, sleeping the way only little kids can.” Absolutely true. Here’s what I liked about Ashley’s writing here. She was observant of normal human behavior in a way that felt like, oh, these are actual people. This is not just people in a movie. And that was great.

So, I loved the suspense I was feeling. Like the suspense of like I know something is going to happen just because of how she’s doing this on the page. And I’m really nervous. And there wasn’t thrum. She wasn’t talking about the music. Just the way it was done on the page, I could feel what the movie was going to feel like, and that was suspenseful. So, really nicely done.

**Craig:** Really nicely done. And also a little note on the title of the episode. So the series is called Four Nineteen. And this is episode is Episode 1, Sleep and Dream of Home. What a fantastic title. And I’ll tell you, that actually goes further with me than, Oh Fuck, I’m Invisible. Because it’s not gimmicky and yet I’m already somehow nervous. Sleep and Dream of Home. It’s very Neil Gaiman-y. It was all just really well done.

Ashley Sanders can do this and I’m excited for whatever this is. You never know, right? I mean, these things can turn into this wonderful series or not, but she can write. And she can write in this format. So very well done, Ashely. Very well done.

**John:** One last wrap up note. For both Ashley’s script and for Wyatt Cain’s script, which had title pages on them, they left off the word Written or Written by, so traditionally on screenplays and teleplays you will spell out Written by for this kind of thing, rather than just By or rather than just your name. So do say Written by. Put it on a separate line. That’s sort of the standard format here. And it’s just – it’s nice. There’s no reason to not do that on your title page.

**Craig:** Agreed.

**John:** So I would also want to celebrate the wonder of Steve Zissis, so thank you very much for reading these aloud for us. If you have three pages you would like us to take a look at, go to johnaugust.com/threepage, all written out there. And there’s a form you can fill out. You can attach your PDF. And it will go into Godwin’s inbox. And he will take a look at it. So he picks the ones he thinks are going to be the most interesting, so not necessarily the best, never the worst, and we take a look at them every couple of weeks.

Thank you to all three of these writers for being so brave to share these with us.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** All right, it’s time for our One Cool Things. Mine is A Speck of Dust, the new Netflix comedy special by Sarah Silverman. It is delightful. So if you have Netflix, it is there. And you should watch it. I loved Sarah Silverman’s show on Comedy Central. And I was at the taping actually for one of her previous specials, Jesus is Magic, which is just so great. And I haven’t gone back to watch the special, but I feel like if the camera ever pans past me, there are moments during that special where I couldn’t breathe anymore. Like I had to sort of close my eyes and recapture oxygen in my body.

What I really appreciated, though, about this new special, A Speck of Dust, is what a good writer she is. Because she’s, I mean, after doing this for so many years, she’s a really good performer. She knows how to sell a joke, but the very careful ways in which she sets things up and comes back to them.

There’s a moment pretty early on in the show where she does a throwaway line, and then she stops and she goes back and she explains what a throwaway line and why she threw that joke away. And how it’s all going to – basically why you throw some jokes away, because they work better that way. But then she folds that back in to where it’s going. You recognize that it’s all so carefully planned and yet so effortless. It was really remarkably done.

So, I’d really recommend everybody check out A Speck of Dust, by Sarah Silverman.

**Craig:** If the world were fair, only comedies would receive awards. The level of skill and awareness and specificity and craft that goes into things like this are just remarkable, and she is an exceptionally good performer and writer. There’s no question about that. She really is at the top of her game.

So, my One Cool Thing, is somebody else who is at the top of their game. John, did you watch the BBC Miniseries, Sherlock?

**John:** I watched the first two seasons. I have not watched this most recent season. I will tell you that I fell off the Sherlock bandwagon, but I think you’re right in the middle of the Sherlock bandwagon, aren’t you?

**Craig:** Well, I went ahead and binged the whole damn thing because I was on a long flight and it seemed like a good idea. And the truth is there are parts of the show that I absolutely love, and there are parts where I’m like, meh. But my One Cool Thing is Mark Gatiss, who is both the co-creator and co-writer of the series, and also he plays Mycroft Holmes.

**John:** Oh, I didn’t realize that was the writer. He is so fantastic.

**Craig:** Yes. He really is – I hope I’m pronouncing his name right. It could be Gatiss. It’s Gatiss. Probably should have done the homework on that. Regardless, these are the people that somehow make me feel so terrible about myself because here he is, he was a performer and writer in a popular comedy troupe in the UK. Then he was running, writing, and occasionally acting in Doctor Who for a number of seasons. Then he does this. And he acts in it. And he does all these other things.

Ugh, I didn’t do anything today.

His portrayal of Mycroft Holmes is phenomenal. I would love a show that’s just Mycroft Holmes. That would be the most amazing series, just the Mycroft series. It’s spectacular.

He also, if you watch Game of Thrones, he also has appeared as Tycho Nestoris, I think the character’s name is. He’s the banker from the Iron Bank of Bravos who sits there–

**John:** Of course, that’s right.

**Craig:** And patiently explains to Stannis why they’re not going to back him with cash. Mark Gatiss, just spectacular. And, again, do look at – if you haven’t seen the show, and if you don’t get into it, you don’t get into it. But his portrayal of Mycroft is just wonderful.

**John:** Agreed.

All right, that is our show for this week. So, as always, it is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Sam Brady. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you send questions like the ones we answered today. But the short questions, we love them on Twitter. So Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

We’re on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcasts. Just look for Scriptnotes. If you’re there, leave us a review. That does help – helps other people find our show.

You can find the show notes for this episode, including the PDFs for the Three Page Challenges at johnaugust.com. You’ll also find transcripts there. They go up about four days after the episode posts. And you can find all the back episodes at Scriptnotes.net, including the Justin Marks episode I reference today, which is really just terrific.

So, Craig, thanks for a fun episode.

**Craig:** Thank you, John. I will see you, whether you like it or not, next week.

**John:** Awesome.

Links:

* [Sony Won’t Release Clean Versions of Films if Directors Disapprove](http://variety.com/2017/digital/news/sony-wont-release-clean-movies-1202466211/)
* [The History of the Screenplay](https://thescriptlab.com/features/screenwriting-101/3147-the-history-of-the-screenplay/)
* [Steve Zissis](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1587813/)
* Three Pages by [Wyatt Cain](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/WyattCain.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Azhur Saleem](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/AzhurSaleem.pdf)
* Three Pages by [Ashley Sanders](http://johnaugust.com/Assets/AshleySanders.pdf)
* [Sarah Silverman – A Speck of Dust](https://www.netflix.com/title/80133554?source=applesearch)
* [Mark Gatiss](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0309693/)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [John on Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/johnaugust/?hl=en)
* [Find past episodes](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Sam Brady ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 304 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show, we’ll be looking at how screenwriters describe locations and how those choices impact production and the final product. Plus, we’ll be talking a look at how podcasts have become a new source of IP for adaptations. Also, how to deal with that note to make your characters “more likeable.”

Craig: Argh.

John: Yeah. Craig, for the first time in 11 months, we are in the same time zone.

Craig: It’s so nice. So I am here with my family in Amsterdam and having a lovely time. And we are on the exact same time you are. Central European Standard time, which in France is nice because it’s – c’est – it is.

John: It’s really, really nice.

Craig: So yeah, we’re here at the same time. The place where I’m staying, it’s a very large room. You know, the Dutch people are the tallest people in the world. You knew that, right?

John: I did not know that. That’s scientifically proven that they are?

Craig: It is a fact. And so the ceilings here are very high. They’re so much higher than any human being would ever be. For instance, the average height in America, it’s shorter than you think. Because it’s an average. So, some people are very, very small. In the Netherlands, the average height of a Dutch man is 6 foot. That’s average.

John: That’s tall.

Craig: Yeah. In the United States, I think the average height for a man is like 5’8” or something, or 5’9” maybe.

John: Yeah.

Craig: They’re very tall people. So, anyway, it’s very boomy and echoey in here. But, hey, you know what? We’re on the same time, so there’s that for us. Nobody else will appreciate it, but we can.

John: I was going to say, it’s going to be one of those rare cases where neither one of us is tired, is except that you’re probably a little bit jet-lagged. So, we will get through this together.

Craig: Yeah, no, I’m actually not jet-lagged now. Today is the first day of non-jetlag. And you know, that’s usually two days before you leave. And in fact it is. So, it’s just beautiful how you get perfectly attuned and then you get on a plane and do it again.

John: Because you’re no longer jet-lagged, you probably have the energy in you for these first two things. So our listeners, again, the best listeners in the entire world, they sent us two pieces of chum this week, just like bait to get us going. And this first one was really targeted towards you. It’s from a place called Screenwriters University. Craig, get us started.

Craig: Well, someone sent this thing. First of all, Screenwriters University, which is not a university, of course, and I assume they mean it’s a university for screenwriters, but then wouldn’t it have an apostrophe? They don’t have an apostrophe. So it’s just Screenwriters University. Those two words. They sent a list of what those people think are 20 common sense script rules. Now, you know, John, you and I are big fans of rules here, right?

John: 100%. We’re completely rules followers. If you give us a template, if you can give us some sort of like dogma to follow, it really helps us out a lot.

Craig: Well, normally when people put these things out, we don’t necessarily know if they mean them as dogma or not, but the people at Screenwriters University did us an enormous favor because they just went ahead and said right there at the top, “Note: These rules will not make you a better writer. They will simply keep you from annoying your average reader or crew member.” What? But here’s the best part. Per Screenwriters University, “You must learn these simple rules or consider another line of work.” [laughs]

John: That’s a fairly strong statement. Like basically you have to do this or else you’re not even a screenwriter.

Craig: Yeah. You don’t have a chance. There’s no world in which you cannot learn – learn – the rules according to ScreenwritersUniversity.com. There’s no chance for you. If you don’t, you’ll never work.

So, let’s go through a few of these. You know, some of them, sure. So, for instance, Fade In at the beginning of your film. Fade Out at the end.

John: Well, see, I’m already jammed here. Yeah, I’m already in a horrible position here because I’ve written many scripts that don’t start with Fade In and don’t end with Fade Out. So…

Craig: Well, John, I’m going to have to ask you to consider another line of work. [laughs]

John: Fortunately today we are actually at the Musée des arts et métiers which is the arts and trades museum. And I saw all sorts of other professions I could get into, such as like plumping or weaving. So that could be my next step if I can’t master Fade in and Fade out. At least I have those.

Craig: I’ll direct you to Weavers University for their 20 cents common sense rules. All right, so then we have things like, for instance, slug lines have no times of day. No afternoon, morning, mid-afternoon, evening. No.

I do it all the time. I write afternoon, morning, mid-afternoon, evening constantly. Now, by the way, when I got to this – that was number four – when I got to number four I stated to think, “Oh dear, I’m only a fifth of the way in. I hate these people so much I want to fire them into space. How will I ever make it to the end?” And I forced myself, John. I forced myself.

John: Well, the way you got through it, you probably didn’t use a Cut to, because that’s line number 14. Don’t use Cut to. Specifically, “I don’t care if people still use it, or scripts you’ve read have it in spades. I’m telling you the reader will throw out your script for such a small and petty offense. Learn the proper way to do it, and when you’re world famous you can bring the Cut to back into everyone’s good graces. And then we’ll wonder what we ever did without it.”

So, again, just this last week I used a Cut to and, man, it’s a problem.

Craig: Well, you never learned the proper way to do it because you didn’t go to ScreenwritersUniversity.com. Of course, we get to number 15, your favorite, my favorite, the eternally favorite and wonderful Don’t Use We See. And this is what they say, “Seriously, one ‘we see’ per script is plenty. And that’s only when you absolutely must, because you’ve exhausted every other possibility of explaining what we see without actually saying we see.”

Now this is where I put my hands around the virtual neck of Screenwriters University, squeezed and rotated in opposite directions until I heard the snap.

John: My theory is that someone is deliberately doing this just to anger you. That you’ve made an enemy somewhere in your life and this enemy wants to sort of rile you up and distract you from other things. And so therefore they’ve created this whole website just to antagonize you. Because that’s the only reason I could see wording these things in this way. Because I look through all of these rules and at each one I could say like, OK, there’s a general case to be made for like pay attention to this thing, but absolute prohibitions are never actually valid.

So this list of 20 things, they are probably 20 things that are useful to look at here, but they are all phrased in ways that I find maddening.

Craig: Maddening. And inaccurate. And misleading. And then in certain cases just wrong. For instance, their “we see” thing is wrong for a hundred reasons. But what fascinates me is they don’t even understand what it’s for. They literally don’t get it. They think the “we see” is somehow a substitute for explaining something. It’s not. Rather, it’s indicating to the reader who is seeing something. Us. We are. As opposed to say the character. It is mindboggling to me.

Now, I’m going to say the following as diplomatically as I can. And this is where it’s good that I know, you’ve changed me, you’ve made me a better man, John. You have.

John: All right.

Craig: Because I think three years ago I would not have been this diplomatic.

John: I think in some ways you could draw a parallel between our relationship and the key relationship in Wicked. Because if those two protagonists had not met each other at that point in time, who knows the arcs that their lives might have traveled in. But because I knew you – because I knew you, I have been changed for good.

Craig: [laughs] That’s right. Well, I don’t know if you’ve been changed for good. I think I’ve changed you for evil. But you’ve changed me for good. So, I don’t say this diplomatically just to cover my tracks. I feel what I’m about to say. This is honest. I naturally was interested in who wrote this. They did not put a name on it.

So then I looked to see who actually teaches at Screenwriters University. Now, any one of these individuals may be a fine writer. That is absolutely possible. There is nothing that says that a lack of shiny credits means a lack of talent, nor is there anything that says a presence of shiny credits means a presence of talent. However, there is a general lack of experience here and what I would say relevant experience.

This is not a collection of individuals that inspires a tremendous amount of confidence in me that they are in tune and have good grasp of the way feature films are currently written and sold today. And I don’t see any other reason for anybody to be going to Screenwriters University and spending money – quite a bit of money – at Screenwriters University, because I do not believe their instructors are necessarily in a position that is any more informed in any substantive way than most of the people who are paying the money.

That’s the diplomatic version. How did I do?

John: Very good diplomatic version. Craig, I was incredibly impressed. You really withheld some of your umbrage and your fire. I think there’s some really good choices you made there.

What I will say is like some people go to college for the social experience. And so maybe you’re going to Screenwriters University for the social experience. Maybe you’re going there for the parties, for the fraternity life.

Craig: No.

John: Maybe you really want to play Division III football. So, I mean, those are all reasons why you might want to go to Screenwriters University. But I don’t think you are going there for the quality of the education.

Craig: Yeah. They don’t have any of those things. They don’t have a building or anything. So…yeah. No.

John: Then maybe you could save your money.

Craig: I think maybe you could save your money.

John: This was sent I think to anger me, but this is the second bit of umbrage bait. So Sony Pictures Home Entertainment announced that it’s going to start releasing clean versions of some of its movies. There’s a list of 20 movies that they have picked which “allows viewers to screen the broadcast or airline versions of select Sony films free from certain mature content.” So basically in renting the film you can rent the original filthy version or you can rent the clean sanitized version.

I think some people have sent this to me, but I also saw Seth Rogan sort of pleading with Sony like please don’t release the clean versions of R movies. So this was sent to me I think to make me feel like well that’s horrific and Sony should not ever do this. And I had a hard time working up a proper amount of umbrage over this. Because it looked like what Sony was going to be doing is essentially when you download a film you have a choice of the original version or the clean version, or basically they send you both of them. You get to choose which one you’re going to do. I’m kind of surprisingly fine with it. But, Craig, I want to see how you feel about it.

Craig: Well, I’m not outraged. It’s not like they’re eliminating the proper version. And we have children and we understand what it means. I guess I’m a little confused. I’ll just come at it as a parent now. I’m going to take myself out of the movie industry and I’m going to put aside any impulse I might have for artistic fury here and just talk as a parent. I can’t imagine that there is a movie that I want to show my child but I just want certain things taken out of it. At that point, I just don’t want them to see the movie. Either they’re ready for a movie or they’re not. The “clean” version thing is something that never really is very satisfying. You know, when I say to my child, “Hey, you should watch this,” I’ve thought about it and I thought they’re ready for this, if it’s something that requires that sort of thought. Obviously a Pixar movie doesn’t.

And so it’s OK. I don’t really think I would ever use this service. I don’t want my child to see Goodfellas but with the cursing and blood taken out of it, because they’re not going to like it. It’s going to stink. I’m not sure what this is good for.

John: I pulled up the site and it’s talking through the movies that they’re originally going to release with the clean versions available. And some of them I think actually do make some sense. And so like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a movie that I can see kids enjoying because it’s just beautiful, but there probably is some stuff in there that you might want to have a younger kid see. I can kind of imagine that.

The three Spider Man movies, the original – actually all five Spider Man movies – they’d release a clean version of that. I guess. I can’t even imagine what’s so dirty about them. But I think they were PG-13, so it may move a PG-13 down to sort of more of a PG level.

But White House Down? I don’t want a kid seeing White House Down because of the language. I just don’t want them seeing White House Down.

Craig: Yeah. Exactly.

John: Captain Phillips?

Craig: Captain Phillips? What’s the point of watching a cleaned up version of Captain Phillips? What child is sitting there going, “I really want to watch Captain Phillips, daddy.” Well, I don’t know, there’s some cursing and there’s some blood. “Well, if we got rid of that, could I then watch the escapades of Navy snipers and shipping captains facing off against Somali pirates?”

What the F? See, I just did it myself. I cleaned myself up. So weird. Captain Phillips?

John: Yeah. So here’s the thing. There have been services out there that have been trying to do this sort of not officially sanctioned by the studios for years. And so to have essentially the airline version of this be available for people to choose, I don’t see a huge crisis there. Now, I do know that there are filmmakers who will take their names off of the airline versions because it’s not their original version. I think that makes sense as well.

And I guess I like that all the edited versions are just as a bonus feature. So essentially you’re downloading the real movie, but under the Extras feature you can choose to have the cleaned up version. I guess I’m just not that outraged by it. If it lets that 10-year-old kid who really wants to see The Amazing Spider Man, it makes his or her parents feel more comfortable watching that movie, I guess that’s not so bad.

Craig: Yeah. Like I said, I can’t. I’m not lit up on fire over it. I’m just more confused by it. As far as the airline thing goes, isn’t the airline cut kind of going by the wayside anyway? Because that was always – you know, in the old days they would have a screen that came down and your five rows were all watching the same movie together because there was one movie. But now everybody gets their own movie on the back of a seat, right?

John: Yeah.

Craig: So I don’t think they clean those up anymore, do they?

John: Yeah. They do clean them up sometimes. I’ve definitely been on some flights where you’ll see a bit of nudity got blurred in the thing. I think it’s because they’re figuring there might be a kid sitting next to you who could be seeing the same screen. So sometimes you will see a little bit of cleaning up in those. But, yeah, I just can’t be that outraged by that.

I think a fairer question to ask is what does cleaned up really mean and what kind of content are they taking out? Because if they’re taking out that tiny bit of gay content in Beauty and the Beast, then I just get a little bit annoyed that that’s the filthy content that you have to protect young children from seeing. But I still can’t be all that outraged by it.

Craig: Yeah. Yeah. You know, I’ve been kind of, I don’t know, marveling at the general liberalism and progressivity of the Netherlands here. I took my daughter to the science museum and they had half of a floor dedicated basically to sex. And this is one of those museums where, you know, elementary school classes are coming through. And there were young children there. They’re like, yeah, it’s sex. You’re here. Go look at the sex now. Let’s talk about how the sex works. They have no problem with it.

So, I can’t imagine what the Dutch would make of this whole thing where we’re snipping out pieces of a movie. I think that they would just find that absurd. So, I’m with you. I can’t get too upset about this. But, seems kind of weird and vaguely useless. I’m probably mostly just umbrage hungover from Screenwriters University. Which, by the way, just to bring it back to them for a second. You realize they’re charging people like $500? I’m going to lose my mind.

John: Yeah. It’s a lot. All right, so let’s give some free education here. Let’s dive in on a topic–

Craig: Segue Man.

John: That we’ve talked about in previous episodes, but a new thing came up this week which made me think about it again, which is location. Which is how we are describing the locations we’re using in the movie, how we’re picking those locations, and how the locations we’re using really can impact the story that we’re trying to tell. So, obviously Screenwriters University can tell you that locations are preceded by an INT or an EXT. But there’s an important level of specificity here. So I want to quickly go through some of the choices you’re making as a screenwriter when you’re picking a location for a scene. And then really look at how those locations you’re picking are going to influence what characters are doing in that scene. Because that’s the new piece that really occurred to me this week. So, let’s look through some questions that a screenwriter asks when picking a location for a scene.

The first one is always what is the most likely location for this scene. And so this scene is a police interrogation, well, that police interrogation headquarters room feels like the natural place for that. It’s the most obvious place for that. But the second question should be what is the most interesting place for this scene to have happen. And I think you always owe it to yourself to go through and like brainstorm five more interesting places for that scene to take place. Before you commit to that first location, really think through like where are the other interesting places I could set this. And what opportunities would occur if I set this at a different place.

Craig: Yeah. You know, you’re right that sometimes your best move is to present the expected location. If you do have, you know, you’ve given the example of an interrogation scene. We know where those take place. And for good and legal reasons it’s rare that you can do them on the rooftop or in a basement. They’re generally going to take place in that room.

But then your job as a screenwriter, I think, when designing that location is to say is there something about that location that is slightly off, a little bit of a twist. Is the paint peeling? Is there a leak in the ceiling because it’s raining outside and that’s this annoying drip-drip into a coffee cup while they’re having this.

You have to do something. Because otherwise it just feels, well, this is not to disparage television, because television is wonderful and they’re putting out better and better television every day, but when I think of the traditional style TV where they got to shoot really fast and they’ve got to shoot a lot and they just don’t have time sometimes to deal with stuff. So you’d end up with these stock locations. Especially if you’re writing a movie, you really want to either not be in a stock location or turn your stock location into something that’s interesting and memorable.

When Clarice goes to visit Hannibal Lecter, that’s the mental institution. That’s a hallway. That’s bars. That’s people inside. But look what they did with it, you know?

John: One advantage to using the stock location, the expected location, is you get a lot of stuff for free. And so going back to the example of an interrogation room or a doctor’s office, we know how those work. We’ve been there ourselves. We’ve seen them in movies before. So there’s no process of like getting the audience used to the location or having to figure out where this place is. We just get it immediately. We see it. We know exactly what it is. And in some ways it’s helpful because the location doesn’t demand a lot of our attention. And so that can be a very useful thing about picking a stock location.

But, I would just say like don’t default to the stock location unless you have to.

Craig: Agreed.

John: Another question I ask myself is are the characters moving or are they standing still? And if they’re moving, you need to give them a space to move through. And so in a location where they’re going to feel hemmed in, it’s not going to be a good choice for a scene that should be on its feet and should be up and moving.

Conversely, I get frustrated sometimes where I see in movies where they have this incredibly active and vibrant location and then they just have the characters standing there. It’s a real mismatch between the production designer picked this great location or the director picked this great location, but the action of the scene doesn’t demand them to be moving at all. And so therefore there’s just a bunch of business happening around them.

So, really ask yourself do the characters want to be moving through a space? Or are they standing there, sitting there, just talking through some idea?

Craig: Yeah. You know, there’s the question which is do the characters want to be moving. And then there’s also a question does this location want them to be moving. Because there are locations that entice you to move. If you’re at a fair, and there are people moving through and around. And there’s rides and things turning all around you, it’s really hard – like if you go to Disney World and you just get into the middle of Main Street and stand there, it’s going to get annoying really fast for both you and all the people around you. So, there is a natural need to keep moving, which is good. Obviously, there are scenes where the motion is the whole point. A chase, for instance, and then that’s a whole different idea.

But if you’re in a situation where you’re thinking, oh, it would be great if my characters were actually moving. They weren’t just standing on their two feet, find something in the environment that naturally gets them to move. Because what I don’t like is the unmotivated walk and talk. It’s just a dreadful thing. And you see it all the time. It’s just two people walking and talking and there’s no reason for them to be walking, because they’re not going anywhere. And they’re just doing it because the camera guy thought it would be nice. And it’s odd.

John: Yeah. They’re doing it because another static scene would just be a killer. Everyone would get bored if they were just standing there, but like there’s no reason for them to be moving. That’s the real frustration.

A question I ask myself is what color do I want to see on screen. And this seems like a weird thing, but we always talk about like hair and makeup and wardrobe and sort of what are we seeing. And hopefully you’re seeing something. But what color are you seeing? And I try in my movies and other things I write to really have a progression of color throughout the story. And so that we’re in a period where we’re in greens and we’re outside a lot, or we have periods where we’re in reds. We have a period where it’s white, because it’s a lot of snow. And so think about what color we might have seen in the scene before. What color would make sense for this scene? Do we want to be consistent? Do we want to mix it up? Just think about sort of what colors you want and that can help point you to a good choice for location.

Now, sometimes based on the nature of the story you’re telling, you may pick a look just to differentiate between two different things. For instance, you may have an A plot and a B plot. And when we cut between those two locations they have a very different color palette just by their very nature. If people watch The Americans, this last season we were in Russia for a lot. And they just slap this massive blue filter on every scene in Russia. And so I feel so bad for the people in Russia because they clearly don’t have enough lights and it’s always blue. But that’s just the nature of the show, the world they’ve chosen to describe. And so it’s always going to blue when we’re in Russia. So, I try to make some of those choices in my head while I’m writing and that can help inform people down the road as you’re actually moving into production.

Craig: Yeah. I put color in all the time. I’ll talk about the color of the walls sometimes, or the color of the floor. I don’t describe the color of everything, but there’s always one thing that I think will catch your eye. And that’s interesting. An old grimy yellow. I can see it now. And I know that it’s grimy because it’s neglected and that’s a thing. I also know that whoever painted it probably didn’t paint it in the last two years.

So, you learn these things from little bits and pieces. I do tend to think about them in contrasting ways. I don’t have an overall color palette for the whole thing. I think of it more the way I think of, you know, when we talked about transition, size changes, you know, like when you go over here suddenly it’s sort of very bleak and gray and cold. And then you go over here and you’re inside with different people and it’s warm and reddish and brown. But those notions of cold and warm, you know, temperature to me is part of location. And temperature informs color. I just think of cold as being bluish and grayish and I think of warm comforting places as those oranges and reds.

And it helps paint the movie for people. You know, this is I guess the opposite of Screenwriters University tells you to do, so forgive us. Because they’re really good. But we’re making a movie. I don’t know how else to put it. You’re making a movie. All these people that tell you, “Don’t step on blankety-blank’s toes,” there’s no toe I don’t step on. Just to be clear. When I’m writing a screenplay, I step on every toe. I am directing the movie, I am casting the movie, I am production designing movie. I’m putting props in the movie. I’m costuming the movie. I’m doing it all on the page as best I can in a way that is evocative so that all those people that come after have something to go on.

But more importantly somebody somewhere read it and said, oh yeah, I’ll spend the money to make that. That’s the point. So, I think it’s great. Color. Yes, use it.

John: You’re making choices that describe the feeling, and that’s sort of my next question I always ask is if this location were a character in the movie, what would its personality be? So if this location could speak, if this character could take an action, what kind of character would it be? And a lot of the adjectives you use to describe in this previous section really apply here. It’s warm. It’s cold. It’s inviting. It’s foreboding. Think about what that location would feel like if it’s a character and then try to figure out what location could embody those ideas. And that’s incredibly helpful to really think about is it sleek and cold and fastidious or is it a jumbled mess? And putting the same kind of scene in those two different locations will greatly impact the scene.

Craig: Yeah. It’s a chance for you also to impart some authenticity to your story, especially if the point is that it’s set in a recognizable place, a specific place. This is where doing research is really, really helpful. And it’s important when you present your version of this real place that you’re not just relying on things like, you know, we’re in Chicago. There’s Wrigley Field. There’s Sears Tower. But you also, you know, you get the vibe of the contradictions of the place, the magic, the ugly, the beautiful.

We spent – Todd Phillips and I spent a lot to time just studying Bangkok. Studying Bangkok online. Then going there and walking around into every kind of neighborhood. And offering people a glimpse of all of it, because there is squalor and there is wealth and there’s beauty and there’s ugliness and there’s crime and there’s peace. It’s got everything. And we kind of wanted to really hand that over. So, that’s kind of how you start to make the place the character is by knowing it as best you can. You know, obviously if you’re not there, start with Google, I guess.

John: That sense of like which Chicago you want to show is so crucial. Because I get really frustrated when I see the establishing shot of Wrigley Field and now we’re at that Fountain. That kind of stuff is just so cheap and tourist brochure that it doesn’t help me at all knowing what kind of movie it is that I’m seeing. And so, yes, ideally you should go travel to the place where you’re setting your story and figure out what parts you want to actually describe and what it actually feels like.

It also means giving yourself the space in your script to describe some of those things especially early on the script to give us a feel for the texture of where we’re at. And hopefully you’re not just flying by some of these places before you get to a real scene. Hopefully you’re setting some of your early scenes really in those places. So your main characters are moving through these locations and giving us a feel for what kind of Chicago we are seeing in this.

I get so frustrated when I read in scripts, you know, it just says, “Chicago,” but I have no idea of what just Chicago means.

Craig: What does that mean?

John: It could be anything. And you just don’t know. And also keep in mind that people are doing to judge the look and feel of your movie very much based on those early scenes. And so if your initial Chicago scenes are in these glamourous hotels and suites and skyscrapers, it’s going to feel like that kind of movie. So if that’s not what most of your movie is, or if we’re starting there and we’re going to someplace else, you’re going to have to spend some page real estate to really paint the picture of where we’re at for the rest of this story.

Craig: But you can do it economically. I mean, nothing of what you just said and nothing of what I have said requires people to burn a lot of space. It’s just that you have to be specific and know what it is that you want to communicate. Because ultimately whatever you want to communicate, it is in its own way going to be very directed and compact.

If you’re telling a story about the seedy under belly of someplace, that is a compact notion. Now, let us get that vibe without you saying it, but rather by describing a street, a place, a smell, a look. Taking a camera and showing me something beautiful and then the camera just lowers down, down, down, and now we’re below a bridge. Now we’re below this. Now we’re in the gutter. Whatever it is, it actually doesn’t require a lot of time. What it requires is attention and care. Sometimes I think that when we write scripts it’s like we’re a 3D printer and we’re putting these layers on top of layers on top of layers.

And the script comes out I guess misshapen if we forget a layer somewhere in there. And this is one of them. This sense of location is a really important layer.

John: So here’s an example. “Jane unlocks her apartment door and goes inside.” So, you know, if you just give me that sentence, I don’t know anything about the apartment. I don’t know anything about Jane. I don’t know anything about the neighborhood. But if she has to unlock three locks on her door, and there’s trash in the hallway, and the light behind her is flickering, and we hear off-screen shouting, then I know a lot more about Jane and her apartment building and everything that’s going on.

Versus if it’s like a sleek high tech glossy, people sort of float by silently, someone tosses a look over her shoulder that Jane’s not dressed well enough to be in this building, or is suspicious of Jane, that tells me so much more about the building, the universe we’re in, and who Jane is. And that’s two sentences early in your script.

Craig: Yeah. They also give you an opportunity to learn something about her. Because she’s interacting. You’ve given her an environment, a location that can be interacted with. So, how she responds tells me about her. When somebody looks down on her, does she internalize it? Does she not give a damn? Does she argue back? Is she scared of living where she is? Is she unscarable? This is the kind of feedback loop you can create. And it’s why you – it’s hard. Sometimes I feel like we give these lessons and it’s unfair to you guys because we’re making things sound easier than they are. They’re actually kind of hard. Because it’s like a circle that feeds into itself. And you have to figure out where you’re going to jump into the circle – character, location, description of location, reaction to location, purpose of moment.

All of that stuff weirdly has to feed into each other. So, you think I know what I need to do. Where would that kind of happen? It could happen here. What would she do? Well, maybe this place could help me show that if it were like this. But now this place means da-da-da, and so the circle goes.

This is how writing kind of happens. It’s hard, John, sometimes, you know.

John: So this last week I’ve been on a rewrite, and part of the reason why I wanted to do this episode was there was a scene that I encountered which I strongly suspect used to take place somewhere else and so the location does not match what’s actually happening in the scene. There’s a kind of generic conversation that’s happening between two characters and yet the location is really spectacular and kind of fascinating and really could speak very well to these two characters, but it’s not speaking to these two characters because I think they just changed the location and basically kept the scene the same way. And so as I look at sort of how would I redo this scene, the location is really driving my choices.

Because to me it just feels weird that they’re in this location and they’re not acknowledging it. It’s a really visual change in the movie and they have to acknowledge that they’re there. And so I’m using that as the basis for really the comedy that’s hopefully going to sort of help drive the information in the scene. So ultimately the scene will still get through the same – it will still stick off the same beats as before, but it’s just going to use the location to acknowledge why they’re there, what’s going on, and hopefully find some new life between these two characters that felt perfunctory before.

Craig: Yeah. Well, it speaks to how important location is, because when you’re stuck with it, that’s when you really feel how it drives so much. I mean, I worked on – I mean, it’s public record that Frank Darabont was going to direct The Huntsman and he left. There was an amiable departing. I don’t know, whatever you call it. And the studio hired a new director and yet kept essentially to the schedule, which meant that the principal photography was going to start in about two weeks. And so I got called in and they said, “All right, we’re starting in two weeks. We got to make a bunch of changes. Here’s the situation. We’ve built a bunch of sets and so we’re using them. And these are what these sets are for. These are the locations.”

That is a tough box inside of which to work. And, you know, these are the things of course people who casually comment on movies don’t understand. This is sometimes what happens.

So, you have to write some scenes in certain ways because the location has happened before you. That’s obviously a very rigid thing in a – that’s a fairly rare circumstance. But it’s a very common thing even when you’re doing a regular rewrite, but a producer or a big star says I really want to do – I love that sequence in Monte Carlo so we’re doing it. OK. I guess we’re going to work with that, but it is one of the fundamental pillars of the story. So, choices are now that much narrower.

John: But the same kind of thing happens on indie films as well. Because if there’s a kind of move that’s so driven by location, indies generally have a very limited selection of what locations they can use to shoot in. And so if you are making a film that is by necessity going to be taking place in one or two locations, those locations become exponentially more important to your story because we’re going to be seeing them the entire time.

Or, on the other hand, sometimes the choices about locations are not really the writer’s choices. They are the choice of production. And so some of the practicalities you’re going to be encountering are costs. Can they afford to rent that amazing penthouse apartment that you have written in page 37? If that location is just there for that one day, and they can’t make it work because of money, or more often they can’t make it work because of schedule, because there’s only sort of one scene there and it’s half of a page, so they have to marry it with some other days’ work. Sometimes you just can’t make that fit.

Sometimes they can’t make a location work because that’s great that you want to set the scene in Rio de Janeiro. There’s no money to go to Rio de Janeiro. So we’re going to have to set this in Guadalajara instead. That’s a change. That’s a change you’re going to have to roll with.

And finally controllability. And I find this a lot where people want to set things in big public spaces. Well, that’s great. And you get a lot of sort of free production value because you get all the monuments behind you or something great in the center of Paris, but you can’t control those locations. And sometimes you’re just not allowed to shoot there. And so figuring out what the balance is going to be can be a real challenging thing.

So, I guess we’re saying as the screenwriter you have to be ambitious in your choice of locations as you’re writing, but you also have to be smart in understanding what’s going to be changing during production and being able to roll with it to make the best use of the locations you actually do get to use when the line producer comes back to you.

Craig: Yeah. It is one of the most frustrating things because the first moment of rubber meets the road/reality check/whatever you want to call it is when you’ve written the screenplay and everybody is on board and it has gotten the green light. And then they come back and they say, “Well, we’ve gone through. This is our budget. This is what we can do. Here’s what we can’t. We just can’t do it.”

And it’s so hard because everybody has been so invested in creating this crystal tower with you, and now someone just comes along with a hammer and goes, “Nope. Not here.” And sometimes you end up in situations where you just think we are being asked to fail. The smartest of the Indies are the ones that anticipate all of that. You know, I’m thinking of for instance Phil Hay and Karyn Kusama and Matt Manfredi. When they did The Invitation they knew they didn’t have a lot of money. They barely had any money at all. So they made a movie that took place in a house. They spent a lot of time trying to find the right house. They found the right house. They’re good. They don’t have to worry about something falling through. That’s kind of the way to go. Protect your key locations because if you don’t, someone is coming with that hammer. And then, oh my god, what a mess.

John: Yeah. Get Out is another movie that is essentially all in one house. There’s a few things that venture out beyond the house, but it is essentially one house. My movie, The Nines, is largely one house. And so when the line producer came back with a budget which was wildly too expensive, I had to sort of talk her through saying like, no really, this one house is mine. We can control this. And you don’t have to worry about rentals or leaving and coming back. This is a safe place. And so that can be the jumping off point for all of the other little field work along the way.

When you are the writer-director, a lot of times you will have in your head like this is where I want to shoot this thing. That can be fantastic. But I had to learn how to let go of some things that I really wanted to shoot in certain places because it just wouldn’t work for budget or more often for schedule. Like there was no way to find that seedy hotel within a three mile radius of where we were going to have to shoot this other thing. And so you make it work.

If you go back to the conversation I had with Chris McQuarrie, he’s on a giant, expensive Mission: Impossible movie, but the same kind of things still happen. It’s like, well, we have this grand vision for what we want to do, but this is the reality of what we have. We don’t have enough extras to make this party scene work. And so we’re going to have to flip the scene around so these 200 people feel like enough people for this party.

That happens at every level.

Craig: You know, it’s funny, when I write and I come up with a location, I start doing some math in my head. It’s never about expense, per se. it’s more about how much is going to be required to dress it. Because what happens is when you get on a movie set there is a negotiation that begins to happen. This is really in preproduction, frankly. There’s a negotiation between the production designer and the cinematographer. And the cinematographer is essentially saying, “I want to be able to see as much as I can.” And the production designer is being held to a certain budget and knows that they have to plow money into sets and other locations is saying, “Yeah, but could you tell me where you probably will be looking? Because then I don’t have to create a whole bunch of world that you never even look at,” because that’s expense.

And one of the expenses that goes separate and apart from what production designers do is extras. Filling a space with people is expensive. You don’t realize it until you show up on a movie set and you see the area where they’re keeping the extras. And you go, oh my god, that’s a lot of people that we have to feed. And someone has to make sure that they’re wearing appropriate clothing. And they’re going to all get paid for the day. And wow.

[laughs] Bob Weinstein once asked me, he goes, “Hey Mazin, do all those people get paid?” I was like, yeah. He goes, “Really?” So, Bob, I think it’s slavery if they don’t get paid, right? And he goes, “Wow, man, never thought of it that. Ha-ha.” What a dick.

John: The only time I will somewhat come to Bob Weinstein’s defense is that it is a little strange that studio audiences for sitcom tapings are not generally paid. So, we are hearing their laughter. I guess they’re getting a free show out of it all. Sometimes they’re getting prizes. But they are not paid. But an extra is really paid.

The one other thing you will find if you are in a place where movies are being made often, sometimes you will walk into an area where they’ll say, “Filming is currently happening here.” And basically by entering this space you understand that you may be in a shot. That’s another thing that can happen.

So, in my movie, The Nines, there are some shots in New York where we didn’t control that at all and Ryan Reynolds is just running down a street and he’s passing real people and we make it all work. But there was one moment where we needed to have an upfronts party. So, when a new TV season is announced, when the network is announcing its whole schedule, they throw these giant parties in New York. And so I needed one of those giant parties. But I could afford like six extras. And so like how do you do that?

And so you do it by figuring out very carefully what your shots are going to be. We did the check in table. We used a hotel and we used a hallway at the hotel. And we just made those people feel like a lot of people. And you use sound design to make you feel like there’s a lot of people over there somewhere to your left, but we’re just not focusing on them. And it works for what the scene needs to be. We needed to sense that there was a big thing happening, but the actual scene was small and intimate so therefore I didn’t want to be in a giant space.

Craig: Yeah. These are the – it becomes a Rubik’s Cube. It really is. It’s a Rubik’s Cube of – once you get into production it’s a Rubik’s Cube of money and practicalities and creativity and vision. But when you’re writing your screenplay, remember your goal here is to attract financing and attract actors and attract directors, if you’re not directing, and terrific crew. Create the world you want to see, and then, you know.

Now, if you know, like I said, that this is the kind of movie where you’re going to be dealing with a couple million dollars for your budget, create a world that you’d like to see that you could probably do for a couple million dollars.

John: Absolutely. All right, our next topic. So, in previous episodes we’ve done How Would This Be a Movie. We’re usually looking at stories in the news to figure out how they could be converted into a big piece of blockbuster entertainment. But a new thing happened this last two weeks that I thought was really interested.

So Julia Roberts has attached herself to star in a TV adaptation of a podcast series. So it was a podcast series called Homecoming which is a fiction series created by Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg. And Mr. Robot creator, Sam Esmail, is supposed to be doing the TV adaptation of it. It was just really interesting that essentially it was a radio drama done as a podcast form but now going to be adapted into TV.

And the first time I could think of that transition happening, which I think we’re going to see a lot more of.

Craig: Yeah. You may very well. Again, you know, I don’t listen to podcasts. But it seems to me that the ones that I keep hearing about are the ones that are narrativizing true life things. This one was fictional the whole way through?

John: This one is all fiction. So, Catherine Keener played the main character in the radio version of it, the audio version of it. Julia Roberts would play her character in the next version of it. I think radio drama is really hard to do, and so god bless them for doing a good job with this. I haven’t listened to it, but I’ve heard only the promos for it. But people loved it. So that’s great. And it’s great that it’s getting traction in another form.

What I see more often happening is another Gimlet show called Start Up is being converted into a TV comedy called Alex, Inc. So Zach Braff is staring in that and it’s about the birth of a podcast company. So it is more the classic thing where it’s like it’s kind of like Shit My Dad Says, where it was a Twitter feed and it became the basis of a real sitcom. This is a comedy based on one guy’s quest to get a business started. And you can sort of more clearly see like, OK, you’re fictionalizing the real versions of people.

Craig: So when is our show?

John: That’s really the natural next question. So, when is our show? How are we divvying up the credits on it? Who is playing whom? These are tough choices, but I guess we should probably ask our listeners, because our listeners are the smartest people out there.

Craig: Well, I mean, look, I know who should be me. If it doesn’t work out with Homecoming, I would love Julia Roberts to play me.

John: Oh yeah. That’s a nice choice. I’ve always seen myself as a Sandra Bullock type. So, she’s both a free spirit, but also a little restrained at times. And I think the two of us, I think casting it as women opens up new possibilities. It really can speak to our sense of the challenges as working moms in this business.

Craig: I don’t think we’re interesting enough to get gender matching casting. It’s too boring. Literally, we need a gimmick. We need a gimmick. We have to be played by women because we’re not women. If we were women, we should be played by men. Basically, we should be the opposite.

John: So, I’ve been thinking like who should play Aline and how about Stanley Tucci?

Craig: Great.

John: Yeah. Just mix everything up.

Craig: Absolutely. Like really what I’m saying is the Scriptnotes show should not resemble Scriptnotes in any way. In any way.

John: Yes. But something I’ve learned about television development is by the time it would get on the air, it would not resemble the original pilot whatsoever.

Craig: Yeah. I’m requesting something that’s just going to happen anyway.

John: One of the first things that will come up as people start reading the script based on Scriptnotes is the same thing that Tom Sanchez tweeted at us this week. “Hey guys, I got a note to make protagonists more likeable. Any tips or basic principles or advice?”

So, Craig, when they read the script and they go this Craig Mazin character is not likeable, how do we fix that?

Craig: You don’t, because it’s not a problem. And this is the worst note to get, because it’s not a thing. This is hard. I don’t know how to combat it in any clean way. If I hear this, I know I can’t say, “No, that’s stupid. Doesn’t matter.” People actually love unlikeable people. There are entire actors that have made a career out of it. It’s wonderful. Grouches are delicious. And, I don’t know, I could sit here and name 4,000 television shows and 4,000 movies that you love that star unlikeable people.

I could sit here and show you Walter Matthau in Bad News Bears. But I don’t have time. I can’t say any of that, so in my mind I start backing for the door. I got to be honest with you. When I hear somebody say, “Well, the protagonist should be more likeable,” I judge that person for giving me the dumbest note in the world. It’s not a real thing.

It is ignorant of the way movies and television work. The key is that the protagonist should be understandable. So I guess that’s my only defense.

John: That is my defense of it, too. Is that sometimes you’ll hear the likeable note and they just don’t actually have a read on the character. There’s something about the Velcro of that character that’s not quite gripping. And so you may need to look for some moment early in the script that gives that character a specificity, something really fascinating about that character that makes people want to engage with them.

So, it could be, you know, a joke. It could be some action they take very early on that is interesting, relatable, remarkable, something about that character that makes say like, “Oh, I get that dude. He’s fascinating. I want to be on his story.” But I get the likeable notes, too.

And so in Big Fish, Will is always considered not likeable. And it doesn’t matter whether it’s the movie version, or the Broadway version, you always get the note “I just don’t like Will. Will is just not likeable.” And it’s just really a functional problem, because he’s the antagonist to a character who is tremendously likeable. There’s a sort of dual protagonist/antagonist relationship. And if he was this charming, life of the party kind of guy, there is no story. I can’t make Big Fish work if Will comes on as being the most likeable kid in the world.

So, we always have to be mindful of that sort of structural challenge in casting a Will that we just don’t cast the most dour, bleak person ever. You have to have a spark of life in the actual actor we cast. But functionally the role is not especially likeable at the start. And hopefully by the end of the story you’re loving him.

So, Tom Sanchez, when you get that note, I just say like, you know, try to figure out whether they’re understanding the character before you try to make huge changes to what the character is doing.

Craig: Yeah. It’s helpful, too, if you can at least point out that your character doesn’t like him or herself either. So they are aware. I do think that it is off-putting when there are characters who are unlikeable and are perfectly happy with themselves and we don’t quite know what to make of that. That’s just Ted Cruz, basically, right? So, we look at Ted Cruz and we say, “I don’t like you and, also, you seem to love yourself.” That’s a terrible combination. That’s where we start to feel like we’re dealing with an alien.

But with characters, for instance, Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa. It’s hard to be more unlikeable than that guy. He is a thief. He is a drunk. He is mean. He is racist. He’s hurtful to children. But, we know that he is in terrible pain. And that whatever it is that he is dealing out he is dishing upon his own head even more. And so we understand there is a potential redemption. And we move toward him. That’s important. If you can underscore that, then I think you’ll be fine.

But I hate it. I hate the whole likeable thing. It’s stupid. And basically it’s the kind of thing you’d expect to be taught at Screenwriters University.

John: 100%. I think you can actually get a special certification in likeability if you pay an extra $500.

Craig: [laughs]

John: All right, it has come time for our One Cool Things. I actually have three things, but they’re all short and related to locations.

So, the first two are maps. There’s a great new Metro map of Paris called the Circle Map designed by Constantine Konovalov and other folks. It’s just fantastic. So, every time you try to do a map of a Metro or bus lines or underground subways it’s always a balance between representing reality and sort of an idealized version that is clear and simpler to understand.

And this version is really just fantastic. It chooses to bend the lines into sort of circles rather than keeping them quite as naturally flowing as they would otherwise be. But it makes the Metro much, much easier to understand. So I’ll put a link in the show notes to that.

Also, a great one that Craig you’ll dig is the Roman Roads. So basically all the roads that the Romans built, but done as sort of a subway map of Europe. And showing sort of like, wow, they did a hell of a job. They really built out a lot. And it’s fun looking at the stops along the way to see what are now cities and sort of like how those Roman names of cities became the modern names of cities. So, another great one.

Finally, you can’t talk about locations without one of the greatest games I think ever for iOS that now has a sequel out. Monument Valley 2 is now shipping and it’s just delightful. So, it has the same impossible geography as the first one, with some other great choices and changes. So, if you’ve not played the first one, play the first one, then play the second one. They are both just great games.

Craig: Yeah. Currently, I don’t know how far in I am, but I’m in it.

John: I would also say Monument Valley, especially the second one, has really good storytelling between the mom and the daughter for like characters who don’t speak. Just their little tiny physical interactions are so well animated that I’ve just really loved watching them.

Craig: Yeah. It’s good stuff. Well, I have a One Cool Thing this week that’s also a game, but I have not loved a game with this much fervor and joy in a long, long time. It’s called Human Resource Machine. No, that’s not my nickname for you, John August. But, it is sort of John August-like. It is very simply a game where you are creating code. They don’t really tell you so much on the nose that you’re creating code, but they give you tasks. Here are a series of numbers or letters and here’s what we need you to do. So here’s your inbox. That’s what your inputs are. You take them, you design a system of things to do to them, and then there’s a result that goes out. But you don’t have a lot of commands. You have very few. In fact, I think there’s a sum total of 13 commands. And it starts off pretty darn easy, and then it gets crazy hard. But every time I did something, I was so proud of myself. So proud because it really hurts your brain. But it’s all doable. I loved it so much. And, it is also wrapped in this very bizarre kind of meta story that was kind of this extra bit of surreal glee for me.

So, the company that makes this game is called Tomorrow Corporation. They are I believe the people that did World of Goo, which I know a lot of people liked. But this is just – I’m just in love with this. Human Resource Machine. John, I think you will like this game.

John: Craig, I can guarantee that I will like this game. Because while you were talking I went through Google and this was my One Cool Thing in Episode 254.

Craig: [laughs]

John: So let’s pull up the transcript and we’ll see how you made fun of me for Human Resource Machine.

Craig: Did I?

John: You did. You made fun of me. So, let’s see.

Craig: OK.

John: This is what I said. The second one is a thing that Craig will make fun of me for. It’s called Human Resource Machine. It’s a game. “Oh, I get to make fun of you for it? Fantastic,” you say. So, Craig says, “This is so great because he is a robot. He’s a robot playing on a robot machine, pretending to be a robot.”

Craig: That’s accurate.

John: Yes. So, I’ll send you a link to the show notes for this one, too, so you can see what we said about Human Resource Machine. I really did love it. And so have you finished it yet?

Craig: The only one I – I’ve gotten halfway through my last level that I have to do which is prime factory, which is brutal.

John: It is brutal. And some of the things are – you know, the interface is delightful, but when you have to make really complicated ones, it gets to be just really, really exhausting. So I think there may have been some left hand forks of some of these things, which I didn’t end up doing, but I really did love the game and thought it was just perfectly well done.

Craig: Yeah. It’s great. And so you were right. And now here I am, 50 episodes later, which that’s about right. I need about a year.

John: I’m about one year ahead of Craig on all things.

Craig: Well, this is not the first time this has happened either. Generally speaking what happens is you say something, I go that’s stupid and you’re dumb, and then about a year later I go, John, I’ve heard of something wonderful.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And then you say, “I said that a year ago and you called me stupid and dumb.” And then, weirdly, I don’t retract any of that.

John: No.

Craig: I say, oh, yeah, you were, but because I’m thinking it now, I feel it.

John: Yeah. The thing you’re doing right now, that’s the thing you do.

Craig: That’s right. That’s what I do.

John: You are 100% consistent. That’s our show this week. As always, our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Rajesh Naroth. 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 short questions, or things you want us to rant about, on Twitter I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

We are on Facebook. Search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can find us on Apple Podcasts at Scriptnotes. And while you’re there, leave us a comment. That actually does help in the algorithms of things.

You’ll find the show notes for this episode at johnaugust.com. Transcripts go up about four days later. That’s the only way that I can really keep Craig honest by proving that I did actually recommend something years ago.

Craig: Yep.

John: You can find the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net. Godwin says that the USB drives have just now arrived in Los Angeles, so they are probably two weeks away from being available to order. So, if you would like a USB drive of all the back episodes, hold your fire because they are coming soon.

Craig: You should get those.

John: We should get those. We will also have a PDF version of the Scriptnotes Listener’s Guide, so thank you to everybody who has contributed to the Listener’s Guide. It turned out so, so well.

Craig: Awesome.

John: Those will be coming out soon.

Craig: Great.

John: Craig, have a great rest of your time in Amsterdam. Don’t fall in a canal.

Craig: I’m going to do my best to not fall in a canal and I will see you next week.

John: All right, thanks.

Links:

• Screenwriters University
• Clean Movie Versions
• Homecoming
• Alex, Inc.
• Paris Circle Map
• Roman Roads
• Monument Valley 2
• Human Resource Machine
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Find past episodes
• Outro by Rajesh Naroth (send us yours!)

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.