Search Results for: 3 page challenge

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/the-one-with-the-agent).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 264 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. So, way back in Episode 2 we discussed how to get an agent. And in the 262 episodes since then the subject of agents has come up quite often, largely from listener questions. Well, today we are going to speak with an actual agent about what he looks for in a writer client and how he sees the relationships between writers and agents and managers and executives. And so that’s our whole episode is just an agent today.

And that agent is sitting across from me. Peter Dodd is a Motion Picture Literary Agent at UTA where he represents a range of clients, including me. Peter, welcome to the show.

**Peter Dodd:** Hello guys. Happy to be here.

**Craig:** Hey, welcome Peter. Welcome. I’m very glad that you’re here, because as much as John and I ramble on and on for 263 episodes, I think honestly everyone out there has been waiting for us to just – can you please just tell me how to get the damn agent? So, we’re really glad you’re here.

**Peter:** Thank you. Well, I am happy to be here. I’m excited to try and answer some of these questions, so shoot.

**John:** Great. Well, let’s start with the basics. How long have you been an agent?

**Peter:** I’ve been an agent for about four years. I’ve been at the agency for around seven years.

**John:** So that’s a long time. So how do you get to be an agent? What was the process from starting there to becoming an agent?

**Peter:** The process is everyone starts in the mailroom, like historically is told, that exists. We start delivering the mail.

**John:** So, classically, when I started out in Hollywood, you were literally delivering mail from like office to office and doing runs. But there’s probably much more to that now in 2016. What does a mailroom person do?

**Peter:** Well, it’s interesting, I wonder if there’s more or less, because now that everything is digital, you send all of your scripts over email. So you’re not – so the function of a mailroom trainee initially was to pick up scripts and run them to actor’s houses, or drop them off in the mail to be sent to whoever for whatever purpose. Now, you spend your time in the mailroom, A, sort of collecting all the mail that comes in the day, dealing with all the stuff that agents are sending out, and delivering mail that comes in on a case-by-case basis. A lot of it happens to be Amazon packages.

**John:** So, you’re doing that at the very start, and then what is the process after you’ve been in the mailroom? Do you get assigned to a desk?

**Peter:** You start in the mailroom. After you spend a sufficient amount of time in the mailroom, you earn the right to interview for agents. And so that becomes the assistant pool that agents can choose from. So, if there are say 20 people in the mailroom delivering mail every day, I might interview five or six of them to be assistants on my desk. And then you select one of them to become your assistant.

So, then they spend the next year of their life basically answering the phone calls, setting meetings, sending scripts out. You know, arranging the life of the agent and manufacturing everything they need to do from the beginning of the day to the end of the day for the agent and for the clients they work with and represent.

**John:** Great. So on a desk means that you are an assistant to an agent. So, my first interaction with you is you were on David Kramer’s desk, who was my main agent, and so you were answering the phone. Is that when I first met you?

**Peter:** Yes.

**John:** So, what is the process from going being the guy who is answering the phones to the person who actually has clients that you’re representing?

**Peter:** It’s a tricky one. Basically, you have to stay at the agency for a while. No one gets promoted in their first year, although everyone is overqualified to do the job. That’s sort of not the point. It’s not about whether or not you can answer a phone or set or schedule a meeting. It’s about whether you’re doing the job of an agent. And so typically you’ll work for a junior agent for a year, and then you switch desks. You’ll work for a more senior agent for a year. And then you might switch desks again and work for an even more senior agent. And then at that point, when you’ve been there for anywhere from three to five years, there’s an inflection point whereby you either succeed and you make the jump to agent, or doesn’t feel like it’s going to work out and you leave and go work at another place.

**Craig:** But that sounds like the ultimate disaster. Right? I mean, I’m sure that it’s not for some people who decide, you know what, the agent’s life is not for me. I don’t actually want to be an agent. But, my god, to put in all those years in the mailroom, and then as an assistant, and then as an assistant, and then as an assistant, and then somebody one day goes, “Eh, meh.” That happens, right?

I mean, people do sort of get pushed off of the platform at some point. It has to, right? Because there’s so many agents an agency needs, right?

**Peter:** It happens all the time. It happens all the time. And, honestly, the job is a tricky one. It’s arduous. It’s not fun much of the time. And if you don’t love it, you’re going to self-select out anyway. And so it makes sense for people to guide you down a different path if that’s the right thing for you.

**John:** So, Peter, of the cohort of people in the mailroom with you, how many of those people are agents now?

**Peter:** Just me.

**John:** Great.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** And how many people were in that first group?

**Peter:** I started on the same day as six people. There were probably about I want to say 20 people in the mailroom overall. But on my day there were six of us. Five of them left. Of the five that left, one has left the industry completely. Works in real estate now. The other four are executives, producers, working in film and in TV. One guy is in reality TV. But anywhere from kids’ stuff to producing movies. So everyone has a career in entertainment, for the most part.

**John:** That’s great.

**Peter:** But not everyone stays at the actual agency.

**John:** And just to back up a little bit more, what was your background before going in there? You had an undergrad degree and then you applied to get into the mailroom? How does that work?

**Peter:** No, I graduated from Harvard with a degree in religion and political science. And after that, I got a job as a consultant. So I was a strategy consultant for big business for like three or four years. I left there and I worked at the Walt Disney Company in corporate strategy, so doing lots of acquisition work for the company. Always trying to get closer to storytelling and closer to movies. And they were actually quite getting there.

And then after I left Disney, instead of going to business school I decided, you know what, I’m going to try this agency thing for a year. If it works out for me, I’ll stay. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll go to grad school and I’ll have felt that I checked that box.

**Craig:** So you went from working on business transactions at the corporate level to standing in a mailroom with five other people, delivering Amazon packages?

**Peter:** Correct.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** I always want everyone to understand the glamour of the industry that you entered into.

**Peter:** By the way, it’s super sexy. But what’s also interesting is that in the mailroom you have people with law degrees, you have people with business degrees, you have people that went to some amazing schools. You have people from all walks of life. And it’s really, really interesting to see how everyone sort of settles in and how some people last and some people don’t. And the skills that you think it takes to be successful at this job are not necessarily the skills that everyone has. And so it’s an interesting sorting process.

**John:** What are the skills required for being successful as an agent?

**Peter:** To be successful as an agent you have to be dogged. You have to be tireless. You have to accept no as only an entry point to a conversation, and not necessarily as the be all and end all of a conversation. You have to love movies, or TV, or whatever it is that you choose to spend all your time in, because frankly you do spend all of your time in it. And in my case, you have to love reading. I love reading. I love good stories. I love writers. That’s why I’ve gravitated towards the literary side is I’m just much more interested in that side of the business. Working with humans, working with actors, working with that side isn’t necessarily for me just yet.

**Craig:** But you have to find that you also love the kinds of people that you have to represent. And we’re not always the most lovable types. It takes a certain kind of person to be married to a writer. John and I have talked about that. And I presume that you have somewhere in there one of those weird quirky personalities that actually likes talking to writers.

**Peter:** I guess so. Maybe I do. I don’t know. But for I think the thing that always interested me was, you know, when you work at an agency you’re at the center of all the information. And so you hear everything that’s happening all around town at all times. And I like being at the hub. And I like being able to help disseminate that information to people that I think it’s relevant for, and helping, you know, on the other side to introduce people – buyers, producers, etc. – to people that I think are really special.

So, from my perspective, I’m sort at this nexus point and from either end I can get people excited about new writers or new directors or get new writers and new directors excited about projects or talent that I think are really special. So you’re sort of like at a high level you’re a matchmaker.

**John:** So, when did you start making matches? When did you have your first clients that were your own? Or when did you start representing other people’s clients? When does that transition happen?

**Peter:** Well, I have found my way into a lot of client teams just by sheer force and energy. I think if you start doing the job of anyone above you, they will appreciate it, especially at an agency. You know, agents never have enough time to read everything, to know every project, to know exactly what’s going on about every facet of everything. And so what I found when I was an assistant still, even working for David, was if you just pick one or two clients and you say, “Look, I want to work for this person. I want to act as if I’m their agent,” it can become practice.

So I would read for specific directors and I would say, “Oh, these scripts are great. We should call these directors and send it to them.” Or I would say, “Oh, these scripts aren’t so great. We should pass for them, or send it to them with the caveat that we don’t necessarily love it, but they should read it anyway.”

**John:** You started doing this while you were an assistant for a bigger agent?

**Peter:** The way that you get promoted is that you demonstrate that you can do the job of an agent. And so while you’re an assistant, you have to do all of the assistant tasks. You have to manage their client lists. You have to deal with all of their submissions. You have to manage them and their phone calls, etc. Plus, on the weekends you are trying to figure out what’s right for their clients, your boss’s clients, and you’re trying to see everything, to read everything, to discover new voices that you can bring into the agency. So, in my – the year before I got promoted, I would just constantly try and bring a new director to agents at the agency that I thought was really special, that I thought they should watch. Or I would try and get a director that my boss represented to take a script seriously.

And it got to the point where I had a relationship with some of these clients where I would just call them myself. I would pitch them material. They got used to talking to me and to listening to me and reading what I sent them. And that worked out really well. So, ultimately, after my assistant time had ended, it’s a pretty natural fit to transition from being an assistant to a boss, to having your own desk, having your own phone, and building your own relationships.

**John:** So, I introduced you as a Motion Picture Literary Agent, but that may be confusing because people think literary and they just think books, they just think written words, but you represent writers and directors. Is that basically the umbrella of people who are doing that for movies is your specialty, correct?

**Peter:** Correct.

**John:** And so if somebody is interested in television, they would also have a television agent who would be representing them for TV at the agency?

**Peter:** Yes.

**John:** And you’d all be in conversation about sort of what that person is up to?

**Peter:** Conversation is one way of phrasing it. I like to think of it as competition for what that person is up to. Because often we have conflicting agendas. I mean, from a larger perspective, we all want the client to be successful, but from a parochial perspective we want the client to be successful in our medium. So I want you writing movies. Your TV agent wants you writing TV. And everyone is competing in a positive way to try and get you work. That’s how it should work.

**John:** Great. So, who were the first clients that you represented who are sort of your people? The people you brought in and became the people you were representing. You don’t have to say names, but like how did you find those people?

**Peter:** Pretty much all of the clients that I have, and all of the ones that I’ve signed, have come from recommendations. I am a recommendation based engine. There is so much volume of content and material just out there in the world that it’s very easy for people to get overwhelmed by the 30 or 50 unrepresented scripts they get submitted a week.

So, in the course of my assistant years I spent a lot of time networking, a lot of drinks, a lot of weekends, a lot of commiserating with other assistants who then went on to get promoted as young executives, and those people that survived I think all have amazing taste. And so I sort of cultivated a group of around 15 people whose recommendations I will read always, and quickly. And they are the ones that feed me probably 60% of my clients.

So, all of my early clients came from that group of people.

**Craig:** And this group of people, they are currently working as producers, studio executives, managers?

**Peter:** Exactly.

**Craig:** So they’re not your direct competition.

**Peter:** No. Because if they were my direct competition, they’re probably looking after the same–

**Craig:** They wouldn’t tell you.

**Peter:** Content as well. They’d have incentive to tell me. When you go through the difficulty and the challenges of being an assistant, you know, when you’re that guy trying to set a meeting at ten o’clock at night for 8am tomorrow morning in London with a director client, and you’re on the phone with the producer, or the producer’s assistant who is London and it’s three o’clock in the morning for them, you know, when that happens a few times you begin to develop this connection that exists beyond just email addresses. And so now those people who have been promoted at this point are all people that, you know, you went to battle with, and these people help you, and you help them. And that’s sort of the circle of life.

**John:** What does that conversation look like? Are they just emailing you out of the blue saying like, let’s invent a writer, let’s say Christina. There’s a writer out there Christina. And so the executives have read Christina’s script and said like, “She’s really good. Hey, you should read her.” Or, are you reaching out saying like, “Hey, tell me who is good?” How does that–?

**Peter:** No, no, no. It always comes from them. Almost always comes from them. I don’t really solicit.

**John:** OK. So they start, they say like, “Hey, I read something that’s really great. You’ll want to read her.” And what is the next step for you? So if they said you should read her, are you reaching out to Christina? Are they sending you the script? What’s happening?

**Peter:** 90% of the time they’ll include the material. They’ll say, “Hey, I just read a great sample for this project. You should check this out. I don’t think this writer is represented.” Or they’ll say, “Hey, I read a great sample. You should check this out. I think this person is unhappy with their agent, or unhappy with their manager. This could be an opportunity.”

**John:** Great. So, what’s an interesting is none of what you’re saying is about a query letter. Like a writer has not written to you saying like, “Hey, I’m looking for an agent.” Does that ever – are any of your clients based on a query letter, like they reached out to you?

**Peter:** No.

**John:** Not a one?

**Peter:** Never.

**John:** All right.

**Peter:** Never happens.

**John:** No one that you met at a conference who offered you a business card or pitched you a script?

**Peter:** No. People have tried, but no. None of the actual clients that I work with now have come in that way.

**Craig:** This is why John and I spend a lot of our time frustrated, because there is – I’m sure you know this – there is a large cottage industry designed to take money from people, and in exchange give them the secrets to getting an agent, and getting representation, all the rest of it. And there’s this obsession over query letters. It’s absurd. It is the most bizarre Fellini-esque circus of nonsense you’ve ever seen.

**Peter:** And it’s complete highway robbery, because that’s not the way that agents look at or think about material.

**John:** Do you care about a log line?

**Peter:** In a submission letter?

**John:** Yeah.

**Peter:** I’d actually rather not have a log line frankly.

**Craig:** I love this. This is so great.

**Peter:** I’d rather have someone say, “I read this and I love it. You read it and tell me what you think.” Because frankly people suck at writing log lines.

**Craig:** Well, everyone, because log lines stink anyway. I mean, what are you going to sum up a movie in two sentences? It doesn’t tell you a damn thing. Particularly, it doesn’t tell you if this writer has capabilities to do more than just this one idea, or if they’re the kind of writer that’s written an idea that you now have to go get John August to rewrite because they can’t actually write.

I mean, what’s coming through, which I find so fascinating, and I think it’s hard for a lot of people to get their minds around this who are trying to get into our business is that they think somehow they have to do something to get you. And really what it comes down to is on your side of things you’re looking for people to help you. In other words, you’re looking for writers and somebody says, “This person would be great for you. You should get them before someone else does.” It is an entirely different mindset, but I think on their side they think, oh, no, no, I have to show them how wonderful I am, or something like that.

It just doesn’t work.

**Peter:** Not at all. You know, I get many, many query letters a day from people that figure out our email addresses and send us these crazy subject lines that obvious click bait. I open them and I’m like what on earth is this, how can delete it faster?

**Craig:** Oh man.

**Peter:** I don’t even read them. And if it’s not from someone I know, or I can tell that it’s fake, automatic delete.

**John:** So, let’s go back to Christina, and so an executive at a production company that you trust, you think has good taste, has recommended you read her script. Has attached the script. When do you read that script?

**Peter:** That depends on the context with which they send it. So, for example, there was a Christina that was sent to me last year, probably around this time, end of summer last year. The executive that I like said to me, “Managers are chasing this person. He’s meeting with 15 different managers over the next two weeks. This is a hot script. You should read it right away.” I read it that night. I reached out to the writer. Contacted them. Etc.

So, in situations like that where you know there’s a lot of heat and where you feel like that’s true, it goes very quickly. If I don’t know, or if it feels like it might be able to wait, I’ll often just wait till the weekend. And then on the weekends, that’s when I do most of my reading.

**John:** Great. So, let’s talk about that weekend read that you’re doing. So, you’ve sat down with her script. How much of her script do you read before you decide whether to keep reading or set it aside?

**Peter:** Honestly, it all just depends on the context of who is sending it to me. Like, typically I will read, you know, the first 30 plus pages. I almost always feel that’s at least giving the person the benefit of the doubt. You know, when I was a young agent I did this exercise. Malcolm Gladwell talks about the thousand hours, or the amount of time it takes to become really good at something. So, when I was a young agent I was like, you know what, I’m going to read every script completely because if I read them all completely I’ll have a great sense of what good writers do.

But what I did was after 30 pages I would always take my notes, whether or not I liked it, who I liked it for, etc., and then I would finish. And then at the end I would look at my notes and say, “Did anything change in reading the subsequent 70 pages from reading the first 30 pages?” And it never changed. You are rarely moved to tears, you are rarely excited by something in the last five pages of a script that you can’t sense in the first 30.

**John:** Well, it’s also interesting because you’re not looking for is this the movie we want to go shoot. You’re looking at can this person write. Your standards for whether to sign Christina as a client or not are not sort of like is this going to be the best possible movie. It’s like can she write [repeatedly]?

**Peter:** For us, and for new clients, it’s all about voice. Do you have a voice? And it doesn’t matter if the voice is in the most uncommercial sounding script in the world. That could still be an amazing voice that we can take and use that unconventional/uncommercial script and launch them into the stratosphere as a cool writer.

**Craig:** I think everyone is listening to this and going, OK, so I’ve learned my lesson. I’m not going to sit here and freak out over log lines. I’m not going to sit here and write cutesy query letters to agents. I’m going to accept the fact that my work has to be of such a nature that now I’m helping them, as opposed to me trying to convince them to help me.

How do they go about getting – I mean, from your point of view, and I don’t know if you know the answer to this because you’re an agent, but how do they get to those people that are going to get to you? How do they start their little chain of recommendations?

**Peter:** You know what’s funny? I thought this was such a confounding question when I was just getting into the business, because they always say Hollywood is about who you know. And when I moved out here after being in business in New York and in Boston, I didn’t really know anyone that worked at an agency. And so what I did was I went through like my college alumni network. I found a guy who was an executive at a studio. I reached out to him cold. And I said, “Hey, I’d love to come and get coffee with you.” I sort of did the informational interview thing.

And then I asked him who else I should meet. He introduced me to another five people. And it sort of spread like a virus. And it actually wasn’t that hard for me. I sort of feel like everyone knows a person who knows a person in Hollywood. So, if you can get someone to read who is a step or a degree closer to where you want to be, like that’s the way to go. That’s sort of the way in.

So, it’s sort of a non-clear answer, but I think that that at least makes sense to me.

**Craig:** You don’t stress competitions, contests? Does that mean anything to you guys?

**Peter:** Yes. Competitions and contests do, if you win.

**Craig:** You have to win. Yeah, people say like everyone is a semi-finalist. Literally in the world, everyone is–

**Peter:** Literally everyone is a Nicholl semi-finalist. There are thousands and thousands of people.

**Craig:** [laughs] Everyone. Exactly. That doesn’t count.

**John:** So let’s start with the Nicholl finalists. So, would you read through each of those scripts, or would somebody – would your assistant read through all of those scripts? Somebody looked at all of those scripts to see if any of those people are–?

**Peter:** Yes.

**John:** So that is actually – they’re going to get read by every big agency in town because they saw you there?

**Peter:** Correct.

**John:** How about Austin? Would they read all of the Austin finalists?

**Peter:** I don’t know. No, not every agent. No. I mean, the ones that people go to are really the Nicholl and the Black List five years ago. To some extent now scripts that are on there and scripts that do really well have already been out in the world, so they’re not as undiscovered gems in terms of representation, even though the rest of the world might not know how great the script is, a lot of them do have agents.

You know, I find another way that we get scripts a lot that works well is by clients. You know, if you were to send me a script, Craig, or you were to send me a script, John, I would trust that a lot more than if my aunt sends me a script.

**Craig:** Isn’t that interesting?

**Peter:** Because you’re professionals in the business.

**Craig:** Yeah. No one ever talks about that. No one ever thinks, “Oh I know, I’ll show it to a writer.” Now, granted, my standard line when people ask me to read a script is, well, A, I can’t. And B, I can’t help you. [laughs] Do you know what I mean?

But, I guess secretly I could.

**Peter:** But you could, Craig.

**Craig:** It’s true.

**Peter:** If you gave your script to your agent, you know, even if your agent doesn’t read it immediately, your agent will have a younger agent read it. And have an opinion.

**Craig:** If I tell him to read it, he’s reading it. [laughs]

**Peter:** Right now. Drop everything.

**Craig:** I will. I’ll make him do it.

**John:** So, Peter, what would Christina’s script be? Would it be a spec feature? Would it be a TV episode? Like are you only reading features to sign feature client? Or what are you reading?

**Peter:** No, I’m reading everything. I will read anything and everything that tells a story. So, 90% of the time it is features, but I will read the hot pilot that’s going around. I’ve no qualms about signing a TV writer on the feature side. But the format that it takes is of much less interest to me than the skill that it demonstrates. I’ll read playwrights. I’ll read shorts. I’ll read whatever.

**John:** So, let’s say you’ve read Christina’s script over the weekend and you like it. What is your next step?

**Peter:** If I’ve read it and I love it and I have her contact information, I will contact her. I will call her first. I will email her. If I don’t have either of those things, I will Facebook stalk her. I will tweet at her. I will Google search her. I will find a way to get to her.

**John:** Now, she may not necessarily know that you’ve read her script. Is that correct?

**Peter:** Yeah. She might not at all. So, often it’s a cold call. But, first of all, every writer or director likes hearing that you like their work, so frankly it doesn’t matter whether they have an agent, or they don’t have an agent, whether they know you’re calling, or whether you’re calling cold. If you call someone and tell them that you love what they’ve done, everyone takes that positively.

**Craig:** Interestingly, you are going after them. A lot of times what we’ll hear from aspiring writers is, “Well, I know that my script got to an agent. And it’s been a month and I haven’t quite heard back. When can I send them another thing and a follow up and all the rest?” And we give them advice, but in my mind I’m thinking you won’t need to.

**Peter:** Exactly.

**Craig:** They’re going to come find you. Or, it’s no.

**John:** So, my very first script that I wrote, this is while I was in Stark, was this romantic tragedy set in Boulder. And it’s pretty well-written, but it’s not really a movie. And a producer took it over to CAA and she wasn’t really a producer. She was sort of a producer. She took it over to CAA and this agent there was reading it. And four weeks sort of went by. And I just remember looking at the answer machine like why is there no message about this? And then she was like calling to try to get an answer. And then we find out the answer and it’s a no. But it’s sort of course it was a no. it was four weeks and that was just too long. It wasn’t going to be a yes answer.

So, your goal is to read that script over the weekend and then call her on Monday if you like the thing that you’ve just read?

**Peter:** If I like it, Monday. If I love it, Sunday, Saturday afternoon. Whenever it is I finish it.

**John:** In that conversation, are you trying to look for other things of hers that you can read? What are you trying to get out of that conversation?

**Peter:** I love to read second pieces. I think that that’s really important. I think a lot of writers do get signed off of one script, and that’s fine, but I feel like a lot of people have one script in them. I feel like a real writer has two or more. And so it’s important to me to read a secondary piece, just to have that perspective that they’re not just a one-trick pony, or that one script hasn’t been worked on for ten years. Right?

But, no, I’ll call them. I’ll tell them what I thought of the script. You know, if it feels makeable, if it feels like a real play, it’s something we can go after, you know, I might talk to them about some directors or some actors that might make sense for it. And if it’s not makeable or if it’s something that’s super tricky or just less clear path, I’ll just talk to them about where they come from, and their background, and what their aspirations are.

You know, a lot of times you have to suss out whether they really want to be writers or not, or whether they wrote it for some other reason.

**John:** So, one of the things we stress on the podcast a lot is that agents, mostly they are there to get their clients work. I mean, they are there to be an advocate for their clients. They are there to help support their clients. But mostly they want clients who work. So, at one point do you meet with Christina to see whether she’s a person you think can actually be employable?

Is it all based on what she’s written? Or does that face-to-face meeting change your opinion of whether to sign her as a client?

**Peter:** The face-to-face meeting is definitely important. I would say it is – if you’re weighting them, I would say it’s probably 80% based on the work. But what you find is that the people that tend to work continuously often are they’re charismatic, they’re fun, they’re people that you want to be around and hang around with.

I mean, in the script process for features, which both of you guys know, it’s a long process. It’s a lot of meetings. It’s a lot of phone calls. It’s a lot of collaboration. And if you are a curmudgeon who can’t talk to people, or you’re someone who writes a script and then thinks that it’s carved in stone, and that it’s not going to have notes, or people aren’t going to have their opinions, then this isn’t the career for you. You should write novels. Or poetry, you know.

So, you have to understand that there is a business side to the art that you do. And that working with other people is a requirement in this business. It’s not just about your words, although it is mostly about your words.

**Craig:** But you can see how without even pointing it out, it’s second nature to you, but I think it’s surprising for a lot of people that when you read a script by Christina and it is something that isn’t particularly marketable. It’s not something that a big studio is going to make. It doesn’t fit whatever the market is insisting upon at the moment, that doesn’t stop you at all. The idea is, oh good, I found somebody with an original voice. Let me see if I can now get her to work on movies that studios are making. Is that fair to say?

**Peter:** Right. 100%. And that’s often a part of the matching process in the signing pursuit. When you sit down in that room, you are trying to figure out whether they actually want to make movies and whether they can work. Or whether they want to live in sort of this isolated sphere which is reflected by the sort of beautiful and charming idiosyncratic script that they wrote that got your attention.

**John:** Great. So, let’s talk about the other side of the equation. So, you have these clients, but you’re also dealing with a whole bunch of other people who are making movies. So, you’re dealing with producers, you’re dealing with executives. How much of your day is spent dealing with them versus dealing with your clients? How much of your life is spent figuring out what they want and how to match up your people to their needs?

**Peter:** I would say it’s probably 60% spent on my clients. And then 40% spent on what the other people want or need.

**John:** Do you have like one studio that you are responsible for covering? Or one place that is yours, like within the agency like, “Oh, that’s Peter’s place and he’s responsible for knowing everything that happens there?”

**Peter:** Yes.

**John:** OK. And so how do you get that information in general? Is it by talking to the executives? Do you have spies? How do you know what’s really going on?

**Craig:** Spies. Say spies.

**Peter:** Spies, yes. That’s exactly it. I spend a lot of time talking to the executives, talking to the producers, and trying to figure out what their real priorities are. You know, every time they make a deal on a project like say they’re going to do a Chutes & Ladders movie, you know, that will be set up at a studio and there will be a producer involved. And the producer’s job is to put that movie together. So the producer will call me and they’ll say, “Hey, we just set up Chutes & Ladders. We’re really excited about it. We’re going to make it like Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s going to be awesome.”

And they’ll be like, “What writers do you have that can write that kind of a movie?” And so I will say, look, these are the ten writers that I think make sense for it. Of the ten, these four are available. And we should send them the material right now. And they’ll be like, “Great. Got to talk to the studio. And then we’ll send you some ideas.”

**John:** OK. So, I need to come back to you with like, so you say ten and then four, but then those are essentially four of your clients that you’re sort of pitting against each other for this one job. I mean, to some degree you are setting your children against each other to try to get this one thing. Does that weigh on you at all? Is that a factor in sort of how you’re thinking about your job?

**Peter:** No.

**John:** No?

**Peter:** No. you’re not really setting your children against each other, because you also have to imagine that in the larger landscape of any given project. Of Chutes & Ladders, for example, they’re calling every agency. They’re asking every covering agent the exact same question. And if I put one person up, and they put one person up, and the other person puts one person, you know, that’s four or five writers competing. You have the best chance of filling the job as a covering agent by putting up the right people and by putting up a few of them.

**Craig:** The conflict of interest that fascinates me, and it’s inevitable as well, so I don’t think it’s an ethical thing. I’m just kind of curious how you navigate these waters. Is not between writer clients, but between writer and director clients. When you have a director on a project and you have a writer on the project, and the director is making way more money, and the director say, “I may want to get a different writer from some other place even.” Or, the director wants the writer to do something and the writer is not sure.” How do you navigate that?

**Peter:** I sort of think you have to keep a separation of church and state. I think you are the advocate for each of these clients individually, but as you address these problems you have to put on your writer hat, or your director hat. And oftentimes if there are real conflicts of interest, like you represent both the writer and the director, you’ll have someone else on the team sort of jump in and be the lead advocate for the writer in this case on a particular circumstance that might happen.

**Craig:** Because, I mean, ultimately you’re walking this interesting line between keeping something going, but also not ending up favoring one over the over to the extent that one of them leaves, because behind you all the time is this issue of competition. That artists have choices. And they don’t have to stay.

So the tricky job, I mean, that’s the part – you know, when I project myself into somebody else’s job, I always find something that makes me feel very anxious. And I think that’s the thing that would make me feel the most anxious if I were doing the job.

**Peter:** I feel like the conflicts of interest that you’re talking about though happen very rarely. This is not something that we spend all day/every day agonizing about.

**Craig:** That’s good.

**Peter:** These situations do happen, but that is not the day-to-day job.

**Craig:** Good.

**John:** So let’s go back to the common scenario, though, so let’s say the Chutes & Ladders movie, and maybe Christina is one of the four writers you want to put up for that, because her spec would be a great sample for that. So, what is the phone call or the email to her to explain what it is? Are you responsible for pitching their take? Talk to us about sort of what that–

**Peter:** So, the interesting part, you know, you guys bring up conflict of interest and pitting your children against each other as it relates to the selling process. We haven’t even spoken to Christina about Chutes & Ladders. Christina might be like, “I would never write a board game. Why would you even talk about me in this context?”

So, of the four people that I’ve talked about and got the studio approval, and their excitement about, she might self-select out just because she doesn’t even want to participate.

But let’s assume that she does want to participate. So then I’ll call Christina and I’ll say, hey, such and such studio has just set up this project and they’d like you to look at their materials for Chutes & Ladders. In some circumstances, the studio and the producers will have very clear outlines for what they want the movie to be. They might have a treatment or a document or some piece of material they’re going to share with the writer. In other cases, they don’t. They have a title. They have Chutes & Ladders. Come up with a movie.

**John:** So, classically, the challenge I always face with these is like they were fishing expeditions. You were never quite clear whether there was a movie to be made there, or if they’re just meeting with every writer in town. And so you could be the tenth meeting of the day to go in on Chutes & Ladders. And I felt like I was burning a lot of time doing those.

Like I was lucky to get one of those jobs pretty early on. I got How to Eat Fried Worms, but it was me versus a bunch of very funny Simpsons writers all trying to get this one gig. And I was lucky to get it, but there were a lot of those gigs I didn’t get.

Now a thing I see a lot with these sort of IP titles is these rooms that they’re putting together where they’re basically bringing a bunch of writers on to crack Chutes & Ladders or to figure out how to do all these different board games. What are those calls like for you? And are those good ways of employing your clients? How do you feel about those personally and as an agency?

**Peter:** Well, I can’t speak entirely for the agency. I don’t think that’s politically correct. But, personally, I don’t like the idea because when you assemble rooms of writers, basically what they’re doing is they’re saying, “I want to pay as little as I possibly can to these people that you believe in as artists and steal their ideas. And then I may or may not hire them to be the writer on the movie.” So, from my perspective, if it’s something that is that ill-formed or that poorly thought out I would rather you write a script that’s original and let me try and sell it. Then have you give your good original idea and let them brand it with a piece of IP or a title.

So, I mean, that’s philosophically how I feel about it. In reality, though, for a lot of younger writers, for newer writers you’re trying to break, it is a good opportunity. Because for a lot of them, A, they get to work with some other writers they wouldn’t know. B, they get to work with someone senior who is running the writer’s room who gets to see how they perform, how they interact, how they collaborate, etc. You know, they get to work with the producer and the studio executive who might not know them. So, in terms of introducing them to the world of features, it’s not that bad.

But, if you’re talking about a writer who has written a lot of movies, or someone who is going to run the room, etc., it’s not really the best use of their time.

**Craig:** That’s something that I worry about all the time because while there are some new things like these writer rooms, the idea of the fishing expedition and everybody going in to pitch some well thought out ten or 15-minute version of a movie, that’s been around since John and I have been around. But, what’s changed dramatically is the amount of movies that are made and the ratio of developed to made movies, which used to be much, much higher.

So, we have about two-thirds of the amount of movies that we used to get made, and probably a third of the amount that are in development, or fewer. And so I’m kind of curious from your perspective as an agent, are you concerned that the farm system of the newer writers, their only way in are kind of through these arduous things that burn up a lot of time and energy and have a very high noise-to-signal ratio. And that somewhere down the line eventually all of the big money keeps going to the same pool of people. Is it harder to transition writers from baby writer to steadily-working writer to A-list writer?

**Peter:** 100% yes. Because the only way you move up that chain is by getting your movies made. And so if you spend a lot of time writing and the movies never get made, then you don’t increase your own quote, etc., in the system.

**John:** All three of us can think of writers who work all the time, but they don’t really have produced credits. So there’s no movies you can point to saying like, oh, that’s that guy’s movie. And they really aren’t moving up the chain. I’m sure they’re making money, which is great, and they’re continuously working, but there’s no way for them to progress because there just aren’t movies with their names on. There aren’t movies that they can really take credit for as being their movies.

**Peter:** Right. Which is why I think original material is so important. And which is why getting caught in the system and doing just the rewrites and just the roundtables and just the studio types of projects can be a never-ending cycle. You’re just sort of spinning your wheels in a lot of cases.

**John:** But the spec market is not at all what the spec market was when Craig and I were first starting out. There used to be this truly vibrant spec market where people would sell million dollar scripts it seemed like every week. It was a very frequent occurrence. And that’s not so common now. So, if a Christina says, “OK, I’m going to go off and write a spec script,” do you want her to pitch you what she’s going to write ahead of time, so you know what it is, so you can tell her whether that’s the proper thing? Are you going to try to get her partnered up with a director from the start?

What is your approach to Christina going off and writing her own original thing?

**Peter:** Well, you’re right, the spec market has totally changed. It’s completely different. You can’t just sell a – I mean, it very rarely happens that a writer goes off and sells a script for seven figures. So, now when we talk about writers writing new material, if they are interested I would love for them to talk to me about it beforehand. I’d love to hear two or three ideas, and then we decide, oh, this one feels like the right one for you.

Often it’s going to be whichever one you’re most passionate about, because ultimately you want a writer to write something they care about. That just gets you the best material for the end of the day. But, if they are interested in input, I would love to participate before they spend two months writing a new piece of material. And then once we get the piece of material, what we try and do is package it with producers, or with talent, or with a director that make the sale more of a fit. That make it going out into the marketplace noisier.

And so you’ll give it to a piece of talent. You’ll give it to an actor or an actress. You’ll give it to a filmmaker because, again, that increases the auspices around that particular piece.

**John:** Talk to us about managers. So, how many of your clients also have managers?

**Peter:** Most of them, probably 80%.

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** What is your relationship to the managers?

**Peter:** My relationship to the managers varies in many situations. In some situations, the managers are nonexistent. In other situations, the managers–

**John:** When you say nonexistent, like they’re ineffectual? They do nothing?

**Peter:** Right. In some situations, the managers are on my phone sheet every day and are very omnipresent. And it cuts both ways. You know, oftentimes I work well with managers who are good developers of material. I really like managers who dive into the story and will help a writer sort of crack their story or will read and give feedback and notes and things like that on a script. You know, they can be very detailed and sort of help a writer break a storyline that maybe doesn’t make sense. I like very literary-driven managers. I think they add a lot of value.

I think there are some managers who basically do the same job I do, and they’re calling studio executives, and they’re selling clients, and they’re pitching clients, and they’re sending submissions. And that feels a little bit redundant to me. But my relationship – it’s like any relationship with any person. It just depends on how well you connect with them, what your vibe is together, and what kind of clients, and sort of how you work with these clients.

**John:** Are there any writer clients who you have declined to represent because they came with a manager you didn’t want to deal with?

**Peter:** Yes. There are managers I won’t work with.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** Interestingly, you’ve never had to decline a client because they didn’t have a manager. [laughs] That doesn’t come up.

**Peter:** Correct. Correct. That’s never been an issue.

**John:** So obviously you’re not going to name names, but how would a writer find out that their manager is a toxic manager, or is a manager who is not well-liked? Any clues that a person could glean, a writer could glean that their manager may not be a good manager?

**Peter:** I honestly don’t know. Yeah, it’s tricky. I mean, I guess, if the piece of talent were that amazing and the manager was really challenging, I might try and make it work for a period of time and just see if you can tough it out. Because oftentimes you just gravitate towards the material and you work with everything else that comes with it. You know, things that come unencumbered are so rare these days. But, god, you know, you try and protect them if you can.

**Craig:** I mean, I’m very manager skeptic. I’ve said as much on the show many, many times. I do recognize that there are some managers out there who do work as producers for their clients and in the way that you’re describing, they help them write a screenplay. And I find it a curious position to be in, because sooner or later there’s going to be a different producer on there who will also be producing the screenplay. But, I understand. At least to get it to a place. Very good.

But, it seems to me that a lot of what the management business has become is just a way for people to double up on agents. You can’t have two agents at once. I mean, you can share two agents at an agency, obviously, but that’s the same 10%. You can’t hire CAA and UTA, but you can hire UTA and a manager. And so I agree with you. I think a lot of these people are kind of just extra agents.

**John:** So, I will speak up for Malcolm Spellman and for Justin Marks who believe that managers are – good managers are fundamentally a blessing. And that they truly help them out a lot.

And I will say that I know some mutual friends of ours who are represented by one agency, yet also have a really cozy relationship with another agency at the same time. It sort of feels like they’re kind of split between two worlds. I see you nodding, so that’s a thing that happens. Is it frustrating when you see that?

**Peter:** It’s very frustrating. Yes. But I also understand that at a certain level everyone knows each other. You’ve been in this business for long enough, you know, you have relationships that transcend agencies.

**Craig:** Yeah, I mean, that’s actually really interesting, because I don’t know how that would work. I mean, I’m friends with David Kramer, but I don’t feel like that relationship does anything strange. It’s not like we’re hanging out together at dinner.

What do you mean by the kind of dual agency? I feel like I’m missing out and I should be doing something.

**John:** Off-air I’ll tell you the name of the person, but a mutual friend of ours, he’s both at UTA and he’s also sort of at CAA at the same time. And it’s always struck me as so strange. But I’ll have conversations with him and like, “Oh yeah, well, my agent at CAA says this, and my agent at UTA says this.” And I think he’s technically only with one of the agencies. Basically he’s managed to not choose between them. And he’s chosen not to choose.

**Craig:** Interesting.

**Peter:** I’ve never heard of anybody being that explicit about it, but I do know of people who just have relationships with agents who are at different places, who might run a business question by an agent that doesn’t necessarily represent them that they’re close with. And I’ve heard that and I’ve had that happen before.

By the way, my best friend is a client who is not at my agency. And who I don’t represent. And who asks me questions about his agent all the time. And I’m like, you need to chill out, your agent is doing a great job.

**Craig:** Good for you.

**Peter:** I don’t even work with you, but it’s interesting. When you’re friends with a writer, you can really talk to them about what their issues are, and also I think I’ve become a better agent because I get to learn what his particular neuroses are.

**Craig:** Well, and god help you if he turns to you and says, “You know what? You have to be my agent.” And then you’re like, oh no.

**Peter:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I know how crazy you are, bro.

**Peter:** It’s super tricky. But I found myself defending agents who don’t even work at my agency, just because the demands or the expectations of my friend can sometimes be a bit ridiculous.

**John:** So let’s wrap this up with Christina. So you’ve managed to land her her first job. It’s an adaptation. So she’s going to be doing it for Sony. What kind of deal are you able to make for her on her very first Hollywood writing job? Is she getting scale? Is she getting scale plus ten? What does that look like for Christina?

**Peter:** Typically, writers who are making their first adaptation will get scale plus ten. I mean, that’s sort of the starting offer.

**John:** And we’ll explain scale plus ten. So scale is the minimum that they are allowed to pay you based on the WGA rates. Plus ten means plus ten percent, which basically they have to pay you.

**Peter:** Right. And then any sort of beyond that is what you get in negotiation based on the heat of the writer, the heat of the project, the talent that’s attached, the importance of the project relative to other projects within the studio. And so oftentimes you can convince them to go beyond that, but that’s sort of the starting point.

**John:** I bring this up just because listeners may not realize that – we talk about WGA negotiations and everything happens, and WGA only sort of sets the floor. And everything that’s above the floor is the agent’s job, and the lawyer’s job, and manager’s job, I guess, to some degree to raise that floor up higher and higher.

I haven’t talked about lawyers. So, when it comes time to make Christina’s deal, you’re dealing with her lawyer also who is helping you make the deal. Is that correct?

**Peter:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And so what is the discussion between the two of you about what you’re asking for?

**Peter:** Most of the time, the discussion between the two of us is about what are the justifications for getting them more money than they’ve been offered. It’s not just about – you can’t just say, “I want more.” That’s never an acceptable line of argument. It’s, you know, based on the reviews of their previous movie, it’s based on the box office performance of a previous movie. It’s based on the elements that are attached. It’s based on the need and the demand for the writer. It’s based on their specific abilities within this world that other people don’t have.

So, you have to justify and you and the lawyer work together to figure out what those justifications are as you’re making the calls.

**Craig:** And you’re not dealing – people may not understand this – you’re not dealing with the people that have hired the writer in the first place, because those people are on the creative side of the studio, the studio executives along with the producer. These are business affairs people who are walled off, church and state style.

**Peter:** Which is the craziest part of it. The fact that I’m arguing about content, I’m arguing about artists and their skills with people who might not haven’t even seen the movie of the writer we’re talking about.

**Craig:** Almost certainly haven’t. Yeah, and don’t care. Because they literally have a computer model for what that person should be paid. They talk to each other, so now you have the business affairs lawyer at one studio talking to another one, because they hate setting precedent. If they give you a raise, then they get yelled at by other studios, because the other studio has to pay that higher rate now for your client.

And it’s a very – the only time I ever feel bad on my side as a client is when they’re like, “Well, business affairs says they should only pay you this.” And I’m like, well then no, screw them. And then someone calls them and says, “Stop being a jerk.”

But it’s got to be difficult when you keep coming back to these same people after you just had a fight with them an hour ago, to have a new fight with them about a new client, right?

**Peter:** It’s wild and crazy. Yes. It’s bizarre. You know, I would say to any writer who is able to do it, the best thing that you can give your agent, the greatest gift, is the power to walk away. If you are willing to say, “No, I just won’t do it for this price,” then your agent can go crazy on the lawyer and know that you’re not going to fire them if they aren’t able to make that deal. That is when it becomes very fun.

**Craig:** You know, my agent knows – he knows I want to walk away from everything. I don’t want to do anything. So, he has the best gift in the world. You know, any time I say, OK, let’s go make a deal. And he’s like, “All right, but this is what I’m going to ask for.” I’m like, no, no, no. Just understand, I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to do anything. I want to retire. So, go, armed with that.

And, you know, the truth is that attitude, you technically could have that attitude at any point in your career. It just occurred to me later that I should have it. But what’s to stop you, right?

**Peter:** You could, but for some younger writers, they need rent money. So, for them making a deal is important.

**Craig:** They’re going to get it anyway. I mean, you guys know. I mean, my point is you’re not going to let – if you know it’s right for your client, you’re not going to let them walk away. If you know you have a really good deal for the right project for them, then you’ll sit them down and say, “Hey, dumb-dumb, do this.” I presume.

**Peter:** 100%. I mean, I’m in the business of representing the best voices, the greatest artists, people that should be creating movies and television. And if the person that I’m negotiating with doesn’t recognize or respect that, then I have no interest in doing business with them, or putting my client in business with them. That’s not what’s good for my client. And if that becomes a deal breaker for me and Christina, then so bet it. They’re undervaluing themselves in the marketplace, and that’s not acceptable.

**John:** Last two questions, both come from trends in television, and I’m curious whether they exist in features and whether you’ve seen them in features. So first off, over the last few years staffing of junior levels in TV, diversity has become much more important. You see a lot more efforts to hire diverse writers at the starting level. Do you see efforts to hire diverse writers for features at those starting levels?

**Peter:** You do, but nearly as clearly defined as they are in television. I mean, in television they will specifically call covering agents for diverse writers. And diversity means a number of different things, but they are very explicit about it. In features, they will say, “We’d love it if a woman wrote this movie.” Or, “We’d love to have a writer or director of this particular background.” But, no, there’s nothing as clearly defined as it is in television at all.

**John:** Peter, you’re African American. Do people come to you looking for African American writers or minority writers? Does that happen at all?

**Peter:** All the time. Yes. Yes.

**Craig:** Because you guys all know each other? [laughs]

**Peter:** I’m the resident expert on African American writers at UTA, and WME, at CAA, everywhere.

**Craig:** Everywhere. It’s amazing.

**Peter:** Literally everywhere. We all know each other. We all represent – yeah, I know everyone.

**John:** Good stuff. My other question about TV practices that are hope are not going to ever come over to features, in TV a lot of times they’ll say like, “Oh, you’re a great young writer. Unfortunately we only have one spot and there’s two writers, so we’re going to partner you up and paper team you, pretend you’re a team.” Is there paper-teaming happening in features? Have you ever seen that happen?

**Peter:** I have seen it happen. It happens pretty rarely, though. That sort of forced marriage is strange and unnatural and doesn’t tend to happen.

The craziest thing is I once saw it happen across agencies.

**Craig:** Whoa.

**Peter:** So imagine trying to make a deal with a lit agent from another agency, you’re both advocating for your client. You don’t necessarily know that they’re worth the same. It would be like if I paired you, Craig, with a baby writer, and said, “OK, we want to ask for this much together as a team.” Well, then how do you split it?

**Craig:** I take everything.

**Peter:** It becomes very, very tricky.

**Craig:** I get all of it. That’s not tricky. That person should be thrilled. Thrilled.

**Peter:** It’s a gift.

**Craig:** I’m literally giving them the gift of my knowledge.

**Peter:** That’s the key to Hollywood, really. That’s what you should tell everyone that’s listening. They should just pair with one of the two of you.

**Craig:** [laughs] Exactly.

**John:** We have one listener question that I thought was actually much more appropriate for you. So, this is actually an audio question, so we’ll listen to the audio.

Question: Hey John and Craig. What’s the viability of making short films in the current climate as a means to break in to the industry?

**Peter:** I honestly think short films are pretty outdated in terms of a way to break into the film industry. They work if you want to be a director. In terms of being a writer, no one signs people off of getting their short film made. It’s just not a thing. It works for directors or writer-directors who are transitioning to bigger movies, and only to the extent that your short serves as a proof of concept of a larger movie.

So, if your short is the first chapter of a movie, that’s fantastic. That’s something that people can see, they get a sense of what you want to do with it. And there’s sort of an obvious next step to where the project goes.

If your short sort of lives in a bubble and doesn’t serve as part of a larger hole, doesn’t really help.

**John:** Gotcha. Cool. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is a new podcast, it’s actually the second season of an old podcast, but it was in Australia, now it’s in the US. It’s called Science Vs. It is hosted by Wendy Zuckerman. And what she does is she takes a look at issues in the news, or just general topics, and really looks at them scientifically, sort of to really break down like what’s actually going on behind the scenes and what’s actually true and what’s not actually true.

So, the three episodes I listened to so far, one was on attachment parenting, one was on fracking. She did a two-part episode on guns. And they’re all just terrific. They’re really well-produced. So, if you’re looking for another podcast, I would recommend Science Vs. by Wendy Zuckerman.

**Craig:** Hmm, that sounds like I might actually like that. The only issue is, of course, it’s a podcast.

**John:** Craig doesn’t listen to podcasts.

**Craig:** Why would I? Why does anyone? I don’t understand it.

**Peter:** People with long commutes.

**Craig:** I guess, though, it’s the thing. I don’t have a long commute. [laughs] So, my One Cool Thing is maybe the dumbest of all of them, but so I already did one beard related One Cool Thing, because Peter, you don’t know this, but I’m a possessor of a one-year-old beard now. And I’m bald. I mean, I’m not fully full bad, but I’m fairly bald. So I don’t have to worry about like hair stuff. But now I kind of do, which is weird.

Anyway, found this awesome stuff, also Australian, by the way, called Uppercut. And it’s like a beard good that keeps your beard kind of tight, so it’s not flying off your face. And it smells like coconut. Yeah!

**Peter:** I didn’t even know that was an issue for people with beards, but I guess. I mean, you have hair like everyone else.

**Craig:** Well yeah, like if it gets frizzy, then you look like a bedraggled sea captain. You know? So you want to keep it natty and everything. And also beards are super dry and this stuff kind of makes it not so crispy.

**Peter:** Well, that’s interesting because, as John pointed out, I am an African American male, and so my hair is very short. So I almost never think about my hair. I don’t invest in hair products. I don’t really gels or anything. It’s never something that I’m really conscious of. And I also don’t have a beard.

**Craig:** Well, look, by the way, keep it that way. But I got to tell you, the joy of not having to give a damn about hair stuff is one of the – now that I have to give a slight, slight damn, it’s one of the great joys of life.

**Peter:** Consider me blessed.

**John:** Peter, do you have One Cool Thing to share with us?

**Peter:** Yeah. So my One Cool Thing is a book that I read over my vacation which is called Dynasty: The Rise and the Fall of the House of Caesar, by Tom Holland. The book came out last fall and I read an amazing review of it, which is sort of how I got into it. You know, as agents, while we read scripts all the time, I do try and read for pleasure, because I do want to have informed conversation and I’m just curious about a lot of things. This book is – it’s sort of the latest history on the House of Caesar from Julius Caesar through Caligula. And as you look at the first five Caesars, what you realize is that the Roman Republic wasn’t as republican as it seems, or as it claims to be.

The characters are larger than life. I mean, it reads like a Game of Thrones episode, except minus the dragons, and with more prostitution. So, the book is fantastic.

**Craig:** Even more prostitution than the actual Game of Thrones, which is prostitution-heavy?

**Peter:** Oh, very much so. I mean, there was an emperor who used to take all of the young senators’ children basically to an island and make them prostitute to each other for his pleasure.

**Craig:** Well, we’ve had Denny Hastert. We’ve had a few. We’ve had a few of those guys.

**Peter:** So, yes, that’s my One Cool Thing.

**John:** Very, very cool. All right, that was show for this week. As always, we are produced by Godwin Jabangwe, and edited by Matthew Chilelli. Our outro this week comes from Roman Mittermayr. If you have an outro for us, you can send it to us at ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you send questions like the one we answered before.

You can find show notes for this episode and all episodes at johnaugust.com. That’s also where you’ll find the transcripts. Godwin gets them up about four days after the episode reads, so you’ll be able to read all about what Peter said.

You can find all of the back episodes of the show at Scriptnotes.net and on the Scriptnotes USB drive which you can get at the store, the johnaugust.com store.

For short questions, I’m on Twitter, @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. Peter Dodd, do you use Twitter? You don’t want people reaching out on Twitter.

**Peter:** No, no, no. Not Twitter.

**John:** Not Twitter.

**Peter:** I don’t know anyone who uses Twitter anymore. I feel like it’s dead, by the way.

**John:** Oh my god, we’re on Twitter all the time.

**Craig:** That’s the most agent thing of all time.

**Peter:** Maybe it’s just me.

**Craig:** I don’t use it, so now it’s dead. Classic.

**Peter:** It doesn’t exist.

**John:** Peter Dodd, you were a fantastic guest. Thank you very much for being on the show with us this week.

**Peter:** Thanks guys. Happy to be here.

**John:** All right. Thanks.

**Craig:** Thank you.

Links:

* [Science Vs.](https://gimletmedia.com/show/science-vs/episodes/)
* [Uppercut Deluxe Beard Balm](http://www.uppercutdeluxe.com/)
* [Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25731154-dynasty)
* [Get your 250 episode USB](http://store.johnaugust.com/collections/frontpage/products/250-episode-usb-flash-drive)
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Roman Mittermayr ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/Episode_264.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/tidy-screenwriting).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** This is Episode 262 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, we will discuss the art of tidy screenwriting and that weird French copyright case involving Luc Beson. We will also be answering listener questions about what constitutes a draft and making characters gay.

**Craig:** Gay.

**John:** Gay. Craig, thank you so much for hosting last week. You and Mike Birbiglia did a fantastic job. I did not listen to the episode in advance of it being published. I listened to it like any other listener and I was delighted you did such a good job.

**Craig:** Well, first of all, I appreciate the faith. Because if I had to bet money I would have said, oh my god, John is certainly going to listen to it before he puts – because you know me, I’m crazy. But, I have to say, I was a little nervous, because I had to all of the grown up stuff that you do. But I cheated. You know, I went to the transcripts so I didn’t miss anything at the end. And we had a great discussion. We had a great time. It was very easy. And Mike is obviously very good at talking. It’s kind of his job.

**John:** It is his job.

**Craig:** It was a good discussion and made all the easier by the fact that his movie lends itself to our topic.

**John:** Absolutely. It is group of aspiring writer/performers – really performers more than writers – but trying to navigate the difficult industry that they are in. A lot of things that they are dealing with our listeners are probably dealing with as well.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** And you hate it when your friends become successful.

**Craig:** [laughs] Of all my flaws, that’s the one I don’t have. I love it when my friends become – it just reflects well on me, I think.

**John:** Absolutely. You picked good friends.

**Craig:** Yeah. I picked good friends. Or, by being friends with me, something happened, and they became successful.

**John:** As a friend, you recommended that I go to an Escape Room for my birthday, which I did. I would like to thank you for the recommendation you made, which was called The Theater. It is one of the Escape Room LAs in Downtown Los Angeles. It was terrific. So we had a great time. We escaped with seconds to spare. And it was great.

So it was a bunch of people from the office, along with Mike and my daughter, and it was a great, fun time. So thank you for recommending that.

**Craig:** My pleasure. Actually, if it makes you feel better, my little group also escaped with seconds to spare. Which makes – we won’t give any spoilers here – but the last thing you have to do is a bit silly and a bit fun, but you’re also panicked that you’re not going to be able to get it done in time. So, it was great. We loved it. And I’m glad that you had a good time.

**John:** Being completely new to the whole environment of escape rooms, this was apparently a larger escape room and we were only a group of seven, or 6.5, my daughter was with us. And it felt like the kind of room where more hands on deck could have been useful.

**Craig:** I generally tend toward the smaller group kind of vibe. We also did that one with six people and that one wasn’t too bad. The problem with extra people is sometimes they just get in the way, or you give them tasks that they’re bad at and it would have been better if you had done it on your own.

But I will say that if you do attempt The Alchemist, which is one of the rooms there, eight people would be super helpful for that one.

**John:** Sounds very good. I want to circle back to Mike Birbiglia for one second, because on Twitter this last week he brought up to the MPAA, “Hey, isn’t it really strange that my movie is Rated-R for one scene of drug us and Suicide Squad is Rated PG-13 for quote on the actual ad review there, ‘Sequences of violence and action throughout; disturbing behavior; suggestive content; and language.’”

**Craig:** Well, let’s put this in the bucket of a thousand other examples of the MPAA’s Byzantine ratings process. And if Byzantine weren’t bad enough, then there’s just the question of the substance of their decisions. So, the way these things work is that there is somebody who works at every studio whose job is to interface with the MPAA. And then they engage in negotiations essentially. Well, if you take this out, maybe we’ll give you the PG-13. And so on and so forth.

The existence of PG-13 is because Steven Spielberg got angry. There’s nobody working for you when you make an independent film, a true independent film like Mike’s, Don’t Think Twice. So, you get what you get. And his point was, hey, so adults smoke pot in my movie, I get an R. Adults shoot and kill people in Suicide Squad and they get a PG-13. That doesn’t sound right.

**John:** It does not sound right. And so an argument could be like, well, smoking pot is illegal, except that increasingly it is not illegal. And so I do wonder whether pot smoking as a thing will be less of a threshold for whether a movie gets its R-rating down the road. Because, you know, them having a drink would have not have pushed it into R. So, I’ll be curious whether that changes over the next ten years as I think marijuana legalization becomes more and more common throughout the US.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s more of a question of social norms than legal status, because of course in all states murder is illegal.

**John:** That’s a good point.

**Craig:** And people are constantly being killed in PG-13 films. But the way the ratings work is there’s a group of people that watch the movie and those people are recruited essentially as representative parents. So, it comes down to what are these representative – allegedly representative parents – think they would be OK with their kids seeing without say them accompanying them by rule, which is the case for a Rated-R movie. And it seems like these people are OK with their kids seeing murders, they’re just not OK with their kids seeing people getting high.

And it’s confusing. It’s also not necessarily consistent over time. For instance, the movie Poltergeist, which came out many, many years ago, has a scene where the parents are getting high. And that movie not only got a PG-13, it got a PG-13 even though it had people getting high and also horror themes and death.

So, over time they don’t necessarily seem to comport, which I guess makes sense, because the parents change over time. But it’s a reflection of just general social mores. I believe that regardless of legal status, that the restriction about things like smoking weed are going to probably get softened.

**John:** I think you’re probably right. I guess my last question would be is the R rating hurting Mike’s movie? Probably. The people that are going to go see that movie are probably grown-ups. But I would want to hope that like a 16-year-old kid who wanted to go see his movie could see his movie. And in some parts of the country, that kid can’t because of this MPAA rating, which is frustrating.

**Craig:** I would guess if it has any effect at all, it’s probably a beneficial effect. Because when adults go to a comedy, and the movie is a comedy among other things, they like the idea that it’s going to be Rated-R. It’s clearly a movie for grown-ups. I can’t imagine there’s a lot of teen appeal there.

But the bigger issue is just sort of a moral issue.

**John:** I agree with you. Last bit of follow up here, so after our season finale a few weeks ago we had a special Duly Noted episode, in which Aline Brosh McKenna, Rawson Thurber, and Matt Selman discussed what transpired. And they proposed this special Three Page Challenge which would be a John and Craig fan-fiction Three Page Challenge.

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** And so a couple people have actually written in with those. And so I guess we’re going to put them in a folder and eventually we might address those. I don’t know if we would address them, if someone else would come back to address those.

But if you have one of those John and Craig fan-fiction Three Page Challenges, you can write into the normal email address, ask@johnaugust.com, and Godwin will dutifully take that and stick it in a folder. It may never be seen again, but if you wanted to write it, you wrote it.

But I would ask that if you’re writing a normal Three Page Challenge, just go through the normal routes, so that’s johnaugust.com/threepage, and there’s a whole contact form for how you send in that stuff.

**Craig:** Is this going to be fan-fiction or slash fiction?

**John:** I think it’s a little of both. And so I’ve only skimmed what’s come through so far. There’s a little of column A, a little of column B.

**Craig:** I just feel like I’m going to be the bottom. I just feel like it’s inevitable.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s cliché. You know what, guys, if you’re going to write John and Craig slash fiction, don’t go the trite route of making me the bottom. But it’s going to happen. [laughs] I’d write it that way, too.

**John:** One of my favorite episodes of South Park from the last year was Tweek and Craig are Gay, it’s the one where they are portrayed by these Asian school girls as being gay. And they’re in complete freak-out over it. And I could see us having a Tweek and Craig moment.

**Craig:** Did you know about that whole Yaoi sub culture thing?

**John:** I did know about that culture. I didn’t know the name of it, but I knew it was a thing that happened. And just because, you know, I’ve watched enough TV shows that had sort of that – like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and some of the other shows had that kind of interest in them. And so I knew that there was like a slash thing. And I saw the visual equivalent of that slash fiction, which is Yaoi.

**Craig:** Yeah. I knew that there was – slash fiction goes all the way back to Star Trek, like the original Star Trek stuff. But I had no idea that there was this other thing going on where specifically this anime depiction of otherwise straight guys or theoretically straight guys in homosexual relationships. It’s so specific.

I love things that are so incredibly specific you think like, okay, that probably interests one or two people. And then it turns out, no, it actually interests millions of people.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Mind-blowing.

**John:** Well, it’s the thing about percentages. Like a tiny percentage is actually a lot of people when you look at it worldwide. And so if it interests like one-tenth of one percent, that’s a huge number.

**Craig:** It is. Absolutely true. And still just marvel at it. Because it’s cute. That’s the thing – anything in anime is adorable. Anything.

**John:** Anything. Everything. [Unintelligible] is adorable.

**Craig:** Adorable. So cute, with his little fish head. Little octopus mouth.

**John:** So, let’s transition to our main topic today which also involves Asian subcultures. So, Marie Kondo wrote a book called The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing. And I read it this last week and I thought it was going to be my One Cool Thing, but as I thought about why I was going to mention it on the podcast I realized like, well, it’s actually its whole own topic. So, I pushed this up to a centerpiece topic for today’s conversation.

So, you probably know this book or know people talking people about this book or have been annoyed by this book. It’s a small white book, written by this Japanese woman, who goes in and unclutters people’s apartments and houses and gets them to throw away bags of garbage. And about two years I think it was sort of a bigger deal, and I had sort of skipped it the first time through. But I was over at Dana Fox’s house and I saw it sitting on the table.

And so I flipped through it, prepared to be amused and annoyed by it. And I saw like, oh, you know what, actually it’s sort of charming in its own weird way. She has this very strange voice. And like a lot of gurus, you can tell she’s kind of crazy, but there’s something just delightful in her crazy.

So, I started reading it basically thinking like, oh, is this an interesting character, and then I actually recognized that there were some useful things in there, not only for like getting crap out of your house, but also getting stuff out of your screenplays. And so I thought we’d make this a centerpiece for today’s conversation.

**Craig:** What a great idea. I have the book and I have read it. And I haven’t done any of the things, but I recognize that there is wisdom there. I also – you can smell the crazy coming off of it, no question. But, sometimes we need crazy people to light the way, even if they are on the extreme edge of things.

We could all probably use a nice decluttering.

**John:** I think so. Let me try to bullet point her three main ideas in the book, or at least the three main ideas I took from the book. The first is the exercise of going through all of your possessions and keeping only the ones that spark joy. Now, “spark joy” is one of those phrases that sort of immediately raises my hackles, like, ugh, it’s so charming and specific but marketing-ish. And just kind of meaningless.

But what she means by “spark joy” is that it’s the things that you actually want to have in your life. And that in holding them you feel like, oh yeah, this is a good thing. I’m happy I have this thing. And the things that don’t spark joy like that, you’re supposed to get rid of. And to summarize it, if you don’t love it, don’t keep it.

**Craig:** Well, it’s not hard to draw a parallel from that to what we do. It’s hard to experience that joyful feeling, that sense of true love for everything in a screenplay. That’s too much to ask. Because a lot of things in screenplays aren’t joyful as much as they are well-crafted or utilitarian. Or necessary.

**John:** So, I’ll quickly summarize the rest of the book points, but let’s dig in on each of these things for how they apply to screenwriting. The second big point I took from the book is when you’re getting rid of something, you can thank it for its existence, which sounds very sort of weird and animistic, and she really kind of genuinely does believe that everything has a soul. At least, if you read the book that way, she thanks her purse for carrying her stuff over the course of the day.

**Craig:** Oh god. That’s where I roll–

**John:** Yes, that can be kind of maddening. But I really liked this idea of thanking things for existing when you’re getting rid of them. And so as we were sort of going through our own closet, like I could take this shirt that I kind of remember loving, but I never wore anymore, and I didn’t really love now. And I could sort of say goodbye to it and not feel bad about it. And that’s a thing often in writing I find is that it gets so hard for me to get rid of certain things because I just remember how hard it was to write them, or I remember so fondly what it was like to write that and it’s hard to get rid of them. It’s a useful way to get rid of things when you can say, “I understand why you were put in this script at that moment. That time has passed. I say goodbye to you.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Dennis Palumbo talks specifically about this. He says sometimes the things we cling to the most we’re clinging to because of what they meant to us when we wrote them. They signified a breakthrough or a new way of thinking about things, or they were really hard to get to.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** It’s not relevant to anybody else at all.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** It’s just relevant to you. And you have to recognize that sometimes its value is not the value that it would have for the story or the audience, and therefore you can cut it and not lose the value.

**John:** Completely. She would say that – she talks a lot about sort of when you get presents, and she says the value of a gift is the moment you receive it. It’s that joy that happens the moment you receive it. That if it is not a thing that’s useful in your life, you should get rid of it. And that’s the same experience with writing. It’s like there can be things that were so valuable at the time, that were so delightful when you found them, but it does not necessarily mean that they need to stay in your life forever.

**Craig:** How hard is it to be this lady’s friend, though?

**John:** Oh, so tough.

**Craig:** You get her a gift, right, and then like three days later you show up and there’s your gift in the dumpster. And you’re like, oh, and she’s like, “No, no, no. The joy was in the moment I got it. But then like five minutes later I’m like this is a piece of crap. But you get it, right?”

“No, I don’t get it!”

**John:** She throws it away in front of you. [laughs]

**Craig:** Right. Like I had my moment. It was great. And I’m done.

**John:** I like what she says about a sweater. And so I think about this in terms of a cardigan. You taught me that cardigans don’t work for me. And I could completely envision that where like I’ve gotten something – I really want to be the kind of person who wears a cardigan, but I just cannot wear a cardigan. And so sometimes it’s been that way with a script where it’s like I really kind of want to be the person who writes this kind of script, but that’s just not me. And that is a thing that that script taught you. It doesn’t mean you have to keep working on that script.

**Craig:** So true. I bought a vest once. I really want to be a guy that wears a vest. I am not–

**John:** You’re not a vest-wearer.

**Craig:** My torso is specifically designed to not be vested. So, I get that. And certainly it’s the case with what we do as well. I mean, there are times when you really want to be, you know, I think comedy writers love to be fancy, and I think fancy writers love to try and be funny. That’s the one that always blows my mind. When fancy writers want to be funny, and they’re so not funny.

**John:** Yeah, that’s the worst.

**Craig:** So not funny. The other thing is comedy writers approach fancy writing like, OK, I’m going to try to climb this mountain and be a big boy. And fancy writers approach comedy like, “Oh, let me just turn my brain off and be silly for a while.” No! [laughs]

**John:** Doesn’t work that way.

**Craig:** No sir. David Zucker calls that, “Kids, don’t try this at home.”

**John:** The last thing I took from her book was that things have a place. And if you have something that doesn’t have a place in your house, it’s just clutter. And so she takes it, of course, to a bizarre extreme, where when she comes home she takes everything out of her bag, she puts everything back in the place it belongs, and then puts her bag in its special little box, and then she can relax and sit down. That is crazy-making.

And yet there’s a point of logic there that I think is so easy to miss is that anything that you invite into your story, into your world, if you don’t have a place to put that thing, it’s just going to sit out there and it’s going to be pulling your attention at all times. And so often in writing, the things that aren’t working in scripts are things that probably just haven’t found their home. There’s no place for them to land and so they’re just grafted onto some other thing, and it’s not a natural home for it.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, it seems to me that in thinking about how we write our stories, placement is purpose, and purpose is placement. They are connected. People talk about structure, particularly the self-described gurus talk about structure as this thing that lays down first. You know, like a scaffolding, and then you sort of build something around it. And that’s ridiculous. All things are interrelated. The structure is part of the things that are over the structure, and vice versa. And when you have something that you love, but it doesn’t have a place, I guarantee you it also means it doesn’t have a purpose. A true purpose in the story.

**John:** I would say that Marie Kondo would argue that these structuralists are basically the people who are trying to sell you closet organizers.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** They’re trying to make you put everything into a specific little drawer, a specific little slot, whether it wants to be in that place or does not want to be in that place. And that is my great frustration with both closet organizers and these people who sell you on structure books, because that’s not the way people naturally live their lives, and it’s not the ways stories naturally want to function.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And, in fact, to extend the analogy, what you end up with if you follow one of these books, if you’re trying to Save the Cat or being a good Robert McKee disciple is you end up with one of these cliché closets that have the little things with the stuff, and that stupid hanger for the ties that everybody has. And it’s not you, right? It doesn’t necessarily fit to you.

But even if it did fit to you, it’s not unique at all. It’s an imposition of some kind of economic model. But when we’re talking about what gives us joy, and we’re talking about creating the living space around us, and we’re talking about the structure of our story, it’s supposed to be unique. If it’s not, who needs it?

**John:** Who needs it? So, let’s dig in and talk about this specifically for writing. And so let’s go back to our first point from the book which is keeping only the stuff that sparks joy, keeping only the stuff that you love. And so let’s talk about how do you keep only the scenes, only the moments, only the characters that you love. Let’s try to figure out some practical guidance for doing that.

I would start by saying look through everything, look through it sort of by category. So look through it by scenes and look through it by categories. Maybe look through it by locations. And ask yourself is this something I truly love, or is this just functional? Is this just getting the job done? Is it satisfying the moment that I can get to the things I actually love?

And challenge yourself to say like, wait, do I really want this here? Would I be happy with this scene representing my movie? If that is not the case where you would be delighted to have this scene in your movie, then that scene should not be in your movie. And you should probably stop and find a different way to get through that moment to do the function of that thing, but in a way that you actually love that scene.

**Craig:** This is something that I think separates professional writers from new writers. And it’s not necessarily that professional writers have more talent, because there are people out there who are currently not professional but one day they will be and they will be spectacular. The greatest writer who ever lived has not yet been born, right?

So, the trick though that I think professionals learn over time is that there are moments where you need to do a job. Someone has to get somewhere. Someone has to learn information. Somebody has to see a thing. It’s a piece of story requirement. And they know after all this time, and particularly after seeing what it’s like when they don’t do it right, they know that it is a requirement to go and look at those things and make them delightful in one way or another.

Delightful could mean also horrifying, but engaging. And interesting to the audience.

**John:** Absolutely. And so if you’re going back through your script, or you’re going through someone else’s script, and you’re asking the question why is that there, and the answer is, “Well, because it’s there, or because it’s necessary, or it gets me to this other thing,” that’s probably a red flag that there is something wrong. And not just with scenes with sequences, but also with characters.

Look at your character list and you need to go through and like do I love this character. Does this character make me excited when this character shows up? Do I understand it? Do I love him, or hate him, despise him? Does he bring special joy to this movie? And if the answer is no, then maybe you have the wrong character, or maybe you have too many characters. Maybe that character doesn’t need to be in your movie whatsoever. And it may be worth stopping to think like what happens if that character leaves the movie completely. The things I have this character doing functionally, might they be better served by one of the other characters who would be left?

**Craig:** Yeah. It seems to me that if the challenge is to only keep the things you love, your choices as a screenwriter are get rid of it, or make it something you love. But what you can’t do is keep it if it’s just sort of meh. Nor, can you keep it if, I think if you love it but it’s not doing anything, then the question is do you really love it.

**John:** Yeah. Now, practically speaking, if you’re going from your first draft to your second draft and you’re asking all these hard questions, one of the best ways to get to that second draft might be to say let’s go through the first draft and really identify the things that I love. Copy and paste those things into a new document. Don’t start rewriting your current document, because you’ll just be sort of trying to clean up the stuff that isn’t working.

Copy through the things that are actually fantastic. The things you love. The things you think best identify the movie you want to make. And you’re going to end up with a shorter document that just has the stuff you love. And then go back through and figure out like what would I need to do so that these moments can tell the whole story. That I can build out from these moments to create the rest of this movie?

**Craig:** One thing you have to be cognizant of as you do that process is that there is a relationship that happens between what you’re creating and what people are experiencing. If there’s somebody, anyone, that you trust – or that you think could be helpful to you in their reaction, give them a look. Because you may find that actually something is fantastic that you didn’t realize was fantastic. It’s funny how that happens.

And, of course, similarly, you may find that something that you loved is sort of, meh, not really working that well for somebody else. So, before you begin your winnowing process, maybe put one pair of eyes on it, or one pair of ears.

**John:** I would agree. The other thing I would caution about, if you’re going through this process, it can be so tempting to focus so tightly on these moments that you love that you forget like, oh, I am making a whole movie. And so the things you love shouldn’t just be the bright pinpoints of light, but also the connections between those bright pinpoints of light. And how you’re moving from this place to this place, and what’s actually happening in those bigger moments.

There was a criticism about two weeks ago, I guess we weren’t on the air for it, but Nerd Writer did a very good sort of breakdown of Batman v. Superman. And one of this primary criticisms of it, and I thought it was a good observation, was that the Zack Snyder movie, it had all these moments but had very few scenes. And in some ways I thought it was the Marie Kondo thing taken too far in the sense of like it was just these bright things that he loved, but there was no sort of scene or framework for these moments to have happened. So, you went through the whole movie feeling like it was kind of just on fast-forward. And like you were watching a trailer for a movie that didn’t quite exist.

So, you have to mindful that in writing you’re not just creating those bright flashes of intense things that you love, but also whole moments in which these bright flashes can happen.

**Craig:** There is value and love for silences in music. And there’s some wonderful pauses that are my favorite things in songs. Love them. And they are essential. They aren’t flashy, but they need to be there to make the flashy flashy. And it is absolutely true that there is – and I don’t – I tend to not blame the filmmakers. I may be a little chauvinistic about this, but knowing what I do about the process of getting these movies made, there is an endless pressure, an external pressure – take that for what you will – to continue to reduce the sauce because, oh, if you boil more water out the flavor is more intense. Correct, until it is just gross, and it’s too much. And you’ve lost any sense of balance.

And I think that’s happening more and more in big movies because there’s this feeling that if you are not constantly dropping jaws, then people aren’t going to enjoy it.

I remember our friend Malcom Spellman, he loved Transformers. He really liked it. But he said, “You know, if that movie had been better, it could have made so much more money.” And there’s room. You can see, there’s a lot of room for that movie to just be way better than it is. And they went for all of the fun, you know, and then they missed a lot of the things – the quiet things – that would make it better.

**John:** So, there’s a director who I’ve worked with who I do love as a person, but our relationship has always been sort of like we’re baking a cake together. And I would say, OK, so here’s the recipe, so we need some flour, we need to sugar this, and he kept trying to throw in more sugar. And I’d say, no, no, no, it’s all going to fall apart. It’s a cake. It’s not like hard candy. We need the flour. He’s like, “Yeah, but the flour is not interesting.” No, we need the flour.

And at any moment that I would turn away, he would just dump more sugar in. And that can be the frustration. They keep trying to add more and not actually recognize the fundamental structural integrity of the thing you’re trying to make. You sort of forget what it is you set out to do because you keep intensifying the things that you think you love about it.

**Craig:** One of my least favorite notes, curiously, is the following positive note: “We love what you did with blah, blah, blah. Let’s do more of it.” No. No. You love Sriracha on that, don’t you? Well, let’s dump a bottle on. No!

No, you love it in part because it’s properly balanced and we kind of have a working philosophy of how this – it’s not random.

**John:** You love it because there’s a contrast to what was there before. Exactly. If it was that way through the whole movie, it wouldn’t feel different.

**Craig:** It’s weird how that makes me angrier than, “We don’t like this thing.” And I’m like, ah, you should like it. But, OK, you don’t like it, fine. But, “We love it. Do it again.” Noooo! Ugh. It makes me crazy.

**John:** Yeah. So next bit of advice from Marie Kondo is about cutting things, or she would say like how do you get rid of things, but in our line of work it’s just cutting stuff out, and getting rid of scenes, getting rid of characters, getting rid of things.

And I’m often sort of reluctant to do it because of really that philosophy of loss aversion. It’s like it’s so much more painful to get rid of something than the thought of like gaining something back. It’s also a sunk-cost fallacy. I spent so much time getting that thing to work as well as it’s working. For me to cut it now feels like a failure. It makes me feel that I’ve wasted my time. That I did not do my job well. That I don’t even know what I’m doing.

I’m sure we’ve all felt this.

**Craig:** Yeah. Well, if you want to be a screenwriter, you better make your piece with wasted time now, because as I’ve said before, not really sure how many drafts it’s going to take you to get to the final one, but a lot. And all of those drafts, with the exception of the last one, can be viewed through the lens of, well, I wasted my time.

Obviously you didn’t. You’re not perfect. Your process is imperfect and highly inefficient. Inefficiency goes hand in hand with any kind of creativity as far as I’m concerned. If there were some clean efficient path to creative success, people wouldn’t be required. We would have software. You know, I had that discussion with Mike last week and he I know firsthand went through countless drafts to get to where he ended up. Countless.

And I don’t think he ever stopped and said, “Oh, I’m wasting my time.” You have to understand that the winnowing away of things you don’t want to do is in and of itself productive.

**John:** Yep. And it’s not just sometimes I’m cutting a scene, I’m cutting a sequence, I’m restructuring things. Sometimes I am walking away from a project. And that is one of those things which was so hard early in my career, because I think like, well, but I just made a movie on paper, and I want this movie to happen. So, I would keep calling these development executives saying like, “Well what’s happening on this movie that we worked on that you said you loved and it’s not there anymore?”

And at a certain point I crossed over to recognizing, well, I get that phone call about like, “Oh, they don’t like the draft, and so I don’t think it’s moving forward, or we’re going to sort of think about it.” And then I felt kind of a relief. I started to recognize that like, oh, by this project not taking up my time, I’m now free to do other things. It felt like, oh, I’m allowed to sort of move away from it and not let it occupy so much brain space.

It’s tough when it’s your own project, when you actually own it, and you could keep pushing it forward. Those are the harder things to walk away from. When it’s sort of taken away from you in a certain way it’s liberating because that space has just suddenly cleared for you.

**Craig:** This is a very dangerous thing for new writers, obviously. This is one that they all struggle with and I sympathize. Because you’re going to come up with the standard rap on aspiring writers is that they start 20 projects and finish none. Very common. And obviously not possible to continue that way and expect to be a successful writer. So, naturally I think for people like that they may feel the need to force themselves through to the end for fear that they are falling down that hole.

And they might be. And maybe when you’re first starting out you should just whip yourself until it’s done, just to say, OK, I did it. And I’m not the guy that just starts and stops. But, certainly we will all at some point come face to face with the end of life for something, whether it’s because it’s taken away from us, or because there’s just a general loss of interest. And, frankly, that’s the most common outcome.

**John:** Yeah. So I’m not the animist that Marie Kondo is about sort of like thanking all of my stuff, but there are a couple scripts that are dead now that I kind of consciously do thank for existing, because they were really helpful lessons along the way. So I don’t look at them as failures, but basically like it was really important that I wrote that script because it taught me X, Y, or Z.

And so my first script, it taught me this is what the screenplay format is like. This is how I can get people to really engage emotionally in the things I’ve written.

There’s this project that will never happen which I wrote out of a place of just incredible anger and frustration. And I think from that I mostly take the lesson of thank you for teaching me not to do that, because that was a real mistake. That was a lot of wasted time. And a lot of sort of living in a very negative space for no good reason whatsoever.

So, you know, take the cuts, take the walking aways as little victories and not as failures.

**Craig:** There are really no failures. I look at it that way. Because in a strange way, there are so many failures. There aren’t any failures. We’re soaking in them. So, at that point it’s hard for me to look at anything as a failure. And, yeah, there are times when the lesson is clear. There are times when, I mean, I’ve done a couple things where I thought afterwards, “I don’t know why I did that. Nothing is going to happen with it. I’m not sure I learned anything. That’s a total wash. OK.”

But, you know, it is part of my life. What can I do? I chalk it up to that inherent inefficiency. You just have to make peace with it. You are going to make mistakes, all of you, and it’s essential. It’s just essential to who we are.

**John:** Circling back to your sense of like having some people put eyes on the things you write before you go between this draft and the next draft, one of the phrases that I’ve learned that’s really helpful is saying pretend you have magic scissors and you can cut anything. What would you cut?

And the phrase magic scissors is useful because it gives people permission to really tell you what they think they would want to drop out of a script without having to worry about the repercussions of it. Or how hard it would be to lose something. Because it’s your job as a writer to figure out how you would actually do that. But you want to solicit the opinions of like really, seriously, what would you cut. And I do that in drafts, but I also do that in first cuts of movies. Just like tell me what you’d like to get out of that script and I’ll find a way to do it if I agree with you.

**Craig:** It’s really smart. Because a lot of times we are afraid to say, well, I just don’t like this storyline, but I understand why it’s there. I know what it’s doing. But if 20 people say, “They don’t like it, but,” then you should get rid of it and fix the but, right? So that’s very smart.

**John:** Cool. The last point is like the finding a place for things so you don’t have clutter. And this is what I would say when I’ve come in to do a rewrite, like a big studio rewrite, my first pass through it is mostly just decluttering. There’s always all this stuff that is sitting in the script from previous drafts that really has no business being in the script. So, that first week when I’m handing back a draft they’re like, “Oh my god, this is so much better.” It’s like all I did was take out the stuff that was getting in the way of the script that you kind of all had there. You just didn’t see it.

I’m getting rid of those decisions that were made that sort of like were these small little additions that were added because someone had this note or that note that no longer needed to be in the script. And so when you find stuff that’s out of place, well sometimes you can just get rid of that stuff. And sometimes you have to find a new place to put things. And that’s, I think the hardest lesson sometimes to learn is that you might have a great idea, but unless you have a place to put that great idea, and a place in a movie means a character who can voice it or demonstrate it, and a place both geographically and over the course of the timeline of the movie where that idea can take place, you’re just not going to be able to ever make it into your movie.

**Craig:** Absolutely true. And like you do, I spend a lot of my time rewriting stuff that’s in trouble. And I am very aware in those initial meetings where I say, “Look, here are some things that I think we should just get rid of, blah, blah, blah.” And everyone just lights up and says, “Oh, thank god you’re here.” And I think, hmm, thank god anywhere is here, really. Somebody else would have said this. It’s not me, it’s new, right? So new eyes have come in and unlike you, who have lived with the construction of this house and can’t even remember why the chimney is top of the garage like that, someone is coming along saying, “Lose the garage. Then you don’t have the chimney problem. You don’t need a garage. And do this…and why is that wall there?”

Oh, you know, I can’t even remember why. Well, sometimes because they asked for it to be there. You know, that’s the other thing. When new people come in, they don’t have the knowledge of who asked for what. So there is no embarrassment, whereas if I’m the first writer on it, well I know that that weird wall is there because the vice president of such-and-such demanded it. I can’t say get rid of it now, because they all know that that guy demanded it, and he knows, and I know, and it’s embarrassing.

But the new guy doesn’t know that that guy asked for it. So he’s got cover. Save face. Yeah, sure, yeah, let’s get rid of it. The other writer must have thought of that. It happens all the time. And similarly I know if I am the first writer on something and someone else comes in after me, they may very well be feted as a genius for a while, in part for the same reason. It’s not a reflection on me anymore than my arrival is a reflection on the writer before.

**John:** Yep. And so I would say as you’re looking at your own work, as you’re going between like your first draft and your second draft, people will come to you with a bunch of ideas. And you’ll have a bunch of idea. There will be things that you’ll want to incorporate. But I would just caution you like don’t bring home homeless ideas. Don’t try to sort of wedge extra things into your script unless you really have a natural place for them. And so often I think the reason why second drafts are worse than first drafts is because people are trying to incorporate a bunch of things that they’ve discovered and the things they really want to have in their script, but there’s no place for them because they haven’t actually cleared out all the stuff that’s already there.

And so you’re going to have to be very mindful about where those new ideas are going to land. Who is going to be able to voice them? How are you going to have these situations that reflect those ideas? Where it will it fit structurally? Because sometimes you’ll see these scenes that could have just fallen at any place over the course of the movie, and those are never good scenes. Unless there’s a reason why that scene had to happen at that moment, that scene probably should not be in your movie.

**Craig:** It’s also the big problem that we experience when we arrive at that second draft and are attempting to address input. Because a lot of input is not place-able. At least it’s not place-able in the story we’re trying to tell. So you end up shoehorning things, or sticking things on top of things. It’s not going to work. No one is going to like it. It’s hard because sometimes the thing you can say that would lead to the best movie is also the thing that will lead to you being fired. It’s rough to say to somebody, “Everything you just said will not work and it will make the movie worse. A few of these things will make it better.”

But, you know, unfortunately people want things. You know, it’s that problem, like we said, “Oh, we want more.” Well, there’s no place for more. So, an enormous part of what we do is negotiating with people who are legitimately trying to help, but are not actually helping.

**John:** Yeah. It’s like those people who come to your house saying like, “Oh, I got this thing that’s going to fit in perfectly in your house. It’s great.” And you look at and say, yes, it’s beautiful. I think it’s just really wonderful. But it doesn’t fit your house at all. There’s no place for you to put it. And so it’s going to sit on the counter for a while and you’re going to feel bad about it sitting on the counter for a while. And you can’t remember sort of like, wait, who brought it to us? And like three years later it’s still sitting on the counter and you have no idea how it got into your house.

**Craig:** Yeah. Being a screenwriter is a bit like being a homeowner, except that the bank that owns your mortgage is allowed – and in fact required – to come in and tell you how to decorate and how to change things.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So go ahead and decorate it as you like, but then we’re going to send a bank official over who is going to say, “No, change that wall color to this. I don’t like that bedroom there. Let’s get rid of it. And your house is arranged now.” What? “Oh, and you’re living here. And we own it, so do it. Or we’ll move you out and move your friend in.” [laughs] Blech.

**John:** Blech. So, let’s try to end this on a more positive note. I would say that the movies I love most are not cluttered. And that’s the thing I would sort of stress about this lesson we’re trying to impart to you is not like all the bad things that happen when people try to shove too much stuff at you, but the really great movies when you step back and you really look at them, they are remarkably clean.

They are not overburdened by things that are not important. And sometimes that came out very naturally in the writing process. Sometimes that came through arduous filmmaking and editing and reshoots. But the end result of those movies that I love are really just delightfully clean and there’s no more there than needs to be, there’s no less. They feel just right put together.

And so as you’re writing your scripts, aim for that in your drafts. You won’t always hit it, but really try to find that clean and decluttered way of telling your story and not feel obligated to take in everything that somebody is going to want to hand you.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, I can point to each movie I’ve made and say, “Here’s some clutter that I was imposed.” And it’s hard. And then it’s really hard because you try and – the worst part is when you’re like, OK, I have to use my skills, whatever they are, to make this seem OK. But now the new bar is OK. It’s not good. Just, OK, yes, I see how that logically follows. I don’t like it. I don’t need it. It’s distracting. But, yes, it’s not bizarre. That’s the new standard.

Not good.

**John:** OK. Let’s move onto our next topic. A bunch of people tweeted this at us this week. This is a second round in a French case involving Luc Beson. So, last week an appeals court in Paris found in favor of John Carpenter who argued that Luc Beson had committed copyright infringement in the 2012 movie Lockout, borrowing key elements from Carpenter’s 1981 cult classic, Escape from New York.

And this is notable because this basically never happens, Craig, right?

**Craig:** It basically never happens. That is correct.

**John:** So, in previous episodes we’ve talked about like Tess Gerritsen’s Gravity lawsuit, where she was arguing that Gravity borrowed from her book. We’ve talked about other people claiming like, oh, they stole my script. But in most cases we’ve just shot that down because it’s common for those kind of lawsuits to be filed. It’s very uncommon for them to win. But this was such a weird case because this is about two movies that actually exist that you can see both of them on your TV.

And basically Carpenter is saying, hey, that movie you made is basically a copy of my movie that I made 30 years ago. You have committed copyright infringement.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, OK, so a couple of things that stand apart from the usual whack job alleges theft: neither of these people are whack jobs. They’re both incredibly successful filmmakers. So, that’s an interesting thing that sets this apart. I don’t even think I know of any other case like it.

The second thing that sets it apart is that this is not a United States decision. This is a French decision. Personally, I think it’s a horrendous decision. But, copyright law is different in France. And I guess that may have been the difference. But, I am not thrilled with this decision.

**John:** Well, let’s talk about what the decision is, because it’s a little bit strange. So, Luc Beson, who is one of the cowriters of Lockout, but he didn’t direct it, he produced it through his Europa Corp production company. And the lawsuit was initially filed in 2014. So Carpenter won that first round in the lawsuit and he won about $100,000. The appeals court decision raised that to about $500,000.

So, that’s money, but that’s not a lot of money. It felt like pretty low numbers for what you’d think of as a big copyright case.

**Craig:** Yeah. And again, this may be part of the fact that it’s French. I don’t know. Although, I agree with you. It seems like a very small amount of money, frankly, considering what’s being alleged and what’s being ruled here. And I don’t know if there is yet another round to go in the French judicial system or not. The implication from the media was that the company Europa Corp, which is Luc Beson’s company, will just go ahead and pay this amount.

**John:** And why wouldn’t you? $500,000 is not a lot of money.

**Craig:** Well, why wouldn’t you have just gone ahead and taken the gimme at $100. I think it’s the same reason. Pride. And principle. I haven’t seen Lockout, but I’ve seen Escape from New York. It sounds to me like Luc Beson, yeah, wrote a movie that is similar in general story to Escape from New York, but just set it in space, I guess.

And as far as I know, that’s perfectly fine. I mean, I can make a list of 20 movies in the United States that do similar things, but this one is in space. And everybody kind of understands you’re doing a version of that movie but, you know, in space.

**John:** It’s one of those weird things where it falls somewhere between a rip-off and a homage and a remake. And I think Carpenter is arguing it’s essentially a remake but they put it in space. And Luc Beson would argue like, no, no, it’s the same kind of story but told in space. And telling it in space fundamentally changes everything.

The same way we have a whole bunch of haunted house movies, but we also have essentially the same story, but like on a spaceship. And that feels enough different that we’re not worrying about that.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, everybody who sees a movie can say, “Basically they’re just doing a movie like this.” I mean, every time there’s some big movie that comes out of nowhere, there’s 20 other movies behind it that do the same damn thing. We all – we’ve seen that happen. You know, in the United States, copyright infringement comes down to unique expression in fixed form. It’s basically like plagiarism, right, like what Melania Drumpf did, or her speech writer.

You have to lift stuff. Clear stuff. Right? And that doesn’t seem to be at all what happened here. For instance, the similarities that are cited: The hero manages undetected to get inside the place where the hostage is being held. After a fight in a glider/space shuttle, finds there a former associate who dies. He pulls off the mission in extremis, and at the end of the film keeps the secret documents recovered in the course of the mission.

Um, I’m going to argue that more than two movies have done that.

**John:** Yeah. So, the other similarities are your hero is sentenced to a long period of isolation, and incarceration, despite his heroic past. And he has to free the President’s daughter who has been held hostage there in exchange for his freedom. So, like it’s the President’s daughter hero combination thing, which I think tipped the people off the first time. Like, oh wait, this is a lot like Escape from New York.

But being a lot like Escape from New York is not copyright infringement. Copyright infringement is actually copying Escape from New York. And so I agree with you that I think it would be a harder case to win in the US. And my suspicion is that it takes place – the lawsuit took place in France just because that’s where Luc Beson is and that was the right venue for it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, nobody in the United States is going to say, “You know, Akira Kurosawa should sue Pixar because Bugs is Seven Samurai.” Because that’s insane. How about that? That’s just flat out nuts. And he didn’t. And, you know, I look at this – I mean, if you go through John Carpenter movies, I guarantee you you’re going to find some elements he’s lifted from other movies.

**John:** Yeah. So it’s a question of elements v. total structure. So, you know, Secret Life of Pets, which I thought was pretty charming, but it’s almost exactly Toy Story. So my daughter left the theater and she’s like, “Well, it’s basically Toy Story but with animals.” And I’m like, yeah, it’s basically Toy Story with animals. Most of the beats really do match up to Toy Story, but with animals. And it was a good enough version of it that in no way could I ever imagine Pixar suing over it. It’s just the same kind of framework of how you tell the story of these characters and their situation.

**Craig:** Yeah. The price you pay for hueing too closely to another basic narrative is the audience rejecting it. I don’t – this is such a weird decision to me. I mean, look, if there were specific lines and stuff lifted, but the notion, like you have to rescue the president and get him out of a thing and his daughter. Well, it’s so generic. I mean, I’ve seen so many movies where somebody had to go rescue the president.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** I don’t know.

**John:** So, let’s go to a listener question which is actually very related. So, this is Joe who wrote in and he was nice enough to send his audio. So, let’s listen to Joe’s question.

Joe: Hi John. Hi Craig. What’s the rule on IP that is specific not only to a certain genre, but also a certain story? For example, zombies tend to all look and feel similar to those put on screen by George Romero and we don’t see him suing anyone. Likewise, the Puppet Masters and Invasion of the Body Snatchers both contain similar plots about emotionless humans who are actually aliens, or being controlled by aliens. Yet, both exist without being seen as having stolen the idea from each other.

I have a show idea that borrows certain specific elements from other stories in the genre. How do I make sure it reads as homage rather than infringement? Thanks?

**John:** So, Craig, he’s facing a similar situation. He wants to do something that someone watching the movie might say like, oh, that’s like that, or that’s from that. How do you do that without crossing a line?

**Craig:** Well, pending this legal ruling, maybe avoid making it in France. But, the truth is you can’t avoid a certain amount of overlap, because you’re going to overlap with movies you haven’t even seen. It’s inevitable. There’s going to be some scene or moment that does that. Or there’s going to be some basic idea that does that. We have thousands and thousands of movies. All of which are layering on top of each other and are remakes and reimaginations and recontextualizations.

Infringement is a very clear thing, at least in the United States. Lifting chunks of dialogue. Recreating clear scenes. Picking a character out of a movie and doing a very similar thing. Let’s say, for instance, you’re making a serial killer movie and you have a FBI agent going to interview a serial killer because he’s going to help her catch another killer. Than in and of itself is clearly a – well, it’s a reference to Silence of the Lambs. But what I’ve just said to me doesn’t feel like infringement.

What’s infringement is if she’s walking down a dark hallway and finds him in a room that’s not metal bars, but a glass box, and he turns around and he’s in his nice little neat suit. And he has a quid-pro-quo discussion with her. Now it’s like what are you doing? You’re clearly just copying another movie.

So, the test is are you copying a movie, or are you copying a general kind of story or arrangement?

**John:** Absolutely. I would point Joe over to Everything is a Remix, which is a great series by Kirby Ferguson where Kirby sort of argues that everything you’ve ever seen in movies, and really most of popular culture, comes from different places. And you may not be aware of the references, but they all sort of stack up on each other to get us to where we are right now.

And so, you know, Star Wars is derived from a bunch of preexisting things. And it was assembled in a way that was delightful and wonderful. And it is original in the sense this is the first expression of Star Wars, but everything that is in Star Wars are ideas that were already out there, and they were just assembled in a great way.

So, I would say, Joe, you have to be mindful of don’t let your references just be references and don’t copy. Just make sure you’re using the stuff of the genre that is appropriate and building something new out of those Lego blocks.

**Craig:** I wonder – this is absolute idle conjecture. But I find it odd that in France an American suing a Frenchman was ruled in favor of. And I wonder in part if this is something to do with Luc Beson and some kind of French thing with Luc Beson.

You know, there is this thing that happens – I was talking with somebody. She’s an English producer. A UK producer. And she said it’s a little bit of the tall poppy syndrome. That if you get too successful as a UK production entity with movies that play well in the United States and around the world, then now you’re suddenly no good.

I wonder if that has something to do with this.

**John:** It might.

**Craig:** Well, conjecture.

**John:** Do you want to read a question from a different Joe?

**Craig:** Yeah. So it’s good that we have multiple Joes. A different Joe writes, “A long time ago, you had a guest on Scriptnotes, I forget who, that had written a crazy ass unproduceable screenplay who knew it was insane to ever get made. So he and his partner just put it online. If you know who I’m talking about, can you tell me the screenwriter’s name and the name of that script?”

**John:** We know the name of the writer and the script.

**Craig:** We do.

**John:** So that is written by the Robotard 8000. It is actually Malcom Spellman and Tim Talbott. The script is called Ball’s Out. And it is just a wild comedy. I’ve never actually read Ball’s Out. I just know it sort of as a legend. And they put it up online so people can read it.

**Craig:** Yeah. You can actually hear it. So I was part of a group of people that did a recorded reading of Ball’s Out for the Black List. So they will occasionally – because it was on the Black List. The selected one. And they will do these podcasts where they have a cast of people come in and do an actual reading of a movie. And so you can hear it. It’s bananas. Absolutely nuts.

But interestingly following the publication of that screenplay, Tim Talbott went on to win the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance for his movie The Stanford Prison Experiment. And Malcom Spellman is currently one of the big writers on Empire.

**John:** And also one of the most polarizing guests on Scriptnotes at times.

**Craig:** And would we have it any other way?

**John:** No other way. Brian from Syracuse writes, “Generally speaking, how much of the work do you think needs to be altered in order to feel comfortable calling something a new draft? Is it 10%? A new scene? Rewriting one scene? Furthermore, how much does the amount of work on a new draft differ from that of a polish?” So asking what is a rewrite, what is a polish, and how much is enough to call it a new draft?

**Craig:** There’s no math. I mean, as far as I’m concerned, it falls into the category of we know it when we see it. Every now and then you will have to get into a bit of a negotiation with a studio. Generally speaking, they want to tend to call things polishes. And you want to tend to call things rewrites because you get paid more for a rewrite.

Polishes to me really are more of a function of time as opposed to percentage of change. I’m going to do two or three weeks of work, that feels like a polish. I’m going to do more than a month – it’s a rewrite. Kind of that zone. And then you get into that ticky-tacky area where it’s like, well, it would be like between three and four weeks. Is it a polish? Is it a rewrite? Eh, let’s figure it out.

**John:** And so what we’re describing is when you’re being paid by someone to do specific work. If you’re just doing your own stuff, don’t really worry the distinction between a polish and a rewrite, or if you’re changing one character’s name throughout the whole script, well, that’s fine. If you want to call that a draft, whatever.

I would just caution people don’t put the number of the draft on the script. Let your scripts be dated and use a current date for what the scripts are. But don’t say like Third Revised Draft. Not helpful to anyone. Just date them.

**Craig:** Agreed. Taylor writes, “Recently there’s been a big push from the audience for studios and writers to make characters gay. Example, a few months ago the hashtags #GiveElsaAGirlfriend and #GiveCaptainAmericaABoyfriend ran rampant through social media. And in the new Star Trek movie, Sulu is revealed to be gay.

“My question is why aren’t people pushing for gay and lesbian writers to take up the reins and write new content that the community can appreciate. Why does the community seem hell-bent on cannibalizing already established characters? Wouldn’t it be more meaningful for a character to be gay from inception than to be retroactively changed to appeal to the gay community? I hold myself to the ideal that if I want something done a certain way, I should go and make it. You want to make a character a certain way, then go write one. Don’t demand that someone else do it for you.”

What do you think about Taylor?

**John:** I was with Taylor up until hell-bent on the cannibalizing established characters. That’s where it sort of tipped over to the, ah, you’ve got an agenda here.

So, I think it’s fantastic to have representations of all sorts of people in movies, because that’s where we see our popular culture in movies and TV, where we see popular culture expressed. And so I think Taylor’s frustration is that there are characters he perceives as being white straight people and if those characters are not portrayed as being white straight people, that gets him a little bit frustrated.

And he can go off and be frustrated. I just think that sometimes it’s worthwhile to look at sort of is what makes the character fascinating aspects of his or her personality, or is it this default assumption that it is a straight white male?

**Craig:** Yeah. I think that there are – I basically had the same break point as you. Because I do think that the #GiveElsaAGirlfriend and #GiveCaptainAmericaABoyfriend hashtags are pointless. Because what is it that you’re asking exactly?

And we’ve discussed this before, that movies should now conform their character’s essential makeup to whoever is yammering the loudest on Twitter? It’s insane. It’s just insane. You may want a character to be gay. You may want a character to be white. You may want a character to be a woman. But if the creators don’t want that, and they’ve been pushing them forward in a different way, that’s life.

I mean, tough. You know, the whole “we demand that Elsa have a girlfriend” is stupid and childish. On the other hand, sexuality is an enormous part of what makes a character interesting. And the last thing I want to see is yet another generation of the same character in the same damn way. I’m just so bored to death.

Remember when Daniel Craig was announced as James Bond, people flipped out because he was blond.

**John:** How can you possibly have a blond Bond?

**Craig:** Blond. It’s like forget not white. We can’t even handle him having blond hair. You know, I’m a huge Bond fan. I’m a huge – to me what makes Bond interesting is, you know, the way that this incredibly sexist caricature of a man is forced to evolve over time. And also the areas in which this character refuses to evolve.

But I’m delighted by certain changes. I want changes. I find it interesting. I liked it when M became a woman. And now I’m happy that M is a man, because look, that changed again. I like that.

Sulu, now, it’s an interesting thing with Sulu because George Takei apparently wasn’t too thrilled about this. I don’t know if you read about that.

**John:** I did. And he sort of came out saying like, oh, you should add a new character rather than gaying a current character. And I disagree with Sulu and I agree more with J.J. and with Simon Pegg who said that if you just try to tack on an extra character, then that character is only defined as being gay. And so what was so useful about the Sulu character is, you know, we’re in a parallel universe. There’s no set logic about who that character has to be in this universe whatsoever. I thought it was a fine choice to make him gay.

And by the way, I saw the movie. It’s the least gay character. I mean, he has sort of a side hug. I guarantee you that all the fan fiction that listeners are writing right now for me and Craig is much gayer than Sulu is in Star Trek.

**Craig:** [laughs] Well, I haven’t seen the movie yet. I’m sure that it is the most incredibly not-gay gay. The only thing that I thought George had a really good point on was look, you’re making Sulu – you could have picked any of these people to be gay. You’re making him gay because I’m gay, because I played him. And that’s a reasonable criticism because, you know, they could have made Bones gay.

**John:** They could have made Scotty gay. They could have made any of them gay.

**Craig:** Right. It was a little like, you know right, just like the guy that played him, right? You know, like OK, you know.

There are some things I think that do resist some kind of change. For instance, if you have a character named – what’s his first name, like Hikaru or something like that? I’m not a huge Trek guy. Like Hikaru Sulu, that’s a Japanese name. He should be played by an Asian person. And an Asian person that reasonably looks Japanese.

Some things you probably can’t change.

**John:** I’m generally not a fan of hashtags and sort of like fan campaigns to do things that are trying pressure creators to do things. I think they’re kind of ridiculous.

What I thought was fun about like #GiveElsaAGirlfriend or #GiveCaptainAmericaABoyfriend is they were just trying to provoke a discussion about like would the world really come crashing to an end if you let Cap and Bucky make out the way they sort of seemed to want to make out the whole time through? Or really the assumption that Elsa as a princess in a Disney has to be straight, when like a lot of her does kind of read gay anyway. So, what would the worst thing be if you actually had a lesbian princess in one of these movies?

So, I think they’re useful in the sense of just like provoking the discussion. I don’t think you necessarily need to honor that discussion as a creator, but I thought they were interesting idea bombs to throw out there.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m totally down. Like there are hashtags #CaptainAmericaAndBuckyAreLovers. OK. Good. Make your argument. That makes sense to me. I buy it.

But it’s the demand that you will do this or we’re not going to buy tickets anymore that I find petulant and frankly counterproductive.

**John:** Oh, for sure. But I don’t really think either of those campaigns were about we’re going to boycott this movie if they don’t do this. I think they were more sort of just like trying to provoke the discussion.

**Craig:** Either way, if somebody takes a character that has existed in many versions, played by many different people, and changes their sexuality to add some new twist on something that has become beyond boring, that’s not cannibalizing anything. Cannibalizing implies you’ve eaten it and killed it. No.

**John:** Not possible.

**Craig:** That’s not the case. So, we reject this, Taylor.

**John:** We reject this. [laughs] All right. It’s time for our One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is Difficult People on Hulu, which I may have actually recommended once before, but I want to recommend the second season of it. So it’s created and written by Julie Klausner, who also stars in it along with Billy Eichner. They play under-employed writer-comics in New York City. It’s just delightful. It’s on Hulu. You can stream all the episodes.

It’s very much in the Seinfeld/Larry Sanders model of like really intricately plotted things that have a bunch of jokes that stack up together and then sort of fall down like dominoes at the end. But I really appreciated the second season is that they have a bunch of supporting characters who are both like punchline machines, like everything they say is funny and just meant to be funny, and yet they’re so oddly wonderfully specific. And so one of the new characters in the second season is played by Shakina Nayfack. Her character’s name is Lola. And she’s a transgender 9/11 truther. And so almost every line she says is both about her being Trans and being how 9/11 was an inside job.

**Craig:** So great.

**John:** And you would not think you could possibly make those things match up, and Julie Klausner does. So, I strongly recommend you take a look at that one. Again, it’s on Hulu. It’s not serialized at all, which is also great. So you can just drop in and watch any one episode. If you’re going to pick one episode, I’d recommend Italian Piñata from the second season. It’s a great episode.

**Craig:** I’m going to give it a watch. It sounds good. I just love the name Shakina Nayfack.

**John:** Isn’t that a great name?

**Craig:** It sounds like you’re trying to get away with something in Pig Latin.

**John:** It really does. [laughs]

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing this week is a game for iOS called Severed. It is – now hold on to your seats – it’s seven bucks. So don’t freak out or nothing. But it’s a terrific little game, in part because they managed to get me to play a move around game on iOS. I hate the way most touch applications work for controls. The kinds of moves that you would make with a console handheld controller are very hard to do with touch. Sometimes they give you like a virtual controller, which I loathe. This one they actually just simplified it down to a way where just, oh yeah, OK, I’m going to tap in a direction I want to go. Two fingers to move my head around and then tap again in the direction I want to go.

And it’s beautiful. It kind of reminds me of old school flash art. Old school meaning like when you and I were still in our 30s. And the mechanics are very simple and it’s very much like Fruit Ninja meets walk around and look around and Creepy Beauty. And it’s casual as hell. So, if you’re looking for something, iPad only, not phone, Severed. I believe the company is called Juice Box. Very good game.

**John:** Very good. So that is our show this week. There will be links in the show notes for most everything we talked about, so if you’re listening to this on your favorite podcast player, just keep scrolling and you’ll find links to all those things.

If you’re visiting us on johnaugust.com, it would be great if you would also subscribe to the show in iTunes because that’s actually how we know how many people are listening to our show. And leave us a review while you’re there, because that’s super helpful as well.

If you have a question for me or for Craig, you can write to ask@johnaugust.com. On Twitter I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

Our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Woo.

**John:** Our outro this week comes from John Venable, so thank you John for sending that in. Our outro last week was by Matt Davis. So you didn’t know who did it, but Matt Davis did that.

**Craig:** There you go.

**John:** If you have an outro for us, you can write into the same email address, ask@johnaugust.com, and send us a link to your outros. We love those outros. But we’re running a little bit low. So, if you have some great themes for us, please send those through. And thank you very much, Craig.

**Craig:** See you next week, John.

**John:** Bye.

You can download the episode [here](http://traffic.libsyn.com/scriptnotes/Episode_262.mp3).

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2016/anthrax-amnesia-and-atomic-veterans).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is Episode 260 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters. Today on the podcast, Craig and I are going to implore all screenwriters to think twice before using the phrase “begs the question.” We will also be doing one of our favorite features, How Would This Be a Movie? This week we’ll be looking at Anthrax, Amnesia, and Atomic Veterans.

**Craig:** Now, that in and of itself would be a fantastic single movie.

**John:** One hundred percent. I think you need some, like there’s a superhero aspect. There’s a courtroom trial aspect. Atomic Veteran just feels like a lesser grade Marvel hero.

**Craig:** Yeah, like, we can’t get Captain America, but we did find Atomic Veteran.

**John:** Completely. He doesn’t remember that he is Atomic Veteran because of the anthrax attack. But it will all be sensible by the third act.

**Craig:** Yeah. Atomic Veteran’s principal super power: reminiscence.

**John:** Oh, very – fond reminiscence but also a little heartbreak.

**Craig:** Yeah. Yeah.

**John:** The things he had to do. The flash of light that took away his true love.

**Craig:** Oh, wow. This is actually getting to be a really good movie.

**John:** It’s going to be a good movie. So, let’s save that for the key points, though. Because last week was a huge bombshell episode.

**Craig:** I mean, everything happened. We are the show where nothing happens for 258 episodes, and then at 259 the whole thing goes up in flames.

**John:** So, to recap, I am moving to Paris. Stuart is leaving us. We have a brand new producer, Godwin Jabangwe. Also, I sold a book.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** And so on the episode last week I talked about it in a vague sense because the announcement hadn’t gone out, but now it is out. So, the books title is Arlo Finch in the Valley of Fire. Arlo Finch is the lead character of it. It is middle grade fiction. It is sort of the kids’ fantasy fiction. The same kind of book as a Harry Potter or Percy Jackson. There will be three of them at least. And it’s Macmillan that bought it, so it’s a division of Macmillan. And I’m so excited. I am writing them now.

So, my year in Paris will be spent writing kids’ books that are not set in Paris.

**Craig:** Arlo Finch is so instantly recognizable as a YA hero name. And it’s great.

**John:** Thank you.

**Craig:** I kind of secretly want there to be a YA series where the hero is Jim Cummings, or Tasha O’Brien. Just something that’s so – it’s not even mundane. It’s in the weird uncanny valley between Jim Smith and Arlo Finch. You know, just like–

**John:** I see what you’re saying.

**Craig:** It’s so average, it’s nothing.

**John:** Like Tasha O’Brien is an interesting case, because Tasha could go somewhere and O’Brien could go somewhere, but Tasha O’Brien feels just like weird. And it doesn’t have–

**Craig:** Like a mistake.

**John:** Like a mistake. You’ve got that weird sort of Shwa at the end of Tasha O’Brien.

**Craig:** It’s terrible. It’s the worst thing. And I just thought of it. I have to give myself a pat on the back, because, you know, the things we ask our brains to do. I said, Brain, fetch me a name that is weirdly off.

**John:** Yep. So, I’m very excited to be writing it. At some point I’ll go into sort of more of the details on how I wrote it and how I sold it, but this was my NaNoWriMo project. I wrote a bunch of it back in November. I didn’t write all of it back in November. What you actually sell when you sell a book is often, in this case, the first bunch of chapters and then a proposal for the rest of it. And so that is what the editors read and that is what they bought. And it’s been exciting to go back and write the whole book.

**Craig:** Now, I see that it’s coming out through Roaring Brook Press. And Roaring Brook is part of Macmillan. So, give us a sense of the other kinds of books that we’ve seen from Roaring Brook so we know what your family is of books.

**John:** From that specific in-print, I cannot point to any titles that you would have recognized. The other books that my editor, Connie Hsu has worked on, they’re really good sellers and really well done books in that genre, but they’re not like big blockbuster names.

**Craig:** You will make Roaring Book Press – I mean, you will be the – Roaring Brook will be the house John August built.

**John:** It could be. So, it is good to understand, we always think in terms of studios, and so we have Paramount and we have Warner Bros, but within each of those big places you have the individual labels. Like Sony has TriStar, they have Columbia, they have Studio 8, and Sony Pictures Animation. There’s different houses within that. And that’s sort of is what it’s like with Roaring Brook Press. They are one of the labels within the bigger company, Macmillan.

So, while I’m so happy to be writing for Connie and for this division, bigger people at Macmillan had to make the call whether to say yes or no to the book, and so I’m happy that they did.

**Craig:** Did it go all the way to Macmillan?

**John:** It goes to Mr. Macmillan himself. He has a monocle. And so you have to speak very quietly and slowly, but then he says yes or no and it’s all good.

**Craig:** I will never, never release my child-like view of the world. I just presume, oh, the company is Macmillan, well, so when can I speak to Macmillan?

**John:** Exactly. But Macmillan is actually headquartered in the Flatiron Building. So, I’ve not actually visited their offices yet, but I’m excited to visit their offices because it’s that weird narrow building in New York City as you head downtown. And you always see that in movies and that’s actually where they will be dissecting every comma in my book.

**Craig:** I believe, just off the top of my head, I think the Flatiron building is right near a place called Eataly.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Eataly.

**John:** I’ve heard many legends of Eataly. I’ve never been there, but that is the famed sort of Italian market with a zillion restaurants and a place where everyone enjoys their Italian food.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s really cool. I like it.

**John:** Cool. There’s other follow up. So, last week not only did we have the season finale episode, we also had Matt Selman , Aline Brosh McKenna, and Rawson Marshall Thurber discussing the season finale episode in a bonus episode we called Duly Noted. That was just the three of them. I wasn’t there while they were recording it. I hit record and I left the room. And so I want to thank them for doing that. It was just a weird lark experiment.

Craig, what did you think of it?

**Craig:** [laughs] I think you know the answer to that. I don’t listen to podcasts, John. I have no idea what they said whatsoever. I mean, I love all three of them. At some point I will listen to it. Was it good?

**John:** It was good. It was – they’re three very smart people. So, it was weird and fascinating to hear them talk about me and us without us being there. And so that was great. They’re all three big fans of the show. Matt Selman has never been on the show, but has listened to almost every episode, so it was great to have him as an outside voice dissecting sort of what we do. So, it was fun.

It was just sort of a lark. And I don’t know that there will be more Duly Noted, but let us know what you thought of that and if you’d like to hear more of those in the future. It’s not going to be a weekly thing. This isn’t going to be our weekly recap episode.

**Craig:** No. We can’t support that sort of thing. We’re just not that interesting.

**John:** No. I will say that if listeners find a given episode so noteworthy that they actually want to record their episode, I wouldn’t stand in their way. So, if you do want to record a response episode and you can do a good job of it, send us a link and I would consider putting it in the feed as a Duly Noted episode. You could be any random people who have the ability to have a good conversation about the show. I’d consider that. No guarantees, but maybe.

**Craig:** Wow. That’s very generous of you.

**John:** Well, I’m not really promising anything other than I might listen to it.

**Craig:** So, I take it back. That was just empty generosity.

**John:** [laughs] Last week, you had a One Cool Thing, and we had a listener who wrote in with a response to your One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, I was talking about the idea that we live in a simulation, which I pretty much agree with. And then I had read that the existence of Pi and irrational numbers like Pi that never stop, the digits just keep coming and coming, that they prove possibly that we’re not in a simulation because there’s no end, and a simulation theoretically should be finite.

And about 14,000 dorks on Twitter patiently explained to me that that was not true. Alit decided to write in. So, we’ll give Alit the floor. Alit says, “PI being theoretically infinite,” well, hold on. Well, I guess that’s fair, because we never got to the end. “Pi being theoretically infinite doesn’t preclude a finite simulation including Pi as part of its construct. This is because Pi is defined as a ratio between a circle circumference and it diameter. Any representation of Pi in real rational form, that is 3.14, is necessarily an approximation, both in a simulated and non-simulated universe.

“So any simulation dealing with Pi would only need to compute Pi out as far as practically necessary for the simulation. Therefore, Pi exists, therefore we’re not in simulation argument doesn’t hold.” And a bunch of people said similar things. Including, oh, you know, if they’re smart enough to create a virtual reality as complicated as the one we appear to be in right now, they could probably toss on a few hundred trillion digits of Pi. I think we’ve managed to get up to a trillion or something like that.

**John:** Certainly. So, Craig, the important question is are you convinced by this line of reasoning?

**Craig:** Yeah. It seems convincing. I think I’m going to have to stand down on the whole Pi thing and revert back to my initial perspective which was that none of this is real. And especially not you.

**John:** And especially not the 10,000 Twitter people who tweeted you the answer that Pi was not proof, because they weren’t real either.

**Craig:** No. No. As far as I can tell, I’m the only one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, I got to say, I’m really enjoying the show so far. I mean, the show of reality is just terrific.

**John:** It’s really well done.

Last week we also talked about Overboard and one of our listeners had done a recut sort of as a request that took the Goldie Hawn comedy and made it a thriller. We have a different trailer that Latif Ullah also wrote in with, which also does similarly a good job of using moments from that movie to set it up as a thriller. So, we’ll put a link to his version, or her version. I don’t know if Latif is a male or female name, in the show notes.

**Craig:** Also in follow up, a little something about Phil Lord, who recently moved off to England with his writing and directing partner, Chris Miller. I went to Chris’s house for a little goodbye soiree and ran into Phil. And he told me that he listens to us in the shower. So, when Phil, and this is now the person that’s going to be imbuing life to the new Han Solo, when Phil is nude he listens to us. But more importantly, John, I wanted you to know that he told me that he uses Highland.

So, Highland theoretically now will be used to write the new Han Solo standalone movie.

**John:** That is pretty much amazing. So, Phil Lord, who I should also say has one of those names that is kind of broken and wrong in a Craig’s bad YA novel character way. Like Phil Lord, it’s like it’s two words, but it sort of comes out as one word. Phil and Chris are fantastic. And Phil had actually emailed me a couple weeks ago because there’s something they were trying to do in Highland and he couldn’t figure out how to do it. It was a Courier Prime problem, and I talked him through how to do it.

But I was so excited that he was using Highland to write this new version of Han Solo that he was working on. So, hooray.

**Craig:** Hooray.

**John:** Let’s get to questions. We have a question from Zack in the UK. And rather than us reading it aloud, I asked if Zack would actually record himself asking the question so we could hear his question in his own words. So let’s listen to Zack.

Zack: Hi John and Craig. Zack from London here. I wondered if you might be able to help solve a script problem that’s been driving us all nuts. We have a script in which a characters’ consciousness are transferred between bodies. When describing the character, it’s important to know which consciousness we are looking at, as well as which body. Both consciousness and bodies recur during the script, so we can’t just discard them after each switch.

So my question is, how would you suggest notating the script to make this clear to the reader. The danger is that bad notation turns a script into one big hot unreadable mess. Is there an elegant solution?

**John:** Craig, what’s your thought? Is there an elegant solution for dealing with a situation where the person speaking is not the person we see onscreen?

**Craig:** I think there is. I dealt with something like this when I writing a script called Cowboy Ninja Viking, which I guess still might get made. Chris Pratt has signed on to do it, so that’s exciting. And the idea of that property is that there’s a guy who in his mind has I guess what you’d call split personality, and so imagines himself as a cowboy, a ninja, and a Viking. And in these scenes, sometimes we would see those characters when we were in his perspective, but then from other people’s perspective, we would just see him.

And at times, he alone would be acting as a cowboy, or a ninja, or a Viking. So, what I did in those situations was the character’s name is Duncan, so I would have Duncan, and then I would have Ninja, and then I would have Duncan as Ninja.

So, in this case, I would probably do something similar. Like if it were you and me and were switching minds, I would say John, Craig, Craig inside John, John inside Craig. Something like that.

**John:** We have one listener in particular who is so hot and bothered hearing John inside Craig and Craig inside John.

**Craig:** It’s Sexy Craig, right?

**John:** That is.

**Craig:** Inside.

**John:** Just awful. So, what you’re describing, Craig, is that in the character cue, so like the little bit that goes above dialogue, you are saying Duncan as Cowboy. That’s the name of the character who is giving that dialogue, correct?

**Craig:** Yes. Exactly. So I changed the character names, and this way – because as you’re reading through a script, as much as possible you want to keep the flow. The one thing we know that always breaks up dialogue is a character name. There’s no option to not have it there. So, that seems like good real estate to repurpose to kind of help get this across. It should do the trick.

**John:** It should absolutely do the trick. And so my advice is the same advice. There are times where I’ve had to do character name/somebody else. Usually that means you’re sort of hearing both people talking at the same time. Or, character name and then in parenthesis after it, like the form of the character that we’re actually experiencing. But anything like that to indicate what’s going on is helpful.

I will say that in general any kind of body switching movie, it can be very tough both on the page and in the movie to remind the audience of who they’re actually seeing. The Change-Up was a movie starring Jason Bateman and Ryan Reynolds, both friends of ours, and I had a hard time over the course of that movie really remembering who it was that I was watching and following. And sort of what I was supposed to be paying attention to and sort of who was doing the action.

I think it’s actually harder when the two people are kind of similar.

**Craig:** Little bit of a problem with that movie, wasn’t it?

**John:** It was sort of a problem with that movie. It’s much more obvious when you’re in a Freaky Friday situation. It’s like, oh, she’s being teenager and she’s being a mom. When it’s a huge difference between those two things, then it’s much more clear. Or, in Ghost when you have Whoopi Goldberg possessed, then you can sort of see what’s happening there. It’s tough when you have people who are very similar to the other form of themselves.

**Craig:** Yeah, for sure. In something like this, also, I think Zack you would be well advised to put a little paragraph in when this starts. And when it starts put a little paragraph, put it in italics, you can put it in parenthesis so everybody gets that it’s a comment. And just say when you see XXX or XXX, this is what it means, so people know.

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Everybody gets the drill here. Clarity is hugely important. And it’s going to ruin everything if people are confused. So, that little note and then changing the character names so we understand, it’s Craig inside John, yeah.

**John:** That’ll do it.

All right, let’s get to our bit of umbrage for the episode. And this is a topic that I think most recently came up on Twitter. We had a little spat back and forth on Twitter. Not between us. Like we were in agreement, but someone else was disagreeing with us.

So, I want to dig into this issue of Begging the Question. And we’ve actually used this on the show. I searched the transcripts and back in Episode 188, we were doing follow up on the Tess Gerritsen Gravity lawsuit and you said–

**Craig:** Begging the question means building an argument around something that needs to be figured out by the argument. It’s essentially saying people are definitely hungry because they’re hungry. This guy – and this is the person we’re referring to – is basically saying I’m baffled by your continued defense of Warner Bros and Cuarón because they’re wrong.

**John:** Exactly. And, Craig, is that begging the question?

**Craig:** It’s essentially begging the question. Yes.

**John:** So talk us through what that term originally meant.

**Craig:** Originally, begging the question was a – it came up all the time in discussion of logic and philosophy. And the idea of begging the question was to take something that you were trying to prove and incorporate it into the basis of the argument to prove that thing.

And so you would end up saying, well, I believe B because the following is true – A, B, and C. It doesn’t work that way. And when you boil it down, really what begging the question refers to is a tautology. In its simplest form, the way it comes up is you can’t teach those people because those people don’t learn.

**John:** Exactly. So, some examples of begging the question would be opium induces sleep because it has a soporific quality. Well, induces sleep and soporific mean the same thing, so you’re basically arguing A equals A.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** Let’s plow through some more examples just so it really lands. Strawberries are delicious because they taste good.

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs] And you know it’s funny, when you say a proper tautological argument, one that begs the question like this, it sounds so ridiculous, but you have an example here that I think we actually hear all the time in slightly tweaked versions. If marijuana weren’t illegal, it wouldn’t be prohibited by law. Now, I hear a version of this argument these days a lot surrounding police shootings.

**John:** Exactly.

**Craig:** If they weren’t doing something wrong, they wouldn’t have been shot. Meaning you deserve to be shot because you were shot. Doesn’t work that. That’s begging the question.

**John:** You hear that with immigration as well. Like, well they’re breaking the law because they’re here illegally. There’s implicit like, well, that’s breaking the law because it’s illegal. Like, you’re not actually getting to what’s really the cause here.

**Craig:** Right. And so you end up drawing conclusions that are faulty because your entire argument is based on the thing that you’re attempting to prove.

Now, we are among the very few people that use it this way, which is the proper way. The vast majority of people say “that begs the question” to mean that invites the question.

**John:** Exactly. And so to the degree to which even in dictionaries now, sometimes they won’t even distinguish that it’s not the original usage of the phrase. The original usage of the phrase comes back form Aristotle days. And so it meant this kind of circular reasoning. And lawyers would use it. And rhetoricians would use it to describe this exact phenomenon. And my hunch, and I have no evidence for this being the actual case, is I think screenwriters and television writers are partially to blame for sort of how this phrase has drifted into modern usage.

My suspicion is that people would see courtroom dramas and they would see the defense lawyer stand up and say, “He’s the begging the question.” And really no one kind of means what that means, but they would hear that phrase begging the question. Like that’s an important thing to say.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And because they hear that important to say, they try to use it in their own speech. And they would use it in a way that really means to suggest the question, invite the question, elicits the question. Which is a very useful thing to say. So, I don’t want to be negative on the construct as like that’s a useful thing to have. I think it’s very, very useful. But, by using begs the question to mean invites the question, we’re sort of stepping over the original usage of the word.

**Craig:** It’s so funny that you bring up that courtroom thing. It’s absolutely true. And if you stop and think about it, that really should have been the place where people stopped and said clearly this doesn’t mean invites the question, because somebody would say, “Objection your honor. Begging the question.” And the judge would say, “Sustained.”

Well, if it meant invite the question wouldn’t everybody go, “True, go ahead and ask the question.” It’s just a totally different thing. This is one of those things where the war is not only unwinnable, it has been lost for years. You and I are like those Japanese soldiers they would keep finding on islands in the ‘50s who hadn’t heard the news we’ve lost. But I will still fight. I will fight on for the truth of begging the question.

Although I see that you’ve indicated a very good substitute for it which would definitely avoid you pedantically explaining to somebody what begging the question is, and that is to say, “Oh, you’re using circular reasoning.”

**John:** Yeah. And so maybe we could put this all to bed by saying when you’re trying to use the logical argument for it, maybe say circular reasoning so people know that that’s what you mean. Because I think people kind of figure circular reasoning, it makes a little bit more sense in terms of what logically the fallacy that’s happening here.

But if you’re using the phrase “which begs the question,” I would just ask you to please stop and think could I say which invites the question, or which raises the question. Some examples here. I have 40,000 Twitter followers, which invite the question, why am I not verified? Or which raises the question, why am I not verified. But to say which begs the question, well, that’s kind of ambiguous. And who are you begging? It’s a strange thing. You’re trying to use this smart-sounding phrase that isn’t actually the correct phrase.

**Craig:** I mean, you can see how this happened. I mean, someone goes, well, the idea is that it’s so obvious that it’s begging to be asked, right? But, yeah. Which raises prompts, invites, all that would be great. We’re losing this fight. Even right now, John, I feel the blood draining from me and the world grows dim.

**John:** The only reason why I think it’s worthwhile raising this thing, because I’m not even fighting this fight anymore, I’m just raising this because our listener base are the people who are writing movies and television.

**Craig:** Good point.

**John:** And I think as the people writing movies and television, let’s just be mindful of what words we’re picking and what words we’re putting in character’s mouths. And if there’s an opportunity to not use the sort of twisted version of begs the question, let’s do that. If there’s an opportunity to say circular reasoning rather than begs the question for this other thing, maybe we should do that.

And let’s also just be mindful of are we trying to use phrases we don’t really understand and putting them in the mouths of big Hollywood actors who are going to say them in blockbuster movies and therefore perhaps shift the usage of language or sort of break a phrase in language when we didn’t need to?

**Craig:** You know what? You’re right. You’re right. Fight on.

**John:** We will fight on. It’s our last dying battle for begs the question. So we just ask you to look at your drafts and look at any usage of begs the question. Look at the usage. Just do a find/replace for “which begs the question.” Because that’s almost the only construct you’re going to see this in. And anytime you see that, just consider using a different word rather than begs.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Let’s get on to the subject of the day, How Would This Be a Movie? And so on Twitter this morning I asked people to send in suggestions for this segment and we have the best listeners in the world, so a bunch of people sent in a bunch of great suggestions. I picked two of them and then one of them was a thing I just – was a deep Wiki hole I fell into myself.

But the first thing that someone suggested was The Day that Went Missing. It’s a New York Times Story by Trip Gabriel. And this was suggested by Elise McKimmie, who is a friend, and she’s also the person who runs the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. So she’s so smart and she wrote in with a suggestion.

So in this story, Trip Gabriel, who is a reporter for the New York Times, he’s discussing June 17, 2015. He went sailing and he does not remember this day whatsoever, because in fact all he does know about this day was waking up in a CAT scan machine and reading a Post-it note saying you’ve had an incident, you have a form of amnesia called Transient Global Amnesia. You’re going to be okay. You didn’t have a stroke. It’s going to be fine eventually.

Craig, what did you make of this story?

**Craig:** Well, this story falls under the general category of Oliver Sacks. And the great Oliver Sacks, sadly the great late Oliver Sacks, was a neurologist who wrote a book called The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat. And it was a collection of stories based on his work and his research into others. People who were suffering from neurological conditions that changed the nature of the way they interacted with the world. And one of Oliver Sacks’ stories became the basis for the movie Awakenings, which was a wonderful movie. But it’s a genre to me. I think of this as the Oliver Sacks genre of what to do with someone whose mind is now functioning a way that changes their inherent way of dealing with the world around them.

We had the romantic comedy version of this is 50 First Dates. So we know about that.

**John:** The thriller version of this is Memento. In Memento he can’t form any memories, but this is sort of more limited version of Memento. But even in the story, Gabriel is discussing Memento with his doctors. He says like, “Oh, is this like the movie Memento?” And then a few seconds later, “Is this like the movie Memento?”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Finding Dory is another extreme example of a character who has no recollection and no ability to sort of form those long term memories.

**Craig:** Precisely. And in 50 First Dates they introduced an interesting twist where Drew Barrymore’s character would proceed through her day thinking that it was the day that she got into a car accident that caused the injury. And would be perfectly fine throughout that day, but then in the morning wake up and it was the same thing all over again. Sort of Groundhog Day in her own head.

These are hard to do because they are gimmicky by definition. Memento, for instance, I think smartly understood that it wasn’t enough to have somebody not remember stuff. They needed to tell the story backwards to make it really fascinating for all of us.

So, it’s a tricky thing. You can’t really do a movie that’s just like, oh my god, I have amnesia. What do I do? You can’t do a Terms of Endearment version.

**John:** I think there’s a version of this that could be like a Gillian Flynn novel like Gone Girl where it centers on this event that happened. So, in Gone Girl it’s her disappearance. In this case it’s like what happened during that day. And it’s all focused on a character wakes up and you’re trying to figure out what actually happened during the course of this day and reconstructing what must have happened. And obviously something very big must have happened during the course of that.

And that’s a classic setup for a story, and especially for a thriller, is not knowing who you were before this moment. I mean, The Bourne Identity is based around Jason Bourne waking up and not knowing who he was. Not just a day was missing, but a whole lifetime was missing before this moment.

**Craig:** Yeah, we like as audiences watching characters try and solve the puzzle of their own life. And that is what The Hangover was. And that’s what Dude, Where’s My Car was. And we enjoy that process. And we can induce that in all sorts of ways, whether it’s okay you drank too much, or you got hit on the head, or you were part of a secret government program.

**John:** Or you were roofied.

**Craig:** Or you were roofied. Exactly. Rohyphnol. The idea of sort of living with this as a condition – so I feel like, first of all, I would say I think we have a pretty good supply of movies where characters have amnesia that are then comedies, romantic comedies, thrillers, spy movies, et. So then the question is is there an Awakenings style movie here?

So, Awakenings was about a patient who sort of had like a – well, I guess we now call Locked-In Syndrome. They seem to be catatonic and yet they were awake. And so the question is are they alive in there, and if so, how do we get to them? And it’s Robin Williams plays the doctor who is interacting with Robert De Niro, the patient, and they do wake him out of this. And he wakens up.

But what we understand in the movie is really it’s about Robin Williams’s character and how he needs to wake up from his own life, which is sort of a flat line. So, you can do a drama like that with this. The problem with amnesia is it disrupts every relationship with that character. Constantly. I have to take my hat off to Tim Herlihy and everyone that worked on 50 First Dates because it really – I love that movie. And they manage to make the relationship work.

**John:** Well, if you look at that movie versus Overboard, like at no point in 50 First Dates do you feel like Adam Sandler is taking advantage of Drew Barrymore’s character. It would be very easy to set that up in a really uncomfortable kind of rapey way. And they were able to move past that, which was very, very smart.

**Craig:** Absolutely. And one of the ways they did that very cleverly was by having Adam Sandler meet her father and brother very early on. So he understood that there were people watching and taking care of her. And that they were naturally suspicious of anybody who is going to interlope.

But I’m not really sure this one says movie to me.

**John:** So, going back to your Oliver Sacks version, there’s a book I read a couple of years ago called The Answer to the Riddle is Me, by David Stuart MacLean. And this might be the longer version that sort of can build out to a full movie. So, in this version, MacLean, it’s a true story, he woke up in India and had no idea where he was. And was basically having this crazy acid trip and went through a horrible two weeks. And these people sort of took pity on him and kept him protected. But eventually they were able to figure out who he was and contact his family and had his family come pick him up and bring him back to the US.

So, it turned out that he was doing work in India and was taking this drug for malaria which sometimes causes these horrible freak outs. And it’s like a form of amnesia where it just kind of wipes your identity clean. And so it was the process of him trying to rediscover who he was and sort of the bad things about who he was. It’s like you always sort of think like, oh, if I could reinvent myself or sort of come back with a fresh slate, but you sort of never get that fresh slate. And all the bad stuff came back with him.

So, that might be the longer Oliver Sacks version, because the journey happens post-recovery from the actual syndrome.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Maybe.

**Craig:** But I don’t know. It just seems like a slog.

**John:** All right.

**Craig:** I don’t know. My studio is not buying this.

**John:** All right. Why don’t you pitch the next one? This is Atomic Veterans. This was suggested by Maxwell Henry Rudolph, our listener, and it’s all about the post-war atomic tests.

**Craig:** Yeah, so between 1945 and 1962, approximately 500,000 American soldiers were exposed to radiation from tests of atomic bombs. It’s hard to imagine because we live in a time where there’s a comprehensive test ban treaty and nobody tests atomic bombs. And technologically we would know if somebody did. It was going on constantly.

The US was constantly blowing these things up, as was the Soviet Union. And they were also constantly using – we were constantly using our own soldiers, almost exclusively men, as guinea pigs to see how close you could get.

**John:** Yeah. So, there are two articles we’ll link to in the show notes. The first is by Tom Hallman, Jr. The second is a New York Times piece by Clyde Haberman. The Clyde Haberman one also has a video that goes with it which is really well produced. But essentially after WWII, well, we detonated these bombs. We knew they worked. We knew they could level cities. But the question was how else can we use them? So we were testing like what happens if we blow them up above a ship? And so they would put a ship out there and blow it up and they’d have a bunch of sailors like kind of cover your eyes, watch it, while the ship goes up in the distance. And then the sailors would have to board the vessel and measure it for radioactivity.

But they’re just wearing tee-shirts. There wasn’t a fundamental understanding or, I don’t know, cleverness to sort of like say, wow, we should have some protective gear here. Or maybe we shouldn’t be doing this at all.

Then, of course, there were the bomb tests in the deserts where they’d be digging trenches and they’d blow things up. And we’ve seen versions of that in movies before where they’re seeing like could we level a house. Well, what happens next? Well, what happens many years later is you have a bunch of these soldiers with cancers that seem quite unusual. And in some cases we see cancers or other problems showing up in their kids and in the generation after that. So, these soldiers who weren’t killed by the blasts, but suffered some sort of radiation poisoning, and that becomes I think the focus of any movie that you try to make out of this.

**Craig:** Yeah. There are actually a ton of different approaches here. We can go on the nose. Let’s set this in the 1950s and let’s have somebody investigating the government’s effort to use our own men as guinea pigs. And let’s have a sort of domestic espionage movie.

You can definitely do a movie about the men now as they exist now as veterans. It’s very tricky when you’re dealing with older people who are in physical peril. Whether we know it or not, we are all little insurance actuaries in our own minds. And we do this narrative calculation the way that courts do calculations of how much money somebody who has been wrongfully injured should get. And a huge part of that is how long do you expect to live. Well, you’re 15, that accident cost you your eye. It was that guy’s fault. We’re figuring you got 80 years or 75 years of not having that eye. You get this much.

My grandmother, my late grandmother, was diagnosed with cancer when she was 80. And it was stomach cancer. And they strongly recommended that she have her stomach mostly removed. And so she went under the knife at 80, which is an enormous risk, and did survive the operation only for us to find out she didn’t have cancer at all. That it was a contaminated slide that the pathologist had messed up. And so my parents sued for malpractice.

And as you can imagine, one easily – it never went to court. But that’s when I learned, if you’re an 80-year-old woman, they’re like, well, we’ll pay you for the next, I don’t know, expected six years of your life. So, we do a similar moral equation when we’re watching movies and old people are at risk, because in part we’re like, well, all right, but you know, he’s 80. Uh, am I worried about him making it to 85?

And it’s wrong, but we do it.

**John:** My hunch is that the place where this movie wants to live is in the ’60s or ‘70s. And so these people aren’t especially old, but maybe they’re having their first kids with like birth defects. That feels like the sweet spot. Because what’s also fascinating about this point in time is they think they’ve been good soldiers and at the time of the tests they signed pledges that they would never reveal what happened. Basically it’s treason for them to talk about these nuclear tests.

But once your own kid is having these problems, or you start to have these problems, or your friends start to have these problems, you have to ask yourself like, well, do I hold myself to this pledge, do I risk treason to perhaps save my daughter’s life, to save all of my fellow solders’ lives? At what point do you cross over that line? And that to me I think is probably one of the really inflection points.

And the true story is this is where they first started appealing to the Senate for help.

**Craig:** There’s another like totally wild way to go is let’s just go fictional. Let’s go science fiction, because any time you’re exploding nuclear devices theoretically you’re messing around with quantum physics and stuff.

You’ve got some guys that are exposed to this. They’re too close. And it disrupts time/space fabric. And they are now moving through time, but always in other places where a nuclear device is about to go off. This actually feels more like a TV show.

Remember like–?

**John:** Quantum Leap.

**Craig:** Yep. Quantum Leap.

**John:** Or Voyagers.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s Voyagers is really what it is. So, it’s like, okay, it’s happening again. At some point in time, right, there’s now bad people who have nuclear devices moving through time and we have to keep up with them because they will detonate this nuclear device and destroy Paris in 1770. And so we are now there at the same time as them trying to stop them. It’s like there’s so many, you know, a movie studio, they’re not going to make the straight up movie. Ever.

Never, ever, ever. Because there’s just not enough, I think, for them to latch onto. But, the idea of a government – if you are writing a movie and you needed to show how the United States government mistreated its own soldiers, this would be a great scene to show it.

**John:** Yes. I think the straight ahead version of it could be made for an HBO. I think it could be made as a History Channel movie. I think there’s a venue in which the kind of Erin Brockovich-y version of this could be a really compelling movie. And it would have a really good home.

But I don’t think we’re often making the big end of year blockbuster movie about this very often. Although sometimes we do. So we make Spotlight. And this could be a Spotlight. It could be the one of these a year that we get that is focusing on one particular abuse by the government in this case and we are going to really show the character’s affected by it and the fight to have the story told.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s possible. But unlikely. I think my studio will not buy this project either.

**John:** So, the actual people who are mentioned in some of these stories, Frank Farmer who is 80 years old during part of this, but I feel like the other characters you’re going to focus on would probably be lawyers, they’d be soldiers, they’d be bureaucrats. They’d be family members. No matter what, it feels like an ensemble version if you’re doing this.

If you’re doing the Marvel version, then they see the atomic blast and they get super powers. And we’ve seen versions of that quite a lot.

**Craig:** And they will never stop. Ever. Ever.

**John:** All right. Our last story for How Would This Be a Movie is about anthrax. And so I fell into this Wikipedia hole over the week because Mike Pence, who is the Republican VP candidate, I was reading an article about him and it mentioned he was a big proponent of investigations during the anthrax scare. And I had sort of forgotten about the anthrax scare.

So, this is what happened. In 2001, one week after the 9/11 attacks, letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to ABC, CBS, and NBC news, the New York Post, and the National Enquirer. And then later on two more letters were mailed to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. So, the first letters read, “9/11/01. This is next. Take penicillin now. Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great.” The second letters read, “9/11/01, you cannot stop us. We have this anthrax. You die now. Are you afraid? Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great.”

And so the return addresses on these envelopes were a fake elementary school. Overall, 23 people were infected with anthrax and five of them anthrax. And so what followed is what’s considered one of the biggest FBI investigations in history. A lot of the initial suspicion focused on this guy, Steven Hatfill, who was eventually exonerated. He was a bioweapons expert.

Ultimately, the blame was pointed at this guy named Bruce Edwards Ivins who was an anthrax researcher who actually wanted people who was involved in the research effort for the FBI, he was one of the main sort of scientists trying to figure out where the anthrax came from. He committed suicide. And so in 2008 he killed himself with an overdose of prescription Tylenol. And the FBI closed its investigation.

So, I will say that there’s still a not too Tin-Hatty discussion that he really couldn’t have been the guy, or at least not the only guy. But right now it is considered a closed case and that he was the guy who sent the anthrax.

**Craig:** Yeah. I remember this whole thing. I remember that the letter was sent from very close to Princeton University. Here’s the part of this that jumps out at me and that I think, ooh, you could go anywhere with this. You don’t have to be stuck telling this particular story, because this particular story feels old and no longer immediately relevant, because we have bigger problems now, different problems with terrorism, both domestic and international.

But what fascinates me is the idea of the perpetrator being hired to find the killer.

**John:** Absolutely. I think that’s the most compelling thing. Especially if you as the audience either know or suspect that he’s involved in it from the start. That’s great. It’s compelling.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, there’s something about the government facing this challenge. Someone has done a very bad thing and they cannot figure out who it is. And this case has landed into – it’s always good when it’s some new law enforcement person who needs to prove herself, you know?

So, this is a big break. And you use the trope of the old drunk who used to be great. So the one person who can help you that we haven’t been able to get through is blah, blah, blah, because he’s out of the game. But there’s all sorts of ways you can get to that person. The point is, that person becomes her partner. And we’re telling that very familiar story of two odd couple/unlikely partners on the trail of a criminal.

And then she starts to suspect it’s him. That’s really interesting.

**John:** I think it’s interesting. That obviously you could take that in a fictional direction and it doesn’t have to be tied to this one anthrax attack. And you could set that present day. That’s a great dynamic between two characters. Classically like do you trust that partner? And so Training Day has an aspect of that, too, although that was much more sort of present tense.

What I think is compelling though about the original anthrax attacks, and made me surprised that I hadn’t seen a good movie version of this, is I feel like people kind of remember what happened during that time. I mean, 9/11 was sort of overwhelming everything, but I remember the paranoia that people felt. I remember like people handling their mail with gloves on. And this paranoia like where are the letters going to come next.

The Unabomber had a quality of that, too, where every couple of years the Unabomber bomb would go off and you’re like, oh wow, that’s still a thing that’s out there. To me I think the home for this kind of story would be as a limited series. Like a People v. OJ Simpson, where you chart through and you follow this session of history and really drill down into it.

I found myself really compelled by this, and if I weren’t just incredibly busy, I think this is the kind of thing I would pitch a network as a limited series because I feel like there’s a really fascinating story to chart through, particularly Ivins’s role is just so good and so castable. It feels like the kind of thing you can bring a movie star in to do this limited series and make something really cool.

**Craig:** Yeah. Absolutely. What you would need I think to find in there is that cultural relevance that obviously OJ Simpson had. You’re always looking for the bigger picture of, okay, I’m going to get you inside the minutia of this investigation, this story, because that’s an exciting soap opera. But ultimately, this meant something and it meant blah, blah, blah. And I’m not sure what the answer is with this one.

**John:** Yeah. I think what was so interesting about that time is that obviously 9/11 we had the attacks then and it was such a visible scar on the world, whereas this was almost more like a sniper attack. It was hitting individual things, but in some ways had a bigger effect of disrupting our news media and our entire postal system than the 9/11 attacks themselves did. It was strange that it was happening at the same time, and yet it was such a different scale.

And in some ways the people who were affected were just so kind of random. There’s a quality of, you know, sort of the cliché movie moment where they’re circling things on a map to try to figure out where something came from. This actually has that, where you had to figure out like well what mailbox did these all come from. And we have to trace it all the way back. It has those qualities which is compelling.

**Craig:** There’s a short story I remember reading from way, way back when about a detective who is on the trail of a killer. And he cannot find the killer. And it made me think of this. I was looking at the Wikipedia page that you linked to and interestingly we’ve combined two of our ideas here. Ivins apparently said to the FBI when they were investigating him that he suffered from loss of memory, stating that he would wake up dressed and wonder if he had gone out during the night.

And that led me back to my memory of that short story, because the trick of the short story, and there’s a serial killer out there who is cutting people up, it’s horrible, and it’s preying on this poor detective. And he comes to understand finally at the end it was him. When he thought he was asleep, he was doing these things.

That’s a really interesting thing. The idea that you’re chasing yourself. Tricky. I like that.

**John:** Yeah. So, I think there’s a lot of material to be mined there. So, whether it’s this individual attack, or it’s just that idea of the agent within who is subverting the whole thing is fascinating. We’ve talked about No Way Out on the podcast before, and that’s another great, compelling moment.

In No Way Out, they save it for the very, very end of the story, that reveal. But if you revealed early on sort of what’s going on, then that’s compelling. We love to watch the villain and sort of watch the villain try to stay ahead of things. There’s a tension that’s naturally there when we know something that the hero doesn’t know.

**Craig:** That’s very typical horror movie type stuff.

**John:** Cool. All right. So those are our three entries. Thank you to everyone who sent in suggestions for what could be a movie and How Would This Be a Movie. If you have more of those suggestions, always write in. So you can just write to ask@johnaugust.com, or hit us on Twitter. When I see things that are interesting, I just file them away and eventually we get them sometimes.

It’s time for our One Cool Things.

**Craig:** So, my One Cool Thing is macOS Sierra beta. And this is the beta version, the preview version, of what will be the new Mac operating system to follow – what are we on now, Mountain, Tiger, what is this thing?

**John:** I think we’re in El Capitan now.

**Craig:** There you go. Oh, that’s right. They switched from cats to landmarks. And they’re still in landmarks for Sierra.

So, this is new for Apple. Apple went through this one very big thing where they suddenly were like, hey guess what, the operating system is free, which is awesome because you could just hear pants filling in Redmond, Washington as Microsoft was like, “What????”

So, yeah, and lo and behold, Windows, which used to cost hundreds of dollars, now free.

**John:** Yep.

**Craig:** So that was the first big change that Mac introduced. But this is the first time I believe they’ve introduced a beta of the entire operating system out in the wild to anyone – anyone who wants it. And we’ll put a link up in the show notes for you to download.

I did download it because I’m crazy like that. And it’s actually working quite nicely. The big change is Siri. You have Siri built into the system, so it’s not just on your phone now. If I want to ask my computer a question, I can.

**John:** Have you found it useful so far?

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s about as useful as it is on my phone. Which is, you know, once every week maybe?

**John:** I find myself as a heavy Siri user. And so I haven’t installed the Mac OS beta because of some other issues, but on my phone I do use it a lot and I think it’s because I just – if you just sort of push yourself to use it more, you find it incredibly useful, especially in the car. I use it for sort of like quick math things. I won’t pull up the calculator. I’ll just ask Siri the answer. And she’s really good at that.

I find it generally pretty useful.

**Craig:** My problem, honestly, and I don’t know if I’m common this way or not, but my problem is I am so embarrassed, even when I’m alone, to say, “Hey Siri,” I’m embarrassed.

**John:** Yeah. And you don’t have to. You can just push the home button.

**Craig:** I know. But if I’m driving and my phone is over there, then I want to, then I’m like, oh my god, am I going to say it? Am I going to–?

**John:** I say it all the time. And I’ll ask for directions while I’m headed someplace and a lot of the times it works. It doesn’t always work, but it works enough that I’m actually really happy to have it.

You don’t have the Amazon Alexa, do you?

**Craig:** No. Alec Berg has it.

**John:** People love it.

**Craig:** Again, I can’t say, “Hey–,” sorry, I don’t want to say it. “Hey Thingy,” I don’t want to say that because I’m embarrassed. I feel like a dope. But I understand that there needs to be something for it to know that I’m talking to it.

**John:** It’s true. I mean, I do like that we’re kind of living in The Next Generation where they tap their little badges and ask the computer a question. That’s always been my fantasy. One of my very favorite episodes of The Next Generation was where Doctor Beverly Crusher discovers that she’s in a simulation – or not really in a simulation – she’s in a time bubble. And she’s the only character in that part of the episode, and so she’s only talking to the computer, and the computer is giving her answers back. But the computer is describing the ship as like, well, what was that sudden shock? Well, the first three floors no longer exist. It was decompression of the hull.

I love that sense of talking to the computer and talking to this disembodied voice. And Siri and Alexa, they’re getting us closer there.

**Craig:** What a surprise that you like talking to a computer.

**John:** See, if you had listened to the Duly Noted episode with Matt Selman and company, you would know so much more about that.

**Craig:** Now I got to listen to it.

**John:** Now you got to listen. My One Cool Thing is called Phased. It is a Vimeo video shot by Joe Capra. And what is it is a series of time lapses of different sections of Los Angeles. And so we’ve seen a lot of time lapses where clouds drift by and things are really lovely. This was shot in 12K resolution on this camera called a Phase One XF IQ3. It’s 100 megapixel camera.

**Craig:** Geez.

**John:** So what that lets you do is you’re in this incredibly wide panoramic shot, and then you can punch into a pretty good close-up of a section. And so you can go from like the panorama to like, oh, I can see individual people. It’s really remarkable. And so I thought it was terrific. I can imagine lots of uses for this, particularly, I mean, for visual effects certainly, so you can get these incredibly detailed backgrounds on things, but other smart directors will find great uses for this just like they found uses for slow motion and for high frame rate photography.

There’s going to be something really cool to do here. So, I do want to stress that what I’m linking to is time lapse, so everything always sort of looks magical and cool because it’s time lapse. But there will be some great uses for this in the future I can sense.

**Craig:** Grand Theft Auto 7.

**John:** It does look like a video game already. And that’s what’s so remarkable. What I love about time lapse of cities is there’s just a glow behind things just because of sort of light bouncing around in special ways. And it does just look magical.

**Craig:** I think honestly the next generation of these big sandbox games will be normal. But I can easily see, like I don’t know, Grand Theft Auto is once every five years, something like that. I could easily see that, we’re maybe two years away, so seven years from now when Grand Theft Auto 7 comes out, they will have 12K’d an entire city. Or, maybe even the entire country at that point. And figured out a way for you to access it as you’re driving around, looking at the real – it’s going to be amazing.

**John:** It’s going to be Pokémon Go, but real. And basically you’ll just shoot real people. [laughs]

**Craig:** I can go to my own house.

**John:** So here’s what’s going to happen. Essentially they’ll just decide that the world is now Grand Theft Auto and the rules are just there are no rules.

**Craig:** The rules are there are no rules. I actually feel like it would be a more peaceful world. Because when you’re feeling really pissed off, you just go into your computer and you blow up people you want to blow up and you get it out of your system.

**John:** Yeah. That’s what we need. It’s like training for how you should deal with things in life.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** Oh, shoot, I thought I could just hit reset, but I can’t hit reset. Like all those Brexit voters who thought like, oh, I can just refer to a safe state.

**Craig:** Well, Brexit voters are, yeah. They are not saved.

**John:** They are not saved. That’s our episode this week. There are links in the show notes to almost everything we talked about, including a lot of the articles we discussed. Our One Cool Things. So, definitely check those out.

If you’re listening to this episode in most podcast players, they have the links below the title artwork. Our show is produced by Godwin Jabangwe.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Our editing is by Matthew Chilelli.

**Craig:** Woo.

**John:** If you have a question for us, write us at ask@johnaugust.com. You can also find us on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin.

We are on iTunes. You know how to leave a review for us. And that would be so fantastic if you would. It just helps new listeners find our show.

And our outro this week is by Rajesh Naroth. If you have an outro for us, send it in to that same address and we will maybe play it on the air. Thanks guys.

**Craig:** Thanks.

Links:

* [Arlo Finch](http://arlofinch.tumblr.com/) on TUMBLR
* [Duly Noted: Let’s Talk about Episode 259](http://johnaugust.com/2016/duly-noted-lets-talk-about-episode-259)
* [Craig’s One Cool PI Thing](https://www.quora.com/Do-irrational-numbers-like-pi-disprove-humanity-being-a-simulation)
* [Latif Ullah’s Cut of Overboard](https://vimeo.com/174891455)
* [Begging the Question](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question)
* [Begging the Question Fallacy](http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/begging-the-question.html)
* [Trip Gabriel](http://nytimes.com/2016/07/17/opinion/sunday/the-day-that-went-missing.html?_r=0)
* [Oliver Sacks](http://www.oliversacks.com/)
* [The Answer to the Riddle Is Me: A Memoir of Amnesia](https://www.amazon.com/Answer-Riddle-Me-Memoir-Amnesia/dp/0547519273) on Amazon
* [Tom Hallman, Jr.](http://www.oregonlive.com/living/index.ssf/2016/07/the_fight_continues_for_vetera.html)
* [Clyde Haberman](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/30/us/veterans-of-atomic-test-blasts-no-warning-and-late-amends.html?_r=1)
* [2001 Anthrax Attacks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks)
* [Bruce Edward Ivins](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Edwards_Ivins)
* [macOS Sierra](http://www.apple.com/macos/sierra-preview/)
* [Phased](https://vimeo.com/173472729) by Joe Capra
* [John August](https://twitter.com/johnaugust) on Twitter
* [Craig Mazin](https://twitter.com/clmazin) on Twitter