John August

The original post for this episode can be found [here](https://johnaugust.com/2022/three-page-challenge-live-in-austin).

**John August:** Hey, this is John. Today’s episode was recorded live last week at the Austin Film Festival. This was the day after our big, raucous live show. This is a more sedated affair, but still a pretty full house. We have a bunch of the writers who wrote their scenes for the Three Page Challenge in the audience. We’re going to talk to them about what they wrote, why they wrote it, and get some real feedback from them. If you’re a Premium Member, stick around after the credits, because we’ll do some Q and A with the audience. Some really good questions were asked and hopefully answered. Enjoy.

Hello and welcome. My name is John August. This is a sort of version of Scriptnotes, which is a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. We’re here live in Austin, Texas. How many people in this room have submitted a Three Page Challenge to Scriptnotes, either now or at some point? That’s a lot of hands here in the audience, a lot of brave screenwriters here.

For folks who are not aware, the Three Page Challenge is a thing we’ve been doing on the Scriptnotes podcast for 10 years, where we invite people to send in the first three pages of their screenplay, their teleplay, and we give them our honest feedback. It’s criticism, but hopefully really genuinely constructive criticism about what we’re seeing on the page, what’s working great, and what could maybe possibly work a little bit better. Craig Mazin, my cohost and I, we talk through this. We do it every couple of weeks. It’s been really fun and educational for everybody, because it’s great to have a podcast about screenwriting, but it’s really hard to talk about screenwriting without talking about the words on the page.

Today is all about the words on the page. We have some other brave writers here who submitted samples so we can talk through these things. If you’re listening to this at home, later on it’ll be attached to the podcast episode. You just click on those links. A good chance to see what these things look like on the page, what we’re talking about literally, like transitions and the language choices that you’re seeing.

When we ask people to send in these script pages, I don’t read them, Craig doesn’t read them. It’s Megana Rao who reads them. Let’s bring up Megana Rao, our producer. Megana Rao, when we call for Three Page Challenges, we’ll put it on Twitter or we’ll announce it on the podcast. How many submissions do we typically get?

**Megana Rao:** We usually get a couple hundred.

**John:** A couple hundred submissions. These are writers who are writing in, saying, “Please talk about my thing on air.” For Austin, how many people did you get? We had a special little tick box like, “I’m going to be here at Austin.” How many did you read through?

**Megana:** Oh god, I didn’t count this time. I’m sorry.

**John:** It was a lot. It was a good number. These are people who could actually join us up on stage, because that’s what’s fun about the Austin Film Festival is we can actually talk through with these people about what they did and what their intentions were and what we saw versus what they were attempting to do, because so often it’s just a vacuum.

**Megana:** Totally. We’re just assuming, and we don’t get that feedback.

**John:** Talk me through your general selection process, because this isn’t a competition. You’re not looking for the best scripts pages. What’s helpful for you in picking a Three Page Challenge?

**Megana:** I think first of all, I want to make sure that no one ever feels embarrassed and that these are pages that I would be comfortable if I had written being on our website and seen by people. I want to make sure there’s no formatting issues or too many typos or anything like that, that there’s a certain level of professionalism.

Then typically, they are pages where I am surprised or excited. I feel like there’s something new, there’s something I’m rooting for in those pages, but maybe it’s not quite landing on every point. I really feel like I want to champion those writers and those pages to be the best that they can be. I usually put those in a selection pile, and then you and I go through the top five or seven and narrow it down from there.

**John:** Absolutely. It’d be great to be like, “Here’s three perfect pages. Everyone do these three perfect pages.” Then we wouldn’t have a lot to talk about. We could just say, “Oh, these are great. I want to read the next 30 pages of the script.” It’s the ones who have some like, “Oh, there’s something really promising here, but there’s also something we can work on, that we can discuss.” As you’re looking through, why we picked these three samples is because we saw things that were really promising but also things that we could discuss.

**Megana:** Totally.

**John:** We don’t have Craig here with us today, but we do have, luckily, someone who has to read scripts for a living. Can we welcome up Marc Velez? Marc, you are a production executive. You are working at Universal?

**Marc Velez:** Yes. I oversee development for a division at Universal Studio Group. There’s many television studios within the studio, and so I work at one of them.

**John:** Great. What is your experience on a daily basis with scripts? Are you reading submissions from writers you’ve never hear of, or are you reading to help put together staffing for shows? What is your experience working with scripts on a daily basis?

**Marc:** I would say it’s a combination of all three. We have overall deals with a lot of different writers and directors and production companies. They will send us material that they want us to option and work with them and then take to platforms, so there’s that. Then agents will call us and say, “Hey, you should know this writer. They have a really great script,” so there’s that. Then there’s, third, I guess, submissions that are just being considered for pilots.

**John:** Great. What was your background before this? You were working with Lee Daniels’s company.

**Marc:** My first job was at Planet Hollywood.

**John:** Wow. That’s a whole origin story.

**Marc:** That’s a whole story.

**John:** You went from all the props in movies to actually working with the people who make those things.

**Marc:** I didn’t know anybody in Hollywood. I thought the way to get to Hollywood was work at Planet Hollywood.

**John:** Of course. It’s got Hollywood in the name, so you’d figure. You were that close.

**Marc:** Prior to working at UCP, I ran Lee Daniels’s company for the last six years as a producer. We did Empire. We did the new Wonder Years. We did a Sammy Davis limited series on Hulu.

**John:** For something like that, you are helping to staff up those shows. You’re helping to find writers who could be making these things possible. You must get a lot of submissions. You’re probably going through a lot. You may not be stopping at three pages, but what gets you excited to finish a script, and what makes you go like, “Oh, you know what? I think I can set that down and never pick it up again.”

**Marc:** That’s a really good question. I would say it’s just a gut thing that I connect with the material at the core of it, the character, the point of view, the emotion in the script.

**John:** Sometimes you’re reading specifically for staffing on a given show, and so does this fit this thing. Also, I bet you can recognize this is a writer with a voice, this is a writer who feels confident on the page.

**Marc:** Yeah. I would say it’s almost like three buckets. There’s, like you said, the staffing where if I’m staffing a specific show knowing that I need to mimic something in let’s say the spy genre or if it’s an agent who has just sent a script in just for a general meeting and I’m just writing it for their voice. Then there’s the third, which I always think is the hardest. I’m reading the script to see if we want to option it to actually make a show, which just has a different kind of structure to it.

**John:** Yeah, because within a third one, you’re really looking like, “Can I see Episode 2? Does it feel like there’s a thing here to keep going?”

**Marc:** Exactly.

**John:** Which is challenging. Let’s apply some of that structure and thinking to these three pages that we’re looking at from these three samples today.

**Megana:** We’re going to start with Michael Heiligenstein, who wrote The Encyclopedists. The summary, “King Lear the 15th smiles to himself as he seals an order and passes it to his attendant. As we watch the order travel from the palace to the police barracks through the streets of Paris, we hear Denny Diderot in VoiceOver describe the corruption of the monarchy and society. We see scenes of Denny writing in his apartment until the police show up to his home with the royal order and drag him out and throw him in a police carriage.”

**John:** The Encyclopedists. Marc, let’s say this landed on your desk, virtually or physically printed, The Encyclopedists, a pilot for a limited series. Just even on the cover page, we have Michael’s name, written by, copyright. Everything looks good to me. Anything trip you up at all?

**Marc:** No, it looks great.

**John:** Cool. Let’s get on to first instincts after reading these three pages. Did you see what this show was going to be? What was your feeling after the three pages?

**Marc:** I would say a couple things, Michael. I would say the first, actually I didn’t know this story, so then I did a real deep dive after, which was really cool.

**John:** Which is great when you get that.

**Marc:** It’s rare to have somebody educate me on something that I didn’t know. That was really cool. I would say overall, I got what the premise was of the show and this man being persecuted obviously for writing encyclopedia within this world. It was a pretty clean, clear premise within the first three pages.

**John:** I would agree. I had a sense that this is going to be this guy’s story, Diderot’s story. I could see there’s going to be a journey here. I was excited to see what happened. He gets thrown in jail by the end of the three pages. Things were moving quickly. We’re essentially intercutting between Denny Diderot writing this thing about the abuse of power and how kings work, while we see his arrest order come through. The intercutting was nice.

I did have some questions though. We’re in a time period, but I don’t really know the time period. I didn’t know the year. I wasn’t anchored into a moment or a year. I didn’t know King Louis the 15th’s age. I like that the writer was telling us to call him Denny, D-E-N-N-Y, so we would actually pronounce it right in our head, because the French name would be Denis Diderot. It didn’t have a great visual on him. I knew that his hair kept falling in front of his eyes, but I couldn’t quite see him. In these three pages introducing this central character, I need to have a clear visual on who he is and be able to cast him in my head.

**Marc:** If you had the timeframe on there, it would’ve just been more helpful to clarify. I know voiceover’s always really tricky. I felt like in those three pages specifically, what did you want to say in the VoiceOver, because the VoiceOver jumped around a little bit from explaining the king is beholden to the realm to then the king, if he is corrupt, makes bad decisions, and then there was something about the guards basically deciding what they want to do. I was looking for a little bit more consistency in tracking that VoiceOver, because I think that VoiceOver was really key in the first three pages.

**John:** It’s an interesting use of VoiceOver, because it’s not a VoiceOver that’s directed just to us as an audience. We’re supposed to believe that this is what he’s writing, because he’s going to get stopped mid-sentence as he’s writing this thing. Essentially, he has that compulsion to write. What he’s writing is what we’re hearing in our heads.

Other things I noticed as we went through on the page, we’re lacking ages on people. I was lacking some sort of physical details on some people that could’ve been helpful. I didn’t necessarily believe at the bottom of Page 1 that Rene Berryer was eating a steak at his desk. That just felt like a modern thing versus a whatever year this is supposed to be thing, a horse-drawn carriage kind of year thing.

Then on Page 2, midway through, “Over his left shoulder, a window; through it you may notice the police pull up outside.” I had trouble visualizing that, because for some reason I saw us on the second floor, and that was a challenge. The “you may notice,” it’s either we notice or we don’t notice. Are we supposed to notice or are we not supposed to notice? I needed a little bit stronger of a choice there.

**Marc:** Yeah. Then for me a little bit on Page 3, I was curious what happened to the blade and if he put that in his pocket for later and what that reveal was to come. I was curious where it went, because for me it dropped out a little bit. Then I just was curious in terms of his point of view. He seemed so nonchalant about getting whisked off by the police. It was just curious getting in his POV a little bit, as well as, if he knew that they were taking him because he was a writer, would he not hide the stuff he was currently writing in that first scene?

**John:** We approach things with an expectation based on… We see this person writing. We see the police coming. We’re setting this up. For his writing just to be out there felt a little bit of a risk.

**Marc:** Yeah. I will say I did not see the reveal coming at the end. That was great. I thought they were going to apprehend somebody else, and you were just cutting between the two when he was narrating the story. That was a really nice reveal that I didn’t see.

**John:** Great. One of the things we love about doing the live Three Page Challenge is we actually get to talk to the folks who wrote the script. Could we have you come up and talk to us about your pages here, Michael?

**Michael Heiligenstein:** I think I’ve gotten so good at taking feedback in the past couple years, I’m finally ready to do it live on stage.

**John:** Nothing at all nerve-wracking about this. Michael, did we misunderstand anything you were trying to do in these three pages?

**Michael:** No, I think that you pointed out a couple things that were unclear and could be clearer on the page. You get the premise. I’m glad that you understood where it was going, what was going on.

**John:** Great. Talk to us about what’s going to be happening on the next 10 pages. What goes next?

**Michael:** I love the next 10 pages. This is a script where the final 30 pages of this pilot I’m less sure about, but the first 15 are why I wrote it. When he gets thrown in that police carriage, Denny is about to find out he is not being arrested for what he wrote. He is being arrested for who he loves, because France is so restrictive at this time, the union of the clergy and the king are such that even though Denny is 33, he needs his father’s permission to get married, who he’s estranged from.

He writes his father to ask permission, and his father calls in a favor from the king to have Denny arrested. He is hauled 80 miles from Paris and imprisoned in this monastery where the monks hate him, because he scammed them at one point in the past. They beat him. They starve him. After a couple weeks, all he wants to do is get back to Annette, who is the woman he’s in love with.

After a couple of weeks, in the middle of a rainstorm, he jumps out the second floor window and hikes back to Paris 80 miles in the rain, shows up at her doorstep sopping wet and 20 pounds lighter than last she saw him. He says, “Annette, I don’t care what my father says. I don’t care what he does. Come what may, I want to be with you. Will you marry me?” She says no. That’s the next 10 pages.

After that, he gets involved in the Encyclopedia Project. His friend Rousseau pulls him out of his slump and is like, “Look, you need to work. You can’t stay in this apartment. You need to rent someplace else, so you need money. This project pays well.” He gets pulled into this Encyclopedia Project that’s already going on. By the end of the episode, he’ll become the co-editor of the encyclopedia.

**John:** Great. Talk to us about tone then, because what you say, having this romance, he feels like a romantic character who’s drawn to great extremes to get back to this woman he loves. Is that the tone? Is it serious romantic?

**Michael:** My overall impression of it is it’s about his life and it’s about both his relationships as well as this political philosophy bent where he’s somebody who wants to write about the world as it is. There’s two fronts, but you see so much of it is about his personal life and the relationships as well, his relationship with the woman who becomes his wife, as well as with eventually his mistress, this other affair. To me, it’s both sides.

**John:** Marc, let’s say this is a project that crosses your desk. There may be these people, things attached, or there’s nothing attached. What is helpful for you to think about this as a property that you could develop at Universal or with Lee Daniels’s company? What are the things that we’d say, oh, these are the comps, this is the framework in which you can see making this series? What else would he need to bring?

**Marc:** I would just ask you thematically your point of view and why you wanted to tell the story from a thematic principle, because I think that would help.

**Michael:** To me, Denny’s situation is not that different from the situation that any writer is in. Some writers are going to chafe at it more than others, but everybody works under some ruling system. For us, that is capitalism. Look, I’m cool with it on some level. I’m here to make stuff that sells and finds that audience. There are constraints. If you’ve got to pull together $30 million, $50 million to put something together, that’s the constraints that we work with, and that colors the storytelling, and not just the storytelling, but what we write about in the world.

I work in marketing currently. I worked at a website in content stuff. The topics that get covered online, working through that industry, I saw how the stuff that gets covered extensively and written about in detail is all stuff that makes money. There are subjects, for instance, like history, American history. I love history. You can’t find really great information about it online. There’s subjects that are just not covered well. To me, that’s because you don’t make money off of that, so it’s not important, I guess.

**John:** What is the pitch for somebody who doesn’t know anything about the Encyclopedia Project? Is that the Wikipedia of its day? How do you talk about that in a way that resonates with somebody who is just… It’s 2022. Tell me why this matters.

**Michael:** It’s a banned book. He’s not just a philosopher. He’s a fugitive philosopher. He’s a renegade philosopher. The book is not able to be published in France, so he has to go back channel through all this stuff. He’s arrested twice in the course of his life. This is the book that eventually is going to be considered foundational to the French Revolution. This is the precursor to the part that we all know about. There’s other fun stuff in there. You get the salon culture, the intellectual culture in France at the time. To me, the core of the pitch is this contrast. He’s a philosopher and he’s a fugitive.

**John:** Now, Marc, I asked about what else he needs for a series. Talk about a pitch book or a pitch deck. If you were taking this to buyers, what would you need?

**Marc:** I would say the first script, it’s a format. It’s between a bible and a format, and so it’s about 10 to 15 pages where you map out episodically where the show goes. Ideally, we would send the script around, buyers would be interested, then basically you would go and you would pitch how you see the show, and then you could leave behind that format for them to decide.

**John:** Since the pandemic, those going around towns have resulted in a lot of Zooms with slideshows, where Megana’s driving the slides. It’s complicated, but it works, and so it does feel possible to do. Michael, thank you so much for sharing this.

**Michael:** Thank you.

**John:** Thank you for coming up here.

**Marc:** It was really good.

**Michael:** Thanks.

**Marc:** It was really good.

**John:** What script should we talk about next?

**Megana:** Next we are going to talk to Liliana Liu. “Nicole, 22, sleeps in the control of a facility where she monitors conversations. She’s woken up, and we see her travel in a driverless pod through the Mojave Desert on her way to her mobile home. At home, Nicole makes instant ramen and exercises in front of a series of monitors. We cut to baby Sophie’s room and see her parents put her to sleep. In the living room, we see Sophie’s mom accept a call from Sophie dated April 22, 2032. They speak, and we cut to Sophie, age seven, in a pod with her dad. Her dad encourages her to talk on the phone to her mom normally. Sophie refuses until she hears her mom’s lullaby. We cut to the control room where Nicole watches the scene.”

**John:** Great. I’m so excited to talk about this because I love near-future. I love this space. The premise feels like a Black Mirror kind of premise, like there’s something, what if you could do this, and what are the consequences of being able to do this, which is really exciting.

There’s also some challenges on the page I think we could really talk through and clean up, because sometimes you don’t recognize what’s confusing in a bad way on a page. By clearing those up, you can actually really lock your reader in, because we always talk about there’s a difference between confusion and mystery. Mystery’s great, because that makes us want to keep going. Confusion’s like, I don’t know, and I lose some confidence. Let’s figure out ways to make us more confident about what’s happening on these three pages. Marc, what was your first read on this?

**Marc:** I would say I love the tone. I think you really created a beautiful minimalist tone that I thought was really cool. I definitely was leaning in. Then honestly, after the three pages were over, I did have some confusion, to John’s point, but I still was leaning in, curious to see what the show was about that I didn’t quite understand, but I think in a good way too.

**John:** I want to focus on something on Page 2 which I thought worked nicely and just the description of what’s inside Nicole’s home. I’ll just read a little bit here. “She closes the door. Boots off. Black backpack and a pair of red over ear headphones go on a hook next to the door. Small yet not cozy. Only the essentials: a table, one chair. Rustic. Retro. Wood and white dotted with red. No photos. Nothing personal. Nicole (22), maroon tunic over black tights, turns to the kitchenette. She is also unadorned, small, not cozy. She grabs a red kettle, fills it, taps it on. Psst – boils in an instant. Grrl – straight to a Nongshim spicy cup noodle.”

I can see it all. I can see what’s happening here. I can see the order of things, which is really nice. It’s giving me that near-future vibe. I get a sense of who she is and where that is. That moment works really well. I think I want to try to bring that clarity to the rest of this, because I got lost a few other places.

**Marc:** Yeah. I loved your description. I thought it was so beautifully crafted, but I was looking for a little bit more of a POV from Nicole at times, because her description was pretty thin, but maybe that was a choice you chose. You had a full page of the surroundings, and I was looking for a little bit more of her as a character within that page.

**John:** Yeah. Let’s go back to Page 1. We open with, “Over black. Silence. Flat green line. Steady. Then a small ripple.” Really what we’re seeing, we’re going to see the voice pattern go past. There were a lot of words to say that there’s a green line on a black screen. I think we can be a little more minimalist here, so, “Flat green line on a black screen. Steady. Then it ripples.”

“A distinctive voice, deep, smoky.” Then we go into the Older Woman and Younger Woman’s dialog here. It was mysterious. That’s mysterious, and then the next moment’s mysterious, and the next moment’s mysterious, and you’re not telling us people’s names. They’re just figures. I need to be a little more anchored in what I’m actually seeing and who these people are, because there’s apparently Nicole that we’re seeing in this control room. Great. Just tell us her name then and don’t keep the mystery until we finally reveal her at her little mobile home pod, to me.

**Marc:** I agree. I was searching, like I said earlier, just for a little bit more Nicole up top and getting in her POV, because I think you beautifully crafted the world really well and the tone. I was looking for a little bit more of the character up top.

**John:** Then on Page 2, we’re moving between Nicole’s home and Sophie’s home. There’s projections in both places. I got really confused. I didn’t know that we’d gone to a different place and that we were establishing a new location and a new time. Give us a transition line. Just make it clear that this really is a jump to a new place that we’ve not been to before. Also, it took me three times to read it to realize that by mobile you meant a phone. I thought it was actually a mobile, like he was running in with-

**Siri:** I’m not sure I understand.

**John:** Sorry, Siri. Sorry, Siri. I thought he was running in with some sort of mobile to hang over the baby’s crib or something. This is really confusing. It’s a phone. Again, it’s one of those American English versus British English things that I read it the wrong way.

The only other point I’ll make is that the premise of what you seem to be setting up, the Black Mirror of it all, is what if you could set up a call between someone who’s 7.14 years ahead or behind. Intriguing. It’s a little strange that we’re in Nicole’s POV for so much of this rather than Sophie’s POV, that we’re starting with this tech worker rather than the actual family at the heart of it.

**Marc:** Also similar, I think the transitions I had to read a couple times to make sure I was tracking timeline, in addition to then when Nicole was back at work watching Sophie, I was a little confused of the point of view that we were in.

**John:** Luckily, we don’t have to stay confused, because we have the writer herself here. Could you come up here? Liliana, thank you so much for being here with us.

**Liliana Liu:** Hi.

**John:** Hi. Talk to us about this script. What’s the status of it? Is the whole thing written or just these three pages?

**Liliana:** Completely out of my depths here, just to say that. My husband is the only one that has ever read any pages, were those pages.

**Marc:** Wow.

**John:** Wow. Brave choices here. Nicely done, Liliana.

**Liliana:** Just a little background, I’m a full-time mom and a part-time software developer. I literally started writing sometime last year. This is a kick in the ass for me to do something, just to embarrass myself and get it out there.

**John:** You did. You’ve done a great job. Black Mirror, is that right? Is that what you’re going for? Is that the feel?

**Liliana:** Yeah. I discovered that all my ideas were all sort of sci-fi-ish but sort of a little realism, grounded in real life, sci-fi. This is my first feature script. In fact, it’s still in the middle of writing this, as I’m trying to propel myself to actually finish writing it. I would say the genesis is very personal, even though the theory behind it is not. I’m a sensitive person. I think a lot of writers are. I grew up in a home where my mom was ultra-sensitive. A lot of times, there’s this thing about going back. You replay things. You talk to people or make decisions or you didn’t say certain things or even make certain decisions. It plays back in your mind. It haunts you. Then you wish you could go back. It could be something very small. You want really hard to say something or do the thing that you didn’t, stuff like that. That’s the genesis of where this whole thing comes from.

**John:** There’s this phrase, esprit d’escalier, that thing you realize you should’ve said as you left the place. This is with a seven-year time period, a bigger gap. It’s a great premise. You’re saying this is a feature. Who is our central character, and who protagonates over the course of your feature?

**Liliana:** Nicole is the central figure. This is a big company. I think the only other thing I found was some movie with Daniel Quaid about, I think, firefighters calling between dinner times. This is more like there’s a company now, like Amazon or something, that provides this service. She is working behind the scenes. There’s some complications around… People think this is an artificial intelligence provide the service, but in the background, because a lot of times this happens, I work in the background software, that that’s not real, there’s no AI yet. She’s one of the people behind it that’s actually making it happen. People don’t know that it’s her job. I guess another complexity layer is that originally I wanted to do something like Lives of Others where she is just almost in the background.

**John:** An observer, yeah.

**Liliana:** Nobody knows she exists. Then she makes an impact to a particular client. I don’t know if this is the right direction. I wanted to make it more personal for her, where she wasn’t just opaque character who just is an observer, like you say. I’ve found basically an angle where she has something very, very key in her own life.

What you see in the first page, that first conversation, now that I think about it, maybe it’s too mysterious. The Older Woman is her mother, and she is the younger woman. She left home when she was 15 and had basically a broken relationship with her mother. Even though she won’t admit it to herself, that’s what’s been haunting her all this time.

It’ll come to pass in the first 10 pages or so that her mother is going to become a client that comes in, but she works behind the scenes. It’s a voice thing. She overhears another worker there that talks to her mother. She’s been listening to these conversations with her mom day in, day out, but she hasn’t talked to her or seen her for seven years. That’s the inciting incident is that her mom is now a client.

**John:** A pitch, and not necessarily a thing you need to do, but the story you’re describing, it may make sense to have an opening vignette that sets up the premise of what this is and what the service does and if we can establish that she works at this company that’s doing this thing, just so we’re clearly anchored in like, oh, this is what normal life is like before things get upended. Right now, it feels like you’re trying to set up so many mysteries, and we get a little bit lost in that.

Marc, let’s say that the cleaned up version of this script crosses your desk. It’s a feature length thing. Is it something you would say, “Okay, this is great. Let’s think about it as a series.” How much does that happen, where you take something that shows up as a feature, you think, “We could do this as a series.”

**Marc:** I’ve actually done it a couple times. I’m doing it recently, where there was a feature script I read that I loved. You met with the writer. You could easily see how you could open up the world. We’re just breaking it up into episodic now. I’m super impressed that this is your first thing you’ve ever written, because it’s a really clear, concise, high-concept, grounded genre piece. There’s something really fresh and cool about it.

**John:** Absolutely. I’m also thinking the cleaned up version of this could be really good staffing, because it reads well for that. This writer can do near-future sci-fi, grounded sci-fi, which is not easy to do. We’re making a fair number of those shows right now. The Nolans would need to have people like you to do that stuff.

**Marc:** It reminded me of Arrival the movie or Severance, a little bit in that tone.

**John:** Cool. Now she’s excited that you did this. Liliana, thank you so much. Thank you very much for coming up here. Thank you so much for coming up here. We have a third and final Three Page Challenge here to talk through. Megana, I think we have a listener question that is relevant here. Why don’t you start with a listener question?

**Megana:** Carrie asked, “Are there legitimately good reasons for the protestant adherence to the unexpressive screenplay format we all use, as in more than, ‘Well, that’s because that’s the way we’ve always done it.’ Several episodes ago, you read a Three Page Challenge with a title page designed like a wake flier, and everyone was so delighted. As a career graphic designer, it seems obvious to me that typography, layout, color, imagery are evocative storytelling tools, but screenwriters are still debating whether bolding a slug line is showing too much ankle. What are some of the good reasons we’re using our great-grandfather’s typewriter constraints in 2022?”

**John:** Provocative question there. We talk a lot about the formatting on the page on normal episodes. I really want to focus on title pages. Marc, if you see a title page that is designed versus just the 12-point Courier, maybe underlined title, what do you think?

**Marc:** It doesn’t really register.

**John:** It doesn’t register for you?

**Marc:** As long as there’s the title, I’m good.

**John:** Great. It doesn’t help you? It doesn’t scare you?

**Marc:** Me, no.

**John:** Our third Three Page Challenge has a very well-designed or a very graphic cover page. I’m holding it up here. For our listeners at home who can’t see this, it’s The Untimely Demise of That Awful David Schwartzman. The title is very big on the page. It’s single words in probably 72-point font, “Original teleplay by Rudi O’Meara.” The background is a photo that is a gradient from red to blue. It’s stylish. It’s big. It’s not anywhere like a normal title page would be. It’s a very strong, bold choice. Megana, could you give us a synopsis of what we see in these three pages?

**Megana:** Yes. This is The Untimely Demise of That Awful David Schwartzman by Rudi O’Meara. “We open on a middle-aged man floating facedown in a pool, wearing a kimono and covered in blood. In VoiceOver, Clay, early 20s, aspiring screenwriter, tells us he can’t believe that David, the man facedown in the pool, is dead and that he’s one of the ones trying to figure out who did it. Clay warns us that David wasn’t usually this calm. We hard cut to production offices, where we see David Schwartzman, a famous indie producer, storm in and scream at Clay about work, looking for some guy named Phil, and picking him up food from Canter’s.”

**John:** Great. Marc, this producer did not remind you of anybody you’ve ever heard of, right?

**Marc:** Many a producer I worked for back in the day as an assistant.

**John:** Back in the days. This is a story about Hollywood. It’s focused on that. There’s a little bit of PTSD that comes up as I read these things, both from having experienced these people and also having read things about these people and the Swimming with Sharks and all this stuff. As I sit down at this, I’m like, oh, so it’s a Sunset Boulevard opening with someone floating in a pool and a screenwriter talking, the narration that’s going onto this. As you finished these three pages, what was your first thought? What was your first feeling?

**Marc:** I would say I love the title.

**John:** I think the title is fantastic.

**Marc:** Yeah, that definitely brought me in. I would say after that, if I was looking at it for development, it would be a harder point of view, just because Hollywood stories are just really hard to sell. I would then assess more of as a staffing sample.

**John:** The Untimely Demise of That Awful David Schwartzman is a really strong title. We’ve talked on the show before. There’s been periods at which spec scripts with very provocative titles would get a lot of attention. Then they would always be released as something completely different than the actual movie. I’m going to remember that. Saying That Awful David Schwartzman is really great. This is apparently Episode 1: Who the F is Phil.

Some other things I’m noticing on the title page here, we’re given an address, we’re given a phone number, we’re given an email address. Once upon a time, we maybe wanted all those things. Email address is great. We don’t need anything more than that. WGA registration number, you don’t need it. We don’t care. It honestly looks to me a little unprofessional. I just don’t trust that people know what they’re doing if they’re putting that number on there.

**Marc:** I agree.

**John:** As everyone who listens to the podcast knows, I’m the one on the podcast who actually is pro-WGA. I think WGA is a fantastic organization. I don’t think WGA registration is meaningful for almost anything. If you decide to do it, great, if it makes you feel good. It’s not any more protective than copyright is in general. Do it if you feel like it, but you definitely don’t need to put that registration number on here. I haven’t registered anything with the WGA for 20 years. Don’t worry about doing it.

**Megana:** Also, it’s because you email drafts. That’s important.

**John:** Emailing a draft around is also a proof that it existed at a certain point of time. That’s all the WGA registration does is just prove that this thing actually did exist at a certain point in time. There’s other ways to prove that.

**Marc:** Also, if you have an agent manager or a lawyer, they’re going to protect you when you submit things to production companies and studios.

**John:** Our point of view is Clay. Clay is giving us the VoiceOver. He’s the one who’s working for That Awful David Schwartzman. He has a VoiceOver power in the story. Not only does he have VoiceOver power, he has ability to stop time and freeze-frame us and be live in scenes while he’s talking to camera. It’s a lot. Did it work for you?

**Marc:** I think at points it worked for me. I think the thing that was hard for me to track was Clay as a character, because in the VoiceOver he was really brash and confident, but then in the description he was fresh-eyed and young. I was trying to find a way to track him as a character when you’re introducing him in the first three pages.

**John:** Yeah. We have basically two characters we’re setting up here. Let’s talk about David Schwartzman. He’s described as “mid-50s, long, thinning gray hair, wire rim glasses.” Love it. “An infamous independent producer with a checkered past” in the description, no. That’s too much for me. I’m always a fan of being able to cheat a little bit on that first character introduction in terms of a thing that an actor can play but is not necessarily visual or something we’re going to see. “An infamous independent producer with a checkered past,” we don’t know that from just that description. If you can quickly get that out there, we’re going to feel it. That just felt like cheating to stick that in his parenthetical there.

**Marc:** Yeah. I don’t know if this is intended to be a comedic murder mystery, but I thought when Clay says, “We’d be the ones trying to figure out who did it,” it felt like it tipped your hat to the mystery a little bit. I wanted a little bit more intrigue and not laying out all your cards in the first page.

**John:** Yep. We have another character cheating thing here when we finally get to Clay’s actual introduction. He’s been voiceover-ing, but only on Page 2 do we actually meet him in person. “The camera wheels around to reveal our narrator – Clay Wilcox,” parentheses, “early 20s,” comma, “a fresh-faced former English major and aspiring screenwriter then unaccustomed to David’s fury.” That whole last sentence there, “then unaccustomed to David’s fury,” facts not in evidence. Show us that, but you can’t just tell us that in a scene description.

**Marc:** Yeah. Similar to the way he talked in VoiceOver, and then when he was freezing, it felt like he had been doing this for a while, so it was hard to track which kind of, I guess, Clay we were tracking and following.

**John:** Yeah. That’s where I had a hard time buying Clay as a character, which is important, because he’s our POV character. He’s the one we’re going to see going through this. All that said, I’m curious and intrigued about the tone, because like you, I thought it was maybe a comedic murder mystery, sort of Only Murders in the Building. There’s something fun about that and piecing that together, we have a dead body, and figuring out who could’ve done this thing, when it seems like everybody probably did want to kill this person, because I want to kill this person, and I don’t even know him. Luckily, we can ask the question of the writer himself. Can we bring up Rudi O’Meara? Rudi, thank you very much for being here.

**Rudi O’Meara:** Thanks for having me. Great feedback though. Thank you so much.

**John:** Great. Thank you for being here. Talk to us about your experience with David Schwartzman. Was he really that bad?

**Rudi:** Yes. Actually, the title, the “That Awful,” so the person… It’s kind of from my life experience in some ways. It’s the reason I left the industry when I was younger. Later in the script, it’s mentioned that he was actually part of The Factory with Andy Warhol. When I was told that I got the job, I was working at a bookstore. The Warhol Diaries had just come out. I went to the index, and his citations were long in his name. I went to the first one. It was like, “Went to so-and-so’s house, ran into that awful David.” His last name was not Schwartzman. Next citation was exactly the same. Twenty citations later was exactly the same. That’s where the title comes from.

**John:** That’s awesome. I didn’t know that it was based on… I think it’s a sad state of Hollywood that there’s a bunch of other people who I assumed it could’ve been based on.

**Marc:** Exactly.

**John:** A bunch of terrible, terrible people, some of whom we’ve discussed on the Scriptnotes podcast, who we could assume that it was inspired by. Was our guess that it’s a comedic murder mystery at all correct? What is the tone for you?

**Rudi:** Ding ding ding.

**John:** Great. Someone killed him, and it’s Clue, and we have to figure out who could’ve done it.

**Rudi:** Correct. Like you said earlier too, it really could be anyone. That’s part of the both episodic nature, but also… Every single person from the financier, basically every aspect of the production, everyone has a motive. They’re trying to figure out how to solve it.

**John:** Talk to us about the engine of the show though, if it’s an Only Murders in the Building, or it could be The Afterparty. Are we switching POVs episode to episode? How does it work, or do you know?

**Rudi:** Clay is the protagonist. There is a time-swapping element. It jumps forward, jumps back. It’s a little bit like Only Murders but then also like The Big Lebowski meets The Maltese Falcon in some ways, where it jumps around, but it’s also a little trippy. In some ways, the narration is maybe faulted for that a little bit, because it does feel like you’re hearing from him at a different stage of his own understanding. At the same time, when he’s speaking in the first person or interacting with characters live, sometimes it’s a little bit disconnected from his later wisdom. It jumps around in time a little bit, and that can be a problem.

**John:** Making it clear to the audience that there is that gap is really challenging, and on the page, feeling the difference between that too, because we’re just seeing Clay with dialog, and so we’re not necessarily always clocking if it’s a VoiceOver dialog versus what’s happening in the scene. It’s a challenging thing to have characters be able to VoiceOver in a scene and talk in a scene, and yet many great movies do it. Clueless does it, and it works flawlessly when it happens. Maybe we’re actually looking at how those things worked on the page and what you can see and feel and steal from how they’re balancing those two things. You mentioned before, Marc, that movies about Hollywood, shows about Hollywood are really tough. They’re tough to get made, and they don’t tend to work especially well. Why is that? Do you have a sense?

**Marc:** There’s always the Entourages of the world that work. I think it’s hard because for the most part, people don’t want to access behind-the-scenes movies, TV shows about Hollywood. I think that’s been always hard. Can I ask you a question about the script though?

**Rudi:** Yeah, sure.

**Marc:** In terms of Clay, and you might not have this figured out, is there a detective that comes in? If Clay is new to this guy’s world, why does he want to figure out who killed him?

**Rudi:** There is a detective later. I’ve only written the pilot, but I’ve mapped out the first season. That’s very presumptuous, first season. In Season 4… No. There is a detective, but also at the same time, they have the motivation in that just before the murder happens, the film that has been in production is failing, and out of desperation, the producer, David, taps Clay for an idea, like, “Give me a spec script of yours.” He’s like, “Oh here it is. I got one.” It starts moving. Things go into production. David gets murdered. They want to keep that moving. Also, at the same time, they’re under threat, because they’re seen by all these other people who are also suspects as possible suspects themselves. Everyone’s on the table in terms of who could’ve killed David.

**John:** Great. Rudi, thank you so much for these three pages.

**Marc:** Thank you.

**Rudi:** Thank you very much.

**John:** I want to thank everybody who sent through the three pages for us to talk about, especially our brave writers who came up here to talk about the things they wrote, because that’s so intimidating to have us talk about problems and then you come up here and do it. Thank you very much for that. Thank Megana Rao, our producer, for reading all of these pages. Thank you to the Austin Film Festival for having us again. Thank you for a great audience. Thank you. Have a great afternoon.

It’s John back with you kind of live again. I want to thank the Austin Film Festival for having us yet again. Scriptnotes is produced by Megana Rao, edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week is by Jeff Graham. If you have an outro, you can send us a link to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also the place where you can send longer questions. For shorter questions on Twitter, Craig is @clmazin, I’m @johnaugust. A reminder that if you want to submit your own three pages for a Three Page Challenge, the place to do that is at johnaugust.com/threepage, all spelled out. You can find the show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts and sign up for our weeklyish newsletter called Inneresting, which has lots of links to things about writing.

We have T-shirts, and they’re great. We saw so many of them at the Austin Film Festival. You can find them at Cotton Bureau, and actually only at Cotton Bureau. There’s now knockoff Scriptnotes T-shirts, which is wild. The real ones are at Cotton Bureau. You should get them there, because they’re the only ones that are soft enough to merit the Scriptnotes brand.

You can sign up to become a Premium Member at scriptnotes.net, where you get all of the back-episodes and Bonus Segments, like the one we’re about to put on the end of this episode, which has questions from the audience after our Three Page Challenge. Thanks.

[Bonus Segment]

**John:** At this point in the podcast, I’d love to talk to you guys and get your questions you have in the audience about either the pages that we talked through today or the general thinking about what on the page works for a person who’s trying to get staffed on a show or get a show set up at a company like yours.

Do we have questions in the audience? Right there in the white. Just say your question. I may repeat it back so we have it on the air. The question is about the layout of each particular page and whether, especially in those early pages, are we trying to make sure there’s a cliffhanger at the bottom of the page and what those all are.

The first couple pages are incredibly crucial to make sure that you’re just drawing people down that page, and they want to keep flipping. The goal is just get them to the next page, get them to the next page. That’s not necessarily a cliffhanger. You don’t want to break the actual story to get you to the next thing. You are really thinking about how am I going to get this person to read. A very common cheat you’ll see in a lot of scripts is that putting a few extra blank lines at the top, so that the first page is just a little bit lighter and so that we’re starting about a quarter of a page down, just to get you flipping and just make it less intimidating to get through.

A thing we talk a lot about when we do Three Page Challenges is just the page feel and how dense it is on the page and how light it is. The samples we’ve gone through today are pretty good examples. The longest blocks of scene description are about three lines, four lines. There’s no 15-line things. If you look back at older scripts, sometimes they had really massive things. Those are intimidating. You might start skimming.

As a writer, you never want your reader to skim. You always want the reader to feel like every word, they got it in there and they took it. The only thing you want your reader to be able to skim is character names. At a certain point you can get into a flow where you don’t have to look at the character names anymore. You have a feeling of it’s ping-ponging back and forth between these characters. It’s great. You basically want to make sure that you’re keeping the reader glued to every word and flipping the next page.

Again, one of the things we always say at the end of each of these samples, would I want to read Page 4? Sometimes, yes. In the case of these scripts, yeah, I would keep reading a little bit longer, which is a great sign.

Right here in the first row. Julie, you’re asking a really good question, because classically, we talk about structure, especially for film structure, like, oh, the inciting incident needs to happen at a certain point, or there’s an act break and these changes. I think the thing we kept trying to stress is that even before then, by the end of three pages, we need to have a sense of what this world feels like, what this movie feels like, what ride am I going on. If you’ve done that in three pages, that’s important. If we’re hooked into who you are as a writer and feel confident, that’s greater. I asked you earlier what makes you stop a script. That’s one of the things you said is just that feeling of, “I want to keep going.”

**Marc:** I don’t think it needs to be somebody gets murdered in the first three pages. It could just be a really beautiful tone that’s intriguing, that you are excited to read more.

**John:** Another question. Right here. Great. The question is, how worried do we need to be in the first three pages of being either too irreverent or saying something, doing something on those first three pages that make someone feel like, “I don’t ever want to meet this writer.” Marc, has that ever happened to you?

**Marc:** No.

**John:** Have you ever been like, “Oh my god, this person seems like a jerk.”

**Marc:** No. Be as authentic as you want to be in your writing, I always say.

**John:** On the live show we did last night, we had two great guests, Chuck and Brenda, coming on. One of the things that they made most clear is that what was key to them getting staffed on shows finally was just writing what they uniquely themselves could write, that no one else could do this. When people read their sample, it’s like, “Oh yeah, I want that guy who did that thing.” It wasn’t a generic thing that someone else could’ve written. It was only a thing that Chuck could’ve written or that Brenda could’ve written. Using something that shows your own voice is crucial.

People also come to me and say, “Oh, I’m working through a couple different ideas. I’m not sure what I should be writing next that might be a good sample.” If there’s something you could write that the central character or premise feels like it matches you, that can be really useful, because then the person who’s reading it can have you in their mind, and so when they sit down and meet with you, they’re like, “Oh yeah, that character and her, yeah, I could see them jiving.” That can be really useful.

**Marc:** I will say there’s scripts that I’ve read in my career that are batshit crazy ideas, but I will always remember them. To John’s point, as I’m staffing a show, I might say, “I really loved that script two years ago,” and then I’ll flip it to the showrunners because it stuck with me as something that just felt noisy and different.

**John:** Noisy can be good. Right here. Marc, are you pro-splat?

**Marc:** I’m always open to a splat. Are you?

**John:** Yeah, I think so. On the podcast, we often call this a Stuart Special. Stuart Friedel, who’s one of our previous producers, as he picked Three Page Challenges, sometimes there would be this big dramatic thing happens, and it says then “two weeks earlier,” and then it goes back. We call that a Stuart Special, because it’s got that flashback thing. Those are often splats, where there’s a whole horrible death or a thing happens and then everything can go back to normal life beforehand. Those can totally work. They can be cliches, but if they’re cliches that are done really, really well or have a spin on them, they work and they can be really, really helpful. Don’t be afraid of them.

Right here. The question is about character introductions, character descriptions that have a lot of psychological insight or they really talk through the psychology of characters and how we feel about that. I want to contrast that with some of my criticisms of this last script, where they weren’t psychological insights, they weren’t things that an actor could play. They were just facts that we couldn’t see. I think that is really the distinction for me.

I haven’t read the Mare of Easttown scripts, but I suspect that if I were an actor reading through that script, I’d say, “Oh, that is really useful for me. That is a thing that I can figure out, how to embody what you’re describing there. That is great, whereas I can’t embody being a despised producer. That’s not a thing I can take into my body.” I’m great with it. You always have to recognize that if you’re throwing a lot of scene description at us, we’re going to be tempted to slow down or stop reading or we might skim it. It’s always that balance. If it works, it can be great. How do you feel when you see those things on the page?

**Marc:** I haven’t read Mare of Easttown. I’ll be actually curious to see how it maps out. I would say I agree. If you could be a little concise with your descriptions, I always think that works better just for the read and the flow.

**John:** Great. Another question. Let’s go all the way to the back. I see you, sir. Great. The question is about companion material, so if there’s a deck that comes with a script or there’s some sort of link, would you click that first or look at the deck first before you read the script?

**Marc:** I think it just depends, honestly. I would actually look at the sizzle first, just so I get the visual tone of what they want to do. Then I would read the script.

**John:** Just so we’re sure we’re defining terms, what is a sizzle to you, and how long is a sizzle reel?

**Marc:** A sizzle reel could be anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes. That’s almost like a proof of concept for the tone and the look and the feel of the series, or if it’s a deck, I’ve gotten decks anywhere between 5 and 20 pages of templates for who the characters are, the world. A lot of times with genre stuff in big world-building stuff, they tend to put a deck together so you understand the scope of the world.

**John:** I’m working on a project for the first time that has a deck that goes with it. It’s exciting. Also, it kind of feels like cheating, because I can show you what this all looks like. This is this giant movie star in this role. That’d be great. Of course you want to make that movie or that show. We didn’t used to do them, but they are helpful. Curious what you think about it. We now can embed links in scripts. We can embed links in things. Do you ever click links in a pdf?

**Marc:** The only thing I’ve seen, which I thought was super cool, was there was a Spotify playlist at the top of the title page, because it was a Southern show, and they wanted Southern music bands. It was actually just really nice at the end just to play that playlist, which I thought was cool.

**John:** That was on the title page or at the end?

**Marc:** It was on the title page, on the QR code.

**John:** Great.

**Marc:** It was pretty cool.

**John:** [inaudible 00:51:15]. A question right over here. The question is, beyond just a link, embedding images, putting other stuff in a script, and do we think that the screenplay format will evolve beyond where it is right now? Craig Mazin who’s not here, would say, “Yes, it’s going to. We’re going to break the whole script format.” Me, as the person who actually makes apps that do it, it’s like, eh. I’m maybe a little more conservative on some of it. How do you feel when you see an image in a script?

**Marc:** I would say at the end of the day, at the core, it’s about the actual script. You can jazz it up and put bells and whistles, but at the core, I think I just look at the script and assess the actual script.

**John:** Yeah, because to be the entire cliché here, the script is the plan for making a TV show. The photo is in the plan for making the TV show. The photo can be really helpful for other things. I think those decks and other stuff can be really helpful for showing what stuff is. The script is the plan for what the scenes are and how we’re going to get through this important storytelling moment. If an image is absolutely crucial for doing that or if you could not possibly understand this without that one image… Rian Johnson did it in Looper. If there’s one image that you have to see for it to make sense, great. If you can’t do it with your words, maybe there’s some reason why your words need to be improved.

**Marc:** I also thought for a deck over Zoom, for my writer friends who have to talk for 30 minutes, it’s a nice break to show visuals.

**John:** Yeah, it really is so great. Because of the pandemic, we first started having to do this. It was better, because suddenly, I can have my cheat sheet of what I’m pitching off of right close to the camera line, but the deck’s filling up some space. It does help, because I’m the person who always used to bring in boards. I would art-mount my boards and bring them in. Slides are just better.

Great. Right here. The question is, we talked about some scripts being really good for thinking about making this into production versus staffing and what the split is here. Can you define what is a useful thing to be thinking about, like, “Oh, this is a good sample for staffing,” versus, “This is something we would actually make.”

**Marc:** I would say the first step is I would talk to the creator/showrunner and say, “Ideally, what are you looking for? What are your needs?” because at the end of it, it’s the writer’s, creator’s decision on who he or she wants to hire. Then off of that conversation… Let’s say it’s a cop show. If they want somebody who has a cop procedural, then I’ll look for specific scripts that mimic that, or if it’s a genre piece, but it’s a real character piece, then look for something specific in line with what the showrunner wants. It really depends on what the show is.

**John:** Of course, back in the day, if you wanted to write on a half-hour sitcom, you would write a spec episode of Seinfeld or some existing show that was on the air. It’s like, “Oh, he can write that show.” You wouldn’t write the show that you were staffed on. It was just to show that you can actually do that thing. Mindy Kaling says she really misses those days, because she misses being able to staff off of like, “I know they understand how shows work and how to write in the voice of a given show.” We don’t do that anymore, because you probably read very few specs of existing shows anymore.

**Marc:** When I first started my career, it was a lot of CSIs, Law and Orders. I hadn’t watched CSI a lot, so it was hard for me to track if they were mimicking the show, because ideally when you’re staffing, you’re mimicking what the show and the creator is creating. Now it’s really refreshing, because it’s all about originals. There’s plenty of playwrights that I’ve staffed off just an amazing play sample that just has a really great character that tonally fits what the creator’s doing in the series too.

**John:** Marc, talk to us about reading things that are not scripts, because reading a play, do you feel like you are getting a good sense of whether they could do it?

**Marc:** Yeah, sometimes if there may be a lower-level writer, so a staff writer or story editor, where they’re not an upper-level writer, but they just have a really great, unique voice, and we just need a really unique perspective in the room, that will help. A couple years ago, I got pitched somebody who had a Twitter handle as a way to staff a show.

**John:** Great. Was it a very serious Twitter handle? It wasn’t funny at all.

**Marc:** No, it was funny. It was for a comedy room. They hadn’t written a script yet, but they had really funny tweets.

**John:** Diablo Cody, quite famously, she was funny on Twitter, and sure enough, she could actually write. Who knew? That is a way to show a very specific voice. Great.

Let’s take one more question here. Right there in the back, I see you. Great. Our question is, we were talking about specs, which is so confusing. In TV, a spec is writing an episode of an existing show that’s on the air, or are people just reading originals? For our writer there, would you recommend she spec an existing show or just do originals?

**Marc:** I’d say originals. I did read recently a Golden Girls spec. That was really fun and new. It was interesting how they told the story. I think it was noisy, the way they planned out the story. For the most part, originals. I would say have two, because you never know if there’s a great genre show that you want to get staffed on or a great drama. To have two samples is always really good.

**John:** Some things I took from this conversation today, I’m going to use the word noisy a lot as a describer, because really, a noisy thing you notice. You just notice people who are noisy, and you notice a script that is noisy. It just sticks with you. Things that are just quiet and subtle and disappear and they’re not objectionable but they’re not memorable, that’s not going to help these people.

**Marc:** I think it mimics… There are so many platforms right now. What buyers are saying, they need things that are noisy to break through the immense amount of content that’s on the air right now.

**John:** Great.

Links:

* [Marc Velez](https://deadline.com/2022/10/marc-velez-ucp-head-of-development-naketha-mattocks-universal-tv-svp-drama-1235136115/) on [IMDb](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm5677194/)
* [The Encyclopedists](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F10%2FThe-Encyclopedists-MXH-3p.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=95fb3359c1be84f6888812633600f586b8a38fef8118d40d897a43a07798da53) by Michael X. Heiligenstein
* [Call Me 7.14 Years Ago](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F10%2FCall_Me_7_14_Years_Ago_Three_Page.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=7cbf886b0e5c2ddb0343817294c00fccd7cfd708a397fbafda7e3c426a5b5e30) by Liliana Liu
* [The Untimely Demise of That Awful David Schwartzman](https://johnaugust.com/index.php?gf-download=2022%2F10%2FUntimely_Demise_v04_AFF_3_Page.pdf&form-id=1&field-id=4&hash=398abcf7c2b4adb0526bc8542da5a43be1da1ed4ab3b13dbe0868ceec2d16cf2) by Rudi O’Meara
* Thank you to the [Austin Film Festival!]() and all our participants in the three page challenge.
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* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Jeff Graham ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))
* Scriptnotes is produced by [Megana Rao](https://twitter.com/MeganaRao) and edited by [Matthew Chilelli](https://twitter.com/machelli).

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You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/573standard.mp3).