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The original post for this episode can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 463 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the show we talk about action. That’s right, it’s an all-craft episode where we look at how the words on the page become the high adrenaline events on the screen. And in our bonus segment for Premium members we talk Emmys.

Craig: Ooh. Emmys. I know about that.

John: Emmys.

Craig: I’m an Emmy expert. LOL. LOL.

John: This is going to be one of those shows where we are literally just focusing on one thing and kind of one thing only. It’s all about writing action. So, it’s been much requested. And it’s kind of like our Three Page Challenges in that we’re going to be looking at the actual scenes from movies and TV shows that you’ve enjoyed and looking at what those words look like on the page. So just two very quick bits of news before we get into that.

This past week the WGA East and West members voted to approve the new contract which we talked about on the show last week. 98% of people voted yes for that, so great. Congratulations. That’s done.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Now we can just think about three years in the future.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, generally speaking forgone conclusion with these things, but that’s good. It is odd – I don’t know who the people are that are voting no. I mean, I fully support their right to vote no. I just don’t know quite what they were thinking. I just always wonder what do they think would happen exactly. If you vote no, yeah, I don’t know. Anyway. But yay democracy.

John: Hooray.

Craig: Three more years of working. And huzzah.

John: In less good news, the past week CAA laid off a bunch of agents and support staff.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So 90 agents laid off. 350 support staff. So, that was across all their offices, so it’s not just Los Angeles. CAA has a bunch of different businesses in different capacities. But it is not great news. We’ve talked a lot about how support staff are being especially impacted by shutdowns. So the fund that Craig and I helped organize originally for support staff, there’s still money there. It’s run through the Actor’s Fund. So we’ll have a link in the show notes to that.

So if you are newly laid off from CAA and are looking for some money to tide you over that may be an option for you.

Craig: Yeah. I don’t know the specifics. One of the folks that I do know did get laid off. But what I’m hearing is that a lot of the agents were out of sports and live events which makes sense. I mean, the music business – so professional musicians make most of their money from live events, not from album sales if they’re from a major record label, because the record label takes so much of that money. So, without live events, yeah, they’re just not earning. That means the agents aren’t earning.

The shutdown has essentially taken – you know, we think of it from a writer point of view like, hey, we the writers walked out of these agencies. That was over a year ago. But since basically production shutdown in late March I want to say actors don’t work. And directors don’t work. And actors and directors are kind of, you know, that’s a rolling income thing.

So, this is not surprising, but it is unpleasant to see people, especially when you’re talking about folks that are on support level losing their gigs is bad news. And it would be wrong I think to not extend this also to just the country at large. The economic report that came out today was grim, and particularly grim for people who are – I mean, because I don’t really care how hedge fund managers are doing. I’ve got to be honest with you. I don’t care. They’ll be fine.

But for the average working American this has been absolutely brutal and, you know, we’re not a hugely political podcast, but just shame on the Trump Administration. Just shame on them. I’m going to say it. I don’t care if we lose our one Trump voter. [laughs] I don’t care.

John: I really like when John and Craig talk about this thing but not about anything else in the world.

Craig: Yeah. Yeah.

John: Yes. All right. Let’s get to our marquee topic. This is something I’m excited to get into. Action scenes. And so we should probably define our terms here because obviously one of the hallmarks of screenwriting as opposed to playwriting is that you as a screenwriter are describing what characters are doing quite literally in some cases in a screenplay than the way you wouldn’t in a stage play.

So there’s action throughout and there’s scene description throughout. But what I mean by an action scene or an action sequence is where the actual movement of characters and what they’re trying to do takes precedent over any dialogue, over any normal things that would happen in the rest of the movie. Craig, help me out with a definition of an action scene.

Craig: I think essentially we’re talking about a movement of choices and behaviors that are not relying on dialogue but rather on what we see. It’s as simple as that. Because sometimes action sequences can be broken down to one character has to pick the pocket of another. We will write that action sequence very similarly I think as an individual writer to the way we would write a shoot-out.

So we’re talking about things that are not dialogue-based, they are not conversational, they are about movement and behavior.

John: Yeah. And the function of action sequences in movies, because something Megana and I were talking about off-mic is in many ways similar to sort of how a musical number functions in a musical. It is a moment which all this heightened tension sort of bursts out and becomes a sequence which is about the movement rather than about the thinking or about the thinking or about the planning. And so sometimes it’s a release of pent-up tension. It marks a change in sort of dynamics. And it kind of goes back to a limbic response rather than an intellectual response. It’s really just the physicality of action sequences tends to be foremost.

Craig: Yeah. In musicals a lot of times because there are lyrics there they can still – sometimes they can be very internal, very thinky. They can be soliloquies. When we are dealing with these kinds of sequences in movies in television one of the things that happens generally speaking is the writer starts to use all the things that are very specific to the mediums. That means being able to edit. So, just a very simple thing that we have that live performance doesn’t is we can edit before we get into the editing room, right. We can just intercut, crosscut, and up-cut. So reduce time between things.

And we can also move from inside to outside, from high to low. There’s a dynamic aspect to it that starts to happen. Even like when I describe the example of somebody picking someone else’s pocket, close on a hand, somebody is looking. There’s a person outside who sees a car go by with two people in it. All of these things can happen that force our writer brains to think in a very different way. It’s almost like we’re using a different section of the cortex.

John: Yeah. And I think my comparison to musical numbers isn’t about the internal/external thing. It’s about in real life people don’t burst out into song. And also in real life action sequences don’t tend to happen.

Craig: Thank god.

John: Yeah, thank god. So, it breaks from our normal reality. Because in normal reality people are having conversations all the time. But they’re not having shoot-outs. And so it’s a break from sort of what we normally expect. And it becomes an important different texture in your film. And so based on the genre of your film there’s an expectation that you’re going to have some action sequences and if you don’t have those action sequences there’s something strange about your movie.

Craig: Yeah. Then you’re making My Dinner with Andre, which I love. But that’s the thing that people are always like, “We’re not making My Dinner with Andre.” Poor My Dinner with Andre. It’s a perfectly good film. It became this like negative example.

John: Absolutely. It’s always the negative example in things.

Craig: “Oh, I didn’t realize we were making My Dinner with Andre.” Shut up.

John: All right. So we’re going to take a look at samples from eight movies and one TV pilot. So, like the Three Page Challenges you should probably pause here and download the PDF we have which is sort of a master sample of all these things. So I’ve picked certain scenes from these movies. And we’ll talk through sort of what we see.

I tried to pick things that were representative of the style the writers used in how they were doing stuff, but also to show the range of what can be possible here. So I didn’t pick any sort of Craig’s example of a pickpocket. That can be an action sequence, but here I went for bigger things. So it’s either a fight between two people or a sort of bigger sequence where we’re cross-cutting a lot.

And I should also stress unlike a Three Page Challenge we’re not critiquing what we’re seeing on the page here. We’re just sort of observing it. Because none of these are bad examples. They’re all actually really good. And there’s just a range of ways you can do the kinds of things we’re talking about. And it’s important to talk about why writers make different choices and all these choices are OK. Just understand sort of why they’re doing what they’re doing.

Craig: Yeah. And all these writers are excellent. And it’s good to observe how they tackle their problems. It’s also good I think to absorb the fingerprint aspect of it which is to say that you and I are the least pedantic people when it comes to this. Rather than suggest that there’s a prescriptive way to do these things what we’re really saying is there isn’t. The best way to do them is the way that is natural to you. I suspect that you and I will both look at one of these and say, oh, this is the closest to the way I happen to do it, but the idea is really here are all these different ways. These are cubists. These are pointillists. These are impressionists. But they’re all making beautiful things. Which one are you?

And if you’re one of these, look how the master does it. Because each one of these men and women are really, really good.

John: Agreed. So we’re going to start off right what I consider the top here and I think writers of my generation we all looked to this script and this screenwriter for clues on how to write action. So we’re looking at Aliens, screenplay by James Cameron, story by Cameron, David Giler and Walter Hill. Aliens is fantastic. The sequence that I picked here for this example is near the end of the movie. So this is Ripley versus the Queen. We’re on the ship. And it’s remarkable.

So we’re starting at Scene 192, Page 102. Let’s take a look at some of what he’s doing here and how his sentences work. On page 102 we have pretty short little scenes/sequences. We’re cutting between different locations. On the next page we’re getting into much longer blocks of action. It’s all just terrific.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So I’m going to just start reading at the top of the page here.

“Without warning it moves like lightning, straight at her. Ripley spins, sprinting, as the creature leaps for her. Its feet slam, echoing on the deck behind her. She clears a door. Hits the switch. It WHIRS closed. BOOM. The alien hits a moment later.”

Craig: Right off the bat this is cool. I love this. And this actually of all the ones we look at, by the way, this is the one I think is closest to the way I do things.

John: It’s probably what I aspire to most. And I would have said that this is how I try to do things. I don’t think I necessarily do it as well as this.

Craig: No. None of us do.

John: I think my actual style is reflected a little bit later on in our samples here. So let’s look at just that little block I read. Why that’s so good. Again, “Moves like lightning, straight at her. Ripley spins, sprinting, as the creature leaps for her.” So, again, our verbs are crisp and clear. We can definitely see what’s happening here. “Its feet slam. She clears a door. Hits the switch. It WHIRS closed. BOOM.” Short sentences that just get to the point. He’s using parallel structure so he can get rid of the subject of sentences. Because she clears a door, hits the switch, he doesn’t have to use she again. It’s quick and punchy.

Craig: Yeah. And what I love about this more than anything is that I can hear it.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: This is something that I think a lot of screenwriters simply neglect and it’s my personal obsession and that is writing sound. So, you can see things, obviously, and a lot of what I love about this paragraph is that not only is it exciting to read, but it’s incredibly useful for everybody on the day.

So, I understand basically how the blocking of this works, including what Ripley is meant to do. Spins. Sprinting. This is clearly a paragraph written by somebody who has seen this scene in their head. He understands that when the alien moves at Ripley she is going to be facing it, therefore she has to spin first before she runs.

So, these are important things. They actually – subconsciously we will notice when they’re not there and things won’t be as satisfying. “Its feet slam, echoing.” OK, what a great noise that is. I can hear it. “It WHIRS closed. BOOM. The alien hits a moment later.” You can hear it. You can feel it. Makes me so happy.

John: So, to the sounds here, just on this page, we have the whirs, the booms, the hum, whine, crash-clang, another crash, a wallop. Screeches. All appropriate. They’re all uppercased which is a really common style. So, originally uppercasing comes from, I think, radio plays in which uppercasing was important to mark like these are literal sound effects that are going to happen live while we’re going through the script. Is it crucial to uppercase all your sounds? No. Is it a style that’s pretty useful? Yeah, it is. I mean, I think you can see the sounds – the fact that I was able to pick out those sounds on the page was because they were uppercased. And it’s an expectation that they’re going to be uppercased. So do it if it feels right for your style.

Craig: Agreed. Over the years I have reduced the amount of uppercasing I do. But only I think just because, I don’t know, as I get older maybe I get a little more confident and I feel a little less need to grab people’s attention with format. That said, the amount of uppercasing here is completely appropriate. When you’re doing an action sequence that’s when you’re going to want to probably loosen up on your uppercase-ometer and let more come through.

It doesn’t have to be a particularly consistent thing. For instance here you do have a lot of uppercased sounds. But you also have an uppercased “scene through.” There’s actually no reason to uppercase “seen through” there, except this. When you’re writing what can sometimes happen is you find yourself wanting to uppercase something because in your mind it is this punchy moment. So in this case “Newt scurries like a rabbit as the looming figure of the alien appears above, SEEN THROUGH the bars.” Meaning just because he’s done that I understand that she’s going to feel it. She’s seeing it. And that’s her fear coming through. SEEN THROUGH. Even if I don’t consciously understand that as I’m reading it I will feel it.

John: Yeah. Now, often as we looked at Three Page Challenges we talk about keeping blocks of scene description relatively short. And on this first page we really are seeing that. Most of these paragraphs are just two to four lines, which is great. And we’re moving between different areas of the ship. He’s using his INTs. If you chose to just use those as slug lines without the INT that’s fine, too.

You’ll notice that there is no day or night because we’re in space, which all makes sense.

But if you look at the second page here there are some long blocks of scene description here of action. And it works because I’m reading every word of that. Because I’m so invested in this. Much easier for James Cameron to do on Page 103 of the script that is fantastic that we love than early on in a screenplay. If this was Page 2 as a reader I might go–

Craig: Oh man.

John: I’ve got to read a lot here.

Craig: Yup.

John: But here is fantastic and it works. And so I would just say don’t be afraid of doing this in the right moments because what I see here on page 103 if you were to space it out the way we would space out other stuff in this it would be an extra page or two to get through all of that.

Craig: Which may be why this is this way. Sometimes I think when I read these things that it was probably paragraphed out a little bit more liberally and then as the page count grew maybe he thought, nah, I could save like literally three pages if I just stop being so crazy about hitting the return.

I personally love hitting the return. This is page 103. That’s not too bad. So, yeah, I’m not sure why that choice was made here. Personally, just for the reader’s sake, I do find it easier to read when I get breaks. When I hit a paragraph like this I do tend to take a breath and it’ll slow me down a touch. So I do like a little bit more white space there.

And I wonder if there was some originally.

John: There could have been. The last point I want to make about this Aliens example is that even in the midst of action sequences he’s not afraid to just pull out another simile or metaphor. This is on page 102, so she’s strapped herself into “Two tons of hardened steel. The power loader. Like medieval armor with the power of a bulldozer.” Great. And that like medieval armor with the power of a bulldozer is exactly what that thing feels like when we actually see it. It’s great. It gives a sense of like, OK, it’s like armor and a weapon at the same time. It’s worth that sentence to put that in there so we really get the notion of what that is.

Obviously you can’t shoot – there’s not enough filmable thing in that little sentence fragment. But it helps us understand what it is we’re going to see when we see that moment onscreen.

Craig: You do need this internal watchdog in your mind as you’re writing. And it’s like newspapers have the – what do they call it? The ombudsman. And the ombudsman who works at a newspaper is the advocate of the reader. And you need an ombudsman in your mind when you’re writing and that’s the advocate of the audience. You know exactly if you’re James Cameron what that thing is. You’ve researched it. You’ve looked at it. You’ve had people draw pictures of what the future version of it will look like.

But the people reading don’t. And you need to give them a little tiny, tiny something so that they do, so that they can appreciate and enjoy this the way you want them to. And you don’t want to take a lot of time doing it. You don’t want to – you know, this is not where you do David Foster Wallace footnotes. So, “like medieval armor with the power of a bulldozer” I think may win the contest for fewest words required to properly describe that. And it does it great. And it also doesn’t sound cheesy either.

You know, the worst versions are the ones that are derivative, like mechanized medieval armor from hell. Well, you know, don’t do that. Just be accurate. And this is accurate.

John: Absolutely. All right, let’s go to our next sample which has a very different style on the page, but also is a movie that I love. This is Near Dark written by Kathryn Bigelow and Eric Red. Craig, you had suggested this, so tell me about your affection for Near Dark.

Craig: Well it’s a movie that I feel like not enough people have seen. In general Kathryn Bigelow, everybody knows Kathryn Bigelow probably from her – well, relatively more recent films like Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. She is a fantastic director. Earlier on she was doing a lot more writing as well. Near Dark I think was her first big feature film. And it’s a vampire movie but it is to vampire movies what Tremors is to good old monster movies. It’s this kind of dirty, deserty, gritty version, although Near Dark is way darker than Tremors.

And it is a wonderful prelude to another one of my favorite Kathryn Bigelow movies which is called Blue Steel with Jamie Lee Curtis and Ron Silver. And it is very actiony, but kind of actiony in that gritty ‘70s-ish sort of way.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And so I was kind of fascinated to see how she and Eric Red had done this on the page. And I’m not disappointed because it is a very specific style. It’s not one that I’ve ever used. But when you read it it does give you that kind of feeling. That kind of Near Dark feeling.

John: I may be wrong about this but I feel like this is also Walter Hill’s style. And that Walter Hill, if I remember correctly, often does this just single lines stacked up on each other. So if you’re not looking at the PDF of this we should probably describe what we’re seeing.

Rather than traditional paragraphs these are just single lines stacked up on top of each other. And so:

Jesse throws the car keys into Caleb’s open palm. The farmboy yanks the bedspread off the bed and throws it over his head. Mae reaches out with her hand, touching Caleb’s arm.

Those are all single sentences but there’s not space between them. They’re just literally stacked up on top of each other like a tower. It’s weird but it works. It changes your expectation of reading. And I think it makes you read a little bit more slowly. But that may not be the worst choice for this because it really reduces each of these lines down to kind of the minimal action required.

Craig: Correct. It’s very sparse. So it’s kind of giving you as little as it can, as opposed to James Cameron’s style which is very much, OK, I want to excite you. You’ve got to feel this. I’m telling you this story and I’m in your face.

This is very sparse. So it betrays no emotion. You are providing the emotion for it. So here’s a sequence from Page 75.

Jesse throws the car keys into Caleb’s open palm. Period. Next line. The farmboy yanks the bedspread off the bed and throws it over his head. Period. Next line. Mae reaches out with her hand, touching Caleb’s arm. BULLETS flying left and right.

Bullets flying left and right – bullets is capitalized, but there’s no sense of urgency. It’s just fact. Bullets flying left and right.

She looks into his eyes. Caleb meets her gaze. Another EXPLOSION of GUNSHOTS.

So there is this kind of sparse montage. It’s almost like a Moviola is telling you this story, because it’s very montage-y. It’s very like visual, visual, visual, visual. Even with some sounds stuff. And in doing so it does impart a coolness. Do you know what I mean? There’s a style to it.

John: It’s detached. Yeah.

Craig: Yeah. Like this script is smoking a cigarette. You know what I mean? It’s got shades on. It’s cool.

John: And that said, it’s not just reporting. And so it’s not just a list of what you see. A few lines later, “The sun attacks him beneath the bedspread.” The sun attacks him. That’s a poetic-y kind of thing to do. It’s not simply just reporting what we see in the shot. You’re making literary choices in sort of how you’re describing those moments. And I get that. I get what the sun attacks feels more dramatic than sort of like sun hits him. So there’s choices being made here.

Craig: Correct. And if you do a paragraph style of this the way Cameron does in time you may start to lose a little bit of the excitement of it because in a way you’re helping it be exciting. And what I like about the way that Kathryn and Eric did this is they are requiring you to just derive excitement from it. So when you get to this section:

He smashes his foot into the gas pedal. The sun blazes through the darkened windshield. He moans assistant the subdued light hits his face. Blackening the skin on his forehead.

The way that “blackening the skin on his forehead” is just its own line with no more emphasis than what comes right after which is “He ducks below the dash” makes it somehow scarier. It’s almost like we’re not going to help you be scared by it. You’re going to now hear and feel the sizzle and the charring of skin. So it’s a really effective way to do this. But you have to have a kind of confidence in your material here. And the one thing that I’m pretty sure no one has ever accused Kathryn Bigelow of is a lack of confidence. I mean, she’s just so assured as a writer and as a filmmaker.

John: Yeah. So let’s talk about trying to use this style if you are an aspiring writer. I think it’s a little bit risky to sort of go this way with the script that you are sending out to the town. Pros and cons. Pro, it’s unusual and if it’s great people will notice that it’s unusual and it will catch their attention and people will be excited about it.

Con. If someone opens this script on page one and they see this, they flip to page two, and flip ahead to page 20 and they see that it’s all this they may not take it seriously just because it just looks different. And so you’re going to have to just – if you’re going to do this you’re going to have to do it exceptionally well just to get over peoples initial reticence to read this kind of different scene description.

Craig: Yeah. I think that if this is instinctively the way you feel you would write best you should do it. The thing about reactions to screenplays is sometimes I think like if a screenplay is sort of unobjectionable in its format and style, if people read through the whole thing and go, “You know, it was OK.” They just think it’s OK. If it’s objectionable in its format and style and people read through and they didn’t like it they’ll be like, “Oh my god. What is this pile of crap?”

But none of it really matters because the point is they didn’t like the script either way. The gulf between good and not good is miles wide. I do think that if you write something that is gripping and fascinating and you have two or three gripping and fascinating pages people will keep going. There is I think probably less fussiness out there than we are sometimes taught to believe. I think the people who teach fussiness are people who are trying to teach people a sense that they can control their fates, which they can’t.

So I would say like if you could write this and people literally who you force to read it go, OK, yeah, this is actually much better, you write better this way than the other way, then you should write this way.

John: Agreed. So, if you actually wrote the screenplay for Near Dark and you gave it to somebody–

Craig: Yeah. That’s my point.

John: Writing it this way? Good choice. Good choice.

Craig: Exactly.

John: Absolutely good choice. Last thing I’ll point out here is the scene headers are underlined. That’s great. Scene headers bold, great. Two spaces/no spaces. You have your choice. Make your decision. Be consistent throughout your script. Anything is fine. So just never come at us saying like, “Oh, it’s unprofessional because of this scene header choice.” It’s fine.

Craig: Yeah. The only thing I’ll add also–

John: Whatever you do is fine.

Craig: Whatever you do is fine. We’re very libertarian at formatting. If you are going to write in this style you need to earn your poetry. You have to be good at it. This is a little haiku-ish. So the very last bit.

EXT. TWO-LANE HIGHWAY – DUSK Three patrol cars swoop after their fleeing quarry like birds of prey. The object of their pursuit driving away from a setting sun. Red cherrytops igniting the livid sky. Two of the cop cars fan out. Windows rolling down. Shotguns aimed out.

That is very lyrical. And it helps if you’re going to do this to be lyrical. If you’re doing this style but you’re writing in a kind of prose, just a traditional dry prose way it’s going to get annoying. This is sort of style meets form in a nice way.

John: You’re giving the reader a reason to keep reading down the page, which I think is something we should underline about sort of all these action sequences is how are you maintaining the reader’s interest and involvement through the action sequence. And in this case it is by this sort of poetic-y lyric style. In James Cameron’s case it was just real mastery of painting exactly what it’s going to feel like in that moment.

Craig: Right. Exactly.

John: So, and it’s a great segue to the pilot for Lost, written by J.J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof. I picked a sequence which is late in the pilot, mid-to-late in the pilot. Jack and crew have found the pilot of the plane. I always loved that the pilot of Lost is about a plane crashing and the pilot is a character in it.

Craig: I know. It’s great.

John: So they found this pilot who has still survived. They’re up in a tree. And there’s a monster outside. It’s their first encounter with the smoke monster. The reason I picked this is that I had long heard that the J.J. Abrams style of TV writing used a lot of profanity on the page but also really sort of grabbed you by the shoulders and sort of shouted at you like what you’re seeing. And this was a good example of that.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And it’s just a very different look than the other examples we’ve had here. But I would say also very common in certain kinds of TV writing. So just really good to know what you’re seeing here.

So, let’s start on – so this is Page 79, Scene 80. Look at all the double dashes here. So, “Kate peeks in — but Charlie’s nowhere to be seen. Kate climbs back — peers into the inverted bathroom where Charlie is leaning over the toilet bowl — “

So it’s unfinished actions being sustained by double dashes. And it works well. It helps bring us down the page. We’ll start dialogue with dash-dash. Even if it’s not directly something being cut off from before.

Look at this long sound being described at the bottom of scene 80.

Craig: Can I pronounce it? I’m going to try to pronounce it.

John: MROOOOOWRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOBWWRRRRRRRRR!

Craig: MROOOOOWRRRRRRROOOOOOOOOOBWWRRRRRRRRR!

John: 40-character word there. It’s the onomatopoeia of describing what this sound feels like. And making it big, making it uppercase, underlining it sort of gives you a sense of what it’s supposed to feel like to those characters in the scene.

Craig: Yeah. This is also a kind of style that emphasizes people. So, some of the other styles were emphasizing action and visuals. So when you look back for instance at the work with Near Dark once the dialogue ends and the action starts there is not much ever said. And it’s very much about the things that we see. Gravel. Cars. Road. A dog. Lights. And when we get to this it’s so much about people’s expression, the interruptions, and their emotions. Who they are looking at, so perspective becomes an enormously important thing.

Almost no one gets to complete a sentence which is a very common thing and an appropriate thing to do in scenes like this because it shows a certain awareness of naturalistic dialogue as opposed to stuff that doesn’t make sense. And all those dash-dashes are kind of implying that no one is waiting to talk.

So, you have – I mean, this is now dialogue, but: Kate: — It’s right outside — Pilot: — What’s righ –? Shh!

So, it’s implying this kind of chaos. When we get to the all caps underlined paragraphs, like these are absolutely screaming at you, and I think that that is partly an extension of something that I think television writing traditionally was more comfortable with, because in sitcoms like the classic three-camera stage-bound sitcom all the action is in all uppercase. So that’s kind of part of their culture there so it’s not quite as screamy I think in television as it would be – in a feature script I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like that.

John: Yeah. It is really, really screamy. We’re talking about the bottom of page 42. And just two paragraphs that are all uppercase, underlined, and what I’ll say is personally I wouldn’t do it very often. I would do it like once or twice in a script. I think the script probably does it a lot more than that. And that’s just the choice they make and it’s probably pretty common for this show. But:

SUDDENLY THE PILOT’S BODY GETS YANKED UP — BUT HIS LEGS HIT THE DASH SO WHATEVER’S GOT HIM CAN’T PULL HIM OUT AND KATE SCREAMS AND THE PILOT — HIS UPPER BODY OUTSIDE THE COCKPIT DROPS THE TRANSCEIVER ONTO THE FLOOR AND HE SCREAMS BLOODYFUCKINGMURDER AS JACK MOVES TO HOLD KATE BACK — CHARLIE SCRAMBLES UP, YELLING:

So, again, it’s not broken down into even sentences. It’s just like one long shreaky moment. And that probably is what it feels like. So I get it on that level.

Craig: Right.

John: It’s just as a reader I see that and I’m like, oh god, I’m going to have to get through that. But once I’m in it I’m like, oh yeah, I get why it’s doing that.

Craig: And also important to remember that when you’re dealing with a pilot script for a network television hour I don’t know quite how long this script was but my guess it was probably 55 pages or something. So it’s not quite the marathon of a 120-page feature read. This is a little bit harder to pull off in a feature because it is climatic.

Essentially once you get to a paragraph that’s six lines of all caps and underlined that’s the climax, right? I mean, you can’t really recover from that. And this does take place on page 42. So I would suspect that this is probably the loudest, screamiest moment.

John: Yeah, it’s actually 42 of 96. So it was a long pilot.

Craig: Oh geez. 96 pages? How the hell did they–? Wow. That’s a lot of pages for an hour.

John: Yeah, I think it was longer than a traditional pilot. I don’t think it was a one-hour pilot. But, still. That’s great. I’m quickly looking through the PDF and there are a fair number of sequences which do go to all uppercase. But they’re spaced out. It doesn’t do this all the time. And I think that’s crucial, too. You’ve got to leave yourself some – if you’re cranked up to 10 all the time we can’t differentiate what feels like this versus what feels like that. So you’ve got to pace yourself some here.

This is a big sequence and I do remember this from the pilot being like a HOLY COW this is a show that’s trying to do something really new.

Craig: Yeah. That’s really interesting. I wonder how that – well, I’ll ask Damon I guess. I’m just going to say, “Damon, I know you don’t like talking about Lost anymore. It’s enough already. But I’m going to ask you some more Lost questions.”

John: We haven’t talked about WEs and camera angles yet. So, the sample I had from Aliens didn’t reference cameras at all, but he will reference cameras. He’ll reference crane shots and things like this. I feel like we have some We Sees and We Hears in this Lost sample but I’m not spotting them yet.

As we said on the show before, the choice to use the second plural of “we” as a proxy for the reader and the viewer Craig and I both think is fine.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Just make sure you’re using it in a smart way. People who say that it’s cheating to use it are incorrect.

Craig: Stupid. They’re just stupid. It has little become the coronavirus is a hoax of screenwriting. I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know who started it. I will forever – and this may be what I want on my tombstone. “It’s OK to say we in the action lines of a screenplay.” I mean, here we are, again, in the pilot script for Lost, which did pretty well.

John: Yeah, I think so.

Craig: And scene 84, “And we intercut now between Kate…” He’s even saying we intercut. As we’re tracking. Now they’re talking about the camera crew as we. You can do it any time in any way. You can do it all the time. No one cares. No one cares. I have never once met anybody real in this business who stopped and went, “Wait, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, who is we?” Never. Ever. Ever.

Anyone who says you can’t use we or tries to restrict your usage of we or puts rules on we is an idiot. And don’t listen to them. And for god’s sake give them no money. End of rant.

John: So Craig’s tombstone it says, “Craig Mazin. We died.” And then it gives your date.

Craig: That’s right. “We see his tombstone.”

John: Indeed. All right, let’s go to Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. Screenplay by Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Peter Jackson.

Craig: Yes.

John: I had them on the podcast a zillion years ago. They’re lovely. And I think they listen to Scriptnotes so hi if you’re listening.

Craig: If you’re listening I just want you to know I watched Lord of the Rings again. Again. I watched it again, John. All of them. I can’t stop watching those movies.

John: Wow.

Craig: I can’t. I’m like at the point now where I literally know tiny things that are occurring in large battles and I’m just waiting for them like the people that go to see – you know, when Monty Python used to tour and they would just watch the dead parrot sketch and just say the words instead of laughing. That’s me now watching the Battle of Pelennor Fields and I’m like, OK, now you say take it down, take it down.

John: Nice. I wanted to put this up next because it’s just so different from what we see in Lost. So those Lost pages were so busy and so much and so shouty. This is so restrained and quiet by comparison. So there’s a lot of uppercase being used. But it’s very – the pages feel pretty spare and it’s not shouting at you very much at all here.

So, an interesting thing is that in these scripts characters are always uppercased. So, not just on the first appearance. They’re uppercased throughout it seems.

Craig: Right.

John: And you don’t see it so much in the pages that I picked here, but angle on, angle on, angle on.

Craig: Yup.

John: Used throughout.

Craig: Perfectly fine.

John: Perfectly fine. Just a style that this trio uses to describe stuff. So, we do see here like:

CLOSE ON: PIPPIN COWERING… ANGLES ON: SOLDIERS throw themselves down as the NAZGÛL zoom overhead, emitting their piercing shrieks.

Even though it’s so much more minimal, they’re still doing a lot of things we’ve talked about in previous samples where they’re choosing where to throw their exclamation points, where to really emphasize this is an important moment that you really need to pay attention to.

Craig: Yeah. There’s one observation that – well, the first observation I make is that when I read “SUDDENLY! 9 NAZGÛL DIVE out of the dim sky” what I saw was 9 Nazgûl Drive initially. And I thought what an amazing address that would be. I would love to live on 9 Nazgûl Drive.

John: 9 Nazgûl Drive.

Craig: Oh yeah. Oh my god. That would be so cool. In like Morgultown. OK, so it strikes me that this is actually a brilliant way to relay action to people so that your script is not 5,000 pages. These are very long movies.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And this movie in particular was very long. And they know what they want to do. So they’re writing this together as a trio. One of the trio is the director. His plan for something like the following is quite elaborate. So, the Nazgûl of 9 Nazgûl Drive “circle LOW over the CITY, like VULTURES seeking doomed men’s flesh. SOLDIERS are plucked into the AIR by SHRIEKING NAZGÛL and dropped to their DEATHS hundreds of FEET BELOW. TOWERS and BUILDINGS are DESTROYED. CHAOS as SOLDIERS, WOMEN, and CHILDREN DODGE falling MASONRY.”

The words towers and buildings are destroyed are the kind of things that if you are writing in a script and you do not have a firm control over your own production is going to make whoever is doing the budget sweat. Because towers and buildings are destroyed is incredibly vague for what needs to be in a very thought-out sequence.

But, it seems to me that the trio here knows exactly what the plans are and they’re telling you what you need to know and otherwise trust us. When towers and buildings are destroyed it’s going to be awesome. And we have plans. We just don’t want to spend 12 pages explaining to you how that works.

John: Absolutely. So, it’s not the extreme example of Atlanta Burns from Gone with the Wind where it’s just like, eh, two words and it’s a giant sequence. There’s more happening here. It’s a little bit more detailed. But it’s not super detailed. And exactly the sentences that Craig pointed out here, another writer could have written them as three pages, where we actually see how this stuff is happening, how our characters are fitting into this. That’s not what they’ve chosen to do here. It really feels like a blueprint in the sense of like this is where this moment happens.

It’s not that it’s entirely just like, you know, a list of shots. There’s flavor here. So, on page 85, Gandalf yells – and you have to do Gandalf’s voice here.

Craig: When he’s yelling, “Not at the towers?”

John: Yeah.

Craig: “Not at the towers! Aim for the Trolls! Kill the Trolls! Bring them down!”

John: “TOO LATE! The TOWERS reach the walls, their DOORS crashing down, releasing ORCS directly onto the LOWER LEVELS.” So that choice of “too late,” it is that editorial moment there to really let you know what this is supposed to feel like. Without that we don’t get a sense of what the drama is there.

Craig: Correct. And if you haven’t seen the prior two films you don’t understand how much stink Gandalf puts on the name Peregrin Took. “Peregrin Took – go back to the citadel!” Oh, poor Pip. You know, he takes a lot of abuse. I’ve got to say Pippin does a great job of being yelled at and abused by everybody. He makes mistakes all the time. He’s the reason they get into so much trouble initially in the Mines of Moria, because he’s clumsy. And you know what? He’s still out there. And in fact he helps save Gandalf’s life in this moment. So good for you, Pippin. “Peregrin Took. [Unintelligible] Took.”

Sorry, I could do this all day.

John: Let’s go onto Natural Born Killers.

Craig: Great.

John: So this is the Quentin Tarantino script for Natural Born Killers and I read this script when I was in film school. It might have been the same weekend I read both the Aliens script and the Natural Born Killers. And they had a huge impact on me. I ended up writing the novelization of Natural Born Killers, which is one of my first paid writing assignments.

I loved Tarantino’s script for this and I did not like the final movie as much. But I think it’s so interesting to look back at what I loved so much about the writing on the page here. So the moment I picked is from near the end of the movie. So Page 127. I chose this because it’s an example of when you’re using sort of different formats to show stuff. Or when you have a couple things happening at once.

In this case there’s the news footage of what the cameras are capturing versus film footage about the reality of what’s going on here. And sort of how you juggle the two of those as a writer to show the textures that you’re getting out of this. So, Craig, what’s your first reaction to seeing this written here on the page?

Craig: Well, it is the kind of writing that lets you see what you are supposed to see exactly, which is why I, too, was a bit disappointed in the movie because it was an interesting mismatch I think of director and screenplay. I think there’s an enormous amount to love about Natural Born Killers. But I think there’s an alternate universe where Tarantino directs Natural Born Killers. He directs his own script and it’s just better.

John: Yeah. I think so, too.

Craig: And so here what’s happening is there’s this commentary on film itself, on the camera and the way the camera works. And it’s doing this wonderful job of having the camera lag behind action. And it’s so smartly done in that way and you can feel it. So a lot of off-screen stuff here, which is incredibly important.

Tarantino understands that part of what action is is what you don’t see. So, there’s a very impressionistic thing happening here. I probably talked about this on the podcast before, but one of my favorite moments in literature is from Heart of Darkness where they’re on the boat heading down the river, or up the river, down the river, and they’re heading via the river. And they are attacked–

John: They’re on the river.

Craig: They’re on the river. And they’re attacked. And our narrator looks over and sees the man that he was staying next to holding a cane and then he falls. And then only like a paragraph later do you realize it’s not a cane it’s a spear and the spear is buried in this guy. So he’s confused in the moment about what he sees, and so too can we be.

The camera follows the body to the floor and then you hear somebody saying something off-screen. “Oh God! Oh God! Ohhh…” “We’re sending out a hostage. Don’t touch him.” Off-screen the door is kicked open. That’s one of my favorite lines in this because I can hear it, which is so great. And then his camera comes around to catch what’s happening. And then he moves out.

So, it’s just a wonderful way when it says “This footage is very similar to Vietnam footage. It’s shaky, real, harsh, and it captures the pandemonium of battle,” you feel that. This is impressionistic writing. And it’s a great lesson in how to write action in a way that is about confusing the mind’s eye and having us be always three or four seconds behind what’s happening.

John: Yeah. I think this reads really well on the page and I think it’s probably more similar to how I would write action than – even though I would love to write like James Cameron, I probably write a little bit more like this in that I wouldn’t trust myself to have giant blocks of action the way that Cameron would let himself do.

But think about this writing and then think about the writing from Lost and they’re both showing these moments of pandemonium and overlapping dialogue and a bunch of stuff happening at once. And you could write a script that gets you to the same scene, both in the J.J. Abrams or the Tarantino way and they’re both good and valid choices for depicting this kind of moment.

It’s really about sort of how you as the writer can best string together words that get the reader to understand what it is that you’re going for.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, all of these efforts do reflect I think the writerly heart of the person doing them, which I love. I just love it. And it’s not that every script that one of these writers writes it’s always going to have the same kind of expression, but I do love the way that all of these are so, well, they’re unique. And I worry sometimes about the way – because we still insist that screenwriting can be taught, which I’m not sure is necessarily the case, there is this therefore requirement for, I don’t know, best methods. I don’t know if there are any – I think the best method is how do you write the best.

And how do you teach that? I don’t know how to teach that. I guess one thing that we’re doing here is we’re sort of saying to people we’re going to give you one of these around the world smorgasbords of different cuisines. Which one do you like the best? That’s probably who you are.

John: Absolutely. And I agree that there’s not sort of one best way to do things, but we’re really just talking about fingerprints. You said that earlier on in the conversation. You can sense that certain writers have a certain kind of style. And it would be weird for J.J. Abrams to write this scene in a Tarantino style or vice versa.

I will say sometimes I’ve come onto do a week’s work or two week’s work on a project and it’s not my movie at all. I’m a craftsman here. I’m just here to help out on one little thing. And I have found it useful to actually just try to model the style of the rest of the screenplay just so that my stuff doesn’t stick out wildly from everything else.

And so I’ve come into to do an action sequence and I will deliberately sort of match the other action sequences in the film just so it feels like the rest of the movie, so it doesn’t stick out as a weird anomaly.

And so looking at other people’s style can be really helpful the same way that a visual artist looking at other people’s style can see like, oh, I get what it is that this person is doing. I understand how they’re using line and shape and shadow and form. And I can do that if I need to, but I could also think about how this fits into my own personal style.

Craig: Absolutely. That is pretty much the way I try and do it myself. There are times – actually there was one time recently, the last thing I did like that where you come in and you do a week or two. It was on a script that was very well done. It was very well written by a writer who just has quite a different style than I do. And given what I was being asked to do I didn’t think I could do the thing where you match the style. And I told them, I’m like, look, this is not about anything other than I think I just need to sing – I’m a baritone. I need to be in a baritone. I’m pretty sure this person is a tenor. So I just need to do that, but understand it’s not a commentary on the style of the rest of the screenplay. I think it’s wonderful. It’s just this area right here needs a little something else and so I’m just going to do what I’m comfortable with. And everybody understood.

Including, I believe, the other writer who I spoke with and who is terrific. So if you’re going to stray from it at least say so. Acknowledge it. Because otherwise it is a bit odd to just suddenly dump a different color into something that has a certain palette.

John: The counter examples where I’ve come in to do a more major rewrite of something and even sequences that I wasn’t really touching I made some stylistic changes just so it would read like one document and it wouldn’t be schizophrenic as you’re jumping from one thing to the other thing. And so sometimes there’s criticism of like, oh my god, that writer came in and rewrote stuff that didn’t even matter. It’s like, well, it mattered because the whole document is going to be read as one thing and it needed to all track and make sense.

Craig: Thank you for saying that. Because as somebody who does arbitrate quite a few credit disputes I will see this in statements from time and time again where people say, “All they did was just rewrite this to change a bunch of superficial things to make it seem like they did it.” And I’m like, no. First of all, I’m not stupid. I know what a scene is. And if I read the same scene and they’ve just stylistically made a few things I’m not giving them a ton of credit for it or barely any.

John: Not a bit of credit for that. No.

Craig: Yeah. It’s just, dude, they need to run it through their typewriter so they can get to the next scene. It’s just a normal writerly thing to do.

I mean, I understand why people say it, but you’re absolutely right. If you’re doing a major rewrite you do need to just run it through your machine because you don’t want there to be lumps in the batter, you know? How many analogies can I use in one episode, by the way? I’m setting a record.

John: You’re really going for it here.

Craig: I’m setting a record. And by the way, they’ve all been amazing. I have to say. They’ve all been on point. Incredible.

John: They’ve all been really, really good. We’ll do a special edition where we ring a little bell every time you’re using an analogy for something. It’s going to be good.

Craig: Fun.

John: Let’s move onto another previous Scriptnotes guest, Jennifer Lee. So she came on to talk with Aline and I about Frozen. I wanted an animation sample here because people sometimes think that animation scripts are wildly different. They’re not. They look like normal screenplays. And there are a few – like numbering can happen a little bit differently in animation screenplays, but having written a bunch of animation the scripts look like the scripts. Same for live action.

So the sequence here is again towards the end. I like this because it’s an example of stakes and crosscutting where you’re following a couple different characters and they’re each trying to do their thing. We as an audience have a sense of what they’re trying to do. Every time we’re cutting from one to the next we’re always wondering, oh, but what happened with Anna there? What’s up with Olaf? We’re always trying to track what people are doing. And it’s just a good example of how we do this.

And, again, there’s some stuff that’s written here that is not directly shootable but gives you a sense of the feel or the stakes. So on Page 103 here, “It’s a long, snowy way down. But what choice do they have? They slide down the ice covered building.” The “but what choice do they have” not strictly necessary. Without it though we don’t get a sense of what it is we’re supposed to be seeing in these character’s expressions and their choice to do this.

Craig: I think that is shootable. I think that’s – because I know what they mean. If I didn’t know what they mean–

John: Exactly.

Craig: But they’re good enough – you know, when she says, “But what choice do they have,” I know suddenly the camera is like I’m going to see their perspective, and then I’m going to have a reverse on their faces. It’s going to be kind of close. They’re both going to be afraid. But then they’re going to look at each other like here we go. Because there’s no other – or maybe they look back and they see that the storm is coming. Whatever it is, I understand what that means. And it’s actually a very good way – I mean, I’ve said before I’ve been writing a lot of dialogue in action these days. It’s a good way to give your actors or in this case the animators who are doing the acting a sense of what their expressions are supposed to be, what the intention behind their face is.

John: Now this is a big dramatic sequence. We’re near the end of the movie. A lot is happening here. But these pages look pretty quiet. They’re not big and loud and shouty. There’s no underlining. There’s no all caps. To make it clear that you don’t have to use all these tools in your tool belt to do big dramatic sequences.

Here Jennifer Lee, this is pretty restrained, and yet it’s completely doing the job it needs to do of conveying this big final action set piece.

Craig: The understanding of how these things are practically used is always helpful. For an animation script if you are working inside of the story the way that they were this is almost never going to be the sole point of contact between people and the movie because there’s also storyboarding going on constantly. So this becomes a very useful tool for production. But it’s always accompanied by imagery and illustration and animatics. And there’s so much more available.

So it makes sense that this is going to be a little less, well, the script feels like it’s not working so hard. Whereas when it’s all we have is text then we do sometimes have to work a little bit harder to at least let people know that this is a moment that’s occurring as opposed to just another skim page.

John: Agreed. All right, let’s take a look at a sample from Black Panther by Ryan Coogler. [EDIT NOTE: Black Panther is written by Ryan Coogler & Joe Robert Cole. In our outline and PDF, we’d left off Cole’s name, so we forgot to mention him. Our apologies.] I love this sequence and I also like that it’s just a fight between two characters. So I’m picking the fight at the waterfall. And it’s a really good scene and there’s really good storytelling happening in the middle of a fight.

One of the most frequent questions you get from new screenwriters is like how specific do I have to be. Do I have to describe every punch, every blow? And that would be exhausting. And what Ryan is doing here is he’s giving us what’s important for us to see. These are the hits that actually matter. This is why it matters. This is how the dynamics of the fight shift. This is like a boxing match, so it’s important that you see that.

And here are the moments where it’s going to leave the being right with the two fighters to look at the reaction of the people who are watching this and sort of how they are encountering this fight that we’re seeing.

So, Craig, this is probably your first time seeing this on the page.

Craig: It is.

John: What are you feeling?

Craig: Well, first of all, love the white space. I’m just such a fan of, like when we were saying I wonder if Cameron was sort of compressing some paragraphs together, I love how easy this is to read. I also love how choreographed it is. So, when you’re reading this action you can feel this movement. This feels like dance. And that is something that I remember experiencing in the scene itself, which is that it felt like two very competent people who had been trained in something that was old and storied were now exercising that talent and that skill against each other.

And the description of movement here is wonderful. I pull from pages like this what the writer wants me to feel. And what I feel like he wants me to feel here is the beauty of this movement. This is a beautiful fight. I mean, when you look at how he describes these things – and he says, “Both with great skill.” Well that’s evident. Because he also balances it out. You know, they’re both, M’Baku and T’Challa are both really good at what they do and there’s showmanship to this. It’s a bit of a show. And they both have their different styles, which I love.

So, this was like watching or reading somebody describing ballet. And music criticism is like, I don’t know, I can’t remember what the analogy is. See, I’ve run out of analogies. But writing about dancing, it just feels counterintuitive and hard to do. Well, he did it. So this feels like an exciting thing because it’s not just, well, you know, good old toxic masculinity fistfight. It’s not that. It’s something else. There’s tradition to this. This feels quite historical and there’s like a culture to it, so I love that.

John: Now, on Page 25, this is the first time we’re cutting away from the sort of POV of being in the fight to people watching it. But even when we’re going to other people’s point of view, “From T’Challa’s POV we see Ramonda cheering from the sidelines.” So, again, we’re looking – it’s the sidelines, but it’s his reaction to the people at the sidelines watching, which is important. We’re centering the story on him. And so this is where we get to the first dialogue. “Show him who you are!” Sort of reminding us what the fight is still really about. Because one of the challenges when you have people fighting is at a certain point you stop thinking about what they’re actually fighting for. What the actual point of this battle is.

And what’s so good about this sequence is that it’s always clear why he’s doing what he’s doing and why he’s giving up his powers. What’s at stake is really clear. And not just his life, but his overall position within this hierarchy. So, just really terrifically well done.

And an important moment, so so many of these things I’ve picked have been late in the story, like sort of final battles. This is a very important early battle that shows who this character is and without this sequence you would not be as firmly rooted in his point of view.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, so all sorts of things get set up here, which is what good early scenes do. And it is, of course, the fight itself. This is all just the subtext where everything is about his character and the way he considers his rival, not enemy, but rival, which obviously will turn to an ally. But it is a great way of thinking about how to escalate and elevate what we’ve seen a billion times.

We’ve seen two guys fighting a billion times. Go watch any nature movie and you’ll see more two guys fighting. A billion times. It’ll just be animals or fish. But placing it and centering it inside of a kind of cultural or spiritual experience makes it different. And writing the action is such a way that it honors that and feels like it’s part of that makes this fun to read. And it also helps me understand why it’s not just two people beating each other up. Because that’s just boring. And this is not boring.

I mean, in the end, right, that’s our job? Don’t be boring.

John: That’s our job, to not bore people. Also, we have clear expectations of how fights are supposed to work is that one character will win and one character will lose. In this case it sort of seems like one character will win and the other character will die because we’re at the edge of this cliff. And so the stakes are really clear. So it’s a surprise when it gets to a point where it’s not about killing the other guy.

Craig: Right.

John: And that’s an important reversal at the end of this. So, it’s all just very, very well done. Again, a good script to look through overall, but I really like what he’s doing on the page here for this action sequence.

Craig: Wakanda Forever.

John: Another superhero movie that I really loved an action sequence in was Wonder Woman, screenplay by Allan Heinberg, story by Zack Snyder, Allan Heinberg and Jason Fuchs. The sequence I’m picking out here is from the No Man’s Land, which is a really important character moment in which Diana first steps out of the trench, crosses through No Man’s Land, WWI, and got to the other side. And it’s her sort of really coming into her own superhero identity. So I wanted to look at what that looked like on the page.

So, this is more conventional. You’re going to read a lot of screenplays that are sort of done this way. And so just be used to this style because it’s common and effective.

One of the things I want to point out the difference between this and Black Panther is “IN THE GERMAN TRENCH. ON THE BATTLEFIELD. IN THE ALLIED TRENCH.” These are intermediate slug lines and they’re a way of sort of directing our attention without going through a full INT. SOMEPLACE – DAY. EXT. SOMEPLACE – DAY.

In Coogler’s script he does the same kind of thing but he uses full scene headers, which you don’t necessarily need to do because they really aren’t separate scenes. They’re just aiming the camera a certain way. And so this is kind of aiming the cameras at the German trench, on a battlefield, in the Allied trench. When you have a sequence that’s moving around to a bunch of different places these intermediate slug lines are a useful way of sort of grouping together a bunch of the kind of scenes that are going to stick together. Even knowing that you’re probably not going to necessarily follow this shot by shot, these are the places where this action is taking place.

Craig: Yeah. I wouldn’t be surprised if just from a scene numbering point of view that once the first AD got a hold of this that “In the German trench” became 77a. “On the battlefield” 77b. Because the scene numbers really are to organize your schedule and make sure that you get everything, right. Because a lot of times I think writers think that the numbers are just there to, I don’t know, have some sort of iteration. But in fact they go all the way to the editors who are keeping track and making sure they get everything.

John: Yup.

Craig: So, in this case they probably would want to do this. But you’re absolutely right. This is kind of what I would call – this is the RP, the received pronunciation, of action description. This is just classic action description. There’s no twists. There’s no like funky bits. This is kind of right down the middle classic good old fashioned action description. And, by the way, absolutely nothing wrong with that, either. Not everything has to be quirky in its own way, or idiosyncratic.

This is probably the thick middle of the bell curve of how action is written.

John: Yeah. To your point about the scene numbering, I hadn’t realized this until I was looking at it. This is all considered Scene 77.

Craig: Yeah. No way.

John: Someone else has a different script that actually has little letters for each of these things because you got to just make sure that everything got shot, that everything made it to the edit, that you have everything. So for people’s sanity there would be more stuff. But it doesn’t matter for the read on the page.

Craig: Correct.

John: Which is really what we’re talking about here. And so these intermediate slug lines and not doing the days and nights makes it an easier read. I think if we stuck in real full scene headers for each of these times we’re cutting between on the battlefield/in the German trench it would have been a little bit more exhausting. So I like this style.

Craig: It would have been a lot more exhausting. Absolutely. Because, you know, once you do get to that, that level of document really is a technical document. So you walk around on the morning of a shoot day and everybody is looking at their little tiny pages of the script. And they’re making notes. And those notes are technical. So, when we get to 77b somebody is writing down we use this lens. The script supervisor is checking in with the camera folks. It’s going to be this lens. It’s going to be this size. Everybody is doing that job. So it’s not about the read anymore. Nobody is there looking at the literary quality of it. It’s technical.

I’m kind of curious, John, what you feel, because I have a feeling – and again this is all preference, there’s no rights or wrongs, about CONTINUED at the end of a scene and then CONTINUED at the beginning on the next page.

John: Oh, so the thing that software will do for you automatically I don’t find it useful or helpful at all. When it’s an option I turn it off. Do you use it or do you not use it?

Craig: I don’t. I don’t because I don’t really know what it’s there to do. It’s a little bit like when you were a kid and you wrote a love letter to your crush in ninth grade or whatever, and so you’re like “this is what I think” and then you get to the bottom and you’re like “continue – arrow” because you’re afraid that they won’t turn the piece of paper over. [laughs]

John: They won’t know to turn the page.

Craig: It’s the most unconfident thing you could put at the bottom of the page. No, it’s not over. There’s more. Yeah, of course there’s more. I haven’t gotten to the end of it. It’ll be over when it says The End. So I don’t know what the point of that is.

John: So here is I think the point of it is that if you see the CONTINUED that happens on Page 80 it also carries across the 77 scene number. And so if you’re flipping through pages and you ended up on Page 80 and you’re like what scene number is this, you don’t have to flip back to see what scene number it is. So it’s a time saver on that level.

But it is just extra words [unintelligible] on the page and that’s why I just turn it off.

Craig: Yeah. And generally what happens on the day is when they’re printing out sides for everybody, which is what we call the little tiny mini script pages, of that day’s work there’s no confusion whatsoever. Because if you have Scene 77 on your first page of sides and then half of it spilling over to the next page and then Scene 78, which you’re not shooting that day on the second half of that page they’ll just put a big X through 78. It’s pretty clear what you’re shooting.

And I think also if you don’t do the continued they may just – I can’t remember if most software just sticks the scene number there anyway, just as a matter of course at the top of the page. I’m going to take a look right now and see if that’s the way it works.

John: Sides are a whole special business. And sometimes there will be problems in sides. And that’s again why it can be really helpful to have a writer on set. Because if you get your day’s sides and you realize they’ve actually left off a line of dialogue here, that stuff does happen. And people unfortunately will gravitate too much towards the sides and not towards the actual script. You have a script supervisor there, too, who is also keeping an eye on that. But sides can be a problem and things can come up.

I’m sure increasingly productions will move to digital equivalents of sides which can hopefully ameliorate some of the problems. But it’s traditionally been you’re at a photocopier and you’re shrinking down pages and you’re using a Sharpie to X stuff out. It’s traditionally been a very physical process that can be prone to mistakes.

Craig: Without question. And that is why screenwriters have to be on the set. Let me say it again. Screenwriters have to be on the set.

In television of course we’re there. We’re there because we’re running the show. But in movies there’s not only are screenwriters often not there, but they decided apparently that directors get to say if screenwriters can be there or not, which is freaking nuts. I mean, do directors get to say if the cinematographer is there or not? It just doesn’t make any sense.

So, nobody – nobody – knows the script better than the writer. Sorry. The writer. And if there had been 12 writers hire one whose job is to be the writer-writer. And they need to be there. And people need to respect what they’ve done. Because they’re the only person sometimes who has the complete and total picture. Especially when you have a non-writing director who really is focused on the work that day and who may come up with a brilliant way of shooting something that leaves one tiny important thing out that was on the page for a reason.

It’s mind-blowing to me. Absolutely mind-blowing. And another reason why I think the feature business continues to suffer, aside from COVID and all the rest of it, creatively in comparison to what’s happening in TV. Because there’s just this cultural exclusion of writers which literally serves no one. It doesn’t even serve the director.

Umbrage.

John: I was worried we would get too far into the episode without any umbrage. So there we are.

Craig: We had some earlier, too. I mean, it’s been throughout.

John: Finally, let’s take a look at The Kingsman, written by Matthew Vaughn and Jane Goldman. I picked this one just because it was a slightly different style. It’s very comic. And so I wanted to have something in here that has a sense of some fun and some whimsy to it. And you see that in some of the scene description. So it’s starting at Scene 204.

Some stuff looks like conventional action. “Bullets spray all over. Thank god for Eggsy’s Kevlar. The guard yells to his cohorts.” All that stuff reads kind of normally. But then like, “Elton is a revelation – a shockingly dirty fighter, biting and clawing as he wrestles the Third Guard to the ground.

So within this action sequence we have to see Elton John be doing some dirty fighting. And so it’s important that within this sequence you are emphasizing the stuff that is shocking and surprising. So it can’t just be a list of shots. It has to have a sense, the feel of the rest of the movie. And you want to make sure that your action sequence do keep in the style of the rest of your film.

Craig: Correct. So action is a sneaky way to influence a reader’s understanding of tone. When we think about Near Dark and the way that Kathryn and Eric did it, you can feel the tone of Near Dark in there which is – it’s sort of gritty and dirty and sweaty. And kind of desert poetry.

And this is clever. There’s a wink. It’s snarky. “Elton is a revelation” is funny. It’s just a funny way of putting that. “Lady Gaga kicks the Fourth Guard in the balls, but he just picks her up and carries her back towards the cells…” That’s funny. Not the balls part. The fact that he just picks her up and he’s like, “All right, Lady Gaga. Come on. You’ve had enough.

That is funny. And your action sequence or your action description should in some way feel like it’s in the same world as your characters. It has to match the vibe. I don’t know how else to put it.

John: In terms of tone and what a script feels like, obviously dialogue is incredibly important. That’s going to be a sense of the voice of your film. But the actual your voice is going to come through a lot in your action and the words you’re choosing to describe this thing. It’s why Near Dark feels so different than some of these other samples is because of how they chose to write those things.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So just be really mindful of things. And don’t assume that there’s only one right way to do things forever.

These last couple examples have been more conventional, but they still within that space find ways to convey what’s important about this film versus another film.

Craig: 100%. And, again, they will keep kind of letting you know how you’re – look, you can have a race between gazelle and Usain Bolt. That is quite serious. But it’s clear it’s not meant to be quite serious. “The best race we have ever seen is taking place.” There’s a certain dry British observational tone to this which is reflective in the movie. Because that is the movie and it’s wonderful. And so it’s smart.

The action is not an excuse for you to stop being smart, smart being literate, stop being clever or creative. It’s an opportunity. So use it. It’s just wasted, I think, if you look at it as this kind of “oh I’ve got to describe things now so let me just get that over as quickly as I can.” So like Jane and Matthew understand that this is an opportunity to entertain. Because the action description is meant to describe a thing that is also supposed to be entertaining. Not just there. They all – all the people we’ve read today have been very good at that.

John: So my small rant here is I remember, god, 10 years ago, 15 years ago I was sent a script and they needed me to rewrite out the car chase sequences because the very well paid famous writer when it came time for the car chases in a movie that was mostly about car chases would say, “And now it’s the coolest car chase you’ve ever seen. Better than you’d ever imagine. And it’s really phenomenal. But I won’t both wasting your time describing it here on the page.”

I’m like what are you doing!? You cannot just abdicate your responsibility for writing this action sequence. That is something that is going to be portrayed in the movie. It needs to be on the page. I was so angry that he had gotten away, apparently, well kind of gotten away with not writing those sequences and he was going to let someone else take care of that.

Craig: I’ve seen this and it is freaking mind-blowing every time. I feel this by the way in scripts for musicals, it’s like “Song.” But…

John: What?

Craig: What am I seeing? [laughs] Are we just stopping the movie and playing a song against a black screen? This is part of our job.

John: Exactly the same. It drives me crazy. Or people just have assumptions, oh, you just write up to the song and write after the song? No. I wrote what happens in the song. And with the knowledge that lyrics can change. But I had to write – it is a scene. I write the scenes. The song is a scene. I’m going to write this moment.

Craig: Correct. It is our job. So don’t be that guy/girl. Don’t do it.

John: Craig, I want to say this has been a really exercise for me. Because so often when we look at pages we’re having to point out the things that are not working and try to be gentle with people’s feelings but also help them. In this case these were all really good writers who did a really good job describing the things that were in their movie which is the whole point of what screenwriting is, to help the reader see a movie before that movie even exists. And each of the examples is really good.

So I hope that people who are listening to this and reading through these pages recognize the wide range of possibilities there are for describing action and experiment. See what feels natural under their fingers to describe the kind of sequences they want to do.

A thing I did early in my career when I was trying to figure out how to write action, I would just imagine these crazy action sequences and just try to write them. They weren’t part of any movie. But I just wanted to get a sense of like how would I describe, like if that helicopter had to come into this building what would actually happen there. And those kind of challenges, it’s like learning to draw. It’s really awkward at first but then you kind of get better at it. And so I would just say look at action as an opportunity to improve your craft rather than as a drudgery, like a thing that you have to do when you get to those moments in your script.

Craig: Yeah. Because if you do that’s how it’s going to read. It will read like drudgery.

John: It’s going to read that way.

Craig: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, movies are not just spaces in between people talking. The stuff in the action is just as important if not more so than the things people say. And we to honor that and practice our craft in those moments I think even more assiduously than we do when we’re writing dialogue. Because the more visceral part of experiencing television or film is what we see when people aren’t simply talking. That’s what we feel.

And even when it’s a conversation it’s important to understand where the action fits in and what I need to see. Tell me what to see. And for the love of god if anybody tells you that you can’t “direct on the page,” show them these things and then tell them to shut the F up.

John: Yes.

Craig: Say, “We see you shutting the F up.”

John: That is the lesson they need to learn. All right, that’s it for that segment. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing, so one of your previous One Cool Things was that guy who was going through his Sudoku and had this brilliant revelation of how to solve a Sudoku.

Craig: Absolutely amazing.

John: I’ve been playing a bunch of Sudoku because a new app by Zach Gage who does a bunch of other iOS apps that I love called Good Sudoku came out. What’s clever about it is it has some tools to make solving Sudoku a little bit easier, but more importantly it lets you tackle much harder problems. Because you can ask for hints and it won’t tell you what the number is. It will tell you here’s how you can figure out the next step. Because there are strategies for doing stuff. It can talk you through that. And so it’s just a really well done iOS app.

If you’re curious about Sudoku and don’t really get how to do certain things in it, like X-wing for me was this bizarre concept for me to learn.

Craig: That’s a tough one.

John: It really helps out a lot. So I would recommend Good Sudoku. It’s a cheap app on the iOS App Store.

Craig: Everybody loves a cheap app. Well, my One Cool Thing this week is an aspect of a game that I’ve been playing called Ghost of Tsushima, which is pretty popular right now. I think a lot of people are playing it. It’s exclusive to the Sony PlayStation, so if you don’t have PlayStation, apologies. Set in feudal Japan and you’re a samurai. And you are helping repel the Mongol invasion, so basically kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, which is cool. But the part of it that I think is so wonderful, really enjoying, is the sword play itself, which I think is really strong.

There’s a certain way to do combat in video games that I find satisfying. And I think of it mostly in my mind as the Batman Arkham solution, which is it’s a button. And it’s a rhythm. It becomes like a dance, like we were talking about in Black Panther. You’re hitting that, let’s say it’s the square button. And that’s your primary sword swing. And you get used to the rhythm of it.

And then as you get better they’re like, OK, now here’s a new thing. You can throw in a triangle and do this. And as you keep going it sort of slowly but surely expands. And so you’re using all of the buttons, including the triggers. And doing different stances, different moves. And it just flows. And it becomes that very beautiful fluid combat the way it was in Batman in the Arkham series, or Spider Man, or now Ghost of Tsushima.

So, recommend.

John: Excellent. Cool. Well that is our show for this week. So stick around if you’re a Premium member because we’re going to talk about the Emmys.

Craig: Yay.

John: But for everyone else, Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, and edited by Matthew Chilelli who also did our special action outro this week. 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.

We have t-shirts and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. Or there’s a link in the show notes. You can find those show notes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts. We get them up about four days after the episode airs.

You can sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments like the one we’re about to record.

Craig: Ooh.

John: Craig, thank you for an action-filled episode.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

John: OK, Craig, I have some bad news for you. You received no Emmy nominations. I’m really sorry.

Craig: That’s weird. I don’t understand.

John: Because last year you got a bunch. And then you look at the chart, just really high. And now it just plummeted all the way to zero. Not negative. But zero.

Craig: Right. Zero. So, that is a–

John: You got snubbed.

Craig: Yeah. That is a dramatic fall off from lots to none. I mean, I didn’t have a show. So, I guess–

John: Yeah.

Craig: Sort of something?

John: And to be fair, I didn’t get any Emmy nominations either.

Craig: Right.

John: Same excuse for both of us, having no show.

Craig: That might be inter-Academy rival though. Like the Emmys think of you as the movie Academy guy. And so it’s like the Sharks and the Jets.

John: Yeah, a little of that. But we were not the only people who didn’t get nominations. And so I want to talk about, I have a small little rant here about snubs.

Craig: OK.

John: I hate the whole concept of snubs because to me snubbing implies that you deliberately chose not to give somebody something. I’m passing out cupcakes but I’m not going to give Susie a cupcake. That to me is a snub. You are snubbing Susie.

Craig: Right.

John: Reese Witherspoon not getting an Emmy nomination is not a snub really. It’s unfortunate because she’s a really good actress and was apparently great in all these shows that I didn’t end up watching, but there’s also probably a really clear explanation why is that if you’re a good actor in three different shows, and so some people are filling out their ballots saying I’m going to nominate Reese Witherspoon for this thing, but not this thing because it would be weird to nominate her for two different things. It splits it up. There’s a reason why she didn’t get a nomination.

It’s not because she’s not good. It’s because she was in too many things.

And I think the problem of too many is also the reason why some shows got “snubbed.” Because there’s just way, way, way too many good television shows in 2020. And we can’t give awards to everything.

Craig: Well, and there’s also this very vibrant prediction community. So, they have predictions about what is going to happen. They get kind of invested in their predictions. They talk about it. And a lot of the people who are writing the stories in the trades are involved and saying, look, I’m pretty sure the five people are going to be this. And then someone says, “Well what about this show?” And they’re like, no, you’re stupid. Well, but then that show gets nominated and so either we were all wrong or something went – they snubbed somebody. Clearly it’s a snub. It’s a snub because they didn’t do what they were supposed to do.

But you’re right. That’s not a snub at all. It was an unpredicted outcome. It is important to remind everybody that it is not ultimately the definition of what is good or bad art. Everybody has a relationship with television shows. I assure you that my daughter’s relationship with Criminal Minds is far deeper than her relationship with say Chernobyl.

John: Oh my god. What is up with Criminal Minds? My daughter is watching Criminal Minds as well. I don’t get it.

Craig: Somebody explain – and I’ve asked my daughter to explain it. She can’t, other than to say she must continue to watch Criminal Minds. It’s like the Chinpokomon thing from South Park. Is it there are subliminal messages? Are they taking over the world? I mean, nothing against Criminal Minds, but like my daughter is so into Criminal Minds that we happen to be – we were sitting together the other day and the topic of famous people came up. And she’s like what famous people do you have phone numbers for. And I’m like, OK, I’ll take out my phone.

And I start saying, OK, I have this person’s phone number, this person. And then I’m like – and I get to Paget Brewster who I directed in a movie 20 years ago. And I’m like, oh, you know what, I think Paget Brewster is in Criminal Minds. Because I don’t watch Criminal Minds. And she was like, “Wait, what?” And I said Paget Brewster. And I kid you not, my daughter cried. Like emotional tears. Because I knew Paget Brewster.

What has Criminal Minds done to our children? [laughs] What is happening?

John: OK. Have you watched any episodes of Criminal Minds with your daughter?

Craig: Yeah.

John: That show is so dark. I cannot believe how dark that show is. And that it’s on every week apparently on CBS.

Craig: Yeah.

John: It aspires to be Silence of the Lambs. But the fact that it’s just a CBS procedural, but it is also doing Silence of the Lambs, it makes it in some ways kind of more disturbing. Because it’s just like these characters are talking in perfectly normal sort of ways about incredibly gruesome things.

Craig: Yes. Look, I don’t speak ill of anything. I will simply say I don’t have the same relationship–

John: No, nor do I.

Craig: With Criminal Minds as my daughter does. I’m not the Criminal Minds audience. And I don’t understand a lot. I mean, I just don’t kind of get the whole Criminal Minds. I don’t know. It didn’t happen between us. We had a good first date, but it wasn’t going to last.

John: But back to Paget Brewster, I think of Paget Brewster as a comedy actor.

Craig: Right.

John: Because she’s so funny.

Craig: She’s amazing.

John: I see her on Another Period.

Craig: So good on that.

John: And I’m seeing her on this show and I’m like, wait, is that really the same actor? Because she’s just doing – she’s doing a perfectly good job of being in a crime procedural, but it’s not at all the actor who I think of her as. It’s so weird.

Craig: Well, it’s a really challenging concept. I love that we’re talking about Criminal Minds instead of the Emmys. It’s so much more interesting to be honest with you. So, Criminal Minds, they have a good starting concept for a show which is every week they’re going to encounter some sicko and they fly – and I love that they have their own plane. It’s awesome. They fly in and they’re like, OK, we’re going to figure out just what new flavor of total sicko this is.

And each one of the people on any episode of Criminal Minds would have their own movie at this point. Like there would have been a made for TV movie about that person.

John: Absolutely.

Craig: They’re all so specifically crazy. But now they’re on like season 80 and it’s like their view of the world is literally every week there is a Ted Bundy level person up there, or John Wayne Gacy. Like every week.

John: Yeah.

Craig: No matter what.

John: But the Ted Bundy/John Wayne Gacy character is often some actor who is always playing a good guy in everything else. So it’s always like a James Van Der Beek or a George Newburn is the killer in it. And I’m sure they’re relishing the opportunity to play somebody who is not goody two shoes, but oh my god.

And I just don’t get what she loves so much about it.

Craig: There might have been something on TikTok. Like something happened on TikTok which as we know is controlling our children’s minds, and it just happened. And there’s so much. I mean, you can watch Criminal Minds in quarantine, by the way. It’s the perfect combination. Well, it’s summer, we can’t go anywhere, we can’t do anything. Criminal Minds everyone. And, yeah, so basically 15 year old girls are living the C-Minds life right now.

John: Just to get back to the Emmys for a second.

Craig: If we must.

John: When you cheated on me with the other podcast for Watchmen I was happy to see that Damon and company got so many nominations for Watchmen. It is a phenomenal show.

Craig: Yes.

John: Which is great to see. And we have many other friends who got nominations. I’m genuinely happy for all of them that they’re being recognized for their hard work. I just also want to take this moment to recognize all the other shows and performers and writers who didn’t get nominations who also did really amazing work, because there just wasn’t space to acknowledge it all.

Craig: Exactly. On the Watchmen front, something cool might be going on there in terms of more to say on the radio. But I also want to call one person out. There is one nomination that made me the happiest, and that was Kaitlin Olson who got nominated for – I think it’s in the Best Short Form Comedy category. It’s the one that Megan Amram kept trying to win I think. And it’s for the show that she does on Quibi with Will Forte. And it made me so happy – the second reason it made me so happy is because I love Kaitlin. She’s fantastic.

But the first most important reason is because she’s married to Rob McElhenney who once again did not get nominated for an Emmy. [laughs] He’s just been waiting. Oh, he’s waiting. And, by the way, in all seriousness deserves it. Like the Always Sunny guys deserve it. I think the Mythic Quest folks deserve it.

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: So he’s just been always on the outside staring in, like the Little Matchstick Girl. And Kaitlin was just like, “Oh, hey Rob, look at this. I got nominated for an Emmy. Anyway, what do you want to do today?”

John: Yeah, Craig, had you been nominated for an Emmy for your performance in Mythic Quest I would have been happy for you, but I also kind of would have wanted to throw a trash can just on behalf of all the actual actors out there.

Craig: No, no, no, it’s inevitable that I don’t. I’m not sure, yeah, the appearance of Lou is always in doubt. Lou is not a character that you expect to see in the list of characters on the first page. Lou is a surprise. Like, what, episode seven, Lou? I don’t know if I’m going to be in the second season or not.

You know what? A little bit of Lou goes a long way. Let’s face it.

John: Yeah. It does.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Craig, thank you for the talk.

Craig: Thanks John.

The original post for this article can be found here.

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

Craig Mazin: My name is Craig Mazin.

John: And this is Episode 461 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Today on the podcast it’s another round of How Would This Be a Movie where we take real life events and consider their cinematic possibilities. Plus, we’ll be answering listener questions on when to start rewriting and board game IP. And in a bonus topic for Premium members we’re going to discuss how would 2020 be a movie.

Craig: [laughs] Oh man. Didn’t we already do it? Isn’t the Day After Tomorrow 2020?

John: Oh, there’s so many 2020 movies. There’s too many.

Craig: There’s too many.

John: But first, Craig, you won yet more BAFTA Awards. When will it all stop?

Craig: Well, I personally did not win a BAFTA award.

John: OK. Your show did? Your creation did.

Craig: Well, so the BAFTAs – the Emmys have what they call the Shmemmys, so it’s the below the line stuff like cinematography and editing and score they do on a different night than the big Emmys, although I found that the Shmemmys were vastly more fun for me because you get to root for your team. And in this case we were rooting for our team. We had ten nominees and seven of them won BAFTAs which is outstanding.

John: Great.

Craig: We have one more, well sorry, we have three more bites at the BAFTA apple. I guess by the time this airs it will be about a week later. Jared Harris is up for Best Actor. Stellan Skarsgård is up for Best Supporting Actor. And then Jane and Carolyn and I are up for Best Mini-Series. The good news was that in addition to all of our folks winning many, many BAFTI/BAFTY, in my category I was up against my beloved Jack Thorne, a former One Cool Thing, and dear friend and brilliant writer. And the good news is neither one of us won. So we didn’t have to beat each other. We both lost to the extraordinary Jesse Armstrong. No shame there. Jesse Armstrong is the showrunner and genius behind Succession.

So congratulations to Jesse.

John: That category was Best HBO Series, right?

Craig: It kind of was. Well, no, it wasn’t. The Virtues is Channel 4 I think over there in the UK. That’s Jack’s show with Shane Meadows. And it was a great, fun ride to see our folks winning. And I was particularly pleased that Odile Dicks-Mireaux won. She had been up for so many of these awards for costume and had not yet won one of the big ones. But if you are a British costume designer as she is I think the BAFTA is the finest award you could hope for and she won it and deservedly so.

John: Fantastic. So, I guess I’m just confused. I feel like the eligibility time for things, I just feel like Chernobyl was three years ago.

Craig: Kind of. The BAFTAs were I guess last week. And we haven’t been on the air for well over a year. So, the reason why is because the BAFTAs were originally supposed to be much earlier in the year. We were very early in the BAFTA cycle anyway. So we were always going to be quite a ways away from when our first air date. But because of COVID they had to scrap the live ceremony and show and push it back quite a ways. And ultimately settle on doing a virtual version.

You know, like on a downer, I would have loved to have gone.

John: Yeah.

Craig: I think it would have been fun to have been at the BAFTAs. So I’ll just have to try and write something else that gets a BAFTA nomination. But, yeah, it’s a little weird at this point. But this is the end. So the final big BAFTAs which I think are streaming like on July 31 or something like that will be the last of the Chernobyl awards stuff. And then finally it is over. And I think like four days later they start giving awards to Watchmen for the next cycle.

So, Damon and his Watchmen team should and I believe will win everything.

John: Yeah, they’re going to win a lot.

Craig: Yeah.

John: Nice. All right, to some more timely topics. Last week we talked about the new contract reached between the WGA and the studios. Now full details and contract language are out and members in both the East and the West should be voting on it. Craig, you’ve had a chance to look at the links and see the full language. Is there anything there that’s interesting or surprising or different to you?

Craig: I would say no, nothing surprising. Interesting – somewhat interesting. I mean, I think overall it’s pretty positive. I mean, we are basically the third to go. So, the DGA effectively goes first, then SAG/AFTRA is behind them, and then we pull up the rear. So we are ultimately going into a difficult kind of negotiation environment anyway. So much has been set in stone and can’t be undone.

But there are a lot of things that we can work on that are specific to our needs in our union. So just running through the basic summaries, we used to get 3% minimum increases each year. First year, second year, third year of the contract. Those are important because those do set the basics for how writers are paid for the writing specifically and also for residuals. That’s gotten knocked down over time. So one of the things that we can also do is defer a little bit of that increase into our pension as we need to. Our pension was struggling a bit. So it’s good that we took care of that.

The pension, overall, the pension contributions go up. And we get paid parental benefits which is fantastic. I think that’s great news.

John: So we actually had a listener who wrote in about that. Do you want to read what Dagney wrote? Because that clarifies some stuff there.

Craig: Absolutely. Sure. Dagney writes, “I’ve been waiting to have a second child because I’m still in shock of how much financial stress my first maternity leave caused. I decided it was best to not have another child until I was more established in the industry, which I estimated would come when I was 40 or slightly older. I was having to make this hard decision and weigh it against the health of my eggs and any potential fertility problems.

“This new agreement means I no longer have to make that hard decision and it takes a huge weight off my family planning. I wanted to correct a misunderstanding I think Craig had in the last podcast about the WGA maternity leave and why he didn’t think it would necessarily work for DGA and SAG/AFTRA members.

“A WGA writer does not need to be currently employed on a TV show or under a screenwriting deal at a studio in order to be eligible for benefits. That’s why this is so fantastic. Women can take maternity leave between jobs so long as they qualify. This benefit is being paid by a 0.5% contribution from all new employers and will generate approximately $9 million annually to fund maternity leave for new mothers. I think a deal like this is very much doable and needed for the other unions to ensure they can support female directors and actors while they are taking care of their tiny humans.”

Oof, well first of all, Dagney, congratulations on going ahead and planning that next kid. And this is obviously exactly why parental leave is so important. I mean, these are the issues people are wrestling with. I am thrilled to hear that you don’t need to be currently employed to get benefits. I mean, my only consideration about DGA and SAG was really about the actual physical leave. Because that’s going to be a little harder for them to work out if you are in the middle of directing a show. It’s going to be a little hard to work out stopping.

But that’s neither here nor there. It’s a great term. And I think it’s probably – correct me if I’m wrong, John – a basis, right. Like this is the beginning and theoretically it improves over time.

John: That is the hope. Essentially that the same way that we started a pension plan, the same way we started a health plan. This is a beginning step and you sort of see what it is. We see whether $9 million a year is enough to actually have a tangible benefit for new parents. And Dagney says maternity leave here. The reason why we say parental leave is it applies both to male and female members. Obviously I’m not a mother but I would be eligible for a parental leave as well and it would have been helpful for me as a screenwriter when I had my kid 15 years ago.

Craig: [laughs] Yeah.

John: So I think that that point about equity and sort of access is really crucial, too. You want to make sure that women aren’t penalized for having a kid. And I think men taking this parental leave as well, and paid parental leave as well will be important for balancing.

Craig: Yeah. I cannot predict the future. But, that’s not going to stop me from trying. It seems to me that as our society changes and reacts to the realities of the world around us that the sense of taking care of each other is going to improve. I do believe that even though right now it appears – it feels, and for good reason, that we’re living through a time of governmental cruelty that is not going to last. And that this is where things are going.

That we deserve the right to have a family. To have children and not risk our own lives and security. If people in a country are so on the economic edge that they cannot afford to leave for four weeks to have a child or five or six, then we have failed. And so this is a good thing. It’s a good beginning. I do hope that it travels to the other unions.

And there are also some other good things that we got here. We improved the – you know, we’ve been struggling with this whole exclusivity and span protections, a very complicated thing. But basically it goes to the way writers are paid and then kind of held captive. So if you’re paid a certain amount but that certain amount applies over a longer amount of time and you can’t go find another job while you’re not doing stuff–

John: That’s pernicious.

Craig: Yeah. That’s a problem. So we keep chipping away at that situation and improving it as best we can.

John: A term that you’ll hear used a lot is mini-rooms. And mini-rooms is problematic as a term for many, many reasons. But when you are employed on a show that is breaking episodes. Let’s say it’s an eight-week mini-room to sort of put together a small season, one of the things that this new contract is addressing is they cannot then immediately hold you for a long period of time after that. Because there were writers being trapped where they worked for eight weeks and then were unemployable for more than eight weeks.

Craig: Right.

John: And so that’s not cool. So, there’s new language and rules around that, essentially saying like if they’re going to hold you they have to start paying you right away at the end of those eight weeks.

Craig: Right. There are a few rollbacks in here.

John: There are.

Craig: And those were, again, this is the cost of being last. [laughs] You get what you get and you don’t get upset. So you want to talk us through some of that?

John: Yeah. So one of the biggest rollbacks is in syndication residuals. And so when Craig and I were entering the industry that’s what you kind of really thought about with residuals is that when your show reaches 100 episodes and it’s in syndication that’s just money coming in. And that market has decreased some, but also once SAG and DGA agreed to reduce residuals on those shows there was very little wiggle room to sort of argue about that. And really it comes down to a question of are you going to push to hold onto something that you used to have, or try to really focus on where residuals and where money is coming in in the future?

And so that was the choice. And so syndication residuals got rolled back, so we could hopefully make some gains in streaming and other things that were priorities going forward.

Craig: Correct. And there are other little things like we agreed that first class flights are not required for domestic and international flights of less than 1,000 airline miles. I think we had already given that up in domestic.

John: So from what I understand is that it matters with certain flights within Canada. There’s certain cases where that is a factor. Or, if you’re flying around within Europe that can also be a problem.

Craig: Right. Exactly. So, that is something, again, that I think had been given up by the other unions. Of course, just a reminder everybody is always encouraged to and are allowed to negotiate better terms–

John: For sure.

Craig: For themselves. These are always the basic minimums.

John: I also want to make sure that as we’re talking about rollbacks, things that we stepped back from, we’re also acknowledging the things we stepped back from from our original intentions. So going into this negotiation we had a big list of things that were priorities for us. We talked a little bit about this on the last show which is really looking at how streaming works, how we get paid in streaming, and how streaming residuals work. And there was small progress here, but it was not nearly the progress that we sort of went into this with.

We didn’t make the progress in writing teams and writing partners, which is such a uniquely WGA situation. We’re the only union in which you can hire two people for the cost of one and really exploit that in ways that feels kind of unfair. So we didn’t make progress there.

We didn’t make specific progress in screenwriting. We didn’t make specific progress in comedy and variety. So there was a lot of stuff that didn’t get done that doesn’t look like a rollback but it wasn’t achieved even though we set out to try to do it in this negotiation.

Craig: Yeah. Well there was one tiny thing that happened for feature writers. It’s super tiny, but I suppose it’s something. It’s better than nothing. So there used to be something called the DVD fee for feature writers. When the movie came out on DVD or home video and you were one of the credited screenwriters you got some sort of like DVD commentary payment, even if you didn’t do the commentary which frequently screenwriters weren’t asked to do, and eventually they just changed that to “script publication fee.” And that amount, sorry, was?

John: $10,000?

Craig: It started at $5,000 and then it’s just been moving up. And it moved up again. It increased by $2,500 so it’s now at $12,500. So, credited screenwriters get another $2,500.

John: Which is not a lot in the big scheme of things, but it could buy you a computer. It could buy you a laptop.

Craig: Sure. It could by you an Acer. You know, you got to factor in the taxes and stuff. But I will say that this is not sustainable. And it’s not sustainable in the face of the fact that there are still pressing matters involving television writers. We know that. And there will continue to be pressing matters involving television writers. There are more television writers in terms of just employment contracts than there are feature contract employment writers. So that’s not going to go away obviously. But we just can’t. We just can’t keep doing this.

So, either feature writers and their essential fundamental issues are going to be addressed soon or I just don’t know what’s going to happen. It can’t continue like this. It’s just – and it’s not that – I understand why it had to be this way this time. It always has to kind of be this way, except at some point you just have to put your foot down and say it can’t be this way anymore. So, I know that we have some feature writer champions in leadership, not the least of which is Michele Mulroney, and I hope that they start now. Essentially if you want to improve the lot of feature writers in our business through negotiations with the companies we have to kind of start now and make it a priority now. Or it just won’t be again. And at that point I think we’re just inviting an enormous amount of apathy and resentment.

John: Yeah. So I think our take home action for writers to do who are WGA members is they should vote yes on this contract.

Craig: Oh yeah.

John: But they should also be strongly thinking about sort of what their priorities are for three years from now. And what gains they really want to see made. And you and I are both pushing for gains for screenwriters. As I’ve learned more about what’s happening with comedy/variety writers, recognizing they don’t even have minimums in certain markets. So, making sure that we really are taking a look at everyone who is employed as a writer in film and television, we’re focusing on the needs of the whole membership and not just the biggest chunk of it.

Craig: Correct. And I would ask our television writing friends that while you are struggling with the rapid changes in your business and the way that you’re getting paid and the notion that sometimes you have to write longer and more for less, that that has been – this thing that has emerged of these mini-rooms and exclusivity – that has been the nature of feature writers since you and I got in the business.

John: Yeah.

Craig: And has been getting worse ever since. So, this sort of emerging problem for television writers has been life for feature writers. So, it’s a little frustrating that it’s getting solved for television writers who are dealing with it suddenly as opposed to feature writers who have always dealt with it. And maybe that’s because feature writers just take it.

Look, our guild has essentially been run by television writers for a long time and we need to address this stuff for feature writers or we’re not really a union. We’re just a television writers union. And by the way if we want to be a television writers union that’s totally fine. But then you got to let the feature writers go and organize and be their own union because, you know, taxation without representation kind of sucks.

So, hopefully that changes. But absolutely this is an easy vote yes. There’s no confusion. We’re not getting a better deal than this one.

John: No, for sure.

Craig: So, yeah. I think you guys got the best you could get.

John: The voting deadline for this is 10am Pacific on Wednesday July 29, 2020. And basically the same on the East as well. So vote. Go vote.

Second bit of WGA news this week was that UTA became the first of the big four agencies to sign a franchise agreement with the DGA, ending the practice of packaging, limiting ownership in production entities, and requiring information sharing with the guild. Also as part of this UTA and WGA are dropping their lawsuits against each other, although CAA and WME are still pending with their lawsuits.

Craig: Right.

John: So I first got the official word of this, even though I’ve been on the negotiating committee for all of this, I got an email from UTA, my former agency, saying like, “Hey, we signed, it’s great. Fantastic. Welcome back to the UTA family.”

Craig: Oh, you’d already left.

John: I had already left. Yes. I signed my letter and sent that through. WGA sent out details in a second email, so you can read the red-lined agreement which talks you through everything.

On Twitter I was really pushing hard to actually read the red-lined agreement because it’s really simple. Like I think we’re so used to the MBA agreement which is just so massive and is hard to understand.

Craig: Right.

John: This is actually really short. And so many of the questions I was getting were answered in this contract, in this agreement. So, take a look at the actual agreement. If you’ve been following through you’ll see it’s basically the Paradigm agreement, but the changes to it are that ownership in a production entity is limited to 20%. It had been at 10%. And the opt-out mechanism for if you have a client at an agency who does not want their contracts sent through that opt-out mechanism is different, but there’s an opt out clause there.

Those are the biggest changes.

Craig: Yeah. So the big thing that kicked all this off was packaging. And packaging is bad. We have a pretty great, incredibly optimistic interview or discussion/conversation with Chris Keyser that took place just before this really became official in our divorce from the agencies. And it was about packaging and why packaging is just shitty.

Now, this has taken from where I’m standing way too long. And I can’t blame the guild or UTA, because I don’t know. I can probably say, “Well Jesus, if you were going to say yes to this, why didn’t you just say yes to this back then? It’s so stupid.” But they didn’t. But they’ve said yes to it now.

It’s going to be an interesting thing to see how this functions. So, the 20% ownership is I think probably a pretty good term for them. I think that they have a 20% ownership in – what is that thing that they own?

John: Is it Civic Center Media? I always get confused who owns what.

Craig: I think it’s that. I think they have a 20% ownership stake and I think they got that term so they wouldn’t have to sell any of it. But the big deal is the ending of packaging. So, here’s the interesting question, and this is what I think we’ve got to keep our eyes on now. This is where it gets fun in a not fun way. Ending packaging for writers is a great thing, but you can’t end packaging for just writers. They are ending packaging for all of their clients. They are not packaging stuff anymore.

Obviously everything gets grandfathered in, right?

John: Yeah. And again we have to sort of clarify the frustrating thing of like packaging in the sense of like here’s a writer, here’s a director, here’s an actor, you can still do that, you just can’t then sort of take a fee for that. So packaging fees are the problem. The actual introducing people and putting things together that’s still fine.

Craig: That’s just called being an agent. That’s just representation. But, yes, packaging fees – I believe they have a two-year, from signing of this agreement they have two years to keep packaging stuff, to keep getting packaging fees.

John: Yeah. From June 30, 2022.

Craig: On that day from that point forward they can’t. So what happens is everything that gets packaged from the beginning of time until two years from now works as it always has. After that it doesn’t. At that point the actors and the directors that UTA represents will have to start paying commission, because the benefit of packaging, if there is one, to clients is that they don’t pay 10%.

So, the agency is essentially bilking money out of the companies and saying you don’t have to pay us 10%, which seems like a good deal except it turns out it’s not. So, the question will be what happens to the big money actors and directors who are used to free agenting. It’s a little bit like, you know, I enjoy free Twitter. If Twitter decides to charge me $10 a month tomorrow I’m going to think long and hard because I’m in a love/hate relationship with Twitter anyway. And what if there are other places I can go to that are Twitter but don’t cost money, like CAA or WME?

So the question is how does this ripple forth. If actors and directors kind of want to stay put then I think at that point the writing is on the wall and CAA and WME are going to have to figure this out one way or another. In my mind there is one more agency to go. I know that there are actually three more agencies to go of the big ones – ICM, CAA, and WME. But really there’s one. Well, no, I’m not going to include ICM.

If ICM were to sign next then there would still be one more big agency to go. We need either CAA or William Morris Endeavor. If that happens.

John: So just to clarify one thing here. By the contract we only need one of those three. So, ICM would count. But you’re saying as a practical matter you think it’s more important to get CAA or WME?

Craig: Correct. As a practical matter, and here’s why. There are X amount of writers that are represented at these agencies and of that X amount there is what we’ll call an amount, a smaller but significant number that the agencies are interested in, because they make enough money for the agencies to be interested in.

There are too many of them to be absorbed by UTA. There are not too many of them to be absorbed by UTA and either CAA or William Morris Endeavor. Meaning that if one of those two large agencies signs this thing and ends packaging and welcomes clients back it’s over. The other big agency can either do it or not. It doesn’t matter. Because if they don’t then CAA and UTA will just absorb all of WME’s writer clients. Or, UTA and WME will absorb all of CAA’s writer clients. It’s just inevitable. So, at that point when the next big one falls into place I think it’s over. Then it doesn’t matter what the other ones do. Theoretically if they’re practical and reasonable they will sign. But that’s the big next thing. We’re one away.

We’re one away from ending this very, very long war. And I hope we end it before all this legal stuff goes through, because I don’t we’re doing particularly well in court. And also even if we were it’s enormously expensive. So, hey, CAA, WME, let’s end this. It’s enough already. Let’s just get back to business.

John: There really are no next steps for listeners to do. This is all sort of negotiation that happens with the negotiating committee, with lawyers, with red-lined agreements being passed back and forth. But we’ll, of course, keep an eye on sort of what happens next.

Craig: Yeah. But this was a great thing. I mean, we needed this. We needed something to happen. Look, eventually it was going to happen. Right? We knew that, eventually. I didn’t realize eventually it would be this eventual. But it eventually happened. My god, my new favorite eventually is – did you see the interview, we don’t talk about politics much in here, but did you see the interview with Donald Trump and Chris Wallace?

John: I’ve only seen little snippets. I can’t watch more than 30 seconds.

Craig: It’s spectacular. It’s spectacular. The relevant part here is that Chris Wallace was sort of saying, “You played down the Coronavirus. You said it would miraculously disappear and that has not happened at all.” And Trump said something like, “It will. Eventually it will.” Ooh, OK.

John: Eventually all things, in the fullness of time all things will…

Craig: Yes. The chance of Coronavirus disappearing over eternity is 100%. [laughs] Anyway, but this was a great thing that needed to happen. It finally did happen. So hopefully we get to a similar agreement with one of the two agencies that are going to change things quickly.

John: Cool. All right. Let’s get to our marquee topic. How Would This Be a Movie? So from time to time we ask our listeners to send in their suggestions for stories from the news, or history, so we can discuss How Would This Be a Movie or increasingly a limited series for streaming that Craig can win some BAFTA Awards for.

Craig: Right.

John: Once again our listeners stepped up, so thank you to everyone who emailed or tweeted suggestions. I’ve picked four of them, but there were many more we could have picked. The first one I want to talk through is something that Kate Williams sent. We’re going to link to a story by Sarah Kaplan writing for The Washington Post. Here is the lead. “Noela Rukundo sat in a car outside her home in Melbourne, Australia, watching as the last few mourners filed out. They were leaving a funeral – her funeral.”

Bum, bum, bum.

Craig: Dun-dun.

John: Dun-dun. It sounds so soap opera, but it happened in real life. So this is a woman whose husband had paid to have her killed while she was back visiting family in Burundi, Africa. And these men who kidnapped her and were supposed to kill her said that they wouldn’t do it. But told the husband that they had done it. She was able to fly home and confront her terrible husband at her funeral.

Craig: Oh, he’s not that bad. [laughs] All he did was pay to have her killed and then go to her funeral and pretend to be sad about it.

So, this is crazy and it feels like, I mean, this is obviously a very tragic thing and a scary thing, but in my mind idea-wise it’s sort of drifting towards comedy.

John: Yeah.

Craig: There was, it was called Double Jeopardy? Was that what it was called?

John: Ashley Judd?

Craig: Yeah. So she gets convicted for killing her husband and sent to jail/prison. And then it turns out that he had fakes his own death and he’s alive. She is released from prison and basically is allowed to kill him because you can’t try somebody for the same crime twice. Legally that’s not how it works.

John: Yeah.

Craig: But it reminded me a little bit of that. But it feels a little comedy possibly. Ish.

John: Yeah. So one thing I thought was really interesting about this is because this woman is living in Melbourne, Australia, but she’s from Burundi, Africa, The Washington Post thing had a little interview with her. And unfortunately it had terrible music underneath it, but I want to listen to a little snippet of it because her language is actually really interesting. So, let’s take a listen to her describing what it was like to be at her own funeral.

Noela Rukundo: And the one thing he [unintelligible] everyone crying like a small child. Crying. Oh my wife. I love my wife so much. I can’t believe she left me. Oh, the key to blah-blah-blah. So, [unintelligible] that was believed him because he’s the one who keeps talking to my brother [unintelligible] and my brother said they identified my body [unintelligible]. Yeah. And when he saw me it was, oh my goodness, he just – it’s like he sees a ghost. I don’t know. He was like – he needed some way to hide in himself. And see how he’s screaming and say, “Oh, I’m finished.” He talked to himself, “I’m finished.” And then he talked in his back home language, too. “I’m finished. Noela, you are alive.” I was, “Oh, you’re surprised I’m alive?”

He come, he touched me like two times. He jumped. To make sure I’m still alive with me.

Craig: She’s a very calm person.

John: Yeah, she is.

Craig: Super chill about the fact that her husband tried to have her killed. She just seems really calm about it.

John: Yeah, she does. And also in the story she has like five kids, so maybe like five kids will wear down your drama quotient.

Craig: She’s like, “Ugh.”

John: But I love her use of English. It’s not clear to me whether she learned English in Australia or if she uses English, she used English back in Burundi. But her dialogue is really specific. Her voice is really specific. And so if you’re going to take the story as the story I think finding her voice and being specific with it is going to be so interesting and so crucial to sort of – as a key into what makes this story unique from Double Jeopardy.

Craig: Yes. I don’t really know what to do with this. I mean, I’m thinking about it.

John: Well, here’s the problem. This is a moment.

Craig: Yeah.

John: This is a moment. This is a plot point. It’s not actually a plot. And so then you have to figure out well where does the story start. Is it with her meeting this man and sort of all the things? Is it a classic sort of the wrong man sort of situation? Do they mutually hate each other and they sort of both kind of want to kill each other in a War of the Roses way?

To what degree is Australia important? To what degree is Burundi important? There’s probably a way into this so that this becomes a moment in it, but by itself it is not nearly enough of a story because you could put this plot point kind of anywhere along the arc of your story. Like this could be a first act moment. This could be a middle of the second act. This could be a third act moment. There’s lots of things to do and just very few choices have been made for you already.

Craig: Yeah. It’s kind of the worst combination of a high concept in that it’s an overwhelming concept. No matter where you put it suddenly the movie becomes about that. But also it doesn’t give you enough meat then to kind of – it’s its own question and answer, right? Like you tried to kill me, it didn’t work, I’m still alive. The end. There’s nowhere to go from there. It’s just like obviously you go to prison and it’s not like we’re going to fall back in love. Nobody wants to see that.

So, I think it’s over right? It’s crazy but I don’t see the movie there.

John: I think somebody could find the movie there. I think there’s a movie to find there, but it’s really scoping out a whole story which this becomes one little moment in it and figuring out whether Noela and sort of – basically at what point are you starting the story with Noela and where does this fall in the beat of it. And honestly this can’t even be the biggest beat of it. There has to be a character journey that this is a moment in it. You know, Gone Girl which is structured around a woman’s murder by her husband has a really surprising twist so that it’s not just that. And your relationship with the protagonist and antagonist are really surprising.

I think you would need to approach this with that same kind of cleverness.

Craig: Yes. Yes. But uphill. Uphill.

John: Uphill. Uphill climb. This next one I think is the biggest – to me is the biggest candidate for How Would This Be a Movie and I sort of can’t believe I haven’t already seen this as a movie. Do you want to talk us through Project Azorian at all?

Craig: Yeah. Sure. Project Azorian. So back in the day a long, long time ago the Soviets lost a submarine. And this particular submarine had nuclear missiles on it. And the Russians couldn’t find it. Now, when you lose something like that it’s a huge problem because if another country grabs hold of it they suddenly have a ton of your secrets. They can now take apart your missiles and know exactly what the payload is and how far they can go. They can also find all of the – they can unlock the safes and find your launch codes and all sorts of secrets. It’s the last thing you want.

So, the Soviets couldn’t find it and we decided we would. Hence, the CIA hatches Project Azorian. The problem is you’ve got to figure out how to find this sub that is in the bottom of the deep, deep, deep ocean without the – because this is international waters – without the Soviets going, “Oh, we see what you’re doing and we’re going to stop you.”

John: This is the 1970s which is also crucial. So technologies are a little bit limited, but it’s also the height of the Cold War.

Craig: Correct. So, what the CIA does is they essentially come up with a plan to cover their submarine retrieval effort with a story that they’re actually trying to mine the ocean floor for minerals. But that’s not a thing. So, what do they do? They make it a thing. And they actually enlist Howard Hughes as somebody who is designing a ship, the Hughes Glomar Explorer, to mine the bottom of the ocean. They invent an industry, like a startup industry. A little bit like when fracking first started.

John: Exactly.

Craig: They’re basically saying we’ve figured out a new way to dig up important metals and rare earth. And we’ve built this enormous industrial ship. And in fact the ship contained this massive empty space inside of it called a Moon Pool where they could hide the Soviet sub if they actually got it.

And so begins this cat and mouse game with the Soviets who are like side-eyeing the Hughes Glomar Explorer. They’re like, “What?” And we were like, no, really. And it kind of worked.

John: It kind of worked.

Craig: It kind of worked.

John: So, Tony Robinson sent this in and so we’ll put a link to the BBC story that he sent through. The Wikipedia article on it is also pretty good. So essentially we did find the submarine and we had to have a cover for how we were going to try to get this thing back up. And that’s why we had to build the special ship. We invented this thing of mining for Manganese nodules on the bottom of the ocean floor.

And the cover story was so compelling that several universities started offering courses in undersea mining, which is not a thing. Which I think is just fantastic. And the BBC article goes into the fact that like eventually because of the sort of fake story people said like, “Hey, maybe you could mine stuff undersea.” And so now there sort of is a thing.

Craig: Right.

John: I think the Howard Hughes of it all is great. There’s definitely cinematic moments where we sort of get the submarine halfway up and then it breaks in half and then we only have part of it. And the Soviets are figuring out what we’re doing. I mean, the obvious recent movie that we can think about that does some of this is Argo.

Craig: Right.

John: In that you have a cover story for why you’re doing this thing and it’s comedic but there’s also thriller possibilities. Craig, do you see this as a movie?

Craig: It could be a movie. You would have to kind of ratchet up the suspense a little bit. I think the stakes are a bit low for a film. So, in Argo we’re trying to get American hostages out of the country, right?

John: Yeah.

Craig: In this we’re just looking for secrets. So it’s kind of low stakes. And so you would need to place it sort of in a larger – I think a larger context. It could be perhaps the inspiration for a dramatic, like a fictional movie where the stakes are a little bit higher. But it’s an expensive endeavor so I think it would need to somehow go beyond just a historical drama.

There is one thing that comes out of this story that I don’t think they mentioned in this BBC article. But because of this operation and the Glomar – what a great name. I assume that means like Global Marine or something. Glomar.

John: Sure.

Craig: So Glomar actually lends its name to something called the Glomar Response. Do you know what that is, John?

John: I don’t know what that is.

Craig: So I know about this only because it just sort of like popped up a couple of years ago on Twitter. I was reading about the Glomar Response. So in 1975 the LA Times gets wind of this whole thing, Project Azorian and Glomar, and they’re going to write a story. And the CIA goes whoa-whoa-whoa, nope. So, the CIA attempts to clamp down on this. The journalists file a Freedom of Information Act request and it is rejected.

But here’s the interesting part. It is the first use of the following. When they ask for information about the Glomar, the USNS Hughes Glomar Explorer, the CIA replies, “We can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the information requested. But hypothetically if such data were to exist the subject matter would be classified and could not be disclosed.” That is the invention of “we can neither confirm nor deny.” It is called the Glomar Response.

John: Wow. That’s amazing. That is kind of great.

Craig: It’s kind of like a good title for the movie, right? We Can Neither Confirm Nor Deny.

John: Project Azorian is also kind of great. Back to the issue of stakes. And I get your concern is that classically we think of sort of like, oh, it’s military, there has to be big stakes. And obviously Chernobyl has giant stakes. But I think we can step back and think about stakes that don’t have to be death and the end of the world in that I can imagine the scenario in which there’s significant tension between the US and the Soviet Union, which there is in the 1970s. And us trying to do this thing and not be caught doing this thing creates the stakes and the tension that you need.

The fact that there are potentially nuclear missiles. There are secrets that are down there. And you have all of the fun of a submarine thriller. And I do love me a submarine thriller.

Craig: Sure. Of course. [Unintelligible] Depth.

John: Yes. You have all of that fun technical challenge with this layer of absurdity and comedy with this fake operation. And you have Howard Hughes who is a great character. You get DiCaprio back in there to play Howard Hughes again. There’s really fun stuff to do here. And all the fun of the 1970s. So, I get your concern that it’s an expensive movie, that it can feel a little bit twee, but I think there’s a movie to be made here that doesn’t have to be quite so serious. That it can actually be like the way that Argo was able to do things of a thriller but also have fun with it.

Craig: Right.

John: I think there’s a movie here to make that way.

Craig: Well, I think tonally you’re right. You want to keep it kind of on the lighter side because it’s not, you know, we have to stop the missiles from hitting a city. It is more of this kind of bizarre – the thing that comes to my mind is many years ago there was an HBO miniseries, oh, I’m struggling to remember the name. But it was about the Pentagon’s creation and building of the Bradley Troop Carrier, which was an insane boondoggle. And it became this kind of Kafkaesque investigation and the madness of how the Pentagon actually paid for things and what they did to things and how stupid they were and wasteful they were.

It’s kind of awesome. And so in part it’s a little bit of an investigation of the way the government functions. So, because it’s bizarre. The people who think that the CIA is this kind of all-powerful shadowy organization that controls our lives through chem trails and so on and so forth, they’re really missing the more shocking truth which is that it’s just bureaucracy. People sometimes do bizarre things. But if it gave us nothing more than “we can neither confirm nor deny” it would be worth it.

John: Yeah. Let’s talk about characters. It’s not clear from this story who your central characters are. I think Howard Hughes is an ancillary character.

Craig: Yeah.

John: It feels like it’s an ensemble. It feels like you’re seeing a bunch of people trying to do their thing, which again works in this genre. We expect this in political thrillers. We expect this also in submarine thrillers. So we can have a bunch of characters who have their own arcs, but it’s not going to be sort of one hero’s journey through this. It doesn’t lend itself very well to that.

Craig: Right. Yes, agreed. I don’t know – you would have to probably invent somebody that was in charge of the whole thing. I don’t know if there is somebody specifically who was in charge of the whole thing. But, yeah, it’s kind of a fun sort of cat and mouse Cold War story. Almost in a way like everybody fails, right? The Soviets lose a nuclear submarine, which they are particularly good at unfortunately. And then we go to enormous lengths to get it and break it in half and lose the second part of it with all the stuff in it. It’s kind of like two superpowers in a drunken slap fight.

John: That’s what it is.

Craig: And, again, it seems like it’s tilting slightly towards comedy.

John: Agreed. All right, our next possible story is a Do it for State. So Dan sent this. It’s about an Instagram influencer who is sentenced for 14 years for a violent plot to steal a domain name. This guy’s name is Rossi Lorathio Adams II. He went by the name Polo. And he ran a series of accounts across Instagram and other platforms known as State Snaps. And this is all while he was attending college at Iowa State University. And so I went to school in Iowa so I know Iowa State.

Craig, this guy and his desire to get the domain name doitforstate.com and threats and violence and actual committing crimes to get this domain name, is there a movie in this?

Craig: No. [laughs] No.

John: I don’t think there is either. But let’s talk about why.

Craig: It’s an interesting concept. So it’s a – I suppose you would call it a modern twist on two people fighting over a thing, like a small thing. So it’s almost a revenge story. In this case there’s a guy named Ethan Deyo who owns the doitforstate.com domain and Adams wants to buy it and Deyo says, “Well, I’ll sell it to you for $20,000. And Adams thought it was too high, so instead he thought what he would is spend less money to hire his cousin, a convicted felon named Sherman Hopkins, Jr. And I feel like if you are named Sherman Hopkins, Jr. the odds of you becoming a convicted felon are about 100%.

So Sherman Hopkins, I mean doesn’t it sound – it’s a great villain name. Sherman Hopkins, Jr. Sherman Hopkins, Jr. breaks into Deyo’s home and threatens him at gunpoint to transfer the name. And it doesn’t work, because what happens is Deyo fights back and after Hopkins shoots him in the leg and then he shoots Hopkins a bunch of times in the chest. They both survive. And Hopkins ultimately gets sentenced to 20 years in prison. And Adams was convicted in a jury trial of conspiracy to interfere with commerce by force.

So, the whole thing centers around how weird it is that people are fighting over something that’s virtual.

John: Yeah. That’s the problem I think ultimately. There’s not a thing you can look at and hold. There’s no MacGuffin that is actually a thing.

Craig: Well, there is one way to think about this which is – the domain name part I think is the problem. It’s just a domain name and people are like, whatever. But there are virtual objects that cost a lot of money. We know that from Warcraft and things like that. There are these special items that people do sell for real money. And there is an interesting version of the old heist film where you’re heisting something that doesn’t actually exist, but yet has great value, as a kind of commentary on the, well, why did diamonds have great value? They’re actually common. They’re common carbon junk. But, you know, we’ve decided they have value.

So, there’s an interesting thought but I think sometimes we get fooled into thinking that modern equals new. It’s not new. It’s just modern. And it feels a little cynical really to – you know what I mean?

John: Yeah. So this past week we had the big Twitter hack where you and I and everybody else who has little blue check marks got locked out of Twitter because shenanigans happening inside Twitter and social engineering had led to Joe Biden’s account and other accounts tweeting out bitcoin things. And it was a stupid plan that just didn’t seem to actually work very well.

I don’t that’s a movie either because while the decisions leading up to it and the investigation around it have characters who are trying to do things and there’s objectives and there’s questions to be answered, there’s not ultimately a thing. You can’t point – there’s kind of nothing to aim a camera at in terms of what the objective is.

Craig: Right.

John: Even classic heist movies when you have Ocean’s 11, there’s a vault they’re trying to get into. There’s actually a thing that’s there. And there’s obviously misdirects and a lot of things going around, but there’s something you can point to. And there’s nothing you can point a camera at with either of these, other than the cinematic moment of like characters beating each other up and shooting each other in front of a computer.

Craig: Yeah, which we know sucks.

John: It does suck. Lastly, let’s take a look at Battle of Blair Mountain. So Robert Guthrie sent this through. This is an historic event that I was not aware of. So it was the largest labor uprising in the United States history and the largest armed uprising since the American Civil War. This all happens in West Virginia in 1921. It’s five days in 1921. It’s part of the Coal Wars, which were these labor disputes in Appalachia. About 100 people were killed. Many more arrested. There were bombs being dropped out of planes. There was a lot going on here.

And so some of the early parts of the Coal Wars are covered by the movie Matewan which I confess I’ve never seen. There’s not been a movie or miniseries that’s about this Battle at Blair Mountain.

Craig: I think it’s Mate-wan.

John: Is it Mate-wan?

Craig: I think it’s Mate-wan.

John: I’m thinking of Matewan, New Jersey.

Craig: There is a Matewan. I think that’s why I know it’s Mate-wan because I lived near Matewan in Jersey. So I thought it was Matewan and I think it’s Mate-wan. Yeah, I feel like it’s – I mean, that’s a great film. And I think it’s done. I think he did it. Do you know what I mean?

I’ve looked at this stuff. I’ve looked at a few of these things. People will send me things now of like “you should do this.” And I’ve looked at this and it is remarkable. This is somewhat reminiscent also of the whole thing that went down in it was Carnegie and the striking – it was iron workers I think. And the Pinkertons. So there actually were wars that would go on between these private militias and working men and women, in which people died.

You know, he did such a good job I thought, John Sayles, of making it beautiful and personal. I don’t know if there’s a straight-ahead kind of historical thing to watch here that would be better than documentary or more valuable than a documentary.

John: That’s a good point. The only reason why I wanted to put it on here to discuss is that I look back to Watchmen and what Damon’s show was able to do in terms of framing Tulsa and the massacre at Tulsa. And that was an event that I wasn’t aware of. And I think most Americans weren’t aware of. And realized like, oh, that actually happened?

I think sometimes you need the big fictional recreation of those things to realize like, oh wait, we actually bombed American workers and it doesn’t land unless you actually see it portrayed.

Craig: Right. To that extent this could be an interesting element of something, the way that Tulsa was an interesting element of Watchmen. They used Tulsa as the original sin that blossoms out into what it eventually becomes. And in doing so also educated people about something that was very real that happened that we don’t look at normally. And this is another one of those things.

It’s also the source of Mother Jones.

John: Oh yeah.

Craig: So there’s Mother Jones Magazine. It’s a well-known liberal political publication. And Mother Jones was one of the leaders in this group. She was one of the people that was involved in this. And tried to stop the war from happening. And failed.

John: Yeah. So, Craig, if we can’t get this movie, can we at least get a Ragtime musical movie?

Craig: Oh, I would love that so much.

John: I would love that so much.

Craig: So much.

John: So much. That’s what I want.

Craig: Maybe the best opening song of any musical.

John: Oh my god. Incredible.

Craig: Just like–

John: All the pieces moving together.

Craig: Everything. It’s just like, boom, here we go. It’s so good. Yeah, there should be a Ragtime musical. Where’s that? Where is it?

John: I’ve had some conversations. I don’t know if it’s ever going to happen.

Craig: Well, you should. I mean, you should do it. It’s such a beautiful show and I think more relevant than ever.

John: Oh yeah. In terms of what is the American–

Craig: Yeah.

John: What are the goals of the American Project?

Craig: That’s right. Exactly. And taking a look at the American Project not just focusing on white people.

John: No.

Craig: And the music is spectacular.

John: It’s really good. So, these were four things we picked, but I want to quickly recap things we didn’t pick because there are also interesting ideas there. Someone pitched a Roger Stone biopic. Someone wanted a spoofed Genghis Khan biopic. Genghis Khan is such a challenging figure to do. But I think a spoof may in fact be, I don’t know if that’s better or worse.

Craig: Funny-con. Sure.

John: Sure. Chinese American immigrants being forced to work on the Transcontinental Railroad. It does seem weird – maybe there is a movie about Chinese workers and the railroad, but it feels like it’s such a big part of our history. It’s weird that there’s not one that I can think of. How the Lone Ranger was based off the real life story of Bass Reeves, a freed slave who protected the Wild West. That’s, again, kind of in Watchmen.

Craig: Yes. And there are many Bass Reeves projects out there that have been brewing for a long time. I think I know like eight different people that are working on a Bass Reeves thing, so that’s going to happen eventually.

John: Megana’s pick for this segment was Is LA’s Trendiest Brunch Spot Serving Horrible Moldy Jam?

Craig: Ooh. Why didn’t we do that? I mean, that’s not a movie, but still.

John: It’s not a movie at all.

Craig: Oh my god. This is amazing. I mean, do they do it on purpose?

John: Not on purpose, but basically it’s a restaurant that’s known for its homemade jam. But the problem is like the people who actually work in the restaurant and they’re like there’s this mold growing over all the jam. They’re just scraping the mold off.

Craig: Well, yeah, because I mean homemade jam I suppose is basically like agar right?

John: It is.

Craig: The perfect growth.

John: It’s a petri dish for that.

Craig: But if you’re using preservatives and things, which I’m sure all the large companies do, then the mold doesn’t grow there. But they don’t, and so, yeah. This is one of those things where honestly sometimes all natural, it’s like, no, mold is all natural. So, enjoy your stomach ache.

John: Enjoy your mold. Several people sent through this really good Wired article about Marcus Hutchins, the hacker who saved the Internet. It’s a really good article. It’s just really, really long. There’s a thousand ways into it, so I just didn’t pick that.

The Real Story of What Happened When Six Boys Were Shipwrecked for 15 Months. So we are used to Lord of the Flies, but historically when there was a real life Lord of the Flies situation they didn’t turn on each other. There wasn’t all sort of what we expect about the worst of humanity. They got along great.

Craig: Yeah.

John: And they worked together.

Craig: No cannibalism.

John: And a Teenage Girl Gang that Seduced and Killed Nazis.

Craig: I feel like this comes up every week, right?

John: Yeah. Actually we have done this in a previous segment about sort of like these young women who would seduce and kill Nazis.

Craig: I mean, I salute them.

John: Absolutely. 100% endorse what they do. I think punching Nazis, great too.

Craig: Totally.

John: Totally. Let’s answer some listener questions.

Craig: All right.

John: Spratzen wrote in to say, “A friend who is a working studio screenwriter was recently asked by an exec to come up with a pitch for a family film centered around the UNO card game. I said he shouldn’t do it, or he should write his own script based on Crazy 8s. Did we learn nothing from the Emoji Movie?”

Craig: Well, the Emoji Movie offered the writers vastly more than the UNO card game would. That’s just stupid. And this is why I sometimes despair. And I will say, I mean, look, that executive was asked by somebody else to do this. It wasn’t like that executive woke up that morning and went, oh my god, I’ve got it. UNO.

Somebody in a corporate room said, “Give me a list of our products that have a built-in awareness and therefore go make a movie out of it.” You know what? I’ll tell you this much. Lord and Miller could do it. Chris Miller and Phil Lord could absolutely figure out how to make a great UNO movie. Other than those two people, no. It’s not doable.

John: I have friends who have been working on the Monopoly Movie, which at some point got close to being made.

Craig: Sure.

John: I was also talking with another young screenwriter who was going in to pitch on – I don’t want to spoil what it is, but it’s basically a childhood playground game. And the producers had asked her to pitch on that. And what I will say is that when you have something like that that is just so, god, there’s nothing here, it does force the kind of like, OK, how do I take this thing that does not have any natural story hooks and find a way into it.

Craig: Yeah.

John: So, I get that. Examples I’ve used on the blog for many, many years, I’ve always said the Slinky Movie, because the Slinky is the least story-driven thing you could imagine. Basically it just walks down stairs. That’s all it can do.

Craig: Right. It’s a coil.

John: It’s a coil. It’s a coil of metal or plastic.

Craig: Yeah. They are interesting from a kind of sheer puzzling point of view. And I have had experiences, a number of experiences, working in movies where somebody has given me a puzzle like that and I’ve said, OK, I accept your puzzle challenge. And I try and do it. And I think I do. I have found a solution to this puzzle. But that doesn’t mean anyone is going to actually want to sit in a theater and watch the solution to the puzzle. It just means you solved it.

John: That’s really what it comes down to is that basing your movie around the property of UNO, you’ve sold zero tickets. It gives you nothing.

Craig: I feel like there’s probably like one of those families with like the 20 kids where they are all going to – they’re like, “When is the UNO movie coming out?”

John: When my daughter was in grade school she had a friend who was obsessed with UNO and had all the different variants of UNO.

Craig: Wow.

John: But he’s one kid.

Craig: Yeah. And even he might be like, “Ah, I don’t need to see the movie.”

John: “They’ve taken everything that was good about UNO and they’ve ruined it. They’ve ruined the source material.”

Craig: “Do they even play UNO? Do they get it?” Yeah, that’s just silly. Camilla writes, “I just listened to the collapsing scenes episode and something I always get conflicted in the process of writing is when should I start collapsing. For instance, some people say that the first draft is a vomit draft and we should write throughout the end and only afterwards we start fixing. But sometimes I can already see things that will probably need collapsing and compressing and I have this urge to start rethinking them right away. Starting the fixing this early feels counterproductive because I’ll have to rewrite after I finish anyway. But it also feels counterintuitive to not do the fixing because it keeps buzzing in my head that it could be better and I should fix it right now.

“What I’m wondering actually is in which phase should we focus on collapsing?” And now Camilla you will get two completely different answers.

John: [laughs] I think – I don’t know that our answers are really that different. If as you’re writing stuff you recognize this does not work, I have three scenes to do, one scene works, I think it is generally the right choice to stop and fix it then, because you’re not doing yourself a favor by plowing through to the end and going back to do work – you don’t want to finish a script that you just know inherently, OK, all these things don’t work. Try to get through a script where it represents your best intention at that moment of telling the story. And don’t put off those decisions too long.

And so I’d say collapse as needed. And a lot of times I will be collapsing in the middle of a day’s work because I realize like, OK, I have been trying to do this as three scenes. It doesn’t want to be three scenes. It needs to be one scene, so I’m just going to do that work now. Craig, I suspect you are a similar writer?

Craig: For sure. And I think part of it has to do with how you begin your process before the actual writing occurs. Are you a big outliner? Are you an index card person? Are you a treatment person? So the more you know going in the less I think of this draft as the first draft. I don’t really think of a first draft as a first draft. My goal is when I write “the end” and hand over something in script format in theory you should be able to shoot it and get something pretty good. That’s my goal for that. So, I do so much of the kind of pie in the sky thinking and blue sky thinking and all the other sky thinking analogies before I start doing the writing. When I’m writing, if I feel like things should be collapsed down or if I realize something is broken I stop. And I fix it.

Because I find that it is all – if everything is going to be unified and feel like it’s part of one whole beautiful thing that was always this way as opposed to being assembled, then the more you build on top of something you know is wrong the more wrong everything will be.

So, don’t be afraid of that. Look, Camilla, here’s the deal. If you find that you’re so obsessed with that stuff that you can’t move forward and you just keep treading water in the same spot, that’s not good obviously. Right? But if you are like, look, I need to spend three days fixing these ten pages. They’re not correct. Or these scenes. And then I can move forward. That’s writing. That’s great. It’s actually an excellent sign that you are thinking the way a writer thinks.

John: Yeah. Here’s an analogy I’ll try out. Let’s say you are a mason and your job is to build a chimney. And as you start to build the chimney you’re five feet up and you realize, oh crap, there is a problem two feet down lower. This one brick is in the wrong place and the whole thing is sloping a little bit. You could keep building the rest of the chimney, but it’s just going to get more and more out of alignment. So you’ve got to go back, take those bricks back, fix that brick and build it up straight.

As a screenwriter you’re going to go back and replace those bricks 100 times again, but fix those problems when you recognize them because it will only get things more out of whack down the road.

Craig: Yeah. You are right to say that you will be rewriting later, but there’s a difference between rewriting something that is pretty broken and rewriting something to take something that is good and making it better. That’s where you want to live, right? The “it’s broken/fix it” only gets you to I guess neutral, right? So, yeah, I think you’re thinking about it the right way. If you feel that desire, listen to that desire. You’re probably right.

John: Yeah. Alec asks, “Do you have any tips for writing stories that suggest the film will be low budget/high profit margins? Some answers come to mind, like fewer shot locations, collapsing scenes, fewer actors. But I would love to hear your thoughts on writing projects that are low budget but suggest a high profit margin.”

Craig: Well, you’ve got the big ones there. So the movie that comes to my mind is Saw. Saw is kind of the best version of this I can think of. You’re in essentially one room. There are a few other scenes. You’re essentially in one room. That means that you are able to shoot a ton in one spot. You don’t have to build multiple sets, nor do you have to find multiple locations and drive around to get there. There are two actors throughout almost everything. So your cast is limited down to two people.

And because they’re in a room they’re also mostly talking. There aren’t going to be a lot of visual effects. There’s not going to be a great need for tons of cameras either.

So, those are the big ones.

John: Yeah. But what I will say is you can come up with this concept and you can pitch this concept and maybe you get hired to write this concept. It doesn’t mean that the movie is actually going to make a ton of money. These movies that are super cheap to make, they are lower risk in general, although if they are actually going to be released all the costs of releasing that movie could be quite a lot higher than the actual budget of the thing itself.

Craig: Right.

John: So I would just stress that underlying advice behind everything is write the movie that you want to see. And if that movie you want to see is a Saw, is a Blumhouse kind of feature, fantastic. Those things are easier to get made than the big expensive things. But don’t write it just because you think that’s the easy thing to get made, because that’s not what you should be writing.

Craig: Yeah. You can really only control the budget. You can’t control the profit margin. The audience is going to control the profit margin. And remember that while making stuff for little money, hoping for large reward is a good strategy for a company that makes many, many movies, it’s a bad strategy for an artist because you’re only making one. Even if 99% of the time that works, if you roll a one on your D100, you lose. Right? There’s no ability to amortize.

So I think you should make low budget movies when you have a low budget. That’s what I think you should do.

John: Do you know another way to make a low budget movie is to not pay the writer very much. That’s another thing.

Craig: Oh god, don’t do that.

John: But realistically, there’s a reason why Craig and I aren’t hired to write low budget movies is that we are expensive as writers.

Craig: Yeah. And also I detest low budget. I actually prefer – yeah, no, I’m imagining that in those cases Alec is probably the writer and maybe director as well.

John: We’ll end here with Scott. Scott writes, “You all talk about Birth of the Nation and how awful it is, so what is the first good movie?”

Craig: I don’t know.

John: And I don’t have an answer for that. I don’t want to reveal my ignorance of film history.

Craig: The Great Train Robbery. [laughs]

John: Sure. Let’s throw this out to our listeners. So please write in with your suggestions. What is the first movie that was made that you can hold up and say like this is still a good movie? If you watch this movie it meets the modern requirements of what a good movie is. I’m curious what our listeners think the first good movie that was made is. And it doesn’t obviously have to an English movie either.

So, tell us what the first good movie is.

Craig: I would guess maybe like a Chaplin film.

John: Sure.

Craig: Maybe a Chaplin film. I don’t know. I don’t know. You know what? I hate the whole best movie thing anyway. Birth of a Nation just sucks. But I never know how to rank things.

John: Well, it doesn’t have to be ranked though. I would say what is an early movie that you can watch and say, oh, that is still an actually genuinely good movie and it’s not just a good movie in the sense of like it’s important for film history–

Craig: But that you actually want to watch it. As a silent film. Because I would imagine we’re really saying what’s the first silent film that you think, wow, that actually really is still super watchable and great.

John: Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is Swift UI and Swift Playgrounds. So for the Mac and for iOS, so my company builds Mac and iOS applications, the underlying programming language which you use for all Apple products is called Swift. Last year they introduced Swift UI which is a new way to create the user interface elements for your applications, so it’s all the buttons and the windows and sidebars and how all that stuff works so that it looks right and works well.

It was a really clever way that they do it. It’s a very simple programmatic way of describing what you see on the screen and what those interactions should be.

So this last year at the WDC they introduced a lot of new stuff to it and really made it quite a lot more powerful. But it’s also really simple in the way that Hyper Card was for me back in the day. You can actually play around with it and see like, oh, this is how I do these things. And it’s been really exciting to play with. So I’ve been able to mock up some applications that we may end up building down the road.

And if you don’t want to download all of X-Code which is the big application which is scary for building professional things, there’s a thing called Swift Playgrounds which works on your iPad or on your Mac that you can build these really sophisticated little things in sort of a playground environment and windows and buttons and things that do cool things and really feel like an application you’d be delighted to use on a daily basis.

So, if you’re interested in programming at all, if you’re a person who has done some web stuff but have been curious about building applications, I really think Swift UI would be a great way for you to explore building some applications. It’s very, very clever stuff that Apple has introduced.

Craig: That’s excellent. Apple, by the way, I guess no longer using Intel chips in anything. Is that the deal? Leaving all that behind, right?

John: They announced a transition for the Macintosh to move it to the same family of processors that they make for iOS, for iPhones and for iPads and such. And so our lead coder Nima now has one of the test kit computers that does not have an Intel chip in it at all. And so the good news is that Highland and all the apps we make they already work on the new hardware. So, that’s great.

Craig: I’m sure Final Draft, they’ll [unintelligible].

John: 100%. First day, you know.

Craig: Final Draft was built on a Babbage machine. Do you know what that is?

John: I do know. Those old things, basically like a loom. Good stuff.

Craig: That’s one of the best things I’ve ever said about Final Draft.

OK, so my One Cool Thing is a gif. Now, do you say Gif or Jif?

John: I say gif with a hard G.

Craig: Well, you’re right. You’re correct. And I know that the inventor of the Gif says it’s Jif, but it’s wrong. It doesn’t matter if he invented it. You know what he didn’t invent? Phonetics. Gif stands for Graphic Interchange Format. Graphic. Not Juraphic. But graphic. It’s Gif. Anyway.

John: If you put a T on it it’s Gift. That’s how–

Craig: Thank you. Exactly. If you put an A in there it’s Gaffe. Anyway, point is one of my favorite gifs, I’m sure you’ve seen this John, is Alonzo Mourning, well let me describe it for you since you don’t know who Alonzo Mourning is.

John: No. I don’t.

Craig: He’s a basketball player. And he is shaking his head sort of in just disappointment and then sort of goes, wait, you know what, but actually I get it. Have you seen this gif? Do you know what I’m talking about?

John: I don’t know that I have seen this gif, although it’s reminding me a lot of the young woman who is tasting Kombucha for the first time.

Craig: Oh no. That woman is the best. That’s a whole other level. But this one, let me just send it to you now so you can see what I’m talking about. Alonzo Mourning Gif.

John: Yeah. It’s fantastic.

Craig: Yeah. So Alonzo Mourning, this is why I love this one. I mean, first of all, a little bit of context. Alonzo Mourning played for the Heat. This was all the way back in 2006. This is quite old. 14 years.

The Miami Heat had won the championship the season before. So they were the returning champions, right? This is like welcome back to dominate yet again. And they’re playing the Chicago Bulls. And this is their first game and it’s the fourth quarter and they’re down by 30 points, which John is quite a bit in basketball.

John: That’s a lot. Even I know that.

Craig: They’re getting crushed. And he’s sitting there and he’s doing something that I think we don’t have a word for. Maybe the Germans do but we don’t. Which is just disbelief followed by acceptance. Like he’s going – this – I don’t understand, no, you know, actually I do understand how this happened. I guess, you know, we suck. Yeah, it happened.

It’s an amazing expression. And gifs are really good at kind of encapsulating expressions or feelings that we don’t have single words for. But this one, I just wanted to single out even though, you know, it’s not like it’s a new thing, but it is a cool thing because more maybe than any other gif it illustrates that we need a word for.

John: Mm-hmm. Here’s the other thing I think is useful to be thinking about with gifs is that so often in screenwriting we are trying to find words for things and really an actor’s face will do a lot of that work for us. And so we would have a hard time writing dialogue that would sort of get this feeling across. But seeing it in his face – it’s a little bit clipped at the end, but you see it in his face. You kind of get it.

Craig: You kind of get it. And it’s one of the reasons why I’ve become such a fan of writing dialogue in action. Because I know – if there’s a line where I know that I can get the vibe of this from your face. I don’t want you to say it, I just want you to be thinking it evidently. It really is helpful. In a way you’re prompting your actors to give you gifs.

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: Which is wonderful.

John: Act more like a gif.

Craig: Act more like a gif. Gif it up.

John: Cool. That is our show for this week, but reminder to stick around if you’re a Premium member because we will be talking about 2020: The Movie and where do we even begin with 2020: The Movie. But for this episode, Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro is by James Llonch and Jim Bond.

If you have an outro you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can send longer questions. For short questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust. We have t-shirts and they’re great. You should get them at Cotton Bureau. There’s a link in the show notes.

You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you find the transcripts.

You sign up to become a Premium member at Scriptnotes.net where you get all the back episodes and bonus segments. You even get a cool new welcome message if you join now that Craig and I recorded last week. So, something to look forward to.

And that’s our show. Craig, thanks.

Craig: Thank you, John.

[Bonus segment]

John: Craig, 2020: The Movie.

Craig: 2020.

John: What is the trailer? What does it even feel like? There’s too many story options in 2020. So should we divide it into categories? I don’t even know where to begin with the kinds of things that are happening in 2020.

Craig: I think the 2020 trailer begins with a couple at a New Year’s Eve party. It’s 2019. Everyone says they’re counting down. Happy New Year. And they kiss. And then the guy or the girl or the guy and the guy, they look at each other and then one of them says, “I think it’s going to be a great year.”

And then–

John: I think it’s going to be a great year.

Craig: And then the camera just moves past them and you see on TV it says 2020. And that’s when Jordan Peele’s “I got five on it” comes on. And you realize that everyone is dying. Everyone is going to die.

John: Yeah. Everyone is going to die, but also systems are going to break down. But then hopeful systems are going to sort of rise up. The political scandals will be immense. Do you remember that we impeached the president? Do you remember that was a thing that actually also happened.

Craig: Huh. When was that? Which year of 2020 was that in?

John: Exactly. There’s far, far too much. So let’s talk about the different kinds of what’s happening in the world right now. What things down the road become movies? And so will there be a movie about aspects of the Coronavirus, aspects of this pandemic?

Craig: There will be movies that use the, one of my more hated phrases, “Take place set against the backdrop of…”

John: Mm-hmm.

Craig: There will be a backdrop. A Coronavirus backdrop. We’re going to see that, it will be as prominent as that weird gray backdrop they use for commercials where people sit on a stool and talk about yogurt. We’re going to get a lot of Corona backdrop.

John: We’ve seen shows try to do special things during this pandemic. So, Parks and Rec was out early with an episode that took place during the Coronavirus. 30 Rock did a special episode which I genuinely loved, which was a promo for the Peacock launch. I really loved the special episode they did. And Tina Fey is just so, so smart. The whole cast is so talented. And it was weird to see how much progress had been happening in how we film stuff ourselves.

And so the whole cast was able to film themselves and put together a credible episode of 30 Rock even in the context of all this. It wasn’t just people staring at Zoom the entire time.

So that’s a TV show. That’s not a movie. The movie version of Coronavirus is not Pandemic, or Contagion or any of those things because it’s been just so slow and so mismanaged. And there’s moments of crisis but it’s more just like, I don’t know, it’s tough. Because you could make a black comedy version of it, but the whole world lived through it and knows that it wasn’t funny.

Craig: Correct. And this is what’s challenging about that. And the Band Played On is fascinating because most people in the United States were straight and unaffected by AIDS. And then somebody else came along and said we’re going to tell you this story that you haven’t been watching, that you haven’t been looking at, or you think you knew, or just were purposefully ignoring, and look at what happened. And there were quite a few movies that came out following the AIDS crisis that illustrated what it did to people. Early Frost I think was one.

So there were a ton of these things. But partly they were bundled also with a kind of emerging gay rights movement and a desire to be recognized and normalized as human beings. The Coronavirus, everybody knows what it is, and I don’t know what – you don’t need to draw their attention to it. People are being drowned in Coronavirus stories. And Facebook, which of course has ruined the world, firehoses a volume of nonsense into people’s faces every day about Coronavirus, some of which might mistakenly be accurate. But most of which is nonsense.

And so I don’t know if anybody would ever – I feel like if somebody said we’re doing a movie about the Coronavirus crisis that people would just riot.

John: I remember I got a call about doing a movie about legalization of gay marriage and it was all centered around the Supreme Court decision. And the producers were so excited. It’s like, oh, we should have a gay writer write this thing because it’s such an important thing. And, OK, as a person who was actually involved with the lawsuit from the very start, I can tell you that there’s not a movie to make about this. And it’s not that these plaintiffs were particularly the most heroic people in all this. They were the face of this thing, but there’s not a simple straightforward movie to make. The Supreme Court victory, while important, was not the cinematic moment here. And that feels like the problem with the Coronavirus movie as well. There’s not a thing to latch onto.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, sometimes with these movies the problem is that there’s just a right answer. So, what was interesting about And the Band Played On was that it wasn’t always just the right answer. I mean, you could see how for instance the gay community in San Francisco kind of screwed up early on. They were deadest against closing the bathhouses, because they didn’t know what was coming, right? I mean, nobody understood what HIV was. Nobody had ever seen that. And they had every reason to be paranoid about the government trying to shut them down.

So, there were these conflicts. There was also serious conflicts between doctors who were trying to figure out what was actually causing this. It was a mystery. Nobody knew.

Well, we know what Coronavirus is. And we also know what’s correct. There’s not really – I mean, there is this side of people that are nuts, but everybody knows they’re nuts, which makes them boring. If you think that a mask is somehow limiting your freedom you’re just an idiot and you’re boring. You’re not a good villain. It’s no fun to watch.

It’s like when I saw Loving. Did you see Loving?

John: I never saw Loving. This is Loving vs. Virginia. So it’s a recent biopic.

Craig: Right. So it’s about the couple that led to the decriminalization of interracial marriage. And so that would be fairly analogous to a gay marriage movie. You’re like, yeah, they’re right. And the other people are bad and wrong. So, I’m going to watch it and I salute them, but also they’re just wrong. The good people are good and the bad people are bad. That doesn’t make a great story.

John: So, going back to this notion of there’s one community knows about a whole thing that’s happening and the rest of the world doesn’t know about it, Black Lives Matter and sort of the protests over George Floyd feels like that kind of moment happened in 2020, where something that was incredibly obvious to the Black community for decades and generations was suddenly very visible to a white population that had never really wrestled with it.

So, what are the – as we’re looking at movies that come out of the events of 2020, I can imagine there are movies that are going to be about aspects of that. That are about sort of not necessarily the protests but the actual changes around it, the specific moments, the new leaders who emerge from it. I feel like there’s some story/movie to be made about that.

Craig: Possibly so. Seems like good fodder for metaphors. Literary artistic metaphors and analogies. I mean, if you were to–

John: Like how The Crucible is about McCarthyism?

Craig: Right. Exactly. Like if you were to do a story, kind of a horror movie story where there are ghosts. But only Black people see them. Right? Only Black people see these ghosts that are dangerous and harmful and can kill you. And they keep warning us and nobody listens to them. And one day we all see the ghosts.

See what I mean? There’s a way to analogize what is the perniciousness of racism and the inability of white people to see it. And then suddenly they see it. And then they act like, “Oh my god, did you know that there were ghosts?” [laughs] It’s like, “We Were Telling You!”

There’s ways to analogize these things so that you’re not just saying to people we’re going to tell you that racism is bad. Because what it comes down to is people that know that racism is bad already know it. And the people that don’t know it aren’t going to go see that movie because they’re racists. So what do you do?

So you have to fool them a little bit with art.

John: Yeah. The way that the Marvel movies have always been about sort of marginalized people coming together to reclaim their power.

Craig: Or the use of state power to combat terrorism and vis-à-vis civil liberties and all the rest.

John: Yeah. Finally, we can’t talk about 2020 without sort of the central character in this who is Donald Trump and how do we use him in movies about this time? I think one of the first movies we’ll see that has him as a character in it will be Billy Ray’s Comey movie.

Craig: Yeah.

John: But it’s hard to imagine there won’t be other stories about this time that need to have him in there as a character. And it’s going to be weird and tough. The same way that I feel like it’s hard to stick Hitler in a movie. It’s going to be weird to put Trump in some of these movies.

Craig: Yeah. I mean, Trump is boring. This is the problem with Trump. He has five phrases that he says over and over. He’s boring. He’s stupid. And everybody knows it. So what do you do with a guy like that? I mean, Hitler said all sorts of things. [laughs] You know, I mean, I’m not a Hitler fan as you might imagine, since he killed a lot of my relatives. But he was certainly smarter than Donald Trump.

So Donald Trump is actually rather boring. I wonder if maybe what we’ll start to see are the stories of people that could be good, who could have been noble and done the right thing and failed.

John: Yeah.

Craig: So you start seeing profiles in cowardice. And what does that look like. Lindsay Graham is a guy that somebody is going to write one hell of a movie about one day.

John: Yeah. Absolutely. When we know what was really happening. Because we can all see from the outside, OK, something is going on there. There’s some pressure being applied.

Craig: I think we have a general sense of what it might be.

John: I think we have a general sense. I do feel like at some point we’re going to know more about the Republican hacks the same way the Democratic hacks and what leverage was being put against people. Or even if it wasn’t actual leverage, the fear that something could be applied against them informed their decision making.

Craig: Yeah. We’re going to find out one day. It’ll all come out. It always does. That, I think, will be fascinating. Because Trump really is as interesting to me as snow. It’s sort of like, well, it’s snowing again. Oh, god, I’m going to have to clean off the car because the snow is happening. Or, Donald Trump is on TV saying that he knows more than anyone and we’ll have to see and people are saying and everyone knows.

John: What I think will be good about whatever those movies are is that there are so many thematic through lines to be able to pick. You can just choose what theme do I want to explore and you can explore in that. So the degree to which one small decision rolls into the next decision. Or you lose your morality bit by bit. I think you can find really interesting ways to look at human nature in terms of how they’re dealing with the crisis with him or the crisis of Black Lives Matter or the crisis of the pandemic.

Again, we’ll always need to focus on what is the human story we want to tell against these backdrops.

Craig: Yeah. I’m kind of interested in the story of someone who perhaps goes to work for Donald Trump, I’m saying a real person, actually I have one in mind, who goes to work for Donald Trump with the internal understanding that they have a chance to perhaps prevent terrible things from happening and maybe guide Donald Trump towards something better and be an adult and keep a governor on the whole process. And then slowly but surely loses them self. You know, they came to do one thing and then they just – suddenly they’re gulping Kool-Aid down because they get tired of being attacked and yelled at by everybody else.

You become embattled and embittered. And suddenly it’s an us-versus-them and you buy into the whole thing and now you are part of the problem. That’s an interesting development to witness.

John: Yeah. Something I suspect I read on Twitter is I’m really curious whether right now in Trump’s reelection campaign there are individuals who are actively trying to sabotage it. And if so, how would we even know? In that you have a person who is so chaotic and so – any decision you make could be justified based on well that’s what the president wants because the president has no ability to think strategically or think ahead. And related to all of this is when this is all over who is going to claim that they were a person on the inside trying to undermine him?

Craig: Well, first of all, screw all of them for that.

John: True.

Craig: I think if there’s anybody trying to sabotage Donald Trump’s campaign from inside they have very difficult competition in Donald Trump himself who just every day I assume sends his campaign people to their beds swallowing Xanax and just waiting for it to all be over. Because he’s impossible. He’s impossible.

And, look, who knows. He might win again. Right?

John: He might. Yeah.

Craig: He won that other time.

John: He absolutely could.

Craig: He might win again. And in that case he sort of “proves them all wrong.” Except that they weren’t wrong. He’s bad for everybody. What they’re really trying to do is steer him towards being more like the president they wish he were. But he’s not. He’s not.

John: They won’t change him.

Craig: No.

John: That’s the thematic thing we learned most about 2020 is the events of the world don’t change people.

Craig: Good lord. No. Well, you know what?

John: Black Lives Matter, I think they actually did change some people.

Craig: People are changing. And then there was this fascinating thing that occurred the other day where Chuck Woolery was confronted by reality. It is amazing to me to watch people finally get hit in the face by the cold fish of truth.

So he was one of these Trumpety dos who insisted that COVID was a hoax and not real and overblown and all the scientists are lying to us. And specifically he said it’s being exaggerated by the media to undermine Trump. And then his son got it. And suddenly he was saying this is very real and it’s very serious and I’m leaving Twitter forever. Goodbye.

Well that sounds like truth arrived. And it is remarkable to me how many people in this country are incapable of accepting truth until it personally impacts them. Personally. It’s like they don’t believe that, I don’t know, driving without a seatbelt is a problem until someone in their family goes through a windshield. It’s the weirdest thing. I can’t explain it. I don’t understand it. But it’s part of our culture.

John: It’s the crisis of empathy. The inability to picture someone else in your situation or you’re being in someone else’s situation.

Craig: Yeah. And I don’t know if it’s that they can’t empathize or if they are just – they dehumanize certain groups. Like they don’t really care if something happens to “liberals” or people in the blue states, or Black people.

John: Protestors in Portland.

Craig: Or protestors in Portland. Because those people are less than anyway. It’s when it happens to real people, like they always talk about real America which just basically means ME. They’re like, “I’m real. And it hasn’t happened to real people yet.”

John: [Sighs]

Craig: [Sighs] This movie sucks.

John: Thanks Craig.

Craig: Thank you, John.

Links:

• WGA Studio Summary
• WGA Studio Agreement
• UTA WGA Deal
• Wife crashes own funeral to confront husband who paid to have her killed by Sarah Kaplan
• Project Azorian by David Shukman
• Instagram influencer sentenced to 14 years for violent plot to steal domain name by Nick Statt
• Battle of Blair Mountain
• Swift UI and Swift Playgrounds
• Disbelief Followed by Expression: Alonzo Mourning Gif
• Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
• John August on Twitter
• Craig Mazin on Twitter
• John on Instagram
• Outro by James Llonch (send us yours!)
• Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

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