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John August: Hey it’s John.

Craig Mazin: And Craig.

John: So this podcast has some of the most swearing I think we’ve ever done on a podcast. It wasn’t intentional. It just ended up being a really high density of swear words. Just I wanted to warn you about this ahead of time.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August.

Craig: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 521 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriter. Today on the show we’re exploring how writers describe action on the page, looking at both samples from movies you’ve seen and brand new three-pagers sent in by our listeners. We’ll also follow up on IATSE which may or may not be on strike as you’re listening to this. And check out more updates on a certain predatory writer.

And in our bonus segment for–

Craig: [laughs] What a great intro. You don’t want that to be the way people describe you in a topic.

John: A certain predatory writer.

Craig: A certain predatory writer.

John: I’d like to introduce you to my friend, Bob. He’s s certain predatory writer.

Craig: A certain predatory writer.

John: In our bonus segment for premium members we will talk scary movies and our experiences with them as writers and as viewers. And I think Megana is also going to expand the topic into sort of things that were scary to you as a child that are no longer scary to you, or interesting to you as a child that you’ve moved on past. Because we got into a big discussion of the power of the Pyramids which was a thing that I knew of that Craig you probably did but it’s a generational split. She had never heard of this.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, it was pretty marginally even when we were kids. I think at least.

John: I think it was tied up with the Egyptology boom, with Tutankhamun’s tour.

Craig: Ah yes. Of course. Makes sense. I mean, it’s Spooky Season. We should try and fill that stuff out as much as possible.

John: We have to sell people on the premium content. Guys, this is how Megana’s salary gets paid. So we’ve got to keep up the premium content.

Craig: So two of you are making money off this. That’s great.

John: That’s the whole goal.

Craig: It’s awesome. Two of us are making money.

John: But money is also at the crux of the IATSE negotiations.

Craig: Segue Man.

John: So as we’re recording this on Saturday we have no idea what is happening in the negotiations. Will they reach a decision by the Sunday deadline? Will IATSE go on strike on Monday? Craig, I was thinking maybe we could just record versions of the possible outcomes and we’ll just use the correct one or all three of them in this.

So let’s lay out the three scenarios here and maybe Matthew in post if you could just put a little ding on the one that actually was the correct thing that actually happened so we’ll know what it was.

Craig: Ding.

John: Ding.

Craig: Ding.

John: Craig, were able to reach an agreement on Sunday night.

[Ding, Ding, Ding]

Tell us what you think about the agreement they were able to reach.

Craig: Not a surprise to me. This is what I’d predicted all along. And it is by and large an agreement that gives IATSE what they needed, not necessarily what they wanted but what they needed to put a pin on striking for now, but I do think that they have figured out just how powerful they are which is a huge deal.

So congratulations to IATSE. And to our industry for continuing on. This was a big win for them and honestly a win for everybody that cares about a reasonable humane workplace.

John: Scenario two. So an agreement was not reached and it is now Monday, or Tuesday as this episode comes out. We’re two days into a strike. Craig, tell us what you’re thinking and feeling right now?

Craig: I’m pretty stunned. I had predicted that this would not happen. The reason it happened is because the AMPTP is out of their goddamn minds. They are insane. What the IATSE was asking for was reasonable. They couldn’t figure out how to give it to them so now we are toast. And we’re not toast for a little bit. We’re toast for a while. And furthermore IATSE is never going to stop striking until the AMPTP gives them what they want, as they should, and will. So eventually they’re going to get the deal that the AMPTP could have just given them yesterday, or two days ago.

So AMPTP, you idiots.

John: Absolutely. So in this scenario two environment we should also say that future episodes we’ll talk about the impact that is on writers and also the guidance being provided to writers in writer’s rooms. All of the stuff that script coordinators and other folks who were IATSE members in those writing environments we’re doing which are now not being done. So we’ll get into that. But let’s move into scenario three which is that we did not reach an agreement but we did not go on strike because they are still talking. Basically they kicked the can for a little bit. So, Craig, now that it’s past this deadline but we’re still not on strike how are you feeling?

Craig: There’s not going to be a strike. They needed extra time to work out the deal. But you only ask for extra time in a situation like this when you absolutely know you really need it just to finish off what’s going to be a win for IATSE. They were pretty clear that they to put a hard deadline on it. They wouldn’t be extending it if they weren’t super-duper close and just dotting Is and crossing Ts. That’s my feeling.

John: So obviously all negotiations are about money, the IATSE negotiation about money, but it’s also about the incredibly long hours that crews are working on these shows and on these sets and how dangerous that can be. And the devastating impact it can have on family life and the ability to have a life that is meaningful. We got a couple emails in this week. I wanted to single out one which is about the very long hours being worked on a movie that’s in production here in Los Angeles and a car accident that happened as a member was driving back from set after an incredibly long day.

I remember driving against rush hour traffic as the sun was coming up. I know how dangerous that is. It seems like an exaggeration to talk about life and death scenarios here, but it really is dangerous to be working so many hours, especially at the end of a long week. And that we really are talking about basic safety things here.

Craig: Yeah. Unlike most people who work late shifts, crews don’t regularly work late shifts. They just work them sometimes when the show needs to shoot stuff at night. So when you’re in production you go into these short term late shifts. Sometimes they last three days. Sometimes they last three weeks. In terrifying instances they last longer. But it is incredibly disruptive to your mind and body. And then when you add on top of that absurdly long working hours it’s a recipe for disaster. And remember not only are crew members driving to work and driving home from work, but a lot of them are working with dangerous equipment on set. Scissor lifts and cranes and all sorts of stuff. And you don’t want to mess with that sort of thing when you’re exhausted. I mean, there have been enough studies to show that when you are severely sleep deprived you are just as bad as somebody who is drunk.

This is not surprising to me. There’s an entire documentary about it by Haskell Wexler. That’s what kills me about this whole thing is nothing that IATSE is talking about is new. I mean, the Writers Guild comes up with new things to talk about because our business changes and suddenly there’s SPAN and mini rooms and stuff. This has been going on forever. Forever. They’re finally – I’m so happy that they are doing something about this. It is nuts. It’s nuts.

John: One thing this letter writer wrote in about is that there is a policy about getting hotel rooms for crew members after the end of a long day which is not a great solution to the real problem. It’s a Band-Aid. Because no crew member is showing up to set thinking like this is what’s going to happen that I’m going to take a hotel room. They’re doing it for the basic safety thing after too long of a day. So get those hotel rooms and make them available, great. But basically don’t go to those hours where people need to use those hotel rooms is a better plan.

Craig: Yeah. Nobody is leaving to work packing a bag because they think they’re going to be staying overnight somewhere else. Plus they have wives, they have husband, they have children. They want to go home. Sometimes they have to go home to take care of children. It’s unconscionable. And it’s unnecessary.

John: Agreed. More follow up. Last week on the show we talked about a Twitter thread by Ariel Relaford and she was describing this older writer who had brought her in on possibly false pretenses to work through this character and this thing he was writing. He was trying to give advice and it became clear that it was a bad situation and that she was not alone in the situation. Other writers had the exact same experience with this one guy.

This past week we got at least two emails in from other writers who this guy had similar encounters with. So we now know the guy’s name. We’re not going to say the guy’s name because we don’t want to get sued. But we’re going to call him Frank for the purposes of this show. We know his credits. His credits aren’t great. And I want to talk about him specifically but also as a general case because if this guy exists there’s other people like him and to just help point out what he’s trying to do and how to be on the lookout for guys like Frank.

Craig: We aren’t going to say your name this time, sir. But you can’t be sued for telling the truth. And the truth is we have received a number of communications regarding you. Naming you by name. So, if we were to report that we received those that would just be a fact. So consider this all a shot across the bow and a warning to cut it out because we know who you are.

John: So let’s get into some specifics.

Megana Rao: Eli writes, “I wanted to write and give you a little more context about how he operates and how I got pulled into the cult. I’m an aspiring writer trying to get my foot in the door. Right after college I went to Asia and worked in a big Asian film hub as a story development intern at an entertainment company. When I returned to LA I had a hard time finding an entry level job. They all required one to two years’ experience answering phones, managing schedules, etc. Then someone presented Frank to me. The deal was I go to Frank’s house and do three hours of personal assistant work. In return he would read my work and give notes. It sounded like a chance to fill out a resume while learning from someone with more experience than me.

“He has anywhere from six to 12 assistants at a given time. I signed up. I did the assistant work and sent him work for review. His notes were tough but mostly fair. But he also left little barbs that would make me feel shitty about myself. I wrote it off as the shitty feeling one gets after receiving any notes. He also does brain trusts several times a week. These are three hour sessions of notes and feedback on his work. The reward was 10 to 15 minutes of him giving notes on our work. He didn’t require these and we didn’t have to stay the whole time.

“He cultivates a feeling that if our work impressed him enough he could get us a foot in the door. I tried to stick it out. I’d give him notes on his projects and would take whatever good notes he gave. I walked away from every meeting though feeling like crap. I resisted going to the next session that made me feel like a failure who couldn’t handle notes from a dick. It also made me feel like I might be missing an opportunity. He was a squatter in my brain and I just couldn’t shake him loose. My wife saw through him right away. When she heard the podcast she said bravo I feel so vindicated. Fuck that guy.

“She asked me to write you an angry thank you letter and by the way he also uses Final Draft and pushes his minions to buy it as well.”

Craig: OK, well this means war.

John: [laughs] Terrible behavior to individuals is one thing, but pushing Final Draft on helpless people? Come on.

Craig: It’s a war crime. Couple of things that jump out. One is that this is sociopathic behavior. So normal people who experience things like shame and empathy don’t enlist six to 12 human beings to work for them for no money. This is not an individual we can tell you that is particularly prominent in our business. In fact, I would suggest marginal is the best description. Whatever doors he could help people get feet into I don’t think they’re particularly impressive. And generally speaking people who cannot afford to give money to assistants aren’t real.

Personal assistant work is ultimately useless for any kind of Hollywood experience. And what he’s giving in return isn’t even anything in return because what he’s saying is I’ll give you notes on your stuff and you’ll give me notes on my stuff. That’s the fair trade. Where does the “and also you’ll be my personal assistant” fit in? What? What?

John: So, Craig, I look at this and I think back to interns and sort of how interns were used and the horror stories we’ve heard about people working as unpaid interns in places and just doing menial grunt work. And sometimes interns at least they felt systematized. There was some sort of umbrella thing over them that was either an academic program or some sort of corporate system here. But this is just a one-on-one relationship with this person and the cult leader thing is I think a useful way to think about it. Because he’s negging you. He’s counting on you feeling a bit like shit, like you’re maybe not worth it. That you have imposter syndrome. That you just don’t believe that you actually could do this thing. Whereas he has really minor credits, but seems to know what he’s talking about.

And you know what? Maybe some of his notes are good. And I remember early on in my screenwriting career there was a person who was senior to me who would read my script and she would give good notes, but she also kind of wanted to insert herself into my life in ways that were not healthy or good. And I recognized this as, I don’t want to say sociopathic, but it’s problematic behavior. And this guy or any other person who is trying to do this kind of thing with you, you’ve got to be on the lookout for it.

Craig: Well I think that people are. The problem is that they get suckered in by something that seems to make sense. Everyone is drowning out there looking for some kind of life preserver and this is a guy disguising himself as a life preserver. But he’s not. And you’re absolutely right. There are lots of unpaid internship programs that you and I believe take advantage of people who ought to be paid for what they’re doing. But at a minimum they are typically at a place of business. So you are being exposed to meetings and decision-making and interoffice memoranda and possibly production. You’re learning something hopefully.

John: Yeah. You’re literally in the room where it’s happening, where stuff is going on and you can sort of pick it up by osmosis, but if you’re just going over to this guy’s house and like, you know, reading a script and he’s reading your script, you’re not getting any place. You’re not getting anywhere.

Craig: You’re learning where the local dry cleaning places are because you’re going to take his clothes there and bring it back. And at this point I’m like I hate him so much. OK, so, hopefully we didn’t hear anything else and nobody else had any complaints. Is that right, Megana?

Megana: Unfortunately not. So this one actually came from a friend of mine.

Craig: Oh, OK.

Megana: And she said that she was listening to Scriptnotes and she’s been burned by the same guy. DM’d one of the girls on the Twitter thread and confirmed it was the same person. She says, “He seemed to have stepped up his game. He put a call out for writer’s assistants for a project he had in development. Of course I put my hat in the ring. But effectively he negged me so hard into the fact that I had no experience in TV in LA despite the fact that I had been an intern page and assistant at NBC, Letterman, and PBS. He said I was totally unqualified and I clearly needed mentoring. He proposed that I do some light personal assisting work for him in exchange for mentoring hours.”

Craig: Oh my god.

Megana: “I thought to myself, screw it, you never know. So I did it. After 30 hours of doing things like picking up his dry cleaning and picking up dog shit out of his carpet.”

Craig: Oh god.

Megana: “It became apparent that he was dodging my request for even one single sit down. He suggested I get a graduate degree in screenwriting at the program he, surprise-surprise, was an instructor at. I literally have my MFA from NYU. Fortunately I happened to get offered a day job and called him to inform him that I would no longer be able to do this work. He screamed at me and told me that I wasn’t taking any of this seriously enough and I was destined to fail.”

Craig: You can’t do this to people. You can’t. You can’t pretend like you’re somebody that matters when you’re not. And you certainly can’t have people picking up dog shit out of your carpet in exchange for what. You’re not even paying them.

John: That’s what I’m talking about the umbrella of an institution, like yeah there are bad teachers at schools but if this friend of Megana’s was taking a class there and he was not a good professor or his notes were weird, OK. There’s a social contract there in terms of what a professor and student are doing. This is not an acceptable social contract for you to be doing this grunt work in exchange for hopefully getting some read on your material.

Craig: All he’s doing is just suckering people into painting his fence. That’s it. He’s just like come on over, do my dishes, do my dry cleaning, pick dog shit out of the carpet. Do stuff I don’t feel like doing. And in return I’ll give you something that is ultimately valueless which is my mentoring. Trust me, you don’t need this guy mentoring you. He needs somebody to mentor him.

John: I wonder if he listens to the podcast.

Craig: I hope he does. Because now we know dude. Now we know.

John: Well we know your name. So write into the podcast and tell us your side of the story. I’m fascinated to hear it.

Craig: Yeah. Even better, come on the show. Come on the show because it always works when people–

John: It always works. I remember the Final Draft episode. It did wonders for Final Draft.

Craig: Yes. You love Final Draft. Why don’t you do what they did? Come on the show and look me in the eye and explain all of this. I’d love to hear it.

John: Yup. All right. Let’s get into our marquee topic here which is about the density of action writing on the page, because this is a thing that we’ve talked about obliquely over the course of 500 episodes, but we really talk about the feeling of reading a page and sort of how intimidating it can be to have a big chunk of action there. And as a reader you might be tempted to skim or skip over pages. So we tend to argue for shorter blocks of action lines.

But our mutual friend, Kevin, sent through this great thing this past week which was these scenes from classic movies and the trick behind this is you’re supposed to identify what movie it was just based on like one paragraph of the action.

Craig: Can we do it? I want to play the game. Because I didn’t look at any of these.

John: Oh, great, fantastic. So because I not only prepped for the show but also read emails that our friends send–

Craig: Weird.

John: I know the answers to these things. So what we’ll do is we’ll put in the show notes links to these and these are just images of screenplay pages and you read through them and you figure out what is this moment from. So this first one is going to be very easy. We’re looking at a single paragraph and I’m not going to read the whole thing out loud.

Craig: First word gives it away. So the very first word is Satipo. So that’s Raiders of the Lost Ark.

John: Yes. So but the paragraph below it I think is really interesting. So this is a Lawrence Kasdan screenplay. Lawrence Kasdan has come on the show. And we’ve done a whole special episode on Raiders of the Lost Ark. This is a very dense single paragraph of scene description and action talking through the moment in which Indiana Jones is deciding how much weight to put in the bag as he puts it on there to take the idol off. And it’s just describing what happens there. It’s actually a great description of it, but it’s not sort of our typical advice about sort of how dense a block should be because it’s super, super dense.

Craig, what are you reacting to as you read this.

Craig: It’s brilliant. It just needs a couple of carriage returns as we like to say. A couple of paragraph breaks. But obviously back in the day I guess people had longer attention spans. There was no Internet so everybody could read a little bit more than they can now. But it’s beautifully written, even though Larry you misspelled the word altar. I’ll allow it. But it’s a great description. Lots of directing on the page which I love to see.

And it also includes reference to sound, which I love. Really terrific.

John: Yeah. So he balances the bag a couple times in the palm, concentrating. It’s clear he wants to replace the idol with the bag as smoothly as possible. So you really get a sense of exactly what’s happening and why it’s happening in ways that we should be able to see it when we see the movie, but if we didn’t put it here on the page we might not really get.

Craig: Yeah. It’s beautifully done.

John: The next sample that Kevin sent through, and I should say that this was all from a trivia competition called Learned League. And so it was a thing that they sent through. So these are scripts that they found but they curated them. We’re drafting off of their hard work.

Craig: Yeah.

John: The second sequence is much more like what I think you and I are classically describing when we’re talking about action writing. So this is talking about a character named Butcher. There’s a lot of dash-dashes to separate out single lines of things. The biggest paragraph we see here is four lines long. It’s full of we sees and we hears. And we continues. There’s so much we in here I can’t believe that this is a screenplay that anyone would take seriously.

Craig: [laughs] It’s really hard, right? I mean, it just doesn’t seem possible. This is almost certainly Hurt Locker.

John: It is Hurt Locker.

Craig: And this is somewhat typical, like you said, action writing. It’s very reportorial. It’s bullet-y. And it’s beautifully done. Lots of directing on the page which I love. And color. Motion. The world around the action. Really well done.

John: It’s just great. And I would say you and I grew up in time when we were reading James Cameron scripts. This very much reads like a James Cameron script in the sense of the flow on the page and how we’re getting into the action and being really present in moments. We’re not inside a character’s inner mental state, but we really are describing what it feels like to be in the audience seeing this thing on a screen.

Now a completely different example, Craig this is pretty short. Do you want to read this next one aloud?

Craig: Sure. It says, “He wears rider jeans, cowboy boots, a plaid western shirt, and a worn beige Army jacket with a patch reading King Kong Company 1968-70.

“He has the smell of sex about him: Sick sex, repressed sex, lonely sex, but sex nonetheless. He is a raw male force driving forward; toward what, one cannot tell. Then one looks closer and sees the evitable. The clocks spring,” it says sprig but I think it means spring. “The clock spring cannot be wound continually tighter. As the earth moves toward the sun,” then it’s redacted name, “moves toward violence.”

John: What do you got there?

Craig: Well, this is a guess. And I’m guessing just from the Army jacket that this is–

John: I’m 90% sure it’s Midnight Cowboy.

Craig: I don’t think it’s Midnight Cowboy. You might be right. I think it’s something else. The reason I’m embarrassing myself is because he doesn’t wear a plaid western shirt as I recall, nor does he wear rider jeans or cowboy boots. I think you’re probably right that it is Midnight Cowboy and he’s describing Jon Voight I guess. But I’m just going to take a swing and say Taxi Driver.

John: So different Craig. This is not a kind of thing that we typically see here. He has the smell of sex about him. It’s not a scratch and sniff movie, so smell seems like a weird thing. And yet this is such a useful character description and a useful way of establishing this is a very different kind of character than we typically see in a movie. This is what he feels like. If this were a Three Page Challenge I guess we would be responding a bit to sort of like you’re putting a lot there on the page that’s hard to film and yet I do like it. I like that I’m getting a sense of what is unique and special about this character.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot here. And I guess you could sort of take it as inspiration for casting more than anything else. There is no way to film “the clock spring cannot be wound continually tighter as the earth moves toward the sun,” which by the way it doesn’t. It moves around the sun. But regardless “as the earth moves toward the sun this person moves toward violence.” There’s no way to show that. So that probably would just be demonstrated through the reading of the script. But this is not uncommon.

I think in the ‘70s and ‘80s there was a bit more of that than there is now. Going off of nothing more than Army jacket, literally nothing more than that, I’m guessing Taxi Driver.

John: That is a fair bet. I was originally guessing Midnight Cowboy because I got too tripped up on the sex thing. I thought it was a sex worker kind of thing. It’s not the kind of character description we’re used to. I was wrong, it was Taxi Driver rather than Midnight Cowboy, but you’re describing the central character who we’re going to be spending a lot of time with. It’s worth it to spend those extra lines to describe what it’s going to feel like to be with this character.

Craig: I got to tell you what’s really interesting about this is that the first part I don’t recall in Taxi Driver that he’s wearing cowboy boots or a plaid western shirt. He might have been. I definitely recall the Army jacket. The second paragraph just for me is not reflected in the movie that Scorsese made. You don’t get the smell of sex about Travis Bickle. You get the smell of loser and anger.

John: Yeah. You get repression and lonely. But yeah.

Craig: Yeah, this feels a little thrusty. It feels a little too thrusty to me. Yeah.

John: This next example, see if you can guess what this is. But we’re opening in this hotel. We see this family come into this hotel. Do you recognize this? Or you may have seen this in the movie itself.

Craig: Let’s see. It’s a family that arrives in a hotel. There are two children. No, I don’t know who this is.

John: Do you think it’s a relatively recent movie or an old movie?

Craig: This feels newer.

John: And why does it feel newer?

Craig: Because the way that the – well, I’m cheating a little bit. There’s a slug line here which looks fairly newish. And the reveal in all caps is something that I do all the time. The capitalizing of raining heavily and two children and dripping wet feels more modern to me. So that’s why I feel like it’s more of a modern–

John: This is Crazy Rich Asians. So it’s a very modern script.

Craig: Oh, incredibly modern.

John: And this is absolutely 100% a script you would read in 2021. This is very much how things feel on the page. And so the paragraphs are, there’s some four and five sentence paragraphs, but nothing feels like a chore to get through. There’s a good use of upper case to call things out, not just sound effects, but really focus attention here. It’s great and it reads really well. “REVEAL we’re in the lobby of an ostentatious hotel.” So again a big movie that did great. Got that we in there.

Craig: Love the we. We feel so good.

John: Yeah. This next one is a favorite of mine. Maybe I’ll read this one aloud. “Hot city night montage. The block. We’ve seen it in daytime, but now we see it at night. Even though the white hot sun is gone nonetheless the heat is still stifling. And in a peculiar, funny sort of way it’s worse. You expect it to be hot during the light of day when the sun is beating down on the cement and tar, but at night it should be considerably cooler. Well, not tonight. It’s hot. All the residents of the block,” names redacted, “all the people we’ve seen throughout the day are now coping with the nighttime heat. Plus it’s humid as shit. Everyone is outside sitting on stoops, on cars, and you know the kids are playing, running up and down the block. Now is the hottest night of the year.” Underlined.

Craig: Sounds to me like Do the Right Thing.

John: It’s got to be Do the Right Thing.

Craig: Got to be, right?

John: And it’s just so great. And this is a moment that’s transitioning between the daytime and the nighttime. There’s so much here you can film but it’s also just so important to show this transition, this change from one thing to the next. It is labeled as a montage so obviously there’s going to be shots within it. I just thought it was great writing.

Craig: Yeah. For sure. And again in the modern format this would be broken up more on the page. It wouldn’t be a big long paragraph. But it does a great job of using weather which is an enormous factor in Do the Right Thing. And so it’s established here and it is filmed, it is played beautifully. And also it used, I don’t know if you noticed “Now we see it at night. All the people we’ve seen.” Huh. If it is Do the Right Thing how did Spike Lee ever get past the no “we see” rule?

John: There’s also second person pronouns. “You expect it to be hot during the light of day when the sun is beating down.” He’s go the we’s, he’s got the you’s, he’s breaking all the rules.

Craig: Oh my god. Breaking all the rules.

John: Breaking all the rules. But it’s great. And it is dense. You would not typically see this thick of a block of text in a script in 2021. And yet it still works. And I think if the rest of the script around it is great and you got to this moment, this is probably 80 pages into it, you’re going to keep reading. Because it has confidence, too. There’s a voice to it. The scene description has a voice. It feels like the movie has a point of view which it clearly does. It’s just great writing.

Craig: Agreed. Well that was fun. I like that game.

John: That was fun. Yeah, I like that game. So there’s lots of different ways to sort of show action and scene description on the page. And in each of these cases just these moments without dialogue, without character names in them really did feel like the movies that they came from. There’s other examples we could include. There’s a moment from the end of The Usual Suspects which McQuarrie does a great job of making you feel like you’re in that room as you’re piecing together what must have actually happened and what story was being told.

We talk about how important the word choices you’re making on the page are. These are just really three good examples of those.

Craig: Yeah.

John: All right so those were examples from professionally produced screenplays. Let’s turn our attention now to the three page challenge which is where we invite our listeners to send in three pages from their screenplays. Craig and I discuss what we see on the page, what was fantastic, what could be better. I remind everybody this is invitation only, so these are people who wanted to send pages to us. Megana reads through all of them. And this time Megana specifically wanted to see scary scenes, spooky scenes, scenes that could be in a thriller, a horror movie, so we’re going to try to be a little bit season focused here because it’s really about the Spooky Season.

Craig: Spooky Season. God.

John: Now Megana one thing you did notice in here which actually prompted our discussion of action on the page, a pattern you saw about people having too dense of action lines, or how they were breaking up stuff on the page.

Megana: Yeah. So I read through about 180 of these.

Craig: Good lord.

Megana: And they were super creative, like really great. So fun to read. But something that I just kept running into was that I was getting very dense paragraphs of action lines. And I couldn’t tell if it was because people felt pressure to jam a lot into these three pages. But you know it’s something that you talk a lot about in visual art or poetry, like the way that form and content meet each other. And even though a screenplay is not the final piece of art I was hoping that you guys can talk about how the screenplay format can lend itself to also create a sense of rhythm and movement as you are reading them.

Craig: Yes. Yes. Yes!

John: We’ve been harping on this really since the beginning which is that you’re trying to create the experience on the page of what it would feel like to be in that movie theater seeing it. And when there is fast-paced action that’s why we go to shorter lines. That feeling like you’re right there in that moment. Also I see here on the Workflowy you have links to the Friday the 13th script, the Scream script. Take a look at those and they’re really good writing on the page and they’re not big blocks of action. It’s very much I think what we’re describing in terms of like a modern screenplay format of shorter, tighter, punchier action.

Craig: It’s especially important when you’re writing scenes that are scary. Everything is about silence in between noise, about suspense. You can’t just dump a bunch of words on the page and think that you’re going to be creating the tone you want to create. So the shape of the page, literally what the page looks like can help set the tone for what the movie will feel like. I believe this in my bones. I think about it all the time. I spend a stupid amount of time sculpting these pages to look correct. And it is very important I think when you’re dealing with scary stuff to use white space. The white space on the page is your friend. It’s the silence between the notes. It’s incredibly important. It’s the rest in the measure.

And so while you can certainly “get away” with these big bricks of text, they are less likely to be problematic or objectionable in say a kind of heavy historical biopic than they would be in something like a horror film.

John: Yeah. Now we have three examples here to look through. We’re going to start with Fractal Forest by Nicholas Nyhof. And if you’ve like to read along with us we’ll have links in the show notes to the PDFs so you can actually see the real pages here. But if you’re just driving in your car Megana could you give us a quick description of what happens in these three pages?

Megana: Mike and Jen hike on a forest trail. They see a deer. Mike takes out his camera to take a picture which scares the deer away. As they continue walking they excitedly banter about their future child. Suddenly, Jen discovers Mike has disappeared. She walks off the trail searching for him. She sees flashes of him in the distance through the trees. Meanwhile, Mike zips up his fly and returns to the trail but discovers Jen is missing. In the woods Jen has caught up with the Mike figure who keeps his back turned to her. The figure yells that Mike will abandon her and she will be a terrible mother. We cut back to the trail where Mike unsuccessfully tries to reach Jen’s cellphone.

John: Great. Looking through these pages, let’s start with the density of action on the page. It’s not that the paragraphs are too dense. There aren’t any paragraphs that are more than three or four lines. A problem I had, Craig, and see if you felt the same thing is that Nicolaus was interrupting his dialogue too often with action lines and I had a hard time getting any flow of dialogue actually happening because we’re constantly interrupting things.

So if you look at my red markup on the page I’m moving his action lines around a lot to sort of keep them together so we’re in dialogue or we’re in action but we’re not breaking stuff up so much. What were you feeling about the rhythm on the page?

Craig: I tend to agree with you. There are times where you must break up the dialogue. I’m particularly not a fan of what I call ticker tape screenplays where it’s just streams of people talking without any interruption or action or description or anything. But there are certain spots where – here’s a good example. On page two, Jen says, “Mike?” Then there’s an action line. “No response.” Paragraph break. “She walks towards where he left the trail. Next, “Mike, come on, don’t play around.”

The no response and she walks towards where he left the trail should be on the same line.

John: Yeah.

Craig: Because no response isn’t enough to be on its own line unless there was more of a decision that she makes in the next line which would make the next line more interesting. And also she laughs I think could just be in parenthesis laughs.

So, yeah, I mean, there is such a thing as too much white space. Although I did not really – that was not a major issue for me on this.

John: Here’s an example. On the first page of actual scene here, “The deer skitter off into the woods. Jen says, ‘Good going.’ She starts walking down the path. Mike, ‘I don’t think it was me.’”

Moving that she starts walking down the path after the Mike “I don’t think it was me” actually keeps his line more connected to what’s going on there. Plus they’re going to keep walking. We’re going to stay on Mike. There’s reasons to keep the action together a little bit more, not necessarily as one big block, but just so if there’s a couple of dialogue keeping those things together a little bit more helps your dialogue make sense. We’re not jumping in and out of dialogue constantly. Just be looking for that.

There’s also an opportunity I felt at the bottom of this first page for a time cut. So “He jogs to catch up to her and they continue to walk along the trail with walking sticks in hand.” The walking sticks appear kind of out of nowhere and I had a hard time figuring out he’s holding his camera, seems like a bigger camera, but now has a walking stick. I thought there was an opportunity for a time cut here. It felt like a natural kind of thing to do a little time cut instead of having it be one continuous scene.

Craig: Yeah. You want to jump this ahead. Pick a different part of the woods and you see them walking through and they’re having this discussion. I think it will also help the discussion itself. Because when you don’t do a time cut, she was concerned that he was scaring the deer away with his camera. He doesn’t think it was him. And she says, “Come on, we’re almost at the site.” Perfectly good time to jump ahead to another thing. But instead he catches up with her and then she says, “I hope our kids like nature.” Why? Where did that come from?

John: And that’s exactly the kind of line that’s so much easier to get into if you’ve jumped forward in time. You can imagine we were in close-ups and then we got back to a wide shot at a new place. Some time has passed. And you can start a new conversation, “I hope our kids like nature.” You can believe there was a line before that actually set that up. And so there’s definitely an opportunity there.

Backing up really to the start of this whole scene, it says, EXT. FOREST TRAIL – DAY. “The forest is dense. Lush trees and overgrowth give life to an already stunning view.” I don’t know what kind of forest this is though. Forests can be the rainforest. This can be the Pacific Northwest. The Appalachian Trail. There’s an opportunity here for a little bit more specificity about what kind of forest we’re in. Just give us a sense of how dense it feels. This is where all three pages are going to be taking place so spend an extra moment here to anchor us into one kind of forest.

Craig: Yeah. And sometimes all you have to do is just describe the trees and that will do it. Let’s talk about what’s working here. There’s a nice misdirection and there’s a nice confusion about what’s going on. I think – my recommendation Nicholas would be to take Mike’s little scene where he’s peeing and connect it to his other bit. So stay with her where she says, “Mike where are you going?” And then cut to Mike, he’s finishing peeing, and then he’s like, “Jen, I’m ready. Wait, where are you? Jen? Jen?” And then cut back to her as she catches up with this fake Mike. And then they have the scene. Instead of doing two Mike, because we’re going from Mike to Mike to Mike to Mike. So, there’s too many Mikes. It’s not as enjoyable as figuring out that there’s a second Mike.

John: Yeah. And I do want to stress that the overall idea of the scene is completely right and appropriate for the start of this kind of movie. Sort of guessing this is a movie. Where it feels like there’s something freaky going on. You’ve established well at the start that the deer are not actually looking at what you think they’re looking at. The deer are frightened by another thing but our characters aren’t there with them. That’s good. And so I think tightening the writing on the page. I would look at sort of the yada-yada dialogue at the top of page two where it is a thing where characters will have bullshit nonsense dialogue a little bit, which is sort of spacer dialogue. It’s OK here. I think it could be better before we get to the actual sort of real event that’s happening here.

So I think it’s the right idea for this kind of scene. I think there’s a better version of it that Nicholas could find.

Craig: I liked – so this bit where she comes face to face, even if we don’t, with creepy Mike was very Stephen King-ish. So one of the hallmarks of Stephen King is that his monsters talk. And they fuck with your mind. That’s what they do. They get right into your psyche and start discussing the things that you are ashamed of or guilty about. Very Stephen King-y which I love.

And that’s what’s happening here with monster Mike. I think I would probably get rid of that last line personally. When he says, “Do you really think he doesn’t know,” that’s very scary. And I don’t want him to say anything else. And I don’t want her to say, “No!” I just want to go from that and her face like oh my god I’m doomed.

I assume that the big secret that monster knows is that she’s no longer pregnant or never was. Or maybe, yeah, I assume it’s one of those. Because it says you would have made a terrible mother anyways, which is a really cool line. So I think there’s a lot of cool stuff here.

John: We end on “He hangs up, then a deep CLACK-CRACK-ACK-ACK-ACK comes from deep in the woods followed by a PIERCING SCREAM that echoes all around him.” Great. And I love the onomatopoeia of describing out what that sound is like. It’s bolded and italics and it’s all appropriate to put that big weird noise there. It gives a feeling of what it would be like to be in that theater hearing that.

Craig: Yes. I’m not a huge fan of screams. Because they’re a big silly. To me at least less scary than nothing. But that’s a taste thing. But I think that there’s a cool scenario. So you’ve laid out a cool scenario here. And anything involving babies and demons and such, it’s Megana-bait is what it is.

John: So a change we made over the Three Page Challenge over the years is we now ask for a log line just so we actually get a sense of what the whole thing would be like. So this is what Nicholas describes as the whole movie. “A search and rescue trainee is dropped in the middle of the woods for his final navigation assessment but while on route to the rally point he quickly finds himself being hunted by creatures manifesting the horrors of his past.”

So my guess is this is an opening segment that is not connected to the search and rescue trainee, which is great. Totally appropriate.

Craig: Pretty standard.

John: Cool.

Craig: I like it.

John: Next let’s get to The Other Side of the Night by Ellen Apswoude.

Megana: Laura and Joshua cook dinner while the nightly news plays in the background. There are three children playing and stomping upstairs. When Laura yells up to them to stop running the children either claim it wasn’t them or apologize. Laura starts sweating. She looks flush. A news announcer in the background mentions that night’s lunar eclipse. Joshua begins to panic. He looks for a phone to confirm that there is in fact a lunar eclipse at night. When he points out to Laura that she is sweating they both look terrified. Laura starts to transform. Her teeth bleed.

Joshua runs upstairs to protect the children from her.

Craig: She’s clearly not flossing.

John: Yes. Laura is probably lying to the hygienist when they say, “Oh, are you flossing?” “Oh yeah. I floss all the time.”

Craig: She’s totally flossing. Yeah.

John: I’m actually a good flosser. It’s going to surprise no one listening to this podcast that I’m a really good flosser and that does actually point that out.

Craig: Do you have problems with your teeth?

John: No, I have great teeth.

Craig: I’ve never had a cavity.

John: I think you’ve said that on the podcast before. It’s a good trait.

Craig: It’s weird. It’s weird to have this one area where you just are completely disconnected from other people’s experiences. It’s just genetic obviously. It’s weird.

John: But it could also be that you are a werewolf like Laura apparently is in this show.

Craig: She is.

John: So I like where this got to. I didn’t like the journey of me getting there. So I think it’s a really compelling, interesting idea. I just think there’s a lot of stuff that Ellen could be doing to create a stronger moment to get us up there. Because really what she’s trying to do is a misdirect where it’s just like a normal household family and we think that the threat is going to come from outside. And the surprise is that it’s coming from inside. That Laura is the problem. Love that.

Craig: This is one of those areas, Ellen, where I don’t have a ton of comments about the format or how you’re laying things out. My problem is that the content is a bit fakey. So everything that’s happening on page one and two doesn’t feel real. Particularly just having been married and having kids and all the rest, the conversation that the two of them are having at the bottom of page one feels like – and the fact that they’re laughing at each other’s not that funny comments, it just feels like fake marriage and not real marriage.

I thought that there’s – OK, I’m just going to say – I think there’s a better way to do this. Because what happens is Joshua is like, wait, hold on, I just heard over the news the three key words. Eclipse. Once in a lifetime. Which you never want that.

Because here’s what actually happens is somebody is going to have to come to you and say what do they say in between, because why are those two words the only ones we hear. But even then he’s like, what, oh my god, no. And then it’s a lot of “we couldn’t have known, the kids, blah.”

So, Ellen, have you seen the movie Raw by Julia Ducournau? John, or Megana, have you seen it?

Megana: I have not. But I’m looking it up now.

John: I have not seen it. So tell us about it.

Craig: It’s the most amazing thing. I mean, she just won Cannes with Titane. She’s a remarkable filmmaker and I’m not going to ruin anything. I’m just going to say you guys should see it. It’s highly disturbing in the most wonderful way. But what I love about it is how grounded the supernatural aspect is. And so what I’m saying Ellen is if I were doing this I would have them making dinner. I would have them eating and being happy with each other and talking about the kids and having a conversation the way parents talk about their kids and all the rest. Very mundane. And then, well, we got about 15 minutes, we should probably get you downstairs. And then they put her downstairs and they lock the door and they padlock it. And you’re like what is happening? That would be the way it would work, I think.

John: I feel like I may have seen some version of that before. And so what I did like that Ellen was doing on the page here was she’s flicking her collar because she’s sweating and that was interesting. And it was a bit of a misdirect because they’re cooking pasta so that’s probably what we’ve got there. What you said that I completely agree with is that if this husband and wife have three little kids they’re going to end up talking about the kids and since the kids are supposed to be in danger let it be about the kids being in danger. Let the kids be part of their conversation so that it’s really about that. And it could be like mundane school stuff or whatever but I didn’t buy the relationship stuff or this is the conversation they have all the time. It didn’t feel like married parents’ conversation to me.

Craig: No. Definitely not. We are way more tired and used to each other than that. [laughs] Way more.

John: Going back to the problem I had in the first sample with the woods or the forest, here it is INT. FAMILY HOME – DUSK. “We are in the throes of an ancient nightly ritual. Making dinner.” What is a family home? I don’t know what that is. And so this is a suburban track house? Are we in the city? Are we rural or out in the middle of no place? It’s going to matter because it’s going to matter for the story. So give us a sense. Anchor us someplace here because I don’t know what a “family home” is like. You’re giving us some details in terms of it’s bustling and there’s winter coats on the backs of chairs. Boots lay abandoned at the front door. OK, but I need more specificity because this could be a cabin in the woods or this could be a mansion. And I need to know more about it so I can really get a sense of what kind of movie I’m in.

Megana, can you tell us what Ellen says the script is about?

Megana: So Ellen’s log line is, “What happens when the horror movie ends? After Laura kills her children and husband during a supernatural event she must prove the existence of werewolves to a courtroom.”

John: I’m not sure this is a perfect setup for what that would be. But I guess I can see it. And in some ways it is – what is the dingo ate my baby.

Craig: I don’t know if it is. [laughs] Because the dingo definitely ate the baby in this case.

John: That’s Cry in the Dark, right?

Craig: I think. You’re going to say to a court, “No, no, either you think I murdered my family or you think I murdered my family as a wolf.” But either way, I mean, it’s not a great defense. I’m a werewolf is not a strong defense. All right, not where I thought it was going.

John: No. Not where I thought it was going. Yeah, so Laura is really your central character there. Everyone else is meat.

Craig: It could be amazing.

John: It could be amazing.

Craig: We don’t know. We don’t know anything.

John: We’ve read three pages.

Craig: We’ve read three pages. What do we know? Nothing.

John: And I would say that I was intrigued by the end of three pages. I would have kept reading even though I wasn’t fully sold, I was certainly curious.

Craig: Right.

John: All right, let’s get to our final Three Page Challenge. This is Big Evil by Lance Baughman.

Megana: We’re in the Sandstone Hills of Oklahoma. A conquistador, Gaspar, hacks at the vines. He’s followed by another conquistador, Hernan, and one-eyed priest, Father Ojo. They’re searching for gold. They approach a clearing. Before then a pile a human skeletons surround a 50-foot log tower. They start scavenging the skeletons for treasure when Father Ojo cautions them that there’s something unholy here. Father Ojo stumbles backwards into a pool of black oil. Before the conquistadors can offer help oil covered figures surround them and attack them

We then jump to an upscale grocery store in sunny Hollywood where a woman asks employee Rick about a cheese display.

Craig: Oil is bad.

John: Oil is bad.

Craig: Bad oil.

John: Big, bad, evil oil. Here’s what I liked about this is once we got to the pile of bodies and the monsters coming out of the muck, and I liked Father Ojo coming out of the oil, that I can see. And I get why this is a disturbing horror movie start of things. Page two I’m liking. Page one and the conversation between the conquistador and everybody else, I didn’t buy it. It felt like, I don’t want to slam on comic books, but it felt like the kind of comic book writing where certain words in a line are bold faced to get that sense of we’re here to find this….I didn’t believe that they were having this conversation. It felt like they were having this conversation for me as an audience to establish why they were there.

Craig: Yeah. And sometimes the only way to do this is to embrace it and make a point of it which is to not say it offhand at some point, but to sit this priest down, get really close to him, and say, “Let me make this clear. Here’s what you told us. Here’s what you’ve delivered. Here’s what’s going to happen if I don’t see this place in the next two minutes. Do we understand?” You don’t run away from it, but you make it interesting.

And generally that’s what I prefer to do. The danger of these things, of “Hurry,” he’s being sarcastic, “surely the Seven Cities of Cibolla lie straight ahead.” He’s mocking Father Ojo. But we know what’s happening. It’s not clever enough. So we know that you’re trying to be clever by hiding the exposition, but you didn’t hide it.

The thing I wanted the most, Lance, was just to know where the hell this was. It says Sandstone Hills. I don’t know where that is. Where is that?

John: And so it makes sense later that Megana says Sandstone Hills of Oklahoma, I get that now. But I assumed this was Mexico. I assumed this was Central America someplace. Because when I see conquistadors that’s what I’m thinking. I’m not thinking of North America at all.

Craig: No. And also you don’t have to machete your way through Oklahoma.

John: That’s true.

Craig: It says green foliage and he’s hacking a sword at a maddening, thorny vine. That’s jungle stuff. That’s not Oklahoma. Nobody has to hack their way through Oklahoma. At least as far as I know it’s flat. It’s the flattest state in the world.

So, I think you could just walk around it, or over it, I don’t know.

John: I think Lance has an interesting idea of tying oil into evil. And that is a primal thing that is bubbling up from below. That’s kind of interesting and I’ve not sort of seen anything that could take place in Oklahoma with the sense of like oil as a primal, evil quality. Great. And the fact that you’re marrying it to this giant company that’s done the drilling there, I think that’s really interesting.

Where we land at the end of the third page is in the least believable Hollywood supermarket that I get really frustrated when I see. She asks, “Is this cheese nondairy? Is it vegan? Is it locally sourced?” It feels like–

Craig: No one does that.

John: No, no one does that. It feels like stock dialogue from something else. And it doesn’t help your story.

Craig: Yeah. I agree. It’s just a caricature of a fussy white lady I guess. But generally speaking people don’t walk up to a cheese sample tray with a picture of a cow behind it and say is this cheese nondairy. Nobody asks if cheese is nondairy. It’s not a question. If cheese is nondairy it’s being very clearly stated because cheese is dairy. Anyway, little things.

John: The first character who I believe probably persists in this story is at the bottom of page three. “RICK SCHNABLE, 32, listens patiently. Rick wears an apron and the fitted shirt that looks better on less pudgy employees. He brushes back his floppy black hair and smiles.” Great. Love that.

Craig: Yeah. Although he needs to answer the questions. So he can’t smile at questions. He has to have an answer. I got a little nervous about the overt nature of this because Lance you probably don’t want my reaction at first to be oil is bad. But you laid it on pretty thick.

John: It’s a thick crude oil.

Craig: The funnel that was driven into a guy’s head, that was sort of one bridge too far on the oil front I thought.

John: You know what? I guess I would say that there’s a convention in horror movies to actually be kind of super overt. I mean, not just the toxic avenger, but you kind of put your themes in this is a stand in for this kind of very much up at the top. And so I can imagine a version of this that would work. But I’m not quite sure tone wise whether this is going to be a pointed commentary on like clever and sort of self-winking version of oil is bad or what Lance is trying to do here.

Craig: Yes. I think good horror movies are a little more subtle. Also, just a logic thing, Lance. Your credit montage can be cool. What you’re showing us is a book, pages from a book. And the cover of the book is Spanish Petroleum, The First 100 Years. And it includes things like headlines announcing oil and an outdoor party, and oil derricks and smug oilman Uncle Frank Standish. But it also includes crying children on a reservation. You don’t put that in the Spanish Petroleum, The First 100 Years book. Yeah, you’re going to want to not put that in there. So I would suggest perhaps instead of limiting yourself to whatever the Spanish Petroleum Oil Company would put in a book you just show images of that time. You don’t need the book closing.

John: Agreed. So Megana can you tell us what is the whole script about.

Megana: OK, so his log line is, “A struggling filmmaker, his scream queen girlfriend, and her misfit son travel from LA to Bartlesville, Oklahoma to shoot an industrial for an oil company’s anniversary at the founder’s creepy ranch where all is not as it seems.”

Craig: Oil monsters eating people.

John: Oil monsters. I think there’s an opportunity here for some self-aware commentary and pointing to the nature of the form a little bit. Because if you have a filmmaker and a scream queen girlfriend you’re in a universe that horror films exist, so I’m wondering if that’s what he’s going for.

Craig: Yeah. I feel like there could be a cool meta thing going on, but if that’s the case the opening is not at all meta.

John: No.

Craig: It’s just straight up. So, hard to say from these three pages. I think that it’s a cool notion and it was well described. Yeah, some logic issues that we need to just take a peek at.

John: Absolutely. What I will say about all three of these samples that Megana picked – thank you for reading through all hundred plus entries for these.

Megana: Of course.

John: The ones that made it through, first off there were no typos that we caught. Love that.

Craig: Yup.

John: And they read OK on the page. There was no place where it was like ugh I can’t even get my eyes down this page. It all worked and I could see what the concept was by the end of the three pages. So successes all around for the three entries this time on those levels. So thank you for everyone who sent stuff in this time, but also for our three brave participants this week.

If you would like to send in your own pages so Megana can read them and they could possibly be picked for a future segment go to johnaugust.com/threepage. That is where you can find the form where you can attach your PDF. And it could end up in a future episode of Scriptnotes.

It has come time for our One Cool Things. Craig, what is your One Cool Thing this week?

Craig: My One Cool Thing is, are, local school boards.

John: Oh my.

Craig: I have been very involved in the public school system in the town we live in, La Canada, for a long time, for 20 years basically. And for as long as I’ve been there in La Canada people have always appreciated our school system for what it is which is public and excellent and it’s always had very good stewardship through the school board. So the school board are locally elected citizens who set the policies of the school board in concert with the recommendations of the superintendent. And this is the way it works all across the United States. And what has happened in La Canada and what is happening all across the United States is that idiots, full-on morons, are showing up and harassing school board members because these morons are full of both misinformation and utter bullshit regarding Covid. And also have no concept of how governance actually works. They are showing up at the wrong place to yell at the wrong people about the wrong things, all of which is motivated by their horseshit Facebook accounts spreading nonsense and idiocy.

Meanwhile people are dying. And what is unconscionable is the way that all across the United States school board members are being harassed, threatened, abused by idiots. And they’re not even in the majority. These idiots are not in the majority. They are in the minority. But they have apparently nothing else to do except yell at people who are volunteering their time to be civically responsible. It is outrageous.

So to everyone who serves on a local school board, I salute you. Well almost everyone. If you’re an idiot I don’t. If you think that vaccines are microchipped and Covid is a plandemic, then no, fuck you. But assuming you’re normal I salute you. And I want people who do serve on school boards to know how appreciated they are by the vast majority of Americans. Maybe not vast. Let’s just go with majority of Americans. It’s tragic.

John: Yeah. And incredibly frustrating. I think back to Parks and Recreation and there are always scenes on that where there are public hearings and people come up and say crazy things. And that was outside of a pandemic. But those are paid officials whose job it is to listen to the public. School board members are not paid. They’re volunteers. Out of the goodness of their hearts they’re trying to do something to keep the schools in their communities excellent. And to find them being threatened or worse is unconscionable.

Craig: Oh, I mean, when you’re being yelled at because you’re not doing something that you know you can’t do because it’s illegal or not in your authority to do things take on a surreal pall. And when school board members explain to members of the public that what the public wants is illegal, or what the public is demanding is not within their purview. The public doesn’t seem to care. They just like yelling because they’re from Facebook.

You know, John, if you Google how to delete Facebook there are some excellent resources.

John: It’s entirely a possible thing that people can do.

Craig: Indeed I have done it. I did it years ago. It was a joy.

John: Yeah. I deactivated my Facebook account. I still use Instagram which I know is complicit. But [unintelligible].

Craig: I have an account. I never look at it. I’m withdrawing from everything. Soon I won’t know anything.

John: Anything. Love it. My One Cool Thing is a new podcast by Gavin Purcell. It is called Way Too Interested. There’s two episodes out as we’re recording this. The first one is about jigsaw puzzles.

Craig: Ugh, they’re not puzzles.

John: With Roy Wood, Jr.

Craig: That’s very funny. But they’re not puzzles.

John: Very funny. Very talented man.

Craig: Yeah, not puzzles.

John: Second one is about the true origins of Bible stories with Felicia Day talking with Dr. Malka Simkovich. Just a delightful idea for a podcast. So essentially Gavin brings on somebody who is – it’s not their job to focus on this topic but they just become sort of obsessed with a topic. And so they chat about it and they bring in an expert to fill in the actual details of things they don’t know about that topic. And it’s a good idea.

So if you’re looking for a new podcast that is short and enjoyable, Way Too Interested, just waytoointerested.com is where you can find the link to the podcast.

Craig: I can’t believe people listen to podcasts.

John: I know. It’s crazy to listen to podcasts.

Craig: It’s insane.

John: That is our show for this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao. Thank you again for reading all those pages. It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is especially spooky and it’s also by Matthew Chilelli. If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. Craig is on there sometimes. I’m on there more often.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the links to the stuff we talked about on the show and the Three Page Challenges if you want to read the PDFs for that. There you can also sign up for our weekly-ish newsletter called Inneresting which has lots of links to things about writing.

You can find our t-shirts at Cotton Bureau. They’re great. And you can sign up to become a premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and the bonus segments like the one we’re about to record on our first experiences with horror movies and other strange phenomena. Craig, Megana, thank you so much.

Craig: Thank you, John.

Megana: Thank you.

[Bonus segment]

John: Craig, what was the first scary movie you saw?

Craig: Oh, god, it’s tragic really. I was in fourth grade. I was nine or ten. And a friend of mine had something called WHT. So if you grew up in New York City one of the weird quirks of growing up in New York in the ‘70s and early ‘80s is that we didn’t have cable television. Cable television came to other places much sooner. In New York we didn’t have it because, I don’t know, it’s New York go fuck yourself cable. Instead there was this weird closed circuit broadcast thing called WHT that was around for a couple of years or so. And they would play movies. And you had to get a descrambler box, which we didn’t have, but my friend did.

And we saw The Exorcist.

John: Oh my god.

Craig: And I was permanently damaged. Permanently.

John: Yeah, about the same age I saw Amityville Horror, where I saw snippets of the Amityville Horror as long as I could watch it and then have to turn the channel because I got too scared. I think my parents were out at a concert someplace and for some reason I was alone in the house at night. And I started watching The Amityville Horror which was on broadcast television for no good reason. And I found it so incredibly terrifying. And I think it probably rooted me into my fear of someone being in the house is probably my number one kind of supernatural fear. It’s not like a monster. That there’s someone in the house.

Craig: The call is coming from inside the house.

John: Megana, what was your first horror movie experience?

Megana: When I was probably like seven years old my mom left and my brother was supposed to babysit me. And she had rented 101 Dalmatians for me to watch upstairs. And my brother and his friends were watching Scream downstairs. But I got way too scared being alone, so I remember being like OK well I’ll just feel better if I’m around them, even though I know this isn’t a little kid’s movie.

And I hid behind the couch and I watched this whole movie and was so terrified and I’m still terrified of garage doors.

Craig: Of course.

John: Oh yeah.

Megana: But I recently reread the script and it’s so funny, but obviously that was lost on six, seven-year-old me.

John: Every time you say six, seven-year-old Megana watching Scream it makes me feel just incredibly old. Because Scream I see as a relatively contemporary movie to me. So it feels strange that you’re referencing that as that old movie you watched.

Craig: I’m glad that she was alive for Scream.

John: Sure. Now I have written some scary stuff. I’ve helped out on some horror movies and done some work on them. And I wrote one thing which is probably truly a scary movie. Craig, you obviously wrote the Scary Movie movies, but have you written horror? Have you written anything that is in the genre itself?

Craig: I mean, I’ve gone and done some rewrites and things. Some of the stuff that I’m doing now for The Last of Us is legitimately scary. But even then not really in the genre of what we would call horror. It’s not specifically a horror film. I don’t think I’ll ever write just a horror movie, or a horror show.

It’s too scary.

John: It’s scary to write. It’s scary to edit. And not having been through the whole process of it I do wonder if at a certain point when you’ve seen this scene on the editing bay for the 100th time if it can actually have any impact again. I wonder if it’s like comedy where it’s like you know it’s funny but it’s not actually funny to you anymore. I’m curious like the folks who make this stuff if they actually are scared by the stuff they’re doing at any point.

I would say because as a writer I have to sort of enter – I try to enter emotionally into the place that I’m at for when I’m writing the sequences. Writing scary stuff is kind of scary to me. I do enjoy being scared up to a certain point, but I want to be able to get out of it at any point. And sometimes when you’re writing I can freak myself out very easily. And I don’t sort of like living in a state of heightened anxiety.

Craig: Yeah. When I’m thinking about scary stuff I try and think about things that are actually really, really distressing and upsetting to me. I don’t really – monsters, like I’m not scared by monsters. And I think maybe the reason that The Exorcist fucked me up so deeply is because she was just a girl. It was a kid. Even though there was a monster inside of her and what it was doing to her, it was through a child. And the child was saying things that adults say. That’s the part that was so horrifying to me.

John: Also I see here on the outline things that were scary to you as a kid that are no longer scary to you, or things that were sort of a part of your life that have just disappeared. This is a meme I’ve seen a lot. I feel like I spent far too much of my childhood worrying about quicksand. What am I going to do if I encounter quicksand? Never encountered quicksand in my actual life. And I was a scout. I was out there in the wilderness. Never saw any quicksand. Not a thing that people are going to be stumbling upon.

Craig: There was a huge thing when we were kids. In cartoons I think people were constantly falling into quicksand. When I was a kid growing up on Staten Island there was the legend of the Cropsey Monster.

John: All right.

Craig: This is very local. If you know about the Cropsey Monster, 70% chance you grew up on Staten Island. 30% Brooklyn. It is really local. And the Cropsey Monster was basically a legend of a guy who had a hook for a hand. He would go around and he would cut you up. And I was just poking around on the Internet looking just to see if there were any more details about the Cropsey Monster that I’d forgotten and a couple of people made a documentary about the Cropsey Monster, both the urban legend and also the real story of this murderous janitor who worked at Willow Brook which was the infamous institution where they housed a lot of children who were severely disabled and it was – Geraldo Rivera, before he was an idiot, actually exposed that whole thing and it was quite the story.

So there’s a documentary about both of those things. But what was kind of nice to see was that one of the people who made the documentary was a woman named Barbara Brancaccio, which by the way is a terrific Staten Island name. Barbara Brancaccio. I went to school with Barbara Brancaccio. She was in my fifth grade class, or my fourth grade class, or both. So that was nice to see. Well done Barbara Brancaccio.

John: Now, Megana growing up in Ohio did you have any local terror legends, any things that were specific to your environment?

Megana: There was a series of books called Haunted Ohio and as Craig was saying that though the sort of details of the Cropsey Monster feel like those were the same details on all of our local urban legends, too. The man who escaped from asylum with a hook for a hand. Why are hooks for hands so popular with that? Was that a common surgery that people were having back in the day?

Craig: No. No one had hooks for hands. No one. And also hooks, like if you’re going to be a creepy murderer, not really efficient.

John: No.

Craig: You know? Something that is just more pointy or maybe just a simple sword, but why the hook?

John: I think hooks were probably practical at a certain point, because you could do some pirate stuff with them. You could use it to pull ropes in or do some stuff.

Craig: I don’t think you can. I think – I’m going to ask you to pull a rope with a hook. I don’t think pirates were good with hook hands. I don’t think anybody ever wanted a hook hand. I don’t think it was a thing. I know that it’s in, what’s in, the new one with the bees and the guy with the bees?

Megana: Candyman?

Craig: Candyman. It’s in the new Candyman. It was in the old one, too. He has a hook for a hand. And the Cropsey Monster had a hook for a hand. And Captain Hook had a hook for a hand. I don’t think anyone has a hook for a hand. I don’t buy it.

John: Do you want to see horror movies now? Do you actively seek out horror movies, Craig?

Craig: No.

John: Megana?

Megana: No. I feel like there was a period from 13 to 17 where I just inhaled them. And ever since that point I have become too much of a chicken to be able to keep watching them.

John: Yeah. I’m not a big horror movie person either. So I’m going to see Last Night in Soho which is kind of a horror movie. And I’m excited to see that. But it’s not a thing I sort of go out of my way to go see. Although I loved Scream and I loved the meta quality of Scream and the re-analysis of horror movies as a form, but I’m not a person who rushes out to see Halloween every incarnation that comes out.

Megana: Well, I think like I definitely enjoy them as an experience, but now I dread seeing them because I know how scared I’m going to be afterwards. And I think it’s because probably true for all three of us that we have really vivid imaginations and scary dreams. So I just don’t want to add any more fodder for that.

John: What was the most recent scary movie that you saw?

Craig: I don’t see them. [laughs] I don’t see them.

John: Megana, because you and I saw Midsommar together. But that’s not really a horror movie.

Megana: I was just going to bring that up. I watched The Haunting of Hill House and all of the Mike Flannigan horror stuff. Oh, I guess I watched Halloween pretty recently. But I’ve seen it before.

John: So Hereditary was the last true horror movie, which was before Midsommar. And I like to bring this all the way back to the beginning and to close, it was like me watching Amityville Horror in that I could only watch it in small segments. And so I watched it ten minutes at a time, then I would stop and I would leave the room, and then I’d come back and watch another ten minutes of it because it was just so overwhelming to me. I just can’t–

Megana: Did you watch it in your own home?

John: I watched it in my own home. That’s why the house is cursed, Megana. All the monsters are here.

Megana: I mean, my trick is I like to watch horror movies on flights.

John: That’s a good choice. Because then you can scream on a flight and everyone appreciates that. [laughs] Oh, Megana, Craig, it’s never terrifying to record a bonus segment with you.

Craig: [laughs] That’s nice.

John: Thanks and have a great rest of your weekend.

Craig: You too guys.

Megana: Thank you.

Craig: Bye.

Links:

• Hollywood Strike Averted As IATSE & AMPTP Reach Deal On New Film & TV Contract
• Learned League
• Learned League’s Classic Action Scenes–play along with Craig!
• Fractal Forest by Nicholas Nyhof
• The Other Side of Night by Ellen Apswoude
• Big Evil by Lance Baughman
• Thanks to all our participants and our selected writers. You can submit your three pages here to be considered!
• Way Too Interested podcast by Gavin Purcell
• Respect your local school board! Also enjoy this SNL sketch.
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John August on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by Matthew Chilelli (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.