John

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

**Craig Mazin:** Hello and welcome. My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 287 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, we’ll be discussing the end of the film industry, unique character voices, and some things I learned going through the process of copy editing. Plus, we will answer those listener questions that have been sitting in the inbox for far too long.

**Craig:** Far too long.

**John:** Far too long. But we have some follow up. We have exciting follow up. The kind of follow up I love, because I love babies.

**Craig:** Aw, babies.

**John:** Aw. So, a few episodes ago we had Kelly Marcel on to help us with a Three Page Challenge. She told us on that show that she was expecting a baby with Mr. Steve Zissis, who is another Scriptnotes guest. That baby was born. So, pretty damn excited that we have a new Scriptnotes listener. The first Scriptnotes guest joint project baby.

**Craig:** Right. The Scriptnotes Baby essentially.

**John:** It is the Scriptnotes Baby. I mean, I think they were both guests. They now have a baby. I’ll let people do the math themselves.

**Craig:** It’s a Scriptnotes Baby.

**John:** Yeah. An interesting thing about this baby. Do you know this baby’s name?

**Craig:** I do.

**John:** Yes. It’s not named Craig. It’s not named Mazin. What is its name?

**Craig:** First of all, we don’t really know that. We know what we’ve been told, OK?

**John:** All right. Yeah. The official story, yeah.

**Craig:** But the baby’s first name is Gus. It’s Gus.

**John:** And that’s short for what?

**Craig:** For Gustave.

**John:** No, the baby’s official name is August. So–

**Craig:** That’s not – I don’t.

**John:** You know what? August did not used to be such a common name. I think it’s an increasingly common name. And, again, I don’t want to take credit for that. But I have to say like it wasn’t common, now it is common. My profile has risen. I let people draw their own conclusions.

**Craig:** This is Boasty John.

**John:** The worst version of Boasty John.

**Craig:** The worst version of Boasty John.

**John:** I mostly just want to thank and congratulate. I don’t want to thank them.

**Craig:** [laughs] I think we should thank them. No, no, no. Let’s thank them.

**John:** Thank them for being wonderful guests. And mostly I just want to congratulate Kelly and Steve on their new baby.

**Craig:** I like the idea that this is follow up. Because it’s not really. If we’re going to be technical, it’s follow up to them having sex as far as I can tell. That’s what babies are.

**John:** They are.

**Craig:** And in follow up news, a baby was born as a result of sex. Steve, here’s a great thing. So, I always think about first names and last names together. I mean, we do this all the time when we’re writing. We’re so obsessive about names.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** So Gus Zissis has more S-Zissis sounds in there. Gus Zissis sounds like a killer from the future.

**John:** I like it.

**Craig:** Gus Zissis.

**John:** Good choices.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** This last week we had two episodes. One of the episodes was a little mini episode I did with Nima Yousefi about his experience as an Iranian refugee. A listener wrote in with a great link to a blog series called Their Story is Our Story. So, if you liked Nima’s story, there are a lot more stories that are sort of like Nima’s.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it’s really well put together. So, I would encourage people to check out Their Story is Our Story. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes.

**Craig:** Fantastic. See, that’s follow up.

**John:** That’s truly follow up, because it just happened in an episode and now I’m talking about it. This is also follow up. So, a previous episode, like last week, we talked about those little marker words that sort of indicate that you are paying attention. And so in Madrid when I was there, in Spanish you often hear Vale which is basically OK. It’s just sort of an acknowledgment yes word.

A listener pointed my attention to a Spanish short film directed by Alejandro Amenábar called Vale which is actually delightful. And it wasn’t only at the very end of this delightful short film I realized it was actually a beer commercial.

**Craig:** D’oh!

**John:** But it’s a really well done beer commercial. So I will point you to the video for that. It’s quite well done. It stars Dakota Johnson. My question for you, Craig, Mazin, who is Dakota Johnson?

**Craig:** Watch what I do now? Watch how I blow your mind. Dakota Johnson is, A, the star of 50 Shades or Darker of Grey. And she is the daughter of Don Johnson and another person, as people are, like Gus Zissis. Sure.

**John:** Isn’t it Melanie Griffith? I’m actually not sure if that’s true. But, Dakota Johnson has a very special relationship with a previous Scriptnotes guest. That is my challenge for you. Who is that Scriptnotes guest that she has a special relationship with?

**Craig:** Well, Kelly Marcel is one of the writers of 50 Shades of Grey. Is that it?

**John:** Well, Kelly Marcel, is the writer of 50 Shades of Grey, but there is another screenwriter guest who she has an incredibly direct relationship with.

**Craig:** Dakota Johnson used to be married to Derek Haas.

**John:** That is not correct.

**Craig:** No. Oh. Sorry. I thought that was true.

**John:** This is going to be really embarrassing when I tell you this. So, are you ready?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, Dakota Johnson played Kate in Ben & Kate, a show created by Dana Fox. She played essentially Dana Fox’s equivalent character in Ben & Kate. Not only that, she was the star of the movie that Dana produced and wrote, called How To Be Single, that Dana was on the show to talk about.

**Craig:** Yeah. You think I’m embarrassed by this? First of all, I don’t watch television, so not embarrassed at all. And second of all, I didn’t see her movie. I have no problem telling people I didn’t see – I feel like I’m now shielded completely from any negative feelings about this because people know that basically I just spend all day writing and playing video games and just it’s the saddest thing. It’s so sad.

**John:** It’s a lovely life.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Our last bit of follow up is about the Amazing Live Sea Monkeys.

**Craig:** Thank god.

**John:** Thank god. We’re finally through to the Amazing Live Sea Monkeys. So, Craig Good, a listener, pointed this out. Craig Good, he might actually be named for you. That’s a possibility.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig Good.

**Craig:** Yeah, like Good Craig.

**John:** It’s like the good version of you.

**Craig:** [laughs] All Craigs are the good version – everybody is a good version of me, because I am the worst version of me.

**John:** Yeah, you’re the best version of the Craig Mazin we love. He wrote in to point out that the puppeteer filmmakers that I mentioned who were co-creators of the show, it’s pronounced Chiodo, no Chiodo, but more importantly they’re also the people behind Killer Clowns from Outer Space, which is a cult classic. Which I’ve never seen, but is a cult classic, and I recognize the title.

**Craig:** Was Dakota Johnson in that?

**John:** She could have been in that. Craig would never know.

**Craig:** By the way, I’m happy to believe it. If you tell me it’s true.

**John:** Let’s get on to our main topic for this week, because I think it’s a pretty important topic. It’s going to be the end of Scriptnotes, basically, I think, because Hollywood is over.

**Craig:** Hollywood is done.

**John:** Which is – it’s done.

**Craig:** Nothing left to talk about really, right?

**John:** So, we’re going to center our conversation around an article that appeared in the most recent Vanity Fair titled Why Hollywood as we know it is already over. But hopefully we’re going to bridge out sort of beyond the article to talk about this kind of article. This article is written by Nick Bilton, who I actually know. So this is sort of my preamble to say that I like Nick. I think Nick is a really good writer. I’ve enjoyed a lot of things he’s written. And I talked to him originally about a book he wrote about Twitter, which I thought was really good.

I don’t think this piece is good. And Craig thinks this is also not good. So, we’re going to be sort of picking this piece apart sort of as a premise and as some details. But I want to make sure we’re able to circle around about the question of like well what if he’s right, or what if in a general sense it really is going to collapse. And what signs should we look for when it does collapse.

If you get exhausted with us just ripping apart this article, stick around, because I want to look for how we might find out if the premise of the article could be true.

**Craig:** All right.

**John:** How do you want to start, Craig?

**Craig:** We’ll obviously have a link in the show notes, so you folks can read along with this. Let’s just talk first, if we could, about this kind of article. This article comes out every year. Every year.

**John:** Multiple times in the year, but especially–

**Craig:** Seasonal.

**John:** Yeah. But I mean, I’ve read a version of this article for the last 20 years.

**Craig:** Correct. So, very famously Lorne Michaels once said that every season of Saturday Night Live some brilliant television critic issues a review entitled Saturday Night Dead. And it has now been running for 31 years. And no sign of stopping. In fact, it seems more popular than ever.

The death knell of Hollywood has been sounded repeatedly really since television, I think, was created. And it seems like people take different tacks on why it’s no good, and will go away, and it’s all over, and that’s the end of that. In general, I think people do like writing articles like this because they’re very provocative. And ultimately they are low-risk/high-reward.

No one will remember your fake false prediction about something ending when it doesn’t end. But everybody will go rushing headlong back towards you to say, “Oh my god, this guy saw it coming,” when in fact just on average someone just guessing will “see it coming.”

So, you see this a lot. It is ultimately sensational journalism designed to provoke and feed into a general desire to see things fall apart. We do have this in our hearts, this weird rooting for things to collapse.

**John:** Yeah. I think we’re also at a very unique moment in American history right now where we are seeing some institutions that you thought like, oh, that could never fall apart, seem to be falling apart.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** I think it’s natural to sort of say, well, Hollywood will fall apart. And, again, it could. But I don’t think it’s going to fall apart for the reasons that Nick Bilton does. So let’s start with the article itself and sort of how he gets us into this, which is that he’s visiting a TV show that’s shooting. He’s in a discussion with the screenwriter on the set. There is a raindrop on an actor’s shoulder. And the screenwriter brushes it off. And the wardrobe supervisor or the person responsible for that actor rushes over saying like, “No, no, don’t do that. That’s my job.”

So, that is sort of the premise that he’s introducing us to the current Hollywood world with.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, this is a terrible anecdote. Horrendous, really. The anecdote makes the following points. Creating film and television is incredibly inefficient because while he’s talking to a screenwriter about how inefficient things are, there are 200 members of the crew who are milling about – I’m just quoting from the article – “milling about in various capacities, checking on lighting or setting up tents, but mainly futzing with their smartphones, passing time, or nibbling on snacks from the craft service tents.”

Let’s start there, shall we?

**John:** Yeah. Let’s be… – A person who is not working in film and television visiting a set, I think that’s honestly kind what you would see. And if you don’t sort of know what everyone’s job is, you might see that and say like, “Oh, why aren’t people working?” I would argue that if you were to go into a Silicon Valley startup and see people sitting at their desks, you might have sort of the same question. Like, what are they actually doing? They’re maybe typing something, but are they really working? And sometimes if you look at a film set you might say like those folks aren’t working. They are working.

**Craig:** Yeah. So film production is not like a typical factory plant where everybody is working. After they clock in, then they get their lunch break, then they go back to work. Nor is it like working in retail. The way films are made, you need a lot of different people who are able to do different things. But, the nature of the crew is that it’s a lot of people, none of whom are always needed, but all of whom are sometimes needed.

It’s just the way film production is. It goes in ways. Like a little bit of a military campaign. When you are engaging in a military effort, not everybody does their job at once. When you are on a football team, half the team is on the bench, the other half is on the field. Are the people on the bench just sitting around, futzing?

So, when you’re turning lights around, the grips and the electricians are working. And when you’re shooting, hair and makeup are working. And when you’re blocking out a scene, you have your ADs and you have the cinematographer, and then you have set-dec, and you have props people coming in and getting approvals. Sometimes they’re on the truck. They’re ordering stuff for the next day.

The truth is, if you don’t understand how film production works, then you might think, “Oh, this seems inefficient.” What’s remarkable to me about articles like this is that the author never stops to ask, “Hmm, do I understand how this works? Is it really just – is the easy observation that it’s all just bizarrely bloated in some kind of crazy way possibly true?” If we were to put a camera in Nick Bilton’s office and just run that 24/7 for a week, I wonder how much work we would see happening, and how much other stuff?

**John:** Yeah. It would be challenging to see. So, let’s look at – he segues from this scene of a film set, to talking about other industries that were disrupted. So, let’s quickly go through some of the other industries that have been disrupted and sort of what the fair analogies are and the unfair analogies.

Let’s start with the music industry. Obviously there was a massive disruption in the music industry. Recorded music sort of fell apart. And the so the profits that you used to come into the recording industry are not there anymore. It’s a very different industry, obviously, but that was the one that was sort of most directly hit by mp3s, piracy. It all fell apart.

To a lesser degree, you see what happened in the newspaper industry. You saw book publishing. Other industries where disruption sort of upended everything. But the music industry is probably the most direct one, so let’s take a look at that first.

**Craig:** Well, the music industry was disrupted in this fashion in the ‘90s. We’re talking about 25 years ago now. I think Napster was, and Limewire, and all these sites – I mean, remember Limewire? These were around in the early ‘90s. And I think everybody watching what that did to the music industry naturally said, “How long will it be before the television and film industry falls to the same fate?”

And really the only thing that seemed to be limiting it was just bandwidth capacity and sizes of hard drives, which probably within six years had reached the place where it could happen. And it has not happened. And they keep talking about this like this is the mistake that old people make. Sorry, Nick. I assume – even if he’s my age, he’s old. We think that because we clearly remember this happening that it’s going to happen again right around the corner. That is a quarter of a century ago. And it has not happened.

Why? Huge difference between the way the music industry works and the way our industry works. The music industry was never developing work because music is not massively collaborative. The only collaboration you find in music really is between maybe a producer and an artist, or four or five people in a band. But the truth is, one person with a guitar can make a hit song. The music industry was always about finding those people, the way that indie companies find movies at festivals, and then supporting their work financially like patrons, and then advertising and distributing the work, which is the only apt comparison to the way Hollywood functions for television and film.

It has never been true and it never will be true about movies and shows that one person or two people or four people can do it. In fact, it takes armies of people. The very armies that this guy thinks might not be necessary, but are, to make these shows happen. And so we are simply in a different position. If this industry around us went the way of the music industry, there just wouldn’t be the content. But we know that that’s not true for music. It’s odd to me that the question isn’t why hasn’t this happened to film, rather than the statement clearly this will happen to film.

**John:** Yeah. I think that’s a great question. It was what I wanted to hit next. And we don’t have time for it today, but let’s try to circle back in a future episode basically why has film and television not fallen apart to piracy the way we always kind of thought it might, because there really is not a fundamental difference in terms of technology of why a television series can still be viable now, even though there is rampant piracy, and we know about Game of Thrones. There’s rampant piracy. And yet it hasn’t happened. So, to predict that it’s going to happen seems naïve.

Moving on through the article, he talks about “Hollywood these days seems remarkably poised for a similar disruption. Its audiences increasingly prefer on-demand content. Its labor is costly. And margins are shrinking.” Craig?

**Craig:** I don’t agree. First of all, I don’t know what he means by Hollywood exactly. He never quite defines that terms. What is that? When I first showed up in Los Angeles in 1992, in the era of Napster, somewhat optimistically, defying all the predictions of disaster, I remember driving through Hollywood. Actually seeing Hollywood for the first time and going, “Wait, what? This is a slum. There’s nothing here. There’s just a bunch of warehouses and a couple of post-production facilities and graffiti and shambling heroin addicts.”

Hollywood, I don’t know exactly what it means. Yes, audiences prefer on-demand content in one sense. I think they prefer it over the traditional way of delivering television series, which was you get one once a week for 22 weeks. You have to wait. There are commercials inside of the episode that you have to wait. Of course they prefer that. They don’t seem to prefer on-demand content when it comes to movies. At all. That’s just a fact.

But the larger question, I mean, margins are shrinking. We’ll have to take a look at his data on that. But, why is Netflix not Hollywood in his definition? When Netflix employs the same crews, and the same writers, and the same actors, and the same directors, using the same methods that he’s decrying here, to make their shows. How is Scott Frank’s upcoming western miniseries that employed hundreds of people and big Hollywood stars, and he’s a big Hollywood writer-director, for Netflix, how is that – and a big budget – how is that not Hollywood?

**John:** Yeah. So we talked about disruption, and clearly you can look at Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, they are disrupting the model of standard television. But they’re disrupting it in very kind of conventional ways. They didn’t find a new cheaper way to make television. They just made really expensive television, and made money making really expensive television. So, it’s a weird kind of disruption.

Classically, you wouldn’t think of disruption as like, oh, you’ve changed the distribution model, you’ve changed – we’re able to make things for like a quarter of the cost. That’s not actually happened. And over the years I’ve seen experiments with like we’re going to see if we can do this kind of movie for a million dollars rather than $10 million. And they do one of those and it tanks. There’s kind of a reason why things cost what they cost. I don’t sort of buy the overall “it looks like it should be disrupted, so therefore it will be disrupted” argument.

But let’s do take a look at some numbers, because one of the things he cites in here, and actually I did tweet at him to ask where he got this number, and I haven’t heard back as we’re recording this, so if I do get the answer I will edit this in here. But he writes that, “Movie theater attendance is down to a 19-year low, with revenues hovering slightly above $10 billion.”

So, again, I don’t know what his source was for tickets sold, but for what I saw, 2016 had 1.3 billion tickets sold domestically. 1998, which is 19 years ago, had 1.4 billion. So, it’s lower, but it’s like a point of a billion. So, it’s not like a huge falloff.

I looked at the MPAA statistics, so for 2015, which was the last year I could find them, admissions or tickets sold were 1.32 billion. And average tickets sold per person increased 4%. That means that two-thirds of North Americans saw at least one movie in the theater, which is a 2% increase over moviegoers from 2014. So, that’s actually a pretty amazing statistic that it says two-thirds, actually 69% of North Americans saw at least one movie in the theater. That’s kind of huge.

**Craig:** It’s enormous. And when you see movie theater attendance is down to a 19-year low, that is classic misinformation. If it’s down to a 19-year low, but it’s down by, like you said, some tiny amount, that’s not particularly meaningful. Nor does his 19-year low take into account what was going on inside those 19 years. So, in 1998, 1.44 billion tickets sold. In 2003, 1.52 billion tickets sold. So, I don’t quite see where he’s coming from here. In 1997, total inflation adjusted box office was $11.6 billion. And in 2016, it $11.25 billion. That seems remarkably stable for an industry that he is suggesting is in some kind of freefall.

I generally do not like these kinds of sensational statistics manipulation because it makes me start to question the motivation here, which I don’t think is evil or malicious as much as over-zealous in support of a grabby click-bait headline.

**John:** Yeah. And obviously writers don’t pick their headlines, and so a lot of what he’s describing here can be sort of charitably taken as this is sort of the experience of sort of what it feels like here. And as a tech person coming in and seeing this stuff, he sees these patterns which are classically setup for Silicon Valley disruption. But what I find so fascinating is the Silicon Valley money from Amazon, from Netflix, they’re spending the same money. They’re changing some things, but they’re actually still spending all the money to make the big, expensive prestige things.

You look at the kinds of series they’re doing. You look at the kinds of money they’re spending. It’s not actually different.

**Craig:** It’s not. And by the way, this is not for lack of trying to disrupt. That’s the other thing that’s really important to understand. Amazon, we did an episode about this a number of years ago. When Amazon came into this world of content creation, they absolutely wanted to disrupt it. In fact, their entire model was based on the presumption that is being stated in this article. That Hollywood system was inefficient, clumsy, unnecessarily cumbersome. And that by disrupting it and going straight to content creators and then crowd-sourcing the material and crowd-editing it that they would arrive at much better work, essentially kind of Ubering their way around a taxi cab industry. And they failed not big, but disastrously, to the point where they have just forgotten about that whole thing completely. That was just a complete whiff.

And they failed for all the reasons we suggested they would. So, believe me, they would. Oh my god, would they have disrupted us by now if they could.

**John:** I don’t think they’re going to. And part of it is also you have to understand the economics of things are not sort of what you might anticipate. He talks about a modest episode of a television show could cost $3 million to shoot and produce. By comparison, the typical startup in Silicon Valley will raise that much for a team of engineers and servers for two years. It feels like a very faulty analogy considering that $3 million you’re spending on that television episode is immediately profitable.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Because of foreign right sales, that $3 million you’ve spent, you’ve already made it back. Like by the time it airs, you’ve made your money back. So the return on investment on that $3 million is really good. And I think that’s part of my frustration is you see people investing new money in Hollywood all the time, including these tech people, because it’s genuinely profitable.

**Craig:** Right. That’s the strange paradox at the heart of this. He’s saying that Hollywood is going to be disrupted by Silicon Valley, and yet Silicon Valley keeps giving money to Hollywood. Right? So, you could take that $3 million if you really want to be efficient and just buy bean pickers. You could buy, I don’t know, 10,000 bean pickers in how many bean fields. It’s not the way this works. It’s a dumb comparison.

And here’s the other thing. People routinely make the mistake of applying classic ROI analysis, return on investment analysis, to Hollywood, forgetting one very important thing: that people don’t want to just be in the entertainment business because of the business part. There’s that old saying, you know, it’s not show fun, it’s show business. This is show business. Yes, but the flip side of that is it’s show business, not business-business, not money business. Show business.

You and I could make more money doing something else. If everybody simply went towards what was the most efficient way to make money, then I guess, yes, we would all be hedge fund managers, or I don’t know. But even the business people, the suits, that are in our business want to be in our business because they’re drawn to the show. To the glamour. And the celebrity. And the artistic experience. And the notion of creating culture as opposed to a slightly more feature-laden spreadsheet. And that’s why Silicon Valley is so fascinated by Hollywood. They can say it’s because they need content for all their new delivery systems, but in the end content is fascinating. And a lot of this other stuff like how to maximize server load is not.

**John:** It’s not. It’s fascinating for certain people, and god bless the people for whom that is fascinating and they get paid well by Google. Let’s bring this a little closer to home and back to screenwriting. Because he talks about if you could give a computer all the best scripts ever written, it would eventually be able to write one that might come close to replicating an Aaron Sorkin screenplay.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** It’s very close to the a thousand monkeys at a thousand typewriters thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Like, yes, that could happen. We looked at the first scripts sort of written by an AI program starring Thomas Middleditch. It was not fantastic.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Do I believe that that kind of stuff will get better? I do believe that kind of stuff will get better. Do I believe it’s going to replace our expectations of screenwriters writing scripts? I do not believe that.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** It falls into a line of sort of Amazon’s model in terms of crowd-sourcing things. Or the kind of inevitable A/B testing that’s done on the tech side, which has the equivalence in our focus group being in Hollywood. They are processes. They are processes that don’t necessarily lend themselves to great works of art.

And I think a thing which may be easy to overlook from a distance is that this isn’t like sort of what color should the links be on Google’s home page, which they can test for. It’s like is this movie working? Is this movie going to be the one that’s going to bring a billion dollars in? That’s not the kind of thing you can actually sort of test for. It actually has to be good. And there’s a qualitative versus a quantitative thing that’s very hard to sort of hit to. You have to get filmmakers and a vision behind that for those things to work.

**Craig:** Well, they keep trying. We will discover every year or so another one of these companies that believes they’ve found an algorithm, and they haven’t. I love sentences like, “If you can give a computer all the best scripts ever written, it would eventually be able to write one that might come close to replicating an Aaron Sorkin screenplay.” Oh, OK. Well, I can’t wait for that day. Here’s what we know about that wonderful day. Aaron Sorkin has to exist first. Aaron Sorkin has to write a screenplay first. This is the kind of thing that people say at a cocktail party and you just go, “You know what, I have to excuse myself to the bathroom,” because I can’t talk to this person anymore. They’re out of their minds.

It’s not that I’m one of these people that thinks stupidly that computers aren’t going to become smarter, and smarter, and smarter. We’re fascinated by this. We talked about this remarkable leap forward that Google took with translation. But they only were able to do that by feeding enormous amounts of data, meaning language, into that computer, and then having the computer parse through all of this stuff.

And you can’t do that with movies. You’ll just end up, I mean, what’s the point? We’ve tested this with everyone on the planet and we’ve come up with the perfect version. Great. They already saw it. It doesn’t matter. What if computers could write Vanity Fair articles? What if computers could make Michelin Star worthy food? What if robots could play baseball? Putting “what if” in front of a prediction adds exactly zero credibility to it. It’s just provocation for provocation sake. And in particular, when you’re talking about movies, what we crave as an audience and as humans is the new. Computers are really good at copying what’s happened before, right?

When we say that Google translation has made a huge leap forward, what we’re saying is they’re catching up to what humans have already done with translation work. They’re not translating hither to untranslated languages. But with movies, we want new. We’re always looking for cultural disruption. Computers will not be able to do that. That’s not what they do. We do that.

**John:** Yeah. You look at the progress in AI, and it’s always really good at solving games. And so translation you can think of as a game. Like are you getting the right result? And so computers just this last week kicked ass at poker, and they were able to do poker really well, and that was a huge breakthrough. The thing is, there’s not a perfect answer in terms of like what is the right movie. Because you can have the right movie. I’ve seen the right movie. And then I’ve been in like three-hour arguments with producers and studio executives over the right movie that’s already finished and they keep wanting to change things.

There’s not going to be a place where you get to like this is the perfect movie. This is the best movie it can possibly be. There’s always going to be opinions. And there aren’t opinions in poker. It’s clear who won.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And you don’t have a clear winner in this. But, let’s do that dangerous “what if” and let’s ask the question of what if he’s right, or what if essentially even if he’s wrong on some of the details, he’s right in saying that Hollywood as we know it is going to end, or it’s going to collapse, it’s going to fall, there’s going to be some reckoning coming. What should we look for if that is going to happen?

**Craig:** Well, you would start to see major studios with names that have great brand awareness shutting down completely. I think if you saw Warner Bros or Universal or Fox or Columbia, Disney, just say we’re out of the business of making television shows and movies, that would be a huge sign. And I think one of those things would have to happen while also not being replaced by some equivalent. So, it’s not like Circuit City goes out of business because Best Buy is just doing the same job but better. But rather we’ve just lost something, the way that brick and mortar stores are disappearing. We know that Sears is disappearing. Best Buy is gone. Circuit City is gone. That’s a sign.

**John:** Yeah. I would say if you saw a lack of investment, basically money was not chasing Hollywood anymore, that would be a sign that they’re saying like, “OK, we don’t believe we’re going to be able to get our money out of this investment.” And we are not seeing that now.

So, I’m not saying that the money spigots will always be flowing at sort of maximum volume, but I’m still seeing a lot of money coming into Hollywood. You’re seeing a lot of Silicon Valley money coming into Hollywood. And that is considered pretty smart money. They must have a reason why they’re trying to do this.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** I would also take a look at sort of movie theaters themselves. And we didn’t sort of hit on this part of the article, but it’s always that question of like will the big screen experience persist, because you know television, yes, got disrupted, but when you think of movies they’ve actually been very much the same experience for the past 100 years. You go into a big room with a bunch of other people. The lights go down. And on a big screen in front of you, you see a story being told, about two hours long, has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And you’re seeing it with this big group of people and they’re all having sort of the same communal experience. The lights come on, and you leave.

Weirdly, that has not changed that much. The theaters have gotten better. The projectors have gotten better. We no longer show film. But it’s the same basic experience. And will that go away? I guess it could? There could be a situation where VR goggles are so much better than the experience of being in that theater that it goes away to some degree. But I think there still will be a social aspect of going out to the movies that persists.

But if we see that the big exhibitors go away, like if money goes away from the AMC theaters, the Carmikes, and all those, then maybe that’s a sign that the big screen movie business – it’s days are numbered.

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that there is some concern there. There’s a realistic concern about the exhibition business, which I think he is confounding here with Hollywood. Hollywood is not in the exhibition business. Hollywood is in the content creation business. And the distribution and advertising business. But it is forbidden by law, and he acknowledges this in the article, it’s forbidden by law to also then control the exhibition business, which is movie theaters.

Movie theaters have been in trouble for a long time. And they’ve been in trouble for a long time because in part they’re being squeezed in all sorts of ways. And you can see that because they pass along those squeezings to you in the form of $20 cup-full of popcorn. And yet, with all the complaints that people have about movie theaters, and concessions, they still go. We know that. We just talked about the ticket buying practices.

Hollywood continues to try and figure out ways to get around the one price fits all model. And they are constantly butting heads with the exhibitors over that one. Hollywood would love to be able to charge $25 a ticket for a Star Wars movie, which they know people would pay, and the exhibitors are terrified of that because those people are not going to then also spend $25 on Goobers.

So, there’s struggles there. And the movie theaters are struggling. So far we have not seen any kind of wholesale shuttering of those facilities. I don’t think VR is going to – VR to me is completely irrelevant. Has nothing to do with watching a movie. All of us are quite addicted to watching things projected on flat things. Children, too. Where things have changed is when you look at the iPad and little videos of babies trying to touch and swipe magazine pages because they think they can interact with it.

But, no, VR to me feels like a trap, frankly. It just feels like a gimmick.

**John:** I’m going to disagree with you on VR. I think VR actually probably will become something amazing, but I think it’s a mistake to sort of assume that it’s going to replace movies. I think it’s going to be its own thing. And I think trying to make it be something it’s not is foolish. It’s going to become its own special and probably amazing art form.

But the same way that videogames are not replacing television. They are different things.

**Craig:** I actually agree with that. I mean to say that I think it’s a gimmick when it comes to movies.

**John:** Oh yeah.

**Craig:** But I agree with you that the applications are pretty remarkable for other things.

**John:** Cool. All right, let’s skip ahead to questions, because I worry that we’re not going to get to questions if we just don’t tackle these.

**Craig:** Yeah, and we’ve been punting these down the line, week after week.

**John:** So I feel bad for Jessica. Would you read Jessica’s question for us?

**Craig:** Sure, Jessica from New York – oh – asks, “I am writing a feature loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s folktale The Red Shoes.” Which, by the way, John, have you ever read The Red Shoes?

**John:** I’ve read The Red Shoes.

**Craig:** Oh my god, it’s horrifying. Hans Christian Andersen, boy was he a dark dude. Anyway.

**John:** Yeah, well we talked about The Little Mermaid and what the original ending of The Little Mermaid was, which was incredibly dark.

**Craig:** And that’s nothing compared to The Red Shoes, where you dance until you’re dead. OK. So, “I’m writing a feature loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen’s folktale The Red Shoes. Since this is in public domain, I know that I’m good to go. However, The Red Shoes was also a novel written in 2013 by John Stewart Wynne. I haven’t read the book, but I have read the summary. The novel is based in New York, like my story, and addresses similar themes. While I know that my take on this folktale will be entirely different as far as plot, I worry there will be some inevitable similarities. Would I ever have a potential legal issue with the author of this novel if my screenplay were optioned or purchased?”

John, what do you think?

**John:** So, here’s the place where we remind you that we are not lawyers, so we’re only going to give you our opinions that are not legal opinions. I would say that there’s always a chance that someone could come to you and say like, “Hey, that’s my thing, The Red Shoes, which was set here and was an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s whatever.” And then it could be a thing. And you just don’t know it’s going to be a thing. But if you’re paralyzed by that worry now, don’t be.

I would say write your great script, write your great movie, and don’t worry about this other thing. I think you are smart not to have read the other thing. I mean, I mean you did write into a podcast where we’re talking about it, so this wouldn’t be great for a future lawsuit.

There’s no project you could conceive of writing that would not have some other thing out there that could theoretically sue you. So, to be paralyzed by it now is foolish.

**Craig:** I agree. I’ll even go one step further. There is an entire world of precedent for different works based on the same underlying public domain properties. There have been god knows how many versions of bible stories alone. So, right off the bat, you’re talking about a novel that’s based on something else and you’re basing something on that same thing. So, similarities are inevitable, and the similarities in theory would be ones that are related to the underlying material which is accessible to everyone because it’s in public domain.

More importantly, you actually would I have potential legal issue if my screenplay were optioned or purchased? No, because the people purchasing your screenplay, forget option because they haven’t bought anything, but purchase, they are going to do their due diligence and make sure that you haven’t stepped on anyone’s toes, which you’re not doing. You’re not infringing. You’re not plagiarizing. And at that point, part of your contract is that you’re indemnified.

So, if somebody does sue, then the studios just handle them. And they do. They sue and as John and I have pointed out many, many times, seems like every week we hear about somebody suing, and every never we hear about somebody winning.

**John:** Write your script, Jessica. Just write it.

**Craig:** Yep.

**John:** Our next question comes from Tully Archer. Let’s listen to what she had to say.

Tully Archer: We’ve all read bad scripts, some of them just shockingly, horribly bad scripts, but I sort of cheerily assume that there’s almost always something promising in there. Some cool idea, or interesting phrasing that we can point to to say this script could be good. It just needs work. However, have you ever read something or interacted with someone where you came away thinking, wow, this person will not make it? If so, what was it? What was the thing? Is there something that when you see it you recognize it as that thing that spells irrefutable doom for the screenwriter in questions? Thanks again. You guys are awesome.

**John:** So, Craig, any signals of inevitable doom as you’ve interacted with other writers?

**Craig:** Yeah. Certainly. You know, we all have had that experience. I think there is weirdly a kind of freedom that is attached to that experience because you don’t particularly have to worry about hurting that person’s feelings. Life is going to patiently explain to them that this is not for them.

Sometimes these people are deeply delusional. What I tend to pick up on immediately is a series of writing mistakes to the exclusion of anything good. Every possible way you could succeed has been foreclosed. And all you have is bad description, bad characters or nonexistent characters. Really that’s more than anything is just they’re not even there. So the characters aren’t characters. The dialogue isn’t dialogue. The action doesn’t seem to be happening. The place where you are doesn’t seem to be real. Everything is just off completely. And at that point, you could try and explain to the tone deaf person why they’re not going to be a professional singer, but really you could just say, unfortunately, sometimes what I’ll do is, “I just stopped reading at page 10. I had a whole bunch issues, I’m happy to tell you why. But I’m probably not the person that this script was meant for. I just am not connecting with your writing.”

And then you move on because it doesn’t matter. They stink.

**John:** Yeah. So now if Craig tells you that, that he didn’t connect with the writing, he doesn’t think that you have a shot.

**Craig:** I don’t read anybody else’s stuff anymore. [laughs] I’m out of that.

**John:** Yeah. I have similar experience about reading through a script and they just fundamentally don’t get it. And especially if like, oh, this is my third script and like I’m reading through and it’s like, no, this person doesn’t understand sort of what a screenplay actually is. There’s a weird thing where it’s like nothing actually clicks. And you flip a page and it’s like you’re in a whole new movie, or you flip a page and it’s like you’re just reading the same scene again and again. There’s just nothing to it. It’s just empty.

So, that’s the experience on the page. Sometimes I’ll be talking with somebody and they’ll be describing the movies they want to make, or how they want to work in Hollywood, and sometimes they’re just brand new, and they’re naïve, and they don’t sort of know what it is. But sometimes they just have a fundamental misunderstanding of what movies are. Or what television is. And I can’t talk them through all of that. And so I can say, oh, we make a podcast about it. Maybe you want to listen.

But there’s people who don’t seem to fundamentally understand not even the business but the creative endeavor of trying to write for film and television. That it’s a lot. And some people just kind of don’t get it. And you can see that they just don’t get it.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know you’re in bad shape when you read a few pages and you think what this person needs to do is find one of the most formulaic, basic, by the numbers, copycat movies out there, and read the script for that. They’re not even there yet. They don’t know the alphabet. Never fun.

**John:** It sounds like, oh, there’s a gleeful sort of – oh, this person just doesn’t get it. No, it’s actually upsetting when I encounter that. Especially when they’re really genuinely nice people.

**Craig:** Of course.

**John:** Because you’re rooting for them. You want them to succeed. But you also want to somehow be able to tell them I don’t think this is going to work for you for these reasons. And I’ve never been the guy who can sort of say that.

**Craig:** Very few people are. You know? If you’re on a television show, and that’s your character that’s fine. You could be Simon Cowell. I always admired that. But in life, there’s really not much of an upside to that. One time I did tell somebody this is not for you. And they took it very poorly. It was probably about 15 years ago. They are not currently a professional screenwriter.

**John:** I have had the experience of like there’s the people who are actually genuine good writers, but they’re not good at the whole thing. Like they’re good at certain parts of writing movies. And I feel like you need to find a writing partner who is good at the rest of this stuff. Because you clearly have some great skills. You’re really good at dialogue, but you can’t sort of do everything else right. And you don’t seem to have a good grasp of how you should act in a meeting and that kind of stuff. Those are the people who kind of frustrate me most, because I can see the right circumstances and the right combination of elements they could write something brilliant. But, it’s not going to be me who is going to be able to get them there.

That’s honestly sort of the heartbreaking situation. I have friends who I definitely sense could do it with just like the right combination of things.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, the truth is if you ask what is sadder, a kid who believes he should be, or whose one dream is to be a major league baseball player, but just can’t make his own high school team, or a triple A player who is almost good enough, but not. It’s just triple A player is sadder.

**John:** it is sadder. It’s a strange thing. To be so close and not get it. To go to the Olympics and not make it to the medals round.

**Craig:** Right. Really, you’re so much better than so many people, it’s just that you’re not good enough. That’s rough. Yeah. Well, but happily that’s not what this question was about.

**John:** Yeah, that’s not this question. The obvious people.

**Craig:** Complete ding-a-lings. Oh, we have another question from New York. This is New York day.

**John:** You can take it.

**Craig:** All right. Alyssa in New York asks, “I’m writing a script where a character is interviewing another character who does not speak English, with a translator acting as a go between. Basically she asks the question, the translator translates it, the woman answers, and the translator translates her response. How do I show this in a script? Do I need to write all the lines twice and indicate that one time they’re in a different language? Or can I just write in an action line Woman talks and then have a line with just the translator saying what was said?”

How would you handle that, John?

**John:** There are multiple ways to do it. When Aline was on the show, she was talking about her French ladies script that had a bit of this where they had to switch back and forth between languages. And she described it basically there would be lines in French when they needed to be in French, but mostly everything was in English. And I think English is genuinely your friend here. So just stick with the translator in English as much as reasonable or possible. There may be cases where if the person who is speaking the foreign language is actually the more important character, I would probably give them the dialogue header. Like put their character name and then in italics or something else put what they’re actually saying, so that we get the vibe of like this is all being translated in real time. But it’s clear that we’re looking at the person and not the translator who is doing the speaking.

**Craig:** Yes. Years and years ago I was working on a script and I made the mistake of having people say something in their language, and then underneath putting the translation. And Scott Frank almost killed me. He almost slit my throat over it. Because it’s unwieldy. And ultimately you don’t get any credit for saying, look, I know words.

So, in a situation like this, especially when you’re talking about repeated, and as a conversation, not just one or two lines, I would probably describe the situation. So, Alyssa is asking questions and Jean-Pierre is answering and Jean-Pierre’s translator is serving as the go between. And then when it’s Jean-Pierre’s time to talk I might say Jean-Pierre/Translator and then put his dialogue in italics.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That’s probably what I would do.

**John:** That’s a smart way to do it. And, again, if Jean-Pierre is the more important character, then Jean-Pierre, just give him the lines and just say woman talks in scene description. But that’s probably not going to be the case in the story you’re describing. But I would say just basically never do your own translation work in the script. You’re just burning page and you’re burning the reader’s attention. Because the reader doesn’t want to read those two lines in different languages.

**Craig:** And god forbid Scott Frank ever picks it up.

**John:** Oh my god. It’s just the worst.

**Craig:** And when he wants to cut your throat, he uses script paper. He uses three-hole punch. So it’s like he’s paper cutting your throat open.

**John:** Well, he’s an expert. He really knows how to do all this stuff. He’s done all those violent movies. And he’s learned some ways.

**Craig:** A thousand ways to kill you.

**John:** It’s really good. So, Craig, we’re at the point of the show where we have two more topics that we didn’t get to, so rather than try to cram those topics in, we’ll save them for next week’s show. So, next week we will talk about, oh, there’s good stuff with Kellyanne Conway here. There’s good stuff I learned from my copy editing experience. But they’re kind of evergreen, so we will get back to those next week. It was important that we answered these questions this time.

And so important that we get to our One Cool Things. So, my One Cool Thing is incredibly self-centered. I was reading through the comment thread on IMDb about my movie Go.

**Craig:** Oh my god.

**John:** I would generally not do this, but someone had pointed me towards it saying like have you seen this thread. And I’m like, OK. And so this thread was started by a user asking this question. “Did anyone else notice that even though the film was shot in 1999, and focused on young people, that no mobile phones appeared in the phone? Unless I missed something, it seems like this was a deliberate decision by the makers of the film. I like the choice.” And there’s an edit here saying that the strip club sort of seems to have a car phone, but it doesn’t explain why no other characters in the movie use a mobile when they clearly had the opportunity.

So, Craig, what is your answer? Why do characters not use mobile phones in Go?

**Craig:** I’m going to guess it’s because that would have ended the movie in about 40 seconds?

**John:** No. Weirdly it isn’t. Because most cases in screenwriters and cell phones, I did a whole presentation on screenwriters and cell phones and how cell phones are the death of screenwriting. But it actually wasn’t that. People assume that like, oh, mobile phones were common in 1999, but they actually need to wind the clock back.

So, the movie came out in ’99. The movie was shot in ’98 and it was written in ’97. At the point in 1997 when I wrote the script, these characters would not have had mobile phones. And it’s so hard to remember back in that time, or if you weren’t born at that time, to know that people didn’t always have mobile phones. And these characters would not have had mobile phones and that’s why they’re using pagers.

What I found so great about this thread, though, it goes on for 13 pages. So, hundreds of people wrote in with their theories about why there were not cell phones in Go. So, I found it delightful. I love when people obsess about things that I actually know the answer to. So, it was fun.

**Craig:** It’s great.

**John:** It was nice.

**Craig:** It’s that moment in Annie Hall where you get to be, “Don’t you wish life were always like this?”

**John:** Yeah. It’s like that. Craig, what’s your One Cool Thing?

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing this week is the much needed resurgence of journalism. Talking about disruption and industries falling apart, much like the music industry, the newspaper industry was absolutely blown apart by the emergence of online media and suddenly overnight their profit base, which was essentially subscriptions to their print versions, disappeared. And they struggled greatly.

And yet now we find ourselves in desperate need of them. Which must be very nice for them to know. It turns out that we need these people to say the truth. And to question people if they feel that those people aren’t speaking the truth. So, what I would like all of you to consider, regardless of your politics, is to actually subscribe to a reputable periodical. There are disreputable periodicals to the left and the right of the political spectrum. But I’m going to list five here that sort of run the gamut from middle left to middle right: The New York Times, The Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times.

These are excellent periodicals that do investigative journalism. They have slightly different points of views. But more importantly, they are experiencing a moment now where everyone says we need you because we’re drowning in nonsense. We live in a time when a presidential spokesperson goes on TV and decries a massacre that literally never happened. And within minutes people will start tweeting about this. And televised news is terrific in its own way. But only publications can really dig down into the, wait, why did she say that? What is that about? What did she mistake it for? What does this mean? You don’t get that from television.

From television you just get people yammering at each other. So, considering subscribing to one or more of these publications.

**John:** I subscribe to three of these publications. And going back to this notion of disruption, I think podcasts have clearly disrupted some of the traditional media landscape, but what I’ve been so happy to see is The New York Times really stepping up its podcast game. So this past week they started The Daily which is a 15-minute podcast. Incredibly well produced daily podcast that’s looking at one or two stories in depth. So, it’s great to see these venerable institutions like The New York Times really embracing how they can tell their stories now. So, I really do urge people to subscribe to one of these or another great publication of your choice.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** And that’s our show for this week. So as always, it was produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Malcolm Nygard. Thank you, Malcolm. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For shorter questions, I’m on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

We are on Facebook. Some people left some really nice comments about Nima’s episode, so thank you for that. If you want to find us on Facebook, just search for Scriptnotes Podcast. You can also search for Scriptnotes Podcast to find our app, which is right now the only way to get to all of our back episodes, as you’re walking around. It’s $1.99 a month for all those back episodes. You can sign up at Scriptnotes.net.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts, about four days after the episode airs. And that’s it. So thanks so much, Craig.

**Craig:** See you next time John.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Scriptnotes Extra: [A Refugee Story](http://johnaugust.com/2017/a-refugee-story)
* [Their Story is Our Story](https://tsosrefugees.org)
* [Vale](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jlQiwcsV9Q)
* [Hollywood is already over](http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/01/why-hollywood-as-we-know-it-is-already-over)
* [MPAA Statistics](http://www.mpaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/MPAA-Theatrical-Market-Statistics-2015_Final.pdf)
* [IMDb is shutting down its message boards](https://www.engadget.com/2017/02/05/imdb-shuts-down-message-boards/)
* [Go IMDb Thread](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139239/board/flat/99293237?p=1)
* [New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/)
* [Wall Street Journal](https://www.wsj.com/)
* [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 Malcolm Nygard ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_287.mp3).

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

**Craig Mazin:** And my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 286 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, well, way back in Episode 37 we discussed dialogue. Today we’re doing a follow up on that. A part two on dialogue. The ways in which characters communicate with each other and let us know what’s inside their heads. Then we’ll be discussing two terms often applied to screenwriters and I will be urging people to stop using those terms.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s a great idea.

**John:** Plus, we’ll have a chance to answer some listener questions if we don’t run out of time, so we should probably get started. Craig, last week we asked How Would This Be a Movie, and several of our listeners wrote in to say that was already a TV show.

**Craig:** Yeah, who knew? So, this was the Alexis Manigo story. This was the girl who was stolen from her parents when she was born, from the hospital, and raised by an entirely different woman. And then comes to find out when she’s 17 or 18 what the truth is, and it was an interesting story. So, she was born Kamiyah Mobley and then was raised as Alexis Manigo, and I guess now she’s back to being Kamiyah Mobley. Regardless, many folks wrote in, including – do you remember this guy, Stuart Friedel? [laughs]

**John:** Vaguely. I think he was a producer early on on Scriptnotes. That’s maybe how we knew him, Stuart.

**Craig:** Only for the first 98% of the shows. Regardless, Stuart and others wrote in to direct our attention to an MTV series that was called Finding Carter. And that show was about – we’ll see if this sounds familiar- a teenage girl whose life is turned upside down when she discovers that the woman she thought was her mother had abducted when she was a child. That’s the exact same story. And it was created by a writer named Emily Silver. So, yeah, looks like I guess life has imitated art there?

**John:** Perhaps. Or Emily Silver was ahead of the game. Perhaps she traveled through time and she saw the story and went back in time so she could be the first one there with that story.

**Craig:** That’s the most likely explanation.

**John:** That is absolutely. Occam’s razor suggests time travel is clearly what was at work here. It’s a good idea for a story in general. So that was a fictional version of that story. I kind of remember a promo for it, because I don’t watch a lot on MTV, but I watch MTV’s The Challenge and I would see promos for Finding Carter back in those days.

**Craig:** I got to tell you, I have forgotten that MTV even exists. I mean, look, when we were kids MTV came out and it was the bomb. Right? We all loved MTV. The astronaut dancing around. Videos were this new thing. We were just thrilled.

**John:** We also said words like The Bomb.

**Craig:** Right. Like that’s how old we are. And then MTV stopped playing music videos and started doing other stuff. And we were like, meh, I don’t know. But then they had MTV’s The Real World. And that became the new hotness. Right?

**John:** I loved The Real World. I probably watched the first six seasons of The Real World.

**Craig:** I don’t know how long I stuck around. I think I probably checked out after San Francisco, which was kind of the height of drama. At least as far as I could tell. And then I stopped watching MTV. I don’t even know where to find it. I don’t know what’s on it. And I’m not sure that’s necessarily a function of me being an old dude. My son is 15. My daughter is 12. I don’t even know if they know that MTV is a thing.

**John:** I think MTV is still a thing, it’s just because channels have become much less important, networks have become less important, and programs have become more important. So, like Teen Wolf is a big MTV show.

**Craig:** Ah, OK.

**John:** And so that is a big scripted show. And so that is sort of what they do now. And Finding Carter was a series, like Teen Wolf, but it didn’t break out in the way that Teen Wolf broke out to become a phenomena.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** Yeah. I think you can still make some sort of movie version of that story, but I kind of feel like we were – obviously we weren’t going to know about Finding Carter. We’re just not in that demographic. But I think a TV series is actually a really interesting way to go with that idea, because it’s an ongoing journey. It doesn’t have to be a one-time situation to discover that you’re kidnapped. There’s a lot of story that you can stretch out ahead there. And so a TV series is a good way to do that. Congratulations, Emily Silver, your time travel seems like a great opportunity for narrative.

**Craig:** Silver!

**John:** Silver! Next up, we talked about sea monkeys. And, again, there was a TV show. I have no idea there was a TV show. There was a television program that ran for 11 episodes in 1992 called The Amazing Live Sea Monkeys. It starred Howie Mandel as the professor. The show was created by Howie Mandel, along with Stephen Charles and Edward Chiodo, who I looked up and they are like puppeteers. They are puppet makers. And so this was a live action show. The sea monkeys had sort of puppeted faced. I mean, they were like makeup faces. And so they were full size people.

I should probably just read the Wikipedia summary. “The plot revolved around the notion that the Professor had accidentally enlarged three sea monkeys to human-size, and plotlines followed their ensuing comical ineptness in the world. Each Sea Monkey displayed a certain odd character trait: Aquarius could not keep a secret, Bill was afraid of an Imperial, Dave would grow excited at the sound of polka music. They occasionally come into contact with their next door neighbors the ‘Brentwood’s, whose daughter Sheila becomes the Sea-Monkeys best friend.”

**Craig:** First of all, what is happening? I mean, we’ve talked a lot about what it means to build a character. This is a good example of what to not do. “Dave would grow excited at the sound of polka music” – not really a solid substitute for verisimilitude in a living creature. But, what the hell does “Bill was afraid of an Imperial” mean? What?

**John:** I don’t know. I feel like we shouldn’t entirely judge a show based on its Wikipedia summary.

**Craig:** The Wikipedia summary. Right.

**John:** But we will put a link in the show notes to the YouTube clip so people can watch it. I feel like if you were taking advantage of California’s new medical marijuana laws, this might be the thing to start watching, because it is surreal in the strangest ways.

**Craig:** Well, it is. I watched about, I don’t know, two minutes of it. And it is – “ensuring comical ineptness” – sounds correct. There was comical ineptness all around there. But I was struck by how, once again, John, how old we are, because this show looked honestly like it was – other than being in color, it could have been made in 1840. [laughs] And it was from 1992. I graduated college in 1992. I can’t believe that this was what was happening back then. Not good.

**John:** No. Not good. I will say that this falls into that gap of – I grew up watching Saturday morning shows. I think this was a Saturday morning show. I hope this was a Saturday morning show. But I grew up watching those. But then, of course, you turn to junior high and high school and you stop watching those shows. And so there’s a whole generation of those shows that you would not have caught.

So, Stuart Friedel, again, probably would have watched this show.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But you and I would not have watched this show.

**Craig:** I bet you Stuart still watches it occasionally.

**John:** Stuart is a huge fan of children’s television. And I guess sort of young adult television. That’s why he knows about Finding Carter. He can tell you what’s happening on the Thundermans. He’s very good at that kind of stuff.

**Craig:** And not in a weird way, by the way.

**John:** No, there’s nothing at all weird about Stuart Friedel. He’s as straight-forward as you could come.

**Craig:** He legitimately loves children’s–

**John:** He really does.

**Craig:** I had dinner with Stuart the other night.

**John:** Tell me about dinner with Stuart Friedel, or after the air if it’s too embarrassing.

**Craig:** No, it was – well, after dinner was what normally happens with me and Stuart. And, you know what, we’re good. We’re cool. It was delightful. It was delightful. He is a lovely person. And a very, very smart person. He’s doing quite well.

**John:** Yeah. And he’s married. Congratulations, Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** He’s married. Yes. One day our show may be produced by Jimmy Friedel, Stuart’s son.

**John:** Wow.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah, just named his kid for him. Why not?

**John:** So, if you’re curious about the sea monkeys, we will link to an episode called the Octapotomus, which is just fantastic.

**Craig:** People should know, by the way, that this episode is going to be wild, because normally we try and do this where it’s kind of mid-morning for me, and early evening for you because of our continental divide. But because of scheduling issues, it’s currently nearly midnight for me and crazy early in the morning for you. This is going to be wild.

**John:** It’s going to be wild.

All right, last bit of follow up here is the Sinbad genie movie. So, we talked last week about the Sinbad movie that never existed in which he plays a genie. And so as we were discussing it, in our show notes we were going to talk about the Mandela Effect. And there’s even a link in last week’s episode to the Mandela Effect because we were supposed to talk about it. We didn’t talk about it.

The Mandela Effect is a general term for situations like what’s happening with the Sinbad genie movie where people have a memory that is not actually true. There’s a collective memory that’s not true. And the Mandela Effect describes people’s memory of Nelson Mandela dying long before he died. Sort of a theory that there’s something weird and metaphysical happening there. So, we didn’t get into the Mandela Effect last week.

But, Craig, this past week you were describing a situation you had with David Kwong which sounds like a very similar kind of phenomenon.

**Craig:** Yeah, so the Mandela Effect I guess posits that there’s parallel universes and there’s like a glitch in either the computer simulation that we all live in, which I believe we do, or a glitch in parallel universes so that a lot of people are accessing some parallel alternate reality in which Sinbad did in fact play a genie in a movie called Shazam, which he did not.

So, David Kwong, our friend of the show, world famous magician, and now creator of a TV show. He’s got a new TV show that he’s doing. I was at dinner with him and the word dilemma came up, you know, just in use. And he said, “You know, up until three years ago,” and David Kwong for context, Harvard educated, one of the smartest people I’ve ever met in my life. He said, “Up until a couple years ago, I was convinced that the word dilemma was spelled D-I-L-E-M-N-A.” As in “dilemna.” With the M sound sort of being like autumn, which of course ends with M-N.

And he said what prompted him to go down this rabbit hole was he saw a poster for the movie a few years ago called The Dilemma, and he thought, “Oh, that’s somehow they’ve done a pun or something. Because they’ve spelled dilemma wrong.” And he looked it up and realized, no, you spell dilemma with two Ms, not M-N.

So, he goes online and realizes that he is one of many, many people who not only were under the impression that the word dilemma was spelled D-I-L-E-M-N-A, but have very clearly memories of being instructed that this is the case in the way that we are instructed in school about words that we might think be spelled one way, but are in fact spelled another way.

You know, so in school I remember we learned that the word separate, there was a poster that said, “There’s a RAT in SEPARATE,” because people sometimes misspell it Sep-e-rate, and it’s Sep-a-rate. These people have clear memories of being instructed, even textbooks instructing them that it’s DILEMNA, and there’s a website dedicated to this called dilemna.info.

So, we’ll link to that one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And you can read all about this bizarre glitch in the matrix.

**John:** Yes. So when you told me about David Kwong’s situation there, I have a memory, too, of having spelled dilemma with an N in it for some reason. And I don’t remember being specifically instructed, but I do remember thinking like, oh, that’s how you do it. And words like column or autumn have similar sort of patterns so it would kind of make sense. Also, dilemma is a word that you don’t use as a child. It becomes a middle school word at earliest. So, I can see sort of how that happens. I still think dilemma looks a little weird with two Ms. There’s something just really strange about the word dilemma. So, it’s not surprising to me that we have this weird situation around it.

Again, I don’t think it’s a metaphysical Mandela Effect necessarily. But, I get it. I get why people are a little bit creeped out by a false memory of having learned it a certain way.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So this idea that it was in your textbooks, well, we can’t find the textbooks that would actually have it printed the wrong way. We can’t find dictionaries that have it printed the wrong way. Yet, I could believe that teachers might have taught it the wrong way. And it’s not a recent phenomenon. Apparently it goes back 80 years. You see examples of people misspelling it in that specific way. So, something is going on there.

**Craig:** Right. And at the dilemna.info site you have – because the one theory was, well, if it’s people from a certain generation, maybe there was just like a bad textbook or something. But there’s a 90-year-old man who remembers this. There are 20 year olds who remember this. It’s a weird one for me because I always remembered how to spell dilemma because of Lemma. I don’t know if you remember the word “lemma” when you were doing geometry or not, but so it’s a Greek word. And dilemma is just two lemmas.

So, I – this is a weird one for me. I’m surprised. And, by the way, they do – they talk about how they remember it in textbooks, but no one can find them because, of course, they don’t exist.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Or do they?

**John:** Or do they? Hmm.

All right, let’s segue to our main topic today, which is words again. It’s dialogue. So, way back in Episode 37 we had Let’s Talk about Dialogue, was our first conversation about how we write dialogue for film and for television. And I wanted to sort of revisit that, because I’ve been thinking about that more over the last week. I’ve been doing some polishing. I’ve been doing some nips and tucks on a project. And it comes down to the dialogue for what I’m doing right now.

And I thought we’d start with sort of a history of what dialogue is, because obviously human beings who have been speaking for our entire existence – that’s one of the things that sort of makes us human. But dialogue is a very special case. And so I was thinking back to well what is the first example of dialogue. It would probably be reported speech. So, if I’m telling you a story and I’m using the speech as the characters in the story, or like I’m recapping something and saying like that he says, then she says, and it’s that situation where you’re modeling the behavior of what was said before. And so you can imagine sort of cavemen around the campfire doing that kind of reported speech would be the first kind of dialogue. Within a monologue, it’s the speech in that. Sort of like how an audio book works.

But then we have real plays. And so have the Greek dramas, the Greek comedies. If you think about the Greek dramas, a lot of Greek dramas are not people kind of talking back to each other. It sort of feels like I say something, then you say something, and there’s not a lot of interplay. But the Greek comedies, they do actually sort of talk to each other in ways that are meaningful. Of course, Shakespeare has plays in which characters are really communicating with each other. The thing I say influences the thing that you say back to me.

And then you have the Oscar Wilde comedies, which are all about sort of the craft of those words, and sort of like badminton where they’re just keeping the ball up in the air. It’s not a ball, but I’d say it’s a birdie.

**Craig:** Yeah, exactly. I went through a period where I was reading some of the old Greek comedies, Aristophanes and so on, and I was stunned at how contemporary they felt in terms of the back and forth of dialogue. It was kind of remarkable. And they are plays – so you’re reading essentially a script. A thousand and thousand year-old script. And they had figured a lot. It’s actually insane how little has changed.

**John:** Yeah. But I think it’s important to distinguish the comedies from the dramas, because when I look at the old Greek dramas, there is back and forth, but it’s not the same kind of back and forth. And it ends up being sort of a lot more like I’m going to tell you this whole long thing, and the next person is going to tell you this whole long thing.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** There’s less of that sort of back and forth.

**Craig:** I agree. It’s very declarative. The dramas are very much about speeches.

**John:** Yeah. But then you look at what happens next is as we get into radio plays, then it’s all dialogue. So, when you have stage plays, you can see the action happening in front of you. You have people there. But we get to radio plays, it’s just people talking. And so the words have to do so much more in order to communicate not only what’s being said, but sort of the world around what’s being said. And so it’s more naturalistic in some ways, but it also has to be sort of pushed in a way because it has to explain everything through just the dialogue.

Same time we were seeing radio come up, you have the silent movies. And so in silent movies, of course, you have characters in scenes together, but the dialogue, if there is dialogue is just title cards that are put there. So, you have characters emoting a lot and then we cut to a card that has a very shortened version of what they would say. That’s a strange form–

**Craig:** It’s very strange, because the cards – they don’t make conversation possible so even though people are talking together, they will choose a, I guess, some kind of representative line of dialogue for one person to sum up this entire exchange that these two people might be having. And, of course, that is probably why a lot of silent films also de-accentuate conversation. And it’s very much about one person making speeches, while another person listens.

**John:** Yep. Then, of course, we transition to the talkies, and then everything is changed, because in once you actually have dialogue and characters that are in a scene together, it changes the frame of reality around things. So you can’t just have a person emoting wildly and then you cut to a title card. They actually have to have a conversation. You have to keep that ball up in the air. And it’s a huge shift in sort of how the audience’s experience of a story and really the writer’s experience of how you’re going to communicate this information. You cannot expect the audience to just be watching and gleaning something. They are expecting to have a real conversation happening in front of them. And that changes everything.

**Craig:** It also famously changed the skill of acting. I mean, the school of acting prior to talkies was very much about being emotive and really more of a filmed version of what people would do on stage, which was very formalized.

And because their faces and movement had to stand in for so much, but once you shift to sound, we begin to see the birth of naturalistic acting which peaks with the method movement that leads to all – you know, famously some of our greatest American films of the ‘70s.

**John:** Yeah. So there’s an expectation that the performances are naturalistic, and therefore the dialogue is supposed to be more naturalistic. It’s not always that way, but the dialogue gets twisted towards naturalism quite heavily once you have real characters speaking to each other.

**Craig:** But then eventually you get to the sea monkeys, which that’s a different kind of–

**John:** That’s really the pinnacle. It’s sort of sad that we peaked in 1992, but at least we have YouTube so we can go back and look at sort of what the sea monkeys were able to do.

**Craig:** [laughs] Because they talk, their mouths are all – ugh.

**John:** It’s amazing. Television in general was a huge shift in dialogue as well. Because you think about how people watch television, you’re watching the screen, but sometimes you’re not really watching the screen. Sometimes TV is playing off in the background. So, there’s a midway quality between what our expectations are of film dialogue and radio dialogue. There’s a little bit of over-explaining that tends to happen in TV. I think less so now than, you know, 20 years ago. But TV dialogue could be a little bit more artificial because there was an expectation that you got to talk people through the process. Even procedural shows right now, there’s an unnatural quality which is sort of inherent to the genre where you are talking as if the other character doesn’t have that same information so you can get it out to the audience.

**Craig:** And prior to – a fairly recent revolution where so much of our television is streamed, commercial-free for instance, if you’re watching it on Netflix or Hulu. Network television which dominated all television was highly bifurcated/trifurcated/quadfurcated because of commercials. And there was an understanding that some people were just coming in, you know, they had missed it. Or, they went to the bathroom while stuff was going on. There was no TiVo. There was no pausing. So, people were constantly reiterating things so that folks wouldn’t get lost just because they went to go get a sandwich.

**John:** Yeah. As you were saying, in recapping what just happened.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So let’s talk about what characters are doing in scenes and sort of what ideally you would love to have your dialogue be able to perform in the scenes you’re writing. So, the first thing we’re looking for is dialogue, which means characters talking to each other, with each other, and not just intersecting monologues. And one of the great frustrations I have in some of our Three Page Challenges is I feel like characters are just having a monologue that’s just occasionally interrupted. Or like two parallel monologues that don’t actually have anything to do with each other.

When dialogue is working well, it should feel kind of like Velcro. Those two pieces of conversation, they’re designed for each other. And so they can only exist together and they’re strong when they are together. But you couldn’t take those people’s lines independently. They would be sort of meaningless. They’re all informed by what the person just said before that.

**Craig:** That’s a very good way of describing a common rookie limitation – intersecting monologues. And it’s understandable because the complexity that is required to create dialogue that answers and is responsible to the reflection back from another character, it is logarithmically more complicated than one person saying something and then another person saying something. The listening is that, you know, they always say that silence is just as important in music as a note. And it’s the listening of dialogue and the reacting and the incorporation and the adjustment, that’s the swordsmanship. So, I think when we look at stuff where we have the intersecting monologue problem, it’s like we’re watching two fencers who are putting on an exhibition for us, and they’re showing us their fencing moves towards us.

But they’re not fencing each other, which is just a totally different thing.

**John:** It is. So let’s take a look at sort of how we indicate in the real world that we are listening to each other and how listening shapes the lines we’re going to say next. And so I want to talk about discourse markers, which is the general term for those words that function as parts of speech that are not quite nouns or adjectives or anything else. They’re basically just little markers that say, “Yes, I heard what you said. I’m acknowledging what you said. And here is my response to it. So, I’m talking about words like you know, actually, basically, like, I mean, OK, and so. Things like also, on the other hand, frankly, as a matter of fact. As I do very often, as you’re talking, I go, “Uh-huh.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** It’s those small acknowledgments that I hear what you’re saying and keep going, or I’m about to respond back to you.

There’s an acronym which I found online for it called FANBOYS. So if you’re trying to remember those words it’s For And Nor But Or Yet or So. Basically it’s ways to take what has just been said and put your spin on the next thing that’s going to come out. And so let’s take a look at why you would use those discourse markers and as a screenwriter how to be aware of those things. Because I think so often we try to optimize our dialogue to the point where we’re getting rid of all the natural parts of speech. But without some of these little things to help you hook into the previous line, it can be hard to make your speech flow naturally.

So, here’s one function. It’s when you want to soften a blow, especially if it conflicts with what the person just said. So, it’s an example of like, “Well.” “Well, that’s not entirely true.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You could say, “That’s not entirely true,” but that’s a harder line. The well takes a little of the edge off that. And sort of connects like, “Yes, I heard what you just said, but I’m going to say the opposite.”

**Craig:** Yeah. So, these words are wonderful to indicate that the person who is starting their sentence with them has changed. Somehow what you said to me changed my brain. I’m not saying it changed my mind in that I have a new opinion. But it has changed my state of brain, which is exactly what goes on in conversation. So, as you’re talking to me, you’re changing my brain because I’m listening to you. Actors understand this. They’re taught very carefully and very rigorously how to listen. You can always tell a bad actor because they’re not listening. They’re just thinking about their next line.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** Similarly, bad writers write characters who are just thinking about their next line. And so you lose these little things. And when we talk about, well, everyone is familiar with the phrase “an ear for dialogue.” A lot of what an ear for dialogue is is this. It’s really not so much an ear, it is a sense of human psychology and an understanding of how it feels to listen.

So, when you’re writing two people talking to each other, you have to schizophrenically – I use that in the wrong sense – you know, split-mindedly say something and then immediately throw yourself into the other person and hear it. And that is what will naturally lead to some of these very useful words.

**John:** Yep. So, you know, we talked about softening a blow. A lot of times you’re also comparing two ideas. And so an example would be, “So, it’s like Uber for golf carts.” And so you’re basically taking the idea that’s been given to you and synthesizing it and putting it back. You might want to add onto an idea. So, that’s, “What’s more, there’s no evidence he even read the book.” So that “what’s more,” you could take that off, but without it it doesn’t connect to the previous line of dialogue.

**Craig:** Right. It’s not an acknowledgement that you’ve heard that. You’re agreeing with it, tacitly. And now you’re adding. So much gets unsaid by a “what’s more.” But we hear it, and the audience hears it, and they know so much because of it. That’s amazing. I’ve never really thought about that. Interesting.

**John:** Yeah. It’s a way of like sort of underlining that previous point. Another example would be indicating that a point has already been conceded and that you’re kind of moving on. So, an example would be, “No, you’re right to be concerned.” And so essentially saying like, “You said to be concerned. I’m agreeing with you to be concerned. Let’s move on to the next point.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** What I also find so fascinating about that no is that’s an example of how no can mean yes in dialogue. And I hear myself doing it all the time, where I will say no when I mean yes. And it’s basically that no means I’m putting no argument up against you. I’m agreeing with you. I’m not denying you. It’s awkward that, and of course, it’s an example of no really meaning a yes. But it’s just the way that it works in our language.

**Craig:** Sometimes I think the – we’ll call it the affirmative no – sometimes when people use it, I feel like they’re actually responding to themselves. So you say something, I’m thinking a thing. You give me a different point of view. And I say, “No, yeah, I think that’s right,” as in, “No, stop thinking the thing you were thinking. This new thing is correct.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It is fascinating how many words we elide as we go through. Yeah.

**John:** A lot of times you’re going to use one of these words to demonstrate a sense of logical sequence. So, “OK, once we disable the cameras, then we can start working on the vault.” Basically, I am going to now set forth a chain of events that describes what’s going to happen next. Or, we’re going to offer an illustration, an example. So, “And we all remember how drunk he got at the Christmas party.”

Again, you could take off that “and” and start and say, “We all remember how drunk he got at the Christmas party.”

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s not a–

**John:** But that “and” is really helpful because it means I’m adding on to the thing you just said. I’m giving you an example of the situation that we’re talking about. That “and” is incredibly helpful and without that “and” the sentence doesn’t mean the same thing.

**Craig:** I think sometimes when educational therapists, there’s a whole world of people who work with kids who have autism, or Asperger’s and they struggle with social interaction. Some of these things are the things that they’re actually instructing them, because for some people, that “and” is absolutely superfluous. And from an informational point of view, it’s close to being superfluous. But what they’re missing is that they’ve eliminated that social glue that says, “Just so you know, I listened to you, and I heard you.” When, of course, somebody who is very regimented and perhaps rigid in their thinking might think, “The fact that I am here staring at you is an indication that I heard what you said.”

And some people need to be taught these things.

**John:** When I was in Madrid last week for the screenwriter’s event, it was the first time I clocked that people say in Spanish say “Vaya” all the time. And Vaya is basically OK. It’s like it’s the uh-uh, it’s the acknowledgment. The equivalent would be d’accord in French. And a non-fluent speaker doesn’t know to say that. And so I don’t know to say that. And so therefore I seem kind of autistic in Spanish or in French because I don’t have the social cues to sort of like acknowledge that thing. So I can sort of nod and sort of say that I’m getting it, but the Vaya is that sense of like, “Yep, got it.”

**Craig:** That’s why you seem autistic in French? Really, John, that’s why? Not your autism? [laughs]

**John:** No, my robot programming.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s a phrase that I picked up when I was taking Italian in college. We had a professor who was a native speaker and he would constantly say, you know, he was giving us a lesson and then he would pause and go [vediamo un po]. And [vediamo un po] means let’s see a little. I think that’s what it means. Yeah, vediamo un po. Let’s see a little. Which is like, okay, so it’s a version of that. And, yes, you’re right, it’s the kind of thing that makes you seem like you’re in the moment. And when you’re not a native speaker you just don’t have those little bits and bops.

**John:** You don’t. But talk us through sort of then the modes of dialogue. What are the tones of dialogue? What you’re trying to do in basic structures of dialogue.

**Craig:** Yeah, I was thinking about this question of the kinds of ways that we – we meaning humans or characters – speak. And if they could be divided up into categories. And I don’t know if these are all of them, but these are certainly many of the ones that you’ll see and use as a writer all the time.

The first one is the easiest and most obvious, which I just call neutral. And that’s sort of the way we talk throughout the day. It is – it’s how we’re talking right now. It’s low stakes. It’s even-tempered. It’s not particularly loud or soft. It can be inquisitive, or informative, or social. It’s two people chatting at lunch. And in movies sometimes that’s what’s going on, but it’s important to match the neutral mode to the actual circumstances. You don’t want to have people speaking neutrally when perhaps it might be more interesting or dramatic or appropriate for them to be speaking a different way.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Then there’s emotional. And that’s what we probably think of when we think about Oscar movies and so forth. But emotional dialogue is in every movie, of all kinds. And that is dialogue where the character is revealing some part of their inner emotional state. It is typically well controlled speech. It can often be uneven because we understand that it is an expression of the lizard brain, our flight or fight type of instinct. Very often this kind of dialogue is irrational. It can be contradictory. It can be very loud. It is rarely well-articulated – and this we’ve seen a lot in Three Page Challenges. People speak in this remarkably well articulated, even – well, I won’t say even-tempered, but very well-articulated way when in fact in the moment they should have an emotional mode which is clumsy and often truncated or weird.

**John:** There was a screener I was watching this last week, a movie that I genuinely loved, but there was a moment in there where a character has a huge emotional moment and I was frustrated that the character was far too articulate in that moment. They actually dialed up the sophistication of the dialogue in that incredibly emotional moment. And the actor was talented enough to pull it off, basically. And, yet, it didn’t actually track. It didn’t actually make sense. Like the moment should have been less coherent and more emotionally clear. And it was sort of too precisely, too finely written for where that character was supposed to be at emotionally.

**Craig:** Well, it sounds like perhaps the writer fell into a fairly common trap where when you should be emotional, you opt for something that I’ll call declarative. This is the mode of speaking when you are intentionally getting across some kind of meaningful insight or important news or dramatic revelation. Declarative, the most obvious example would be a lawyer giving a final argument. There’s that moment in – what was that movie called, A Time to Kill, where Matthew McConaughey delivers this impassioned speech about what happens. And then he says, “Now, imagine she’s white,” which is a very declarative, insightful, there’s a wisdom to it. And actors and writers love these moments because they are so remarkable.

You know, Yoda is always declarative. These very – but when you are emotional, you should not be declarative. That would make the emotion seem fake and it would make you and the character and scene feel inauthentic.

**John:** Yep. It’s the reason why the lawyer can’t give that passionate closing argument after having just found out that his wife died.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** There’s a mismatch of sort of what’s going on in his mental state to be able to do that. And it’s a very controlled thing for him to do that remarkable speech.

**Craig:** That’s right. And, by the way, that example that you just gave, oh and interesting, I just used “by the way” which is another great signifier to indicate that I heard you and it’s triggered something else. Sometimes you’ll see these notes come up where somebody will say there’s a mismatch in the way this moment with how they feel and without putting their finger on it what they’re saying is you’re using the wrong mode of dialogue for what would be the mental state of this person.

Interestingly, there’s this other mode that I’ll call manipulative, which makes it sound Machiavellian, but I’m using it more as an over-arching term. And manipulative dialogue is anything where you’re trying to either convince somebody or calm somebody down or inspire somebody or avoid their questions. You’re using dialogue purposefully to achieve an effect in this other person. And if you think about our example of the lawyer, that’s the difference between a lawyer who is trying to get one over on a jury, and a lawyer who fervently believes what he’s telling them. One person will be manipulative, and the other one will be declarative.

**John:** Absolutely. So, what I find so fascinating about everything we talked about with dialogue in this segment was it’s all about the emotional state and the emotional content of dialogue. So, in no ways are we trying to talk about dialogue as a mechanism for conveying story, at least story in terms of plot. We’re really talking about like how do you convey characters’ emotional states and how are you going to let them try to change the emotional state of the other characters in the scene.

That’s really what dialogue is supposed to be doing as it functions now. Not like how it functioned historically, but what we do now when we write dialogue is to be able to provide insight to the audience about what’s going on inside the character but also let the characters try to change the emotional state of the characters around them.

It’s part of the reason why the example of neutral modes of dialogue, that’s why those scenes are generally not so exciting because there’s not going to be a conflict there. There’s not a challenge for the character there. There’s nothing they’re trying to do to the other characters in the scene. There’s no inherent drama there.

**Craig:** Precisely. And this is one of the great challenges of writing a scene is that you have to be – let’s just say – we’ll limit it to two people talking. Forget three or four. You have to be three different people at once. You have to be the architect of the story, who understands in an intellectual way that something must be achieved in terms of plot and character to advance this narrative.

Then you have to be both people, who do not know that, and don’t have access to that, and are reacting and living in the moment. Reacting to the world around them. Reacting to the feelings inside of them. And most importantly, reacting to what the other person is saying. So, that is very difficult for a lot of people. When we talk about talent in writing, sometimes I think that’s what it is. Those are three different people at once and the best writers are the ones that are talented at being all three of those people. The writer, and then the two people in the scene. And one of the ways I think I immediately am aware of quality in these moments is when there’s a mismatch of mode between two characters. Maybe one character is being neutral, and the other one is being manipulative. Or the other one is being emotional, and the other one is being declarative.

You know, Luke is very upset and Yoda is very calm and wise. Or, somebody is very emotional and the other person is calming them down. So, whenever possible you do want that mismatch because that is creating conflict or resolution. When two people are emotional, it’s just two people yelling and absorbed in their own minds. And when two people are being wise and informative, you’re wondering why they’re both telling each other these incredibly wonderful fortune cookie insights.

Mismatching these modes is a huge help when you’re navigating your way through a scene.

**John:** Absolutely. You want to be able to give the characters someone to play against. And if they’re trying to play the same melody, it’s not going to be nearly as exciting as if there’s a conflict between what they’re trying to do and sort of where they’re at in the mode of the scene.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But, talking about the skill of the writer here and sort of good writing versus bad writing is a great segue to our next big topic which is two terms you hear thrown about about screenwriters, specifically the quality of screenwriters, and I’m going to urge people to stop using these terms because people don’t really use these terms. And whenever I hear them, the hairs on the back of my neck go up.

And so I want to talk about and hacks.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So let’s talk about script doctors, Craig. Do you ever hear people in Hollywood use the term script doctor?

**Craig:** The only people I ever hear use that term are insecure writers trying to convince other people that they’re important. That’s it. And thankfully there are not too many of them. But every time some on the bubble or low self-esteem writer announces that they’re doing some script doctoring, everybody else puckers up, clenches their buttholes, and gets very awkward. Because it’s atrocious.

**John:** It’s atrocious. And so I heard this term a couple times the last months. When Carrie Fisher passed away, some of the articles talked about her “script doctoring,” always in quotes, and then when I was in Madrid someone asked what is it like to be a script doctor. And I had to say like, “First off, no one uses that term.” And truly, honestly, the only people who use that term are people who are like outside of Hollywood who have seen that term in a magazine and thought it was a term that was being used.

So let’s describe what they’re trying to talk about here and the real words we use for that work. So, I think by script doctoring they’re meaning a writer who comes in to do a short bit of work on a specific project, usually a movie that’s about to go into production. Usually in a sort of high stakes situation. There’s actors involved, directors involved, lots of money is on the line. And that writer is coming in to do specific work to fix, change, alter something in the script to make people happier. That is the function of what these writers are doing in those situations. But we don’t call them script doctors. And we shouldn’t call them script doctors because doctors are like – Doc McStuffins’ mom is a doctor. These are just screenwriters.

And Craig and I both do this kind of work, but we would never call ourselves script doctors.

**Craig:** No. And you put your finger on why it’s so gross. It’s a forced romanticization of what we do. Oh no, the movie is in trouble, we’re two weeks away – what do we do? Call the doctor! That’s ridiculous. And then I’ll come in with my eyepatch and I’ll say, “Everybody, get out of my way. I need a computer, a glass of water, a window.” [laughs] I don’t know, it’s ridiculous.

It’s not how it works.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** At all. What you’re doing is you sit down and you’re like, OK, I read the script, here’s what I think. What do you guys think? What are you trying to achieve? Got it. OK. Here’s what I think I can do in the time I have. Let me talk to the director. Let me talk to the producer. Let me talk to the actor. OK. Here’s my proposal of what I should do. Does that sound good? Great. Let me start writing it. I’ll start sending you pages.

And then hard days ensue where you’re too tired. You’re not some – they might as well call it Script Hitman, or – do you know what I mean? Like Script Assassin. Script Savior. It’s ridiculous.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Script doctor.

**John:** I don’t know where the term first originated. I remember the first time I heard a Hollywood person use it, I think, was an interview with Spielberg where he was talking about Steve Zaillian coming in and doing something. And I’m paraphrasing here, but I remember saying like, “Oh, we call him the doctor because he comes in and can solve these problems.”

Steve Zaillian is Steve Zaillian. He’s a remarkably talented writer. So, as a metaphor to say that he was a doctor who was helping out on something, fantastic. But it’s not a term that’s used in daily life here. No development executive is going to say like, “Oh, we need to get a script doctor in here to work on this.” Just doesn’t happen. And so when I hear people outside the business say that term, I think of like – it’s like me describing an NFL kicker as a “field goaler.”

It reflects what’s actually be done, but no one would actually use it. And when they hear me say it, they think, “Well, he’s an idiot.” And so I would just urge people to stop saying it.

**Craig:** Right. When Ted Cruz was in Indiana and referred to a basketball hoop as a basketball ring. [laughs] What an idiot!

**John:** Yeah. Remember Ted Cruz? Remember that life?

**Craig:** Don’t worry. He’ll be back.

**John:** He’ll be back.

**Craig:** He’ll be back. No, you’re absolutely right. It’s grating. It sets your teeth on edge because it’s so goofy. And, yes, sometimes in conversations when we’re doing this work we might say, “Look, we’ve got a sick patient here.” You may do that – internally, you may talk about things like that. “Or like, no, there’s definitely a pulse here.” But you would never describe yourself as a – that’s just like a silly metaphor. You’re not a script doctor. That’s ridiculous.

**John:** It’s ridiculous.

**Craig:** And I guess, more to the point, if Steven Spielberg wants to call you a script doctor, great. But god knows you should never refer to yourself as one. That is just goofy.

**John:** That is goofy. So, if script doctor is the glorious term applied to the very high level writers who are doing this work, hack is the opposite of that. Hack is a pejorative, reductive term. Because it’s pejorative, you know, sometimes it’s used on yourself, sort of self-mockingly, like I feel like such a hack for that scene. Or, this line of dialogue feels so hacky. So, it’s one of those things I will hear writers refer to themselves that way. But I don’t hear writers refer to other writers as hacks. Or if they do, I throw some major side eye there, because it’s not cool at all.

**Craig:** I know. Again, it’s clunky. If you want to go after some writer and, you know, look, I never do that publicly. Like you and I never do that on this show. Not once in all these episodes, nor do we ever do it on Twitter. But in a private conversation, you may say, “Look, I don’t understand why everybody loves this person. I think they stink.” You know? And you might say, “I just feel like they’re kind of a fraud. I don’t know, they just seem hacky to me, or whatever.”

But that’s private. You know? Where I’m shocked is when people use that word seriously and you’re like, what are you, from 1930? “You’re a hack, kid.” It’s a dumb word because it doesn’t mean anything. It’s taking the place of what you should be saying which is, “I don’t like their work,” which is completely fair. That’s your opinion. And the work is meant to be absorbed by other people. Naturally, some will like it and some will not. But if the purpose of the term is to denote somebody who doesn’t care about their creative work, which is I think what that word means, somebody that literally doesn’t care about the quality or the writing, the passion, nothing. They’re just doing it for a check. That person doesn’t really exist, as far as I can tell. Or exists very briefly. [laughs] And is never hired again.

I mean, do you know anybody who consistently just writes whatever they need to write so someone gives them a check without any care, love, passion, concern?

**John:** You know, I have encountered some writers who at a certain point in their career seems like they stopped caring. They would literally just take any note and just do that note and not sort of worry about. And seemingly not lose sleep over it. And so that’s, I think, what we are pointing towards when we talk about hack. Who is doing the lowest common denominator version of any joke, of any scene. You sort of feel like a robot could write those things.

But I’m not going to call those people out as hacks, because I don’t know sort of what their real situation is. And a lot of times I think the people who are pointed at as being hacks, they’re trying to do something very specific and very true. And they’re actually killing themselves to do it. It’s just not working out especially well. So, it’s such an ad hominem to attack the person rather than to look at the work that they’re actually doing.

**Craig:** I think hack is the definition of ad hominem, right? You’re saying I know why you wrote something I don’t like. No you don’t. It’s OK to just not like it. But to presume that you don’t – I mean, reviewers will use the word “lazy” all the time, like, what? Were you there? What? Lazy? How do you know? [laughs]

I mean, that’s lazy, right, to just decide that somebody was lazy because, you know. A lot of times when people look at something and they go, “Oh my god, I saw that movie. That guy is such a hack.” They don’t understand that that guy or that woman showed up to try and make something good and it was destroyed by the process, or by other people, or maybe that person showed up and something was bad and they just did everything they could to make it a little bit better.

Nobody knows why these things happen because they’re not there. And Hollywood is really good at concealing its process from everybody else. They are a restaurant where you cannot see into the kitchen. The more you see into the kitchen, the less interesting the food is. It’s an illusion business.

So, while there is somewhat ironically this enormous industry that professes to know what’s going on behind the scenes and what’s going on inside people’s minds and their hearts and why they do things, the truth is most of the time not only are those implications of hackery or motivation wrong, most of the time as far as I can tell they’re nearly completely wrong.

**John:** Yeah. It’s so maddening. So, I think we are casting major aspersions on anybody who uses the term script doctor on themselves positively, or calls any other writer a hack. Because they’re unacceptable. And so if you see this being done on Twitter, please mock them and CC us. @ reply us so we can join in on the call for these two words to not be used.

**Craig:** It will be a nice break from the current Twitter stream I have from Nazis. [laughs] Oh my god. John, there are so many Nazis on Twitter. Like legitimate Nazis.

**John:** Why are Nazis a thing again? It frustrates me so greatly that like, you know, I like them as a historical and fictional adversary. Not actual adversaries who show up in our lives.

**Craig:** It’s so strange. My wife was like, “Does this upset you?” Because some people are using terrible slurs and talking about putting me in an oven and so on and so forth. And I just thought, no, I actually feel great. This is kind of remarkable. I don’t know why it put me in such a good mood. Something is really wrong with me.

**John:** Something is really wrong with you. Not a shock. Not a surprise.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** Also not a surprise is that we completely ran out of time for our questions. Sorry Jessica and Alyssa and Telly Archer. We will get to your questions. We promise.

**Craig:** We’ll get there.

**John:** But it is now time for our One Cool Things. And this actually ties in very well with your Twitter escapades. This is a great article I read this last week written by Mirah Curzer called How to #StayOutraged Without Losing Your Mind. And so what she’s describing is how – it sort of goes back to right after the election you and I had that horrible short episode in which we talked about like not that everything will be OK, but this feeling will end.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And you described I think in very good psychological terms why you cannot stay at this level of peak paranoia and fear, because your body just will just it down.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, what she’s looking at is how do you stay outraged, how do you stay fresh to what’s going without just completely falling apart. And as I was reading it, I was nodding a lot, but I was also recognizing that a lot of what she’s describing is not just about our current US situation. It’s really about any sort of like long term conflict, like which is making a TV show, or a long shoot on a movie. It’s how do you sort of keep fresh on something when it’s just so hard day after day.

So, the four things she sort of focuses on that you need to look away in order stay fresh. To see clearly, you have to be able to look at something else. And that’s something I’ve really found while filming or trying to run a TV show, you have to not be thinking about it for certain hours of the day, otherwise you cannot even see what you’re doing. You have to be able to focus on something in the distance so you can come back and take a look at it.

If we’re in the editing room, doing a cut, if the editor is working on the cut, I will deliberately put my gaze someplace else so that I cannot see what he’s doing. And then I can look back with fresh eyes. And you have to do the same with in a bigger scale for sort of world events.

She stresses you can’t do everything, so you have to pick what you’re going to focus on and let others pick what they’re going to focus on. And that’s a thing I really learned as a director is that I can have an overall vision for how the things are I want to do, but I have to let people who are specialists in different fields really focus on those things. And so I can look at the things that are most important to me, but I’ve got to let other people worry about those things because I can’t do everything.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** You have to make it fun. You have to have some enjoyment in your days. You have to look forward to going to the set. You have to look forward to being part of that. You have to find some moment of joy in your day, or else it’s just going to be horrible.

And then, finally, you have to focus on staying healthy. And people who are on TV shows a lot of times, like they will not go to the doctor or the dentist for the entire run of filming, and then in the two months of hiatus they’ll have to do all that stuff. You can’t do that. You got to go to the gym. You got to sleep. You got to get your appointments. You cannot, you know, put aside your entire life just for this one thing. You got to do all the other stuff to stay healthy.

So, I thought it was a great article both for sort of how to address the current conflict in the world, but also how to look at the long term conflicts that a person is going to encounter in their life.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s really smart. I wonder if – I don’t know if this is in there, but I would my own little fifth thing to that, which is don’t respond to or take seriously anybody who tells you that these things aren’t right. Because there are people who are like, “Why are you talking about this when this is going on? And how can you laugh at a time like this? And why are you spending your time blah-blah-blah when you seem to care about…”

Just ignore all of that. Ignore all of that. There are people who will demand that you express your outrage purely and perfectly. But you can’t. So, don’t.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And don’t bother defending yourself either. Just ignore them. Man, I find that I have become an ignoring addict. I love it.

**John:** On Twitter, you just ignore it? Oh yeah, I love it.

**Craig:** Yeah. There’s so many things where like, you know, there are phases of it. I think the first phase is people say things and you respond and you’re in fights. That’s like the first run of your life online. And then the second run is you start to respond to them and you go, no, I’m deleting this. Then you get to the enlightened place which is, well, that’s stupid. Ignore. [laughs] It’s gone. It’s literally gone. And the funny thing is that the people who are poking at you, they’ve forgotten about you and the thing they said the second they’re done typing it.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So why not give them the gift of that in return?

**John:** I was talking with a friend who was describing – she got this long email and she was going to respond to it. And then she’s like, “You know what? I’m not going to respond to it.” And she just deleted it.

And so this person wrote back this long response. And we talk about the joy of deleting without reading. To know that somebody spent half an hour writing this thing and you’re like–

**Craig:** I know!

**John:** It did not even hit my inbox. It’s just gone. You’ve wasted your time.

**Craig:** Talking about declarative modes of dialogue, when my wife first started getting really active in PTA and she was the president of the school PTA, and then there was this older woman who was the president of the council, which is the Over PTA for all the schools. And Melissa was talking to her and saying, “I’m getting these – I got a couple of wacky parents, a couple of wacky moms in particular, who keep emailing me these long things and I don’t know how to respond to them because I think they’re crazy.”

And this older woman just looks at her and went, “Delete.” [laughs] I thought that was the best advice ever. Just delete. That’s it.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** And you’d think like, but they’re going to keep writing me and demand why I haven’t written back. No they don’t. They don’t. Because they have 12 other letters they have to write to people. And whomever responds, that’s the winner of the day for them. And they just keep going with them.

Well, speaking of staying outraged, my One Cool Thing, John, is women.

**John:** Women are great.

**Craig:** Women are spectacular. And I say this today that seems perhaps a little general. A little too wide of a category. But specifically I’m saying women because the Women’s March was remarkable. Not only was it massive. I think the largest protest in history in our country? I think. I think.

**John:** Yeah. Yeah, probably.

**Craig:** But it was the most peaceful protest I think we’ve ever had in this country. Not just in Washington, DC, but in New York, and Los Angeles, in Boston, in Chicago. In every major city and every minor city it seemed. There were women that were marching in Alaska and Antarctica, all across the world. And everywhere it was perfectly peaceful. No violence. No ugliness. It was the utopian ideal.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Of what a civil protest should be. And it could have only been that way because it was women. Because if you throw – like once you hit, I don’t know what the tipping point is, probably 15% men, you have fist fights. Fist fights. Molotov cocktails. And people getting punched in the face.

So, fantastic job, women. Outstanding. What a great example. And also great proof of, I think, hope for us all. And for humanity as it goes through this challenging time.

**John:** I had a delightful time with the Women’s March in Paris. I was there with my family, with my daughter, with a friend’s family. And it was just remarkable seeing everyone gathered together. We marched from Trocadero down past the Eiffel Tower, and to the Ecole Militaire. And it was remarkably well put together and run. Every sign was great. Some were in French. Some were in English. But just to see everybody coming together to do this was great.

It was also wonderful because of time zones, again, we were ahead of the US marches, and so this went really well. And so fingers crossed that the American marches are going to go great. And, of course, they were nutso and fantastic. And the Los Angeles march was off the charts great. So, I’m so proud of everyone who did it. And also inspired by sort of what can happen next given this energy. So, more hope.

**Craig:** It was great. I saw they were talking to a cop in New York. And he seemed stunned. They were asking him about the march and were there any problems. And he said, “No. Nothing. I’ve never seen anything like this.” Actually, he seemed a little scared. Because he’s just like this isn’t the way this goes.

It was just great. So, congratulations and thank you, women. Outstanding job.

**John:** I would also like to single out Carrie Fisher as the Princess Leia’s character was featured in many, many signs, sort of a woman’s place is in the revolution. It was wonderful to see. I think she would have been delighted to see her place in the memes of this march and I think what’s going to be coming forward.

**Craig:** Fantastic.

**John:** That’s our show for this week. Our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Puddles Pity Party.

**Craig:** Oh, of course it does. [laughs]

**John:** So, I’ll put a link to the video, because you’ll see that he’s actually a clown who sings. But he’s singing the Mary Tyler Moore theme, because Mary Tyler Moore passed away this past week. That show was a huge inspiration for me growing up. It is so well constructed. It is a character on a journey. It was an amazing show. She was an amazing talent. And, weirdly, the Mary Tyler Moore theme song is kind of close, melodically, to the Scriptnotes theme. So I’m going to call an audible there and say it’s sort of like the Scriptnotes theme.

**Craig:** That’s what they were thinking at the time.

**John:** That’s what they were thinking.

**Craig:** It’s certainly not that our theme is a little bit like the Mary Tyler Moore theme, because that would be ridiculous.

**John:** No, come on, Mandela Effect. You know, they traveled through time. Somehow it all bled over. So, I’ll let you listen to this.

If you have an outro, you can send it to us at ask@johnaugust.com. A link is fantastic for those. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions like the ones we neglect to answer. But for short questions, I am @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

We’re on Facebook as well. Look for Scriptnotes podcast. Also iTunes. That’s where you’ll find us. Leave us a review. That helps people find our show on iTunes.

We have an app that lets you get to all the back episodes. It’s through the app store for Apple and for Google Play. You can find us there. Scriptnotes.net is where you sign up for all the back episodes.

We used to have USB drives. We no longer have USB drives for the back episodes, so right now the only way to get to those back episodes is through the service, through Scriptnotes.net.

You can find show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com.

Craig, thank you so much for staying up late.

**Craig:** Thank you for waking up early.

**John:** All right, and we’ll talk to you next week. Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* Episode 37: [Let’s talk about dialogue](http://johnaugust.com/2012/dialogue)
* [Finding Carter Trailer](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DS9Th9Drujg)
* [The Amazing Live Sea Monkeys](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7yF-F1IVWw)
* [The Mandela Effect](http://www.snopes.com/2016/07/24/the-mandela-effect/)
* [David Kwong and Dilemma](http://dilemna.info)
* [Discourse Marker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discourse_marker)
* [How to #StayOutraged Without Losing Your Mind](https://medium.com/the-coffeelicious/how-to-stayoutraged-without-losing-your-mind-fc0c41aa68f3)
* [Women](https://www.womensmarch.com/)
* [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 Puddles Pity Party ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/scriptnotes_ep_286.mp3).