The original post for this episode can be found here.
John August: Hello and welcome. My name is John August.
Craig Mazin: My name’s Craig Mazin. How can I help?
John: This is Episode 552 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the show we talk narrative geography, professional development, and when it’s okay to take that pitch out somewhere else. Then it’s another round of the Three Page Challenge, where we take a look at entries from our listeners and give our honest opinions on what’s working and what’s not. In our Bonus Segment for Premium Members, we’ll teach you the one secret to social media everyone is too afraid to show you.
Craig: Oh god, it’s not the top 10 secrets?
John: No, there’s just one secret, it turns out. It’s a secret you already know, Craig. The secret was in you the whole time.
Craig: I can’t wait.
John: It’s going to be good.
Craig: Fun.
John: I should say there’s not a general language warning for the whole episode, but I will probably swear when we get to that part. If you’re a Premium Member and your kids are in the car, John’s going to probably be saying some bad words.
Craig: Now you’ve unleashed me.
John: Craig, we’re going to start with some Follow-Up. This is so much in our pocket. It’s one of those questions that comes in that you and I are so well qualified to answer. Megana, start us off.
Megana: @ryanbeardmusic from Twitter asked about the credits for the upcoming Elvis movie. He said, “Hi all, can you explain Baz’s multiple writing credits for Elvis, please? I presume it’s a WGA thing, but I can’t wrap my head around it.”
John: This tweet shows the credit block for Elvis. This is what it reads. It reads, “Story by Baz Luhrmann and Jeremy Doner. Screenplay by Baz Luhrmann & Sam Bromell and Baz Lurhmann & Craig Pearce and Baz Lurhmann & Jeremy Doner.” Baz Luhrmann’s name appears four times in just the writing credits for this movie. That’s a lot, but it happens. Craig, talk to me about why this happens.
Craig: We do answer this pretty frequently, but this is a particularly good one. I really like this one. The way to understand all this stuff is to understand that every writing team that works on a movie is considered an individual writer for the purposes of credit. Let’s say there’s a writing team of Baz Luhrmann and Sam Bromell. We know they’re a writing team because of an A-N-D between them, there’s an ampersand. The ampersand tells you they’re a team. They count as one writer for the purposes of credit arbitration.
Now, when we do credit arbitration, and in this case there was an automatic arbitration, because Baz Luhrmann is also the director of the film, we don’t know who the writers are. We’re given scripts, and the scripts say Writer A, Writer B, Writer C, Writer D. I’ve done a couple that hit Writer H, which was exciting. What happens is we say, okay, we’ve gone through all the scripts, and here’s what I think it is. I think that the writing credit should be story by Writer A and Writer B.
John: With an A-N-D between those two.
Craig: That’s right. Writer A and Writer B, they’re two different writers. Then I think it should be screenplay by Writer C and Writer D and Writer B. Now, here’s where it gets fun. What if Screenwriter C is Baz Luhrmann & Sam Bromell? As it turns out in this case, that’s what happened. Baz Luhrmann wrote on this own for the purposes of story. Then he clearly did a draft in tandem as a team with a writer named Sam Bromell. He also did another draft as a team with a writer named Craig Pearce. This is an interesting one. Basically, the arbiters gave out as much credit as they could on this. They gave credit to the team of Baz Luhrmann and Sam Bromell. They gave credit to the team of Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce. They gave credit to Jeremy Doner. Then when it came to story, they gave it to Baz Lurhmann and they also gave it to Jeremy Doner. Wow.
John: It’s a lot. Here’s a thing that will help people understand this is, if you added some parentheses it would make a little bit more sense. If you put some parentheses around Baz Luhrmann and Sam Bromell, if you put parentheses around Baz Luhrmann and Craig Pearce, parentheses around Baz Luhrmann and Jeremy Doner, you’d understand those are three separate writing teams, and they were probably Writers B, C, and D, but they could’ve been writers B, F, and J. We don’t know how many writers were involved in this project.
Craig: Sure don’t.
John: That’s how it happened. By the distributive property, you want to be able to put Baz Luhrmann out and then put everyone else in parentheses, but you’re just not allowed to do these credits. As a person who’s been an arbiter on these things, I can tell you that Craig’s exactly right. We have no idea whether these people are writing teams or individual writers when we’re reading through these scripts. We’re giving credits to Writer A, Writer B, and then C, D, and E. We have no idea. That’s why you get credit blocks like this which look kind of strange. Same thing happened with Chloe Zhao on Eternals. It’s just a thing that happens.
Craig: It’s just a thing that happens. There is only one weird circumstance where we can collapse the credit down a bit. That is if there’s a writing team and then another writer, and the writer is one of the writing team, and there’s nobody else getting credit. If I worked on a script with John, it would be Craig & John. Then John goes off to do something else and I write another draft just by myself, and the arbiters say, oh, A and B both share credit. Written by Craig Mazin & John August and Craig Mazin looks bizarro. In that case they can smush it down to just written by Craig Mazin and John August. The apportionment of residuals would still be accurate to the technical credits.
John: All this was done by the books and is all good. I think a person could reasonably argue that there should be some way that these writers could agree to have the credits not have his name there so many different times, that there’d be some way the actual monies could be apportioned properly, but the credit block could look less screwy. Craig, under our existing rules, could these four writers decide that?
Craig: No. They can’t. There is an almost never used rule that says that writers can determine their own credits if they want to get together and do that, but not in the case of an automatic arbitration. Furthermore, the apportionment of screenplay credit among three writers can only be granted by arbitration.
John: Yes, in this case the screenplay is apportioned between three writers, in this case three writing teams, so only arbitration can do that. Megana, did that answer your questions?
Megana: I guess my question is can you talk about the development process of this, the process of Baz Luhrmann working with these three different writers? Are they hiring these people on to work as a part of a writing team to work with Baz Luhrmann?
Craig: Yes.
Megana: My question was whether the writing team is also under contention, like who did what to the draft?
John: We know people who’ve worked on… None of these writers. We don’t know these writers personally, but we know other folks who were involved at some point in this process. I think the call was, hey, do you want to go to Australia and work with Baz on this script. A writer would go and work with Baz for a couple weeks on this thing. It was a collaborative team writing thing where you were doing stuff together. There’s no real transparency into that process from the arbitration point of view. How much were they really a team? I don’t know. These writers were hired on to work on drafts with Baz Luhrmann.
Megana: Got it. That does clarify things.
Craig: That’s correct. There is really no… Other than a writer protesting to the guild and saying, “Listen, I was strong-armed into being part of the team. I didn’t want to be part of the team,” or somebody stuck their name on as if we were a team, but they really weren’t, unless that kind of protest happens, no, it’s just presumed that the writers who share the credit on the title page there for that draft are a bona fide team. It does seem like Baz Luhrmann probably wrote some kind of treatment at some point, some sort of story material by himself. Whether that came before or after Jeremy Doner, I do not know. Then it seems like he did indeed have at a minimum two writers that he did extensive work with as part of two different teams.
John: That’s my guess as well.
Megana: Got it. Thank you guys.
John: Megana, what else do we have?
Megana: Chris asks us, “What do you call the page before a script begins, where the writer puts either a quote or an explanatory message? I’m trying to figure out why writers do this, because my gut reaction is that it feels like cheating, but perhaps I’m missing a valuable tool I could use to better elucidate or thematically prep the reader for some of my writing. I don’t mean a character list like in The Nines script. I’m referring to something that is much more directly explanatory for the reader.”
John: Craig, what do you call that page between the title page and the first page of a script?
Craig: I don’t. It’s just the stupid page with the stupid quote on it.
John: It feels like a dedication page. I’ve also called it an intermediary page. If there were a standardized name for it, I think it would be helpful, because it’s weird we don’t have a good standardized name for it.
Craig: You could call it quote page. It’s not something that you need to worry about, Chris, honestly. I don’t think it’s cheating. If somebody wants to do it, God bless them. Is it a valuable tool? No. There has never been a single screenplay that went toward the path of success as opposed toward the path of failure, simply because of the strength of its quote. It’s not a thing. It doesn’t matter. You’ll be fine. You use it, you’re fine. If you don’t, you’re fine. It is not a valuable tool. It sounds like it’s not the kind of thing that you feel a great desire to do. The vast majority of screenplays do not do this.
John: The majority of the screenplays I’ve written do not have one of these pages. He mentions The Nines, which has a character explanatory page, which was really crucial for that, because otherwise you might not realize that the same actor’s playing these characters in different parts of the movie. Big Fish has one. It says, “This is a Southern story full of lies and fabrications, but truer for their inclusion,” just a single sentence on that page. It was helpful for Big Fish, because it just set up the right tone for what is the story you’re about to read. For that, I thought it was great. It ties in very nicely to the next question from Corey here. Megana, if you want to ask.
Megana: Corey asks, “In Episode 550 you discussed a screenwriter placing a trigger warning page between the cover and Page 1, whether it was warranted. I’ve written a screenplay that has several characters with disabilities. I don’t outwardly identify as a person with a physical disability, and I’m concerned that it could deter producers into thinking my writing is ableist. My question is, should I be putting a disability inclusion/information page at the top of my screenplay? Since my script is a comedy, it involves both abled to disabled bullying and disabled to disabled bullying. Can an information page alleviate potential producer concerns or scare them off more quickly?”
Craig: That was a really good question. Wow, it’s funny, we’ve been doing this so long, John, that now we actually can get new questions, because the world changed. That’s how long we’ve been doing this.
John: It did change.
Craig: The world changed.
John: Craig, before your answer, what would your answer have been 10 years ago?
Craig: My answer 10 years ago would’ve been nobody cares. That is not the answer that I would give today. This is a good question to ask. It’s relevant, because I think that a lot of producers, particularly in mainstream Hollywood, have become very concerned about this issue. Depending on what the story is, they may feel a burning desire to know if the writer is part of the class they are portraying. There’s lots of ways they can find out. The easiest way is your agent. Your agent says, “By the way, I represent this disabled writer, and he or she has written this script.” If you don’t have representation, nobody’s doing that for you, then I think it actually is helpful to put some kind of thing in there to let them know that you are coming at this from the inside as opposed to from the outside.
John: I agree with you in principle. I’m trying to imagine what would actually be said on that page that would both set the reader up for a good experience reading the script and not feel weirdly pre-defensive. I think it’s a really challenging thing to phrase there for that one page, that one sentence you’re going to put there, that’s going to set the person up right.
Craig: It’s not an easy… You could simply say something… Let’s say Corey’s last name is Jones. “Corey Jones is a disabled writer from Virginia.” You could do something as simple as that that is the most barebones biographical thing. Then I think the readers would say, “I understand why you were saying this.” I don’t think anybody would go, “Who cares about your bio, Corey?” They would get it, I think.
John: I think another alternative would be to find some quote, a thing a real person said out there, who is a disabled writer, a disability activist, who said the most important thing is that we push hard and then take it back. There might be some quote from a disabled person who says you also have to be able to have fun. You can’t put people up on a pedestal. There might be something like that that can actually help frame the comedy that you’re about to get into, because otherwise the person might be uncomfortable with some of the bullying that’s happening there.
Craig: Every comedy, you risk that, regardless. You could. You just don’t want to start your comedy by saying, “Lighten up. It’s a comedy.”
John: Don’t do that. Not a thing to do. I can imagine other kind of comedies that are talking about marginalized communities where a similar kind of advanced statement could be really helpful in framing who you are and why it’s appropriate for you to be telling this story or the kind of story that you’re hoping to tell.
Craig: Megana, what would you do in a situation like this? Should there be something? What do you think? Also, how would you phrase it?
Megana: I think it’s becoming a lot more common just in my experience. I feel like I’m seeing whatever we want to call that interstitial page a lot more. I think that people are more open to reading that. I think the quote is nice. I think what John was saying about finding a quote that frames it, without being too explicit, sounds nice and warming you up to the story.
John: I’m curious what our listeners think about this issue, but also what to call that page, because Megana just said interstitial page, which is the term I was reaching for rather than intermediary page. What do we want to call this page? I feel like if we just picked a title to this page, within five years we could actually name this page, and it would no longer be a question out there in the world. Write in to Megana or just tweet at us and let us know what we should call this page between the title page and the first page of the script. Those are follow-up-y questions, but Megana, we have some new things in the inbox. What do you got for us?
Megana: Great. Fred asks, “What do established screenwriters do for professional development? I’m in a field where there are continuing education requirements to keep up on the latest developments and hone my skills, but I’m curious what you do.”
John: Craig, are you caught up on all your classes or your coursework? Is your documentation up to date?
Craig: Yes, I have been proceeding up the ladder of professional development, and I should have access to the executive bathroom shortly.
John: That’s good, because you got to keep your credentials going there, because you never know when you’re going to be called up on it.
Craig: I’m so un-credentialed.
John: We tease, and yet there are some things I think we are doing consciously or subconsciously that are the equivalent of professional development. There’s certain things like WGA Showrunner Training Program, well-known, well-respected. Hey, you are going to be running a show. Here’s a boot camp in how you run a show. That is important. It’s been going on for a decade. It’s been really helpful in people figuring out how to do that job, the management function at that job. Things do change and evolve over the course of our careers. What Craig was just saying about 10 years ago, he would’ve had different advice for this writer, than now when we recognize that the world around us has changed to some degree, and we have to adapt what we’re doing. Yet there’s not a systematized way of doing that, because we’re not continually employed by the same employer. Just know we have to do HR training and sexual harassment training if we are staff on a show sometimes. For feature writers, that’s not really a thing.
Craig: I did have to do that when we started our production here. I don’t really consider that professional development, per se. It’s a creative job. We really don’t have professional development beyond watching TV, seeing movies, reading books, talking to people that are different than we are, the things that creative people and writers have always had to do. Professional development, I think in a lot of fields, is essential. Then in other fields it seems like it’s just a bunch of busy work designed to make people jump through hoops so they can get paid more, when they should have just been paid more already. It’s a way for some people to say, “Oh, I took these seven classes, so I should get paid more than that person, who is way better at this job than I am, but I took the seven classes.” We don’t have these problems. We don’t have the benefits or the drawbacks of professional development. We just try and stay plugged into culture and hold on to some relevance, I think is probably a good way of putting it.
John: I would say, just to be perfectly honest, most of my professional development has come through Scriptnotes, because you and I having a structured weekly conversation about the profession that we’re in, between each other, but also with all the guests that we bring in, I learn a lot, especially when we bring in folks who are doing something different than what I’ve ever done. We bring on showrunners or folks who are working in late-night or other fields I’m not directly involved in. That’s professional development, because I’m learning how they’re doing their jobs, the questions they are asking themselves, the struggles that they are facing. If I were to run a TV show, I’d be much better prepped, just because I’ve been doing all of the work and listening to these very smart people talk about their jobs.
Craig: There’s your answer. All you have to do, Fred, is start a podcast and do it for 10 years. Then you too will be professionally developed.
John: Love it. Megana, what else do you have for us?
Megana: Rachel asks, “I’m working on a spec script that’s based in a city I know well. I know where each of my characters live and work, and when I have them meet, I’m automatically thinking in terms of where they would genuinely meet if they were real, like which character would selfishly pick a place that’s close to their home but inconvenient for everyone else. At the same time, I’m aware that this isn’t generally how real-world locations are treated in actual movies. Any Before Sunset fan who’s visited Paris knows the disappointment of trying to trace Celine and Jesse’s walking route, only to discover that it dissipates after 10 paces because they teleported to some entirely different part of Paris mid-scene. Is my current approach misconceived? Am I sweating a set of considerations that don’t matter at all?”
Craig: A good question.
John: That’s a good question. I’m not saying you are totally misconceived, but I think you’re also, in your question, you’re answering your question. In the real world, people don’t think about that as much. In the actual making of films, we are going to cheat things to get from place to place. All that said, it does drive me crazy when people can do impossible things in LA in a movie. In movies that I’ve set in LA, things like Go, I am mindful of what part of town I’m sticking in and being sure it all tracks and makes sense within that part of town, both logistically but also just culturally and visually that it feels like you’re in the same part of the city that whole time. It’s not wrong for you to be thinking about where these people live, but you can get too anchored into some of your choices in the script that aren’t going to be relevant to the reader or to the viewer.
Craig: There was this note that used to get handed out a lot in the ’90s. Let’s say you were writing a movie that was set in Miami. The studio executives say, “I feel like you need to make Miami more of a character in the movie.” You would always think, oh, yes, yes, but what does that mean? Do you mean show places in Miami or have things that are… That’s what setting a movie in Miami is supposed to be. What do you mean? I think maybe all they meant is to provide some bits of authenticity and specificity. I think it’s probably a good thing that you’re thinking this way because it’s helping you think about your characters. If you think in terms of where they would genuinely meet if they were real, that gets you closer to where that scene is going to take place.
Now, if you’re doing a movie that is very much about a city, then sure, you’re going to want to make sure that Fenway Park is where it actually is in Boston, because people will just point at you and say that you’re terrible. It’s okay to lay everything out as truly as you can, and then when production happens, you figure it out. If they say, “We can’t shoot there. We’ll have to shoot here,” you can either rewrite it or you can cheat it. If it’s helping you write and it’s helping you achieve a certain amount of verisimilitude, specificity, and authenticity, then yeah, as long as it’s not holding you up, march on.
John: The other thing I would ask you to do is keep in mind what your reader needs to know versus what you want to know, because you as the writer/creator have this vision in your head for how people got from this point to this point and the shoe leather that would take them from this moment to this moment. That may not be important to your reader at all. Always just try to go back through your script and think, okay, do they actually need to know this detail? Do they need to know this connecting bit, or are they just looking like, “We’re in this location and we’re in this location. We don’t need to know how we got there or how realistic it is.” Is it not informing the characters and their dialog and the choices within those scenes, it probably doesn’t belong in your script.
Craig: I want to answer another question, desperately.
Megana: Do you want to answer this one from Jack from Sydney, Australia?
Craig: I haven’t read it, but yes. I don’t know what you’re going to say. I haven’t opened the thing. I’m committing to answering this question no matter what it is.
Megana: Jack says, “I recently completed a feature, and after receiving some extremely warm notes from a coverage service, I decided to share details and the log line of the project online. It’s very high concept, and judging by the responses and feedback, it’s clear the idea alone has a great deal of appeal. Off the back of this, I’ve been contacted directly by development executives asking to read it, which all sounds very positive but also has me a little nervous. I know ideas on their own are a dime a dozen, so I’m very keen to get the entire script into people’s hands to digest and enjoy. As this is my first time with any sort of industry attention, I’m just not sure how to navigate this and whether to share it freely with whomever asks. I’m unrepped and still very early in my writing journey, so any advice on what to expect and how to manage this would be appreciated. Before sending, should I watermark my script somehow? Will I be expected to sign release forms? Are these for my protection or theirs? Is this all just the ramblings of a paranoid newbie?”
Craig: I’ve committed to answering this question, Jack.
John: Craig, do it.
Craig: I’m going to answer this question. Don’t worry. You are from Australia, Jack. I do not know how copyright functions in Australia, but I can assure you it offers you more protection than copyright does in the United States, because copyright protection in the United States is the worst, unless you’re a business. You have Droit Moral. You have moral rights of authors and so on and so forth. The point is, when you write something, you have established authorship. There is likely a copyright office in Australia. You should contact them, register your screenplay with them so that there is a legal paper trail. Then you should go ahead and give it to people. You can absolutely watermark it. I think most of the major screenwriting programs do it. John has a separate program called Bronson Watermarker that does it.
John: Oh my gosh, this is Craig Mazin hyping one of my products. Please make a note of this in the transcript. This is the first time this has happened.
Craig: I don’t know if I hyped it, but I’ve acknowledged it.
John: Acknowledgement is hype from Craig Mazin.
Craig: If your sales spike, I want money. Yes, you may be expected to sign release forms, but they have requested this, so it is now, instead of an unsolicited screenplay, it is a solicited screenplay. If it’s an unsolicited screenplay, it’s fairly common for them to ask you to sign something, because they really didn’t want to read it at all, and they don’t want to get sued over something they didn’t want to read. If they’re soliciting it, then in general you should be able to send it to them, watermark it with their name. They won’t be offended. It is for everyone’s protection. Live and love, man. Go for it. That’s what you wrote this stuff for is to show it to these people, right? Show it to them.
John: The moment has come which you’ve been hoping for which is that people like your stuff and want to read it. This is very exciting. Yes, so you can watermark it. It doesn’t have to be a big, obnoxious watermark either. Just a little reminder like, hey, this is for you and only for you. You have a trail because they’ve asked for it, and then you were emailing the thing. Down the road, if you do need to sue somebody, you could prove that they had access to it, that they read the thing. It’s fine. Don’t catastrophize this yet. The best possibility is that you’re going to make some connections. You’re going to hopefully find somebody who makes this movie or at least wants to meet you as a writer. These are only good things. I’d say take the excitement, work with the excitement, and keep pressing on. Also, in stressing out over this script, don’t stop writing your next one, because that’s even more exciting than this current one.
Craig: Agreed.
John: Megana, give us one last question before we get to these Three Page Challenges.
Megana: JJ from Pasadena says, “A couple of months ago, I had a general meeting with an exec from a company that controls a lot of magazine IP. After the meeting, the exec sent me a couple of articles they thought I might be interested in. One of the articles clicked with me, and I came up with a pitch for a show. I didn’t use any characters from the article or any other material except for the idea for a setting. Even then, my setting became completely fictional. I pitched my idea, and they passed. My question is, am I free to take this pitch to other places, without the article attached, of course? The characters I created, their relationships and backstories are wholly original works and have nothing to do with the article. My managers are saying it’s tricky, but my take is what’s the difference between what I did here and me reading the article on my own and using it for inspiration to create something original, which happens every day?”
Craig: Managers. I swear to God.
John: I’ll take the first crack at this, because I may have a different approach than Craig. We just talked through Jack’s situation where people have solicited his script, and so he doesn’t have to worry about this. In this case, the reciprocal is true, because this magazine can show like, oh we came out to you for this thing, and we didn’t want it. We didn’t want it, but you took this article that we’ve used, and it became a basis for your project. Is that likely? Not likely at all. The way to make it even less likely or ever become a thing is to really change whatever other details were from that article and just make it your own thing. If this thing was set at a bowling alley, could it be set at a roller rink instead? Is there a different place you could set it, it just gets rid of all traces of that article? Yes, what you did, JJ, was create a whole new story that was vaguely inspired by that thing. You can get rid of that thing that was underlying it and use what you’ve got there as its own pitch. Craig, what’s your take?
Craig: The tricky part is only the diplomacy between yourself and these other people, but they passed.
John: They passed.
Craig: Which to me, that’s the end of diplomatic negotiations. The fact is, I’m presuming this article is nonfiction. It may not be. If it’s fiction, that’s a different story. To me, I don’t think of articles as fiction. If you had said essay, that might be different. Fiction is copyrighted, and it is a unique expression and fixed form. You can’t infringe upon somebody’s copyright on that any more than they could infringe on something you wrote.
If it’s a nonfiction article about facts, and the facts have been published in a magazine or newspaper, those facts are free to everybody in the world. You cannot own facts, particularly after you have reported them. You have gone even further than you would need to go, because you’re not using any of the characters from the article, or if it’s nonfiction I would call those people people. Then you said your setting became completely fictional. I think you’re perfectly fine if it’s nonfiction. If it’s fiction, no. That’s dangerous. You would have to make it very, very different so that when the executive from the IP magazine company hears about what you’re doing and reads it, that he or she can say, “Oh my god, I’m suing you.”
John: Let’s talk for a moment about fiction versus nonfiction, because we’re not lawyers obviously, but let’s talk about it just in a general sense of why they feel different and why they work differently in terms of what we consider literary material. If something is a work of fiction that has characters in it, something that has story developments, you can see, okay, this is the movie within this space. These are characters that were created to tell this one story. It’s hard to get rid of all those things and create a whole separate story. It’s unlikely you’re going to do this. As opposed to most nonfiction works, which are like, okay, this is about underwater mining, and there’s just a general sense of how this all works and the people involved in this, but there’s nothing there that you couldn’t go out and just do your own research and come up with the same details and facts. You’re going to be able to do that with nonfiction. You’re not going to be able to do that in fiction. That’s part of the reason why they feel different and why you don’t see the same kind of problems happening with the nonfiction articles.
Craig: The nonfiction work is research. You’ve read it. It counts as research. It’s facts. Certainly you can write about real people. You can’t defame people. The reason that we are so obsessed, we meaning Hollywood, with buying the rights to nonfiction articles, is because it helps the company stake a claim to an area, so everybody else knows they’re making a movie about let’s just say-
John: FIFA Soccer scandal.
Craig: The FIFA Soccer scandal. So-and-so has bought the rights to this big article in Rolling Stone about the FIFA Soccer scandal. They’re going for it. Also, now, when they buy that article, they have access to the journalists’ notes and all the stuff that was behind the article, including the contact information for all the people they talked to so that you can keep going further. You can also use things that they didn’t publish in the article. Beyond that, facts are facts. It’s just research.
John: Facts are facts.
Craig: That’s why anyone can write a movie about the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan. You can take any fact you want from any nonfiction book or article, any of them.
John: Let’s discuss a practical matter though. Let’s do your Reagan assassination attempt thing. Let’s say there was a really good article and JJ was brought in to maybe pitch on this really good article about this Ronald Reagan assassination. It’s a very specific moment and beat. They say, no, actually, we’re not interested in that. If JJ then went out and started pitching this Ronald Reagan assassination movie to other places, those producers would be pissed. The ones who passed would be pissed. Would they legally have a claim to stop it? No, not really, they wouldn’t, because he could do his own research. That doesn’t mean it’d be a good idea for JJ to do, because it’s very clearly they brought him in, they passed, and he’s going off and doing that. Doesn’t mean he shouldn’t do it. It just means he should be aware of that. I can understand some hesitation there. It doesn’t sound like JJ’s situation is anywhere near that specific.
Craig: No. It’s a bad idea unless somebody buys it, in which case it was a great idea.
John: Then it’s a great idea.
Craig: This is an area where having great representation helps a lot, because representation can launder these kinds of interactions. No, you wouldn’t want to be known for going around town shopping an idea like this. If you had a general meeting and you mentioned your awesome take on the attempt on Reagan’s life, and they got excited, when the other people call to complain, your agent’s going to say, “They wanted to make one too. They mentioned it to him. What do you want? You don’t own the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life.” Then they just have to eat it. This is the danger of developing stuff that’s nonfiction. While I was developing Chernobyl, there was a competing Chernobyl project at Discovery, I think, which now amusingly is HBO, so that’s weird. You’re aware that it’s there. Let’s all see what happens. Nothing you can do.
John: Let’s get on to our Three Page Challenges. These are, as far as we know, not based on any fiction or nonfiction works. Instead, these are pages that our listeners have sent in. If you go to johnaugust.com/threepage, you can see the entry form, which you can send us a pdf of your three pages, generally the first three pages of a script. It can be a teleplay. It can be a screenplay. Every once in a while, Craig and I will read through these and give you our honest opinions. I say we read through these, but of course it’s really Megana Rao, and in this case Drew Marquardt, our intern, who is reading through all the entries in this last batch. If you want to read along with us, you can go to the show notes for this episode and click there. It will have the links to the pdfs of what was sent in to us, so you see. You could pause this episode and read through the pdf first, or just go back through it after you’ve listened to us describe them. We have three of them here. Megana, could you help us out with a summary of this first script?
Megana: The first one is Tag, You’re It by Suw Charman-Anderson. In the dead of night, World War One trench fighter William leads a small group of soldiers to silently plant barbed wire in No Man’s Land. Caught by a German patrol, William is riddled by machine gun fire and bleeds out. We cut to present day, where Nia Jenkins, 50s, goes to take a sip of water but notices a drowned spider in her cup and flings it across the room. At the same time, a man in filthy clothes mutters to himself as he walks through the town center. He lunges at a group of students who fight back, and in the scuffle, pull off his hoodie to reveal he’s William, and he hasn’t aged a day.
John: Craig, one thing I want to say about these pages before we get into anything else is a lot happens in them. There’s actually a fair amount of story beats that happen in just the course of these three pages, which I just want to commend, because so often we’ll get through three pages and it’s like, okay, that set up some scenery, but not a bunch happened here. A bunch happened here, so good job on that. Before we get to these three pages though, the title page here reads Tag, Season 1, Episode 1, You’re It, but doesn’t have Suw’s name or contact information on it, nothing else. A cover page doesn’t do any good unless you actually have the cover page stuff on it. Just make sure you’re always putting that stuff on for a Three Page Challenge or for any script you’re sending out there into the world.
Craig: Particularly if your script is entitled Tag, because there is a thing in television that is the tag, and so they may think, wait, is this just the end of Episode 1. You might want to put that in all caps or something, just because… It’s a little interesting. Often, you will see pilot episodes. Season 1, Episode 1 is a bit… It’s very optimistic.
John: Say pilot.
Craig: I think pilot seems a little bit more true to what it is, unless Suw knows something that we don’t.
John: Craig, when we got into… We’re opening up in these trenches of World War One. What did you think of this first page? Let’s go through the World War One sequence.
Craig: There was a lot of really good stuff here. World War One trenches are pretty evocative things. I think that Suw did a pretty good job of placing us in that world. I needed a little bit of effort, which I didn’t want to expend, I generally don’t want to expend any effort early on, to get through a little bit of lack of information. It begins with, “Exterior, World War One trenches, night,” although it is WWI. I think if it’s World War One, you can go ahead and write it out at that point.
John: I agree.
Craig: You can come back to the abbreviation later, but give us the first bit. Then it says “super: the Western front, 1916.” Other than my late father and men his age and history professors, a lot of people are not going to know what the Western front was. They’re not going to know where it was. I think we need to hear where we are, whether we’re in Germany or France. We need to know a town, an area, just so we can place ourselves.
I loved that William Fernsby, I liked he had “ferrety eyes and a shaven head.” He’s “up to his ankles in filthy water.” He’s got lice. He’s waiting for the soldier in front of him to move forward. It’s a nice way to move us into establishing that there are six men. It says “in the wiring party.” We don’t know what that is. Probably not a good idea to use that lingo when you just need to show me what you show me next, which is they’re gathering “supplies of six-foot pickets and rolls of barbed wire.” We proceeded through the No Man’s Land. Again, probably a good idea to give people a little bit of a concept of what No Man’s Land is, which was essentially this dead space in between opposing trenches.
This puzzled me. I’m curious, John, what you made of it. In the second scene, “William treads carefully, quietly, his nerves humming. The German trenches are only 150 meters away. There’s a noise.” Noise is in all caps. “The entire party freezes, nervously searching for its source. Communication is by hand signal and low whispers. Slowly, as they realize there’s no one there, they begin to move again.” Now, I know what happens next, but what-
John: Yeah, but at the time, what-
Craig: What is this noise? What is it? Do you know? I don’t know.
John: I don’t know what that noise is. You have to be more specific here, because a noise could be anything. What do they think they hear? Do they hear movements? Do they hear someone approaching? What do they think are hearing?
Craig: Describe the ruckus. We need to know what they think it might be. Now, it seems to me that what Suw’s going for here is in the next scene, “William has moved away from the others.” That’s pretty vague. Why? What’s he doing? Why is he away from the others? “Out of nowhere appears a German soldier,” which is ironic, because that is how a German would say that. It’s backwards. A German soldier appears out of nowhere is better syntax, I think. “Part of a patrol.” You wouldn’t know that, because we don’t see them, because he’s alone.
John: Scratch that.
Craig: Don’t need it. Also, how out of nowhere? Do you mean apparated? Do you mean from the shadows?
John: From the darkness?
Craig: Yeah, because there’s clearly something supernatural going on. We need a little bit more clarity there. Also, it says, “The German soldier is on him immediately, but neither fire their weapons. Instead, they grapple hand-to-hand, silent except for huffs and puffs,” until the German soldier puts his wrist against William’s and then, “William screams in pain.” Why were they quiet earlier? Maybe that gets answered later. I don’t know. I like what happened next. Everybody died.
John: Everybody died. I was assuming they were quiet just because everyone has to be so super, super quiet. I think that could’ve been a little better set up. I think my only real frustration with this trench sequence is that throughout this whole thing I have got no sense of who William is individually. I wanted just one line. Just give one piece of business to William that is his alone, because otherwise it’s just the camera is favoring this one guy. I don’t know that’s going to be enough, because it is important that it is him, that we’re really going to see his face.
Craig: I agree. I did like that on the top of Page 2, the German soldier, which is spelled solider, a word that any spell check would capture, so please, for the love of God… “The German soldier leaps almost gleefully into the line of fire, his body jerking grotesquely.”
John: Love it.
Craig: Whoa, okay, that’s interesting. Then we find out that William is dead by, “William lies amongst the mess of bodies, eyes barely open, blood flowing freely from bullet wounds in his chest. Dawn breaks on the dead.” That’s great.
John: Dawn doesn’t break on the dead though, Craig. The sun suddenly comes up?
Craig: I still don’t know the difference between dawn and sunrise, to be honest with you. Every cinematographer laughs at me. Meaning there’s light on the horizon and there’s a lot of dead people. It was evocative.
John: It was evocative.
Craig: Then we ran into some trouble.
John: Last thing I’ll say is we want to get William off by himself. I think the wringing of the wire could be a good reason for him to be off by himself. Either he’s pulling ahead or he has to stay back with the reel as the others are pulling it forward. Just show us how he gets to be put by himself.
Craig: Agreed. No question, we need to explain that, because otherwise what’s happened is your screenplay has moved him somewhere he shouldn’t be so that something can happen. Audiences just don’t like that.
John: They don’t like that. That’s not all of our scenes. Next, we’re moving into Nia’s house, the bedroom. The room is “stylishly decorated, tidy but sparse … curtains drawn, dawn light seeping in around the edges.” I don’t know what tidy but sparse means.
Craig: Tidy and sparse. Sparse does not contradict tidy. It says “super: present day.” I’m not sure we would need that if you could just give us some details in the room that would tell us we’re no longer in 1916.
John: Now, we see this spider crawling around. I don’t need the spider crawling around at all. I basically just need… I love that she’s hot in bed and she’s the sort of person who sleeps hot and she grabs for the water and there’s a spider in it. That’s great. I think we spent too much time on this spider business.
Craig: Unless it becomes really important later, which is possible.
John: It could be.
Craig: We have some reverse syntax again. “Alone in the double bed lies a sleeping woman.” I’m starting to wonder if maybe Suw is a German speaker.
John: Could be.
Craig: “The menopause has reached Nia at last.” The menopause?
John: The menopause.
Craig: The menopause.
John: You got it.
Craig: I think it’s just menopause.
John: Menopause has reached-
Craig: She’s menopausal. Here’s my biggest issue. She wakes up. There’s a spider. She freaks out about the spider. She calls up for somebody named Tomos. There’s no one there. She’s upset. She then picks up the spider with some barbecue tongs and flushes it down the toilet. It says finally she can breathe again, except it says, “She can breath again. She sags.” Then that’s it. Then we’re off to a different scene. I’m like, why did I watch any of that?
John: I don’t know why we watched it.
Craig: I learned nothing. It didn’t drive me forward. Why? Here’s the deal. Suw, you get this big, exciting first sequence. Then you go somewhere else. I need something at the end of that sequence, doesn’t have to be crazy, to make me go, “Oh, what’s going on here?” I don’t get anything. I just get a lady flushing a spider.
John: I like the details. I like her with the tongs and all that stuff. I see it. It’s all great. I didn’t get any new information that’s making me extra intrigued. It just feels like a different movie, like okay, that movie happened, now we’re in this movie, and now we’re going to this third sequence, which is the college students. This fortunately does tie back into our opening. We see that William is part of this world. He seems to be the stereotype of the insane person rambling around that everyone’s trying to not look at, but mostly this worked for me. Then he’s on top of a student there. I would say my frustration at the end of this was, “With surprising speed and agility, the man lunges at the nearest student. There’s a scuffle as the others pull him off. His hoodie falls backwards, and we see his face.” The other student, who is that student? Is it a man? Is it a woman? Give us some detail here. Even if this character’s not going to survive this moment, we’ve got to know something.
Craig: Also, again, describe the ruckus. “There’s a scuffle as the other pull him off.” What does that mean, scuffle? Are people throwing punches? Do they grab him? Unless you were different, John, I had zero doubt that this was going to be William.
John: No. Of course it was going to be William.
Craig: His face is covered by a hoodie. I wonder who it is? You might, Suw, get away with not doing this ornate reveal and just a simpler reveal. We see a man from behind, stumbling “through the pedestrian precinct.” That’s an interesting choice of words. A car almost hits him. He turns, and now we see his face. It’s William, and he’s muttering to himself or whatever. This feels pretty involved. Generally speaking, “One notices the man but studiously ignores him,” I don’t know. The students, they’re nothing. They’re like props. Then we end with a reference to a character. We learn their name. We learn how the name is pronounced. We learn what their skin color is, what their eye color is, what their hair color is. We really probably don’t need all of that there. We’re going to learn it later. I would rather learn it when other people would learn it, because the audience isn’t going to learn it here. They’re not going to know his name here. I would probably dose that out a little bit later perhaps, because he’s supposed to be mysterious.
John: Agreed. Let’s give a little more detail on William at the start. Let’s consider whether we need to have this scene with the spider and Nia where it is, because I think it’s meant to be just a filler scene so that we don’t have these two things back-to-back. It’s not doing a job here. Let’s get to our William quicker. Even though I started this conversation by saying I was happy with how much happened in these three pages, and I still am, I think we could spend our time better in these three pages still.
Craig: If you do have what I think is a pretty interesting narrative conceit, which is Highlander but World War One, there’s other, more imaginative ways to show somebody being launched through time and still being alive and being as disturbed as the man who put this curse on him. I think this feels familiar. The executive feels familiar. I would really take a look at Page 3, and I would just ask myself… Let’s presume people get it, that there is actually… It’s not the most earth-shattering concept. Maybe put a little less pressure on the concept and think a little bit more about a more contemporary or challenging execution of it.
John: A thing we started doing recently with Three Page Challenges is that we asked them to submit a log line as well. Craig and I don’t know the log line until this very moment. I’m going to open up the triangle here. Here’s the log line for this thing which Suw sent through. “A curse transforms a single mum into an immortal heroine who must protect Earth from aliens, but is her 1,000-year-old champion really on her side or should she be protecting her enemies from him?” I did not see aliens coming.
Craig: No.
John: An involuntary immortal quality there, I get that.
Craig: You knew that Nia Jenkins was important because we saw the scene, so yes, but aliens, that’s the part I was like… That caught me by surprise.
John: I’m excited to see what Suw does with the rest of this script. I thought there was some promising stuff here.
Craig: Agreed.
John: Now let’s move on to our next thing. Megana, can you give us a summary of Halloween Party?
Megana: Great. Halloween Party by Lucas Abreu and Zachary Arthur and Kyle Copier. In a local newscast, a reporter delivers breaking news that three people have died and hundreds more were injured at a Halloween Party at Arizona State. They showed the mugshots of the two students identified as suspects, Carmichael and Allie. We then go back to two days earlier as Carmichael and Allie walk to class. Allie bemoans that they’ve yet to attend a single college party, but Carmichael defends this decision, saying he needs a spotless record in order to sit on the Supreme Court one day. Allie pushes back, insisting one party won’t destroy his life, but Carmichael asks her to wait until after his longtime crush, Maddie, leaves.
John: That’s where we’re at after three pages. Craig, first impressions of Halloween Party?
Craig: Lucas and Zachary and Kyle, this is going to sting just a touch. There’s a lot going wrong here. There’s a lot going wrong in a way that is very typical for screenplays. In that regard, this is, I think, useful and fixable. I want to go through them, because there are just a lot of screenwriting sins that pile up really fast and really consistently.
John: Agreed. There’s also some good things we can point out as well, but the sins are very obvious.
Craig: The sins are pretty obvious. Let’s start with sin number one. The reporter is not reporting the way any reporter reports. This is what the reporter tells us: Breaking news. Three people died and hundreds of people were injured “in a Halloween party gone wrong” near a college campus. Two people were taken into custody. They are the key suspects. What? How did the people die? It said investigation “into last night’s horrific events are ongoing.” What events? No one ever gets on the news and said, “Three people died.” How? Were they shot, chopped up, melted?
John: Poisoned?
Craig: We need something. Right off the bat, there’s just a clumsiness here. Reporter dialog is just something you need to get right.
John: Let’s talk about reporter dialog. This whole setup essentially is a Stuart Special, where it’s just like we’re seeing the aftereffects of this and the news footage of this thing, and then it jumps forward to three days earlier, which is fine. There’s nothing wrong with a Stuart Special. This could be a good setup because it is surprising that these two people did this horrible thing, apparently. They want to see them in the time before. That can absolutely work, but we’re relying on this newscast to do a little too much. I also wonder about starting over black. There’s a limited amount of time which an audience is willing to just stare at a black screen and have someone talking. I think this was pushing beyond that. Think about what are you actually showing on screen. Are there multiple reports happening simultaneously in an I Am Legend kind of way? That could be a way to get into it. This is not going to work here. All that said, I love the character descriptions of both Carmichael and Allie. “Carmichael, 21, short Black chubby kid with a smile wide enough that it probably hurts his face, has a cul-de-sac haircut and lipstick all over his face.” I don’t know what a cul-de-sac haircut is, but I love that his smile “probably hurts his face.” I love it. Craig, Megana, what is a cul-de-sac haircut?
Craig: In the shape of a horseshoe?
Megana: I took it to mean just suburban and nerdy.
Craig: We’ll have to look that one up. While we’re doing research on this, I didn’t mind this description, but I did not like the description of Allie. The description of Allie was, “Allie, 22, tall skinny woman who’s far cooler than she has idea about.” To me, that’s just cool but doesn’t know it.
John: I like “glossy eyed and faded, she’s still on top of the world and doesn’t give a fuck about her black eye.” Great.
Craig: Hard to get across in a still photo. Also, who’s watching this? It’s on TV. We won’t know she’s a tall skinny woman because you’re showing us mugshots. How do we know she’s tall and skinny? Is there a specific height on the mugshot? They don’t really do that. That’s from the bad movies from the ’50s. There’s so many issues here. I thought, okay, let’s see where we end up two days earlier. We’re at campus. By the way, there’s nothing wrong with the Stuart Special. We’ve seen this particular kind of Stuart Special a lot.
John: I do not believe that two days before Halloween, people are already wearing their Halloween costumes around campus. I just don’t believe it.
Craig: They’re not.
John: I did not believe the campus at that moment. They’re not. Here’s my frustration is, there’s no such place as “exterior, Arizona State University campus.”
Craig: Thank you.
John: That’s not a place.
Craig: Not a place.
John: It’s not actually a location. You can be like, the main quad moving between the dorms and this place, but describe, give us a place, because I don’t know what the ASU campus looks like. I need to know something, and especially because you’re going to do a walk and talk, attempt to do a walk and talk for a very long time between two characters in a space. I have no idea where we are. By picking a more specific place, you could break it up. Give us some things to do and see and change up the scene. Right now, we are just trapped in this conversation that just keeps going. Aaron Sorkin could not make a good walk and talk that could carry us through these two pages of some void that we’re in.
Craig: Well-observed that we are in a place that doesn’t exist. Many, many years ago, all the way back when I had my blog, I wrote an article called You Can’t Just Walk into a Building. I think that’s what it was called. It’s common for screenwriters to say walks into a building and looks around. It’s like, what building? Building isn’t a thing. Someone has to go find the building. What is inside of the building? Is it just a building? Campus is not a place. Absolutely true that nowhere on the planet Earth are people in costumes two days before Halloween. There is no reason for Carmichael to be dressed in a Harry Potter outfit. Why?
John: I think it’s trying to ironically comment on JK Rowling’s trans controversy. I have no idea why he’s in a Harry Potter outfit. No idea.
Craig: It’s a brave attempt, but no. Then what proceeds is two pages of what I called ticker tape writing, just dialog, no interruption, no action lines, no one else shows up. I simply have these two people having a conversation that doesn’t appear to have a moment before. The conversation begins like this, “This weekend we’re doing it. I think we should try drugs.” Okay, but what were they saying before that?
John: They were together. They were already walking.
Craig: Correct.
John: This could be a first line if she runs up behind him and grabs him, startles him, and pins him down and says this is what we’re going to do. That is the beginning of a scene, that that moment started. It can’t start with them already walking and she says this.
Craig: If you just added the word no, then I would understand that she was responding to something, and so that we were inside of a…
John: That’s true.
Craig: You can’t just start as if these people were walking silently and then suddenly, scene. Then what happens is two people that know each other very well start telling each other things that they should already know. They just start announcing things that they should know. “We’re seniors at the number one party school in the nation and have literally never been to a single party.” Yeah, they know that. “I want to be on the Supreme Court.” Yes, I know. Then, “You act weird around Halloween,” which is bizarre, but also something that you would know. Then, “Imagine how many more copies of my book I’d sell.” Okay, so you’re a writer. You need to tell him that, even though he already knows. Then he has to tell her that there is a woman that he is in love with, that she already knows about. None of this would happen.
John: It would not happen.
Craig: None of it.
John: We often talk about how late could you come into a scene and still get the purpose of the scene. It’s a fun exercise with this, because you would come in so much later to this and actually get the information out that you want to get out, and give yourself space to do more interesting things in here. We won’t keep beating on this, but it’s like a jokoid. It has the quality of dialog, and dialog that people say in movies, but it’s just there’s too much, and it’s not actually moving us anywhere, not going to any place. There’s one sentence I actually have to talk about, because I think it would be actually an impossible sentence to diagram. I’m going to read Carmichael’s sentence from the top of Page 3. This is what Carmichael says. I’ll try to give a fair performance of it. Here it is. “I’m simply saying I have to go in there with a resume solid enough for Lindsey Graham to be comfortable nominating somebody with a skin color that’s darker than his mother’s.” Wow.
Craig: What I wrote next to that was awkward and written. By written, I mean instead of somebody talking, which is what dialog in a screenplay is for, it appears that somebody has taken some time to write some prose out. He does it again. Then his next dialog brick is, “This just kind of feels like one of those moments I bring up in my bestselling autobiography 50 years from now where I talk about how your decision to try drugs in this moment led you to a life hunting for Sasquatch and multiple felony-level prostitution charges.” No.
John: How many words was that?
Craig: So many words. The sentences are coming out in absurdly complete packages. I have a challenge for Lucas and Zachary and Kyle. The challenge is I want you to rewrite this scene. I want you to not worry about being funny. I don’t want you to write a single joke. I want you to write it in the most realistic way possible, as if these were actual human beings walking across an actual campus, going somewhere, coming from somewhere, and having a discussion that two people that have known each other for years would actually have, in the way that they would have it. Just go as low concept as you can. Go mumblecore on this. You can always then pull it up. I think you guys need to get down to the really realistic ground on the ground before you can start getting into the comedic stuff, because it’s just not connected to reality right now.
John: I very much want to see that. I was going to propose the same thing. I want to see a cleaned-up version of this. I think it’s also challenging to have a team of three writing scenes. It can happen, but you don’t see it very much. It’s not common.
Craig: That’s true. Maybe that’s part of it is that it becomes committee-ized or something. All I can say, guys, is I think that I’m sure that you have a movie that all three of you love, that is in this genre. See if you can get that screenplay and just really dig into how it’s constructed. I think you will move forward by leaps and bounds. I really do believe so.
John: Agreed.
Craig: I am rooting for you guys.
John: Here’s the log line that they sent through. “When two best friends decide to impress their friend group from out of state, they mistakenly throw the greatest Halloween party of all time.”
Craig: That’s what I think probably you thought it would be about, certainly what I thought it would be about. There are lots of great movies about young adult parties going bad but good. Time-tested genre often works. I think you guys, just give yourself this little exercise, and then I think write back into it. It’s okay. Like I said, you didn’t invent any new mistakes, so don’t worry about that. I made these mistakes. John, you made these. Maybe you didn’t, but I did.
John: A hundred percent, I did. Also, I do wonder if some aspect of what happened to dialog at a certain point, and what we took to be as good dialog, like of the Joss Whedon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it’s very convoluted, and yet it all fits together, people heard that and internalized that and think that’s what dialog should sound like. It’s just not working in some of these situations.
Craig: Also, there’s a certain kind of person that can do it. If your characters are highly educated, articulate press secretaries for the president or future Mark Zuckerbergs who are on the spectrum and at Harvard, yeah, then they can talk like that, because some of those people talk like that. This is not to insult anybody at Arizona State University, but this is not the typical cadence of anybody. Neither Carmichael nor Allie are talking like actually people there. All of their lines are too formed. When Allie said, “Never fucked a woman,” she knows he hasn’t. What is that even about? Then you fuck him then. It was just so weirdly mean, and then he just kept going through it. That’s an example, guys, where I think you’re going for a laugh but you’re actually hurting the characters. That’s the other thing is never, never sacrifice character on the pyre of the laugh, because you probably won’t get the laugh, because people will be upset at the character, and you’ll hurt the character.
John: For sure.
Megana: Wait, also, do you want to know what a cul-de-sac haircut is?
Craig: Yeah.
John: I want to know. Please.
Megana: I think that what they are saying here is it’s a fade. There’s a little bit of hair on top, and then you have the cul-de-sac effect because it’s really trimmed down on the sides.
Craig: Got it.
Megana: The thing that comes up when you first search for this on Google is just male balding patterns. That makes more sense to me as a cul-de-sac.
John: A horseshoe, yeah. I doubt he has shaved his head to resemble male pattern baldness, although I’d want to know that character. I’d really want to know that character who would choose to do that.
Craig: I would respect that.
John: A hundred percent.
Craig: I would respect that.
John: Megana, can you talk us through our final Three Page Challenge?
Megana: Ronnie, an American at college in Scotland, comes home from a one-night stand to a voice mail from her dad, Ed. As she listens to the voice mail on speakerphone, she notices her pet goldfish floating in its tank. As she tries to resuscitate the fish, Ed informs her that her mother has died. Back home in Santa Barbara, Ronnie and her siblings stand on the beach as Ed pushes their mother’s urn out to sea, which the tide quickly brings back to shore. Her sister Elle swims the urn out and submerges it. When she returns to shore, their sister Sophia accuses Elle of stealing her earrings.
John: That’s where we’re at at the end of three pages.
Craig: What’d you think, John?
John: I liked quite a lot about these. I really liked quite a lot about these pages. There’s some interesting stuff here. Again, we’re on a college campus, and yet it feels a more specific college campus. I wasn’t trapped in nowhere for this as much. I have specific things about getting to voice mail. This is essentially the convention of someone listening to their voice mail when they get home or the answering machine that we used to have in the ’90s. I want to propose that maybe her phone is dead and she’s plugging it in when she gets into a room and that’s why she’s now getting this message from her father about her mother being dead. Yet I dug the tone. We were in a dramedy space. I was curious to see what was going to happen on Page 4, which is always my question for these kinds of samples is do I want to keep reading. What did you think?
Craig: I loved it. Do you think it’s Emme or is it Emme?
John: I think it’s Emme. That’s my guess.
Craig: If it’s E-M-M-E?
John: We’ll say Emme for this podcast. We’ll apologize if that’s not quite right.
Craig: Miss Harris. The start, here’s a description that does work for me, “Ronnie Thomas, 20, American, the kind of girl you ask to watch your laptop at a café, ties her sex-wrecked hair back and throws on sneakers.” Now I must admit, I’m not sure what the kind of girl you ask to watch your laptop at a café is, but sex-wrecked hair gets a check mark for me. I can see her. This was a very efficient way to show me something that I’ve seen a million times. Here’s the thing. It’s okay to do things that people have done a million times. Just don’t dwell on it like you’re the first person to do it. What I liked here about Miss Harris is that she writes this very efficiently, like you get it, you know the deal. As you point out, she’s running across the university campus. I would like to know where, but at least at the end, it’s super short and she’s heading for another dormitory building. At least I get a sense roughly of where she is. I like the stone spiral staircase.
I thought this was such an interesting way to convey information. We’ve talked about exposition a lot and how you get across ideas and how exposition is sometimes a wonderful opportunity to be creative. This is creative. He’s just yammering on her voiceover. She’s very upset about a goldfish. She starts doing little… I saw her doing little finger compressions, which I thought was really hysterical. Then her dad says, “Oh, and your mum is dead.” Then she starts screaming. Then her roommate says, “Well, that seems a bit dramatic, doesn’t it?” It was very good. It was a good way to… I’m so leaning forward and excited. I kept feeling that way when we got to the beach in Santa Barbara. How did you feel about that scene?
John: I think the beach mostly worked. We are there. The idea is that we’re going to put these ashes. We’ve seen the ashes at the beach thing a hundred times. Again, you weren’t scared of the stock scene. You’re doing the thing. You’re putting the urn in, and it just won’t sink. That comedy, it just keeps washing back up, feels great that the sister swims out with it and finally submerges it and dunks it. It feels right. Do I know quite what’s happening on the page after that? Nope, but in these three pages we’ve met our hero, we’ve taken her from Edinburgh where she’s going to school to Santa Barbara. It feels like that’s where we’re mostly going to stay. We don’t know. We’re curious. We want to know more about her. We basically like her so far. These are promising things.
Craig: They’re smart. This is a very funny bit. I thought this was really funny. I liked the idea that Ed is like, “This is ridiculous. This urn full of her ashes, it’s biodegradable, it’s supposed to just sink and release the ashes into the water.” Everyone starts laughing. Then Elle takes it and brings it out into the water and she dumps it in, and then there’s this bit about earrings. It had that kind of intelligence that you see in Fleabag, for instance, to me. You know in Fleabag, in the second season, when they’re at the funeral, and everyone’s just like, “Oh my god, you look really great.” It’s this incredibly awkward thing that happened. Her hair just was perfect that day. It’s so weird and specific. I could see her sister. I could see her other sister. I like that Elle was wearing a slightly too extravagant gown. It’s all just really well done. I loved how much white space there was on the page. I salute you, Emme or Emme or Emme Harris. Well done.
John: Here’s a suggestion for Page 1. As Ronnie’s speeding across campus, her friend in upper case “carrying books, stops as she passes.” Friend asks, “Are you coming to Lit?” Ronnie says, “Yes, just going to my room to grab my stuff. I’ll see you in a sec.” “They part ways. Ronnie heads for another dormitory building.” Who’s that friend? That friend male, female? That friend could be somebody specific. Just give us a gender. Give us something about that. Also, it’s a wasted opportunity. It’s like a nothing conversation. There’s a moment to either acknowledge that this was a walk of shame coming back from this thing. I wanted something funny there and for them to just tell us that, okay, we’re in a comedy and get us primed for the next scene, which could land even better if we had some joke before that.
Craig: I agree with that.
John: Cool.
Craig: That’s an excellent point.
John: As we wrap up here, let’s talk about the log line. “After the death of her estranged mother, a college student returns home to her sisters and dad in California for a memorial service that reveals more than one complicated relationship.” It’s a half-hour pilot, apparently.
Craig: Great. Great. I want to read it. Send it. I’ll read it. I’m excited. This is good. It was funny. I enjoyed it.
John: I want to thank all the people who sent in Three Page Challenges, especially these three that we talked about today. If you want to send in a Three Page Challenge, go to johnaugust.com/threepage and fill out the form there and attach your pdf. We do this probably every two or three months. If you’re a Premium Member, we’ll send out an email in the week before we’re going to do one so we can get that last call of entries for this. I want to thank Megana and Drew for going through all of these entries…
Craig: Thank you guys.
John: …and remind people that this is a voluntary thing, so we really applaud you for sending in scripts that we can all talk about. All right, Craig, it has come time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing comes from, on Saturday night, we did a thing we had not done for a long time since the pandemic, which was having a game night. We were over at a friend’s house. We all played games together and gathered around a table. It was tremendously fun. I played a new game I never played before, which was the Blockbuster Party Game. I’ll link in the show notes to it.
This game comes in a case that looks like a Blockbuster tape, which is just such a wonderful bit of nostalgia. The game itself, you have movie titles on your cards. You’re trying to get your team to guess them. It has a Charades-y kind of quality, but it actually has some really smart game mechanics in terms of things you can do to compete against the other teams. There’s timers. It’s all smart, and just the right version of this kind of game. If you’re a person who loves movies, which you probably are, if you listen to this podcast, and want a party game for six people or more, I recommend you check out the Blockbuster home game. It was like eight bucks on Amazon, so not a big commitment, but a really surprisingly fun game.
Craig: This was a game from the ’90s, right?
John: No, this is a brand new game.
Craig: No, it’s not.
John: This is a brand new game that just-
Craig: You’re kidding.
John: It’s a brand new game that just happens to have the packaging and the feel of Blockbuster. They must’ve just found out whoever has the logo for Blockbuster. They got the rights to have the logo for Blockbuster. It’s a brand new game.
Craig: Oh my god, so this isn’t when Blockbuster’s at the height of their power. They had a little associated game. Maybe they’re like, “Who’s going to sue us? There’s no Blockbuster.”
John: I think Blockbuster’s one of those brands, it’s like Ataris. You don’t need the real company. You want the nostalgia for the thing.
Craig: Got it.
John: I quite enjoyed it. When you’re back in town, Craig, I’m going to have you and Melissa over for game night with a bunch of folks, and we’ll play this, and I think you’ll enjoy it as well. It’s a smart choice they made in deciding this.
Craig: Deal.
John: I also insist that at some point you host Mafia again, because Craig may be a good screenwriter, he’s one of the best Mafia hosts you could possibly ever imagine.
Craig: I’m thinking about just doing that professionally from now on.
John: I think it’s a good choice. Craig, it’s less stressful. People would pay you good money. You could have billionaires pay you to be a host for Mafia parties.
Craig: I worry that for billionaires, when people die, they actually die, because they can murder, because laws don’t matter. My One Cool Thing this week is something that wandered my way via Twitter but I guess from TikTok. This is not a new thing, although it’s new to TikTok. It’s called the hanger reflex. Have you been following along with this one, John?
John: I have. We tested the hanger reflex around in our house after watching an episode of TV. We tried it. Craig, does it work for you? Does it work if you do it to yourself, or only if someone else does it to you?
Craig: I only tried it putting it on my… Let me tell you what it is. If you haven’t heard of the hanger reflex, you take a wire coat hanger and you spread it slightly and put it on your head and then let it go so it squeezes on your head. For many, many people, including myself, your head will naturally turn to either the right or the left. What I found was if I rotated it, it would turn one way or the other. It always turned towards the way the coat hanger was hooked.
John: The hook.
Craig: This is not one of these mass suggestion things. This in fact is an established reflex discussed in journals, medical journals, research journals. No one really knows why, although they think it has to do with shearing force, which is basically when one force is pushing one way and the other one is pushing the other way, but not directly at each other. It creates a natural desire to twist along with the shearing force. It’s really weird. I was not expecting it to work. It absolutely worked on me. Have you tried it, Megana? Have you hangered yourself?
Megana: I have not yet, because you have to have a wire hanger, right?
Craig: Yes.
John: Yeah. Apparently, it will work with a thicker plastic hanger, as long as there’s actually space, as long as it will squeeze properly, but wire is the preferred one.
Craig: I think I’ll find a wire hanger and I’ll put it on your head. We’ll get this done. Don’t you worry. Don’t you worry. Anyway, check it out. If you just Google the hanger reflex, very easy to try at home. Fun for the whole family. You start to feel very, very stupid as you’re doing it. Some people are like, “Wait, this is a setup, right? You all just agreed to say that this does something, and then I’m going to be the idiot that puts this on my head, and you’re going to laugh at me.” No, it’s a thing. It’s actually real.
Megana: Have you tried to resist it when you’re doing it?
Craig: Yeah. You can.
John: It’s not overwhelming. It’s not like some ghost is turning your head.
Craig: No, it’s really more that if you don’t try and resist, you don’t try and help it, your head will just naturally want to turn. It’s really weird. You’ll see when I put it on your head.
Megana: Cool, I can’t wait.
John: That is our show this week. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, with help this week from Drew Marquardt.
Craig: Nice.
John: It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Craig: Indeed.
John: Our outro’s by Nico Mansy. 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’m @johnaugust. We have T-shirts, and they’re great. You can find them at Cotton Bureau. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing. 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 on secrets of social media. Craig and Megana, thanks so much for a fun show.
Megana: Thank you.
Craig: Thank you.
[Bonus Segment]
John: The secret to social media was actually revealed this past week by Sara Schaefer, a writer and comedian who has actually been a guest on this podcast before. Let’s take a listen to Sara Schaefer’s secret to social media.
Sara Schaefer: I used to always share my opinion online. No matter the topic, I was ready to dive into the discourse, even when it had nothing to do with me. The result, me posting a lot of dumb shit. Before I knew it, I was posting dumb shit online every single day, until all that changed. Now I don’t post dumb shit at all. What’s my secret? Silence. Surprised? I was too. Turns out you don’t have to post anything at all. It’s not required. Sometimes you can just be quiet. My girl friends ask me, “But Cheryl, wouldn’t that be censoring yourself? Is this the end of a free society as we know it?” No, it’s actually something else. It’s called maturity. I wondered what would happen when I stopped blasting out every half-formed thought from my head like a diarrhea cannon, but now, thanks to silence, I’m posting half the amount I used to, and guess what, I still exist. Silence, I never knew. Did you?
John: Craig, do you think Sara has hit upon the formula for social media success?
Craig: She has, although I have to give credit to fellow screenwriter Katie Dippold for saying this exact thing a number of years ago. Somebody had tweeted something, and she showed it to me and then just wrote, “You don’t have to say anything.” It’s just an interesting thing. Sometimes you get fooled by social media into thinking that it must be used. It doesn’t have to be used at all.
You know what? The other day I was thinking about this very issue. We’ve been living with alcohol for thousands of years. They find residue of beer in prehistoric bowls. What if we hadn’t? What if no one had ever had alcohol until 10 years ago? Then the first alcohol was very rudimentary. It was pretty watered down. Now after 10 years, there’s beer, there’s wine, there’s vodka, there’s gin. Someone just invented tequila. People are going crazy. No one knows what to do. They’re puking. They’re arguing if it’s a disease, is it not a disease, is this a good thing, is it a bad thing. We’re so ill equipped to handle something as powerful as alcohol, because it’s only been around for 10 years. That’s social media. We don’t know what we’re doing. It’s alcohol. Sara Schaefer, what you’re really saying is you don’t have to drink it. You don’t have to drink it. You can watch other people drinking, and it’s fun.
John: One thing I think Sara hits on which is really important is that, “I didn’t say anything, and yet I still continued to exist,” because one of the things about social media, if you’re not posting it’s like you’re not really there. No one’s retweeting you. No one’s acknowledging you. If you don’t put out your opinion, do you even exist? You do continue to exist. You actually are a person who has opinions, even if you’re not sharing those opinions. More importantly, you don’t have to have an opinion on everything. You can just stay out of whole conversations. That’s a crucial skill which I wish people could pick up earlier.
Craig: I love staying out of conversations. It’s like crack cocaine for me now. I read something. In my mind I’m like, “I’ve got something to say.” Then I don’t say it, and I feel great. It’s such a joy.
John: What put us on the bonus topic today was the Amber Heard, Johnny Depp trial, which I’ve never commented on. Obviously, I know Johnny Depp from work projects before. I don’t know Amber Heard at all. It angers me so much that this is a public trial that’s being shown to the world and also discussed by the world, when it’s none of our fucking business whatsoever. I just get so incredibly frustrated by that it’s just a moment of entertainment and enjoyment for the world to participate in and comment upon, when who the fuck cares? We shouldn’t be allowed to watch this thing.
Craig: I haven’t been following along with the trial of the century. You’re right. It’s none of my business. I can’t possibly learn anything or grow as a human being by following the Johnny Depp, Amber Heard trial. There was this other thing that happened to me over the last couple of months. That was, and I think I shared this with you, getting a number of interview requests by real places like TV news outlets here and abroad to comment on the war in Ukraine, because I had written a television series about a nuclear disaster in Ukraine. They’re always very flattering when they come for you. I politely declined. The reason I politely declined is because I am not qualified to discuss the war in Ukraine. That’s not what I do. It seems like nobody out there cares. They’re just trying to throw more people at microphones. Everybody can shout their unearned opinion at each other. That’s why I like that we do this, because we actually have earned our opinions about screenwriting, so it’s nice. You see what I mean? Why would anyone ask a screenwriter to talk about a war in Ukraine? That’s crazy.
John: On the podcast we are sharing our expertise and our opinions on a topic that we know very well because it’s actually the thing that we do every day. Had they gone to an expert in Ukrainian military history or the tactical issues involved with Russian military or nuclear safety, fantastic. Those are great places to go to. The guy who wrote Chernobyl is not a valid news source for this thing.
Craig: No. I think everybody has been trained to believe that everyone is an expert on everything, and God knows they’ll tell you about it. The problem is, what do we do? I don’t know how to get out of this.
John: A choice is silence, as Sara Schaefer lays out. We don’t have to weigh in on things. We don’t have to weigh in on things that we are experts on or not experts on, that we do know of some information. We can stay out of it. There have been times where I’ve jumped in on something because it’s a funny moment. Great, but I’m trying to stay out of things that are just like, this is an enraging thing that’s happening in the world. If I’m not showing my rage, it sounds like I’m sitting on my hands. No, it’s just that I’m better off donating to abortion rights charities than screaming about it on Twitter, or I’ll go to a protest where actually my physical presence is important for me to be there, than just putting it out on the timeline, where everyone else is also venting. Megana, you are not as big of a social media user as I am. What is your decision process about what to amplify, what to keep back from? What’s your metric for doing that?
Megana: Sorry, this is something that I could talk about forever. I think I prefer to hold most of my opinions to myself and reserve the right to feel differently about things.
John: Wait, I want to stop you there. Reserve the right to feel differently, reserve the right to change your mind?
Megana: Yes, I reserve the right to change my mind, which social media and the internet does not respect or it’s not a thing that is really possible on the internet.
Craig: You monster.
John: You monstrous hypocrite. How could you possibly change your mind?
Craig: How dare you?
Megana: I agree. I also grew up with social media. Me and my friends all got MySpaces and Xangas when we were 12 years old. No 12-year-old has anything interesting to say. I think that around 2014 I was grossed out by the way it felt like everyone around me was behaving in a way that they could then curate to social media instead of just living. After that, I just stopped posting stuff. I’m still on social media. I’m still on Facebook because there are certain groups that I get information from and message boards. I wish that I didn’t have to be on Facebook, but I am, because of that. I’m on Twitter because of writing and work stuff. Then I’m on Instagram. I’m actually not really on Instagram that much. I wish that I didn’t have to be on any of these things, because I think that there is some value in them, but for me in my life it’s mostly a negative.
John: You’re distinguishing between you’re a consumer of these things but you’re not a producer of content for these things. That’s an absolutely valid choice. Basically, it is helpful for you sometimes to get this stuff coming in. There obviously can be toxic effects of that too. I guess back to Sara Schaefer’s point, you don’t feel the need to comment on everything that’s happening, passing by. You’re very judicious about what you put out there in the world. You got to go up and see Craig in Calgary, and Bo, and hang out with them. I got to see pictures of beautiful stuff up in Calgary, which is great. I was so happy to see you posting that kind of stuff. You could share that with people who would be interested in seeing those things, but you didn’t have to weigh in on bigger issues.
Megana: I think another thing with social media is that especially with the new Facebook algorithm and the metaverse overhaul or whatever, it favors extreme opinions. Most people don’t have extreme opinions. Most people think pretty similarly about things. When I’m on social media, I’m like, “Oh my god, this world is so polarized.” When you go outside and talk to people, you realize that’s not actually the case at all.
John: I will stand up for the fact that Oreo Thin cookies are the best version of Oreos, and the dark chocolate Oreo Thins are the best version of Oreo Thins. That’s the hot take that I will stand by.
Craig: Guess what? You’re a garbage person.
John: Tell me why I’m wrong. Tell me what is the actual correct answer for what is the best store-bought cookie.
Craig: You may absolutely be right, but I feel that my job is to express outrage. Where is the outrage? I love when people on Twitter are like, “Where is the outrage?” I’m like, are you kidding me? What else is there here? “Where is the salt?” says man drowning in ocean. It just doesn’t make any sense.
Megana: One thing that was nice is John and I went to the Bans Off Our Body March in LA, what was it, two weeks ago?
John: Yeah.
Megana: The Supreme Court leak and the stuff about Roe v Wade is something that is incredibly frustrating and painful. I see so many hot takes on social media. First of all, found out about the march through social media. Being able to be in a physical space with people was so affirming. That’s all I wanted to say.
John: You just don’t know how many people there are on Twitter. You can see all these things scroll by in your timeline, but when you’re actually physically in a space with a bunch of people, you’re like, oh, these are all as upset and angry and scared as I am, and they’re all coming together to stand up for something, is meaningful. Shouting there was meaningful because we were all shouting together. Shouting at each other on Twitter is not doing any good.
Megana: There’s no room for anyone to “well, actually” you at that march.
John: Exactly.
Craig: Exactly, because you were experiencing real community. These places call themselves virtual communities, but that’s an oxymoron. You need to see people. You need to be with people. It’s why sporting events are still popular. Everyone has the best seat in the house to see any baseball game they want, any football game they want, and still, tens of thousands of people go every day in each individual city to see a team play because it’s community. It’s physical community. Fuck you, Meta. It’s not going to work. It’s just not.
John: Craig, what I hear you saying is that while you love Scriptnotes as this podcast, we need to go back to doing our live shows and we need to get all 40,000 of our listeners together in a stadium to listen together to a Scriptnotes recording.
Craig: That would be good if they would all agree to show up on the same day. It’s true, the pandemic, we worked around the lack of physical communion, but it’s just not the same. We were designed to live in space, in reality and space, and not in this disconnected fucking void. It is of course a system that is built on shouting, will encourage shouting. Sometimes people say, “Twitter just makes everybody mean.” I don’t think it’s Twitter that’s making people mean. I think it’s people being assholes make people mean. It’s the “well, actually” people. They have no control over themselves. They don’t know how to use this. They don’t know how to drink the alcohol, and so they’re ruining the party for everybody. All my metaphors collided, smashed together. I don’t care. It’s awful. Talk about a really hot, hot, hot take. Is there anything more Twitter than complaining about Twitter?
John: Nope. The circle is now complete.
Craig: The circle is complete.
John: Thank you guys.
Craig: Thank you.
Megana: Bye.
Craig: Bye.
Links:
- Ryan’s Elvis Question on Twitter
- Follow along with our Three Page Challenge Selections: Tag – You’re It by Suw Charman-Anderson, Halloween Party by Lucas Abreu & Zachary Arthur & Kyle Copier, Belly Up by Emme Harris
- Blockbuster, the Party Game
- The Hanger Reflex
- Sara Schaefer Silence Video
- Get a Scriptnotes T-shirt!
- Gift a Scriptnotes Subscription or treat yourself to a premium subscription!
- Craig Mazin on Twitter
- John August on Twitter
- John on Instagram
- Outro by Nico Mansy (send us yours!)
- Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao and edited by Matthew Chilelli.
Email us at ask@johnaugust.com
You can download the episode here.