Search Results for: 3 page challenge

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/go-set-a-spider-man).

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

**Craig Mazin:** Uh, uh, uh, uh, my name is Craig Mazin.

**John:** And this is episode 184 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, you are in the thick of it.

**Craig:** I’m in the thick of it. Every now and then, you get a writing job that is truly a job.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Okay. You have three weeks. We’re shooting a movie. Fix a whole bunch of stuff. Go very, very fast — faster, [laughs] faster.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Please write for budget, please write for schedule, please write what the movie stars want, please write what the studio wants, please write what the producer wants. Listen to everybody, do everything right. Get it right the first time. Go, go, go, go, go.

**John:** Yeah. And I’ve been in your situation before and I know how stressful it is. And then I remember that people who write for one-hour dramas on television, that’s their life every day. As tough as it is for us, at least at some point, you’ll be able to hand this in and say, “Bye. Enjoy making the movie.” Versus a TV show, you turn this in and they’ll be like, “Oh, your next script is already late.”

**Craig:** The only thing I’ll say —

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** In our defense —

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Is that while episodic television is brutal, particularly primetime network episodic television where you’re doing 26, 22?

**John:** Yeah, it’s 22, but it keeps cranking up —

**Craig:** Keeps cranking up.

**John:** Because they want more.

**Craig:** So you’re doing a ton of these things. But the characters are there, the voices are there, the settings are there, a lot of the plots have been broken before or at least the general storylines. You know, you’re not shouldering this burden of all of it and kind of building a train as it’s rolling down the tracks. That’s the scary stuff.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** But, you know.

**John:** What you’re doing is a little bit more analogous to shooting the pilot where it’s just like there’s a real question like what is this thing even —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Supposed to be?

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And there’s a lot of competing voices for what this thing is supposed to be.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** The challenge of course of network TV or really any TV is you could be already making the thing and they could tell you, “No, it’s not the thing that we want you to be making.” And then you’re going to have to deal with stuff you’ve already shot, stuff that’s going to come down the pipe, it’s just — it’s bad.

**Craig:** Yeah, this is the stuff where you just want to be able to say to people who are observers or analysts of movies and how movies are made, I just wish that we could all work in some sort of Plexiglas booth so they can watch and go, “Oh…”

**John:** “Now, I understand.”

**Craig:** “Oh, that’s why sometimes movies are the way they are.” [laughs] And the crazy thing is sometimes it works.

**John:** Sometimes it works brilliantly and sometimes that pressure cooker creates great stuff, so.

**Craig:** Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. All I know about this is certainly these jobs are difficult and they are exhausting. And it’s a little bit like giving birth, I think. You know, my wife said after our first kid, “Well, I’m not doing that again.” And then she did. You sort of forget because time passes and then you’re like, “Yeah, yeah, it’s no big deal.” So, whatever, two, three weeks. Whoop-tee Doo. You know, these two, three weeks, they feel like five years.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They feel like five years. So anyway, I’m almost out of the woods on it. I’m doing the best I can. And in many ways, it’s been a lot of fun. But I’m a little a tie-tie.

**John:** I understand it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Today, we’re going to walk you through a very gentle discussion of many different topics, some of them suggested by our readers. We have follow-up on previous episodes, talking about Gravity, talking about Australian television, some suggestions about the premium feed, a question about film by credit.

And then because rights are so much in the news these days, we have three sort of related stories about film rights and how much studios want to hold onto things. So it’s a good continuation of our chain of title discussion.

**Craig:** Great. I thought that our, I don’t pat myself on the back very often for our podcast. But I thought our last podcast about the Gravity situation was one of our better podcasts.

**John:** I’m really happy with our episode. It was one of our more sort of detailed and planned going into it episodes where we really figured out what we were going to talk about. And this is going to be completely the opposite of that because I literally just put the notes together about half an hour ago.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** But we can start with a follow-up question about Gravity.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, Nick writes, “Let’s say that there is indeed absolutely no evidence that Gravity, the movie, was based on Gravity, the book. However, what if there were evidence that the screenplay, what Gerritsen did subsequent to publishing the book was directly lifted and used in Cuarón’s movie?” So essentially, what if she really did write some other stuff and somehow Cuarón or Warner Bros read this stuff and tried to incorporate it into the movie?

So her book was not utilized, but her script work was. What kind of case would she be able to make against the WB? Certainly, nothing about her book contract would necessarily directly apply. But would there be an arbitration claim? What would the scenario be like if the work she had done that wasn’t part of the book somehow made it into the movie, Gravity?

**Craig:** I’m going to presume that she is aware of this. I’m going to presume that prior to the movie coming out, she is aware that in this scenario that the movie has appropriated what she believes is work that she’s done in her screenplay stuff.

Now, if she’s written this material and it was not purchased by the studio and then she lobbed the charge here, most likely what would happen is the following. There would be, yes, it would be a WGA issue. There would be pre-arbitration. So a pre-arbitration and/or a participating writer investigation which is sort of like a pre-pre-arbitration, where you’re trying to figure out is this person a participating writer, did they provide literary material that was used on screen for this movie?

If that’s the case, the studio is going to need to give her a contract for her work, pay her at least minimum, and then Ms. Gerritsen would become a participating writer for the purposes of arbitration, and then her material would be entered into the arbitration, and people would decide, “Okay, does she deserve screen credit or not?”

Now, the tricky part here with this is if that were the case, the next question would be a non-WGA question. This would be a question for her attorney and that would be does the stuff that she’s written that ends up in the movie, is that so closely related to the material in the book that we can now assume that the book is part of the chain of title here, that this is a derivative work of her book, in which case, we’re back to this contract claim situation.

**John:** And so, in our discussion of Gravity, this last episode, we noticed we didn’t really bring the Writers Guild into it at all. And usually, when we talk about credits and we talk about sort of who’s the author of the movie, we’re always bringing it up the Writers Guild. Because the Writers Guild is who determines, in US movies, who gets screenplay credit, who gets written by credit. All that is the screenwriting work of creating a movie.

The Gerritsen case is about these underlying rights to this novel and her belief that the underlying rights to her novel were utilized to make the movie, Gravity, and Warner is saying, “Uh-uh. That’s not what happened.” So if she truly had created screenplay material that somehow made it into the movie, and again, it’s not just like a Warner’s executive says like, “Hey, you know what would be a great idea is if this kind of thing happens.” It has to be real material that makes it in.

If that somehow happened, then that becomes — that enters into the universe of the Writers Guild. But independent of that, it would never be a Writers Guild thing. And I think a lot of times people assume that, “Oh, well the Writers Guild handles everything related to rights in movies.” And that’s not actually correct. Everything that is sort of underlying material is ultimately something that’s being dealt with in contracts and copyright law. It’s only when you have to figure out who gets that written by credit on a movie that that underlying material becomes a factor for arbitrations and for the Writers Guild.

**Craig:** Yeah, “Written by,” Story by,” “Screenplay by,” and so forth. I mean, the Writers Guild has control over what their deal with the companies gives them control over. It’s entirely tautological. So we have a collective bargaining agreement like any labor union does with the companies. And Theatrical Schedule A, which is online if you choose to read it if you’re suffering from —

**John:** Masochist.

**Craig:** Insomnia one night or you’re a masochist.

Theatrical Schedule A lays out exactly what the rights are of the Writers Guild and how these processes are handled, and what the procedures are. And from that comes our Screen Credits Manual and all that. There have been cases. I know of some where writers have said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. You’re using some of my stuff that you never bought.” And the companies have had to very quickly buy it, and naturally, they don’t have a lot in the way of leverage, you know.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** So one of the things that the Writers Guild has raised a red flag about numerous times, and it’s not germane to the Gerritsen case, but there’s this odious practice of inviting multiple writers in to pitch on projects to try and get a job. And then sometimes the studio executives will say or sometimes the producers will say, “Well, can you write us up a, you know, write us up a little pitch.” Or, “Write me the first ten pages.” Which we are, by our working rules, not allowed to do at the guild.

Writers may do this. “May,” meaning they could realistically do it, not properly do it. And if they do, the companies expose themselves because they don’t own that material. They haven’t bought it. If they don’t buy it, they don’t have the rights to use it. If any of it shows up in a movie, they’ve got a real problem. So that’s one of the tactics that we have used to say to the studios, “You got to stop doing this stuff.”

And frankly, the business affairs people completely agree. The business affairs people who do write up the contracts are fastidious about securing as many possible rights as they can. The fact that the folks over in the creative wing are sort of willy-nilly having people write stuff that they don’t buy or get the rights do freaks these lawyers out and for good reason.

**John:** Yeah. So I want to issue a caveat here which I think Craig is going to agree with me on. If you are a writer who’s going into one of the situations where it’s an existing project and they’re inviting multiple writers in to pitch, and the producer or the studio executive says, “Hey, would you write me up something?” You have a choice. You have a choice to write that thing up or not write that thing up.

And you might have just heard what Craig said, it’s like, “Well, it sounds like I should write this thing up and turn it in because then maybe I have like a copyright claim.” I don’t think that is your best course of action.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** I think you should actually follow the instructions and the rules of the Writers Guild and not write up something without being paid for it because that is part of the whole reason we have a guild and a union to make sure that people aren’t doing work they are not paid for.

**Craig:** Yeah, look, that’s the moral argument which is a correct argument. And here’s the practical argument. 999 times out of 1,000, they don’t use the work. You’ve just wasted your time, and more importantly, you have once again lowered the bar for all of us. You know, this is the proverbial race to the bottom that we’re trying to avoid here where the ultimate end of it is everybody write a script and we’ll just pick the one what we want and buy that one.

If you’re a professional writer in the Writers Guild, you get paid to write. You don’t have to get paid to pitch. You can go and tell them as much as you want. You can go and say, “Hey, look, I will talk about this all day long to anybody you want. I’m not writing a word. I am not printing a letter until I’m hired.” That’s the deal, that’s how we’re supposed to do it. And I would argue that those of you who are not doing this are actually hurting yourselves because you are, A, being taking advantage of, and B, signaling that you are the kind of person who is willing to be taken advantage of.

**John:** Well, it’s a dangerous position to put yourself in.

**Craig:** Correct.

**John:** So speaking of people doing their jobs properly, we have follow-up from Ben in Australia who writes in reference to the Rebel Wilson episode and the clean Rebel Wilson episode, not the Dirty Show.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** In the clean episode, she talks about writing her show for Australian TV and how there really aren’t censors and it was a completely different experience than what she found on American television. So, Ben, who actually works in Australian TV writes, “You call it ratings. We call it classification, tomatoes, tomatoes.

“I want to clarify a misunderstanding. Rebel mentioned that Australian TV channels don’t have the equivalent of standards of practices. This is incorrect. All the commercial networks equivalent to NBC or CBS, the public broadcasters like PBS or BBC in the UK or pay TV, like cable TV, have in-house professionals called classifiers. Network TV in Australia is relatively tame like the USA. However, there is plenty of scope for provocation in the evening. Rebel probably didn’t hear from a classifier because her TV series didn’t require edits.”

So Ben is saying, yes, it’s looser. Yes, they probably have some different standards, but there are sort of standards and practices. And they actually have people who have the equivalent jobs of the American ratings people.

**Craig:** Well, all I can say to Rebel, who we know listens, is for shame, you’ve failed to discuss the classifier to such an extent that they call you.

**John:** Indeed. So, Rebel, basically, you had extra head room. And you could have gone even dirtier and you didn’t. So basically, you sold Australia short.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I hope you feel good about yourself.

**Craig:** You weenie.

**John:** Rebel, you’re the best.

**Craig:** Not bad.

**John:** Oh, I just love her.

**Craig:** I do too.

**John:** She gives good hugs.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. We have a question or sort of a suggestion from John who writes, “Big fan. And all about paying Stuart and Matthew’s bills.” So he’s a premium subscriber and so he’s saying that he’s paying Stuart’s salary and Matthew’s salary because he is a premium subscriber. So thank you for that.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** He asks, “What if you did a premium Three Page Challenge episode where you only receive submissions from premium subscribers? Or even do a Golden Ticket thing again where you choose one Three Pager from the show and privately read their whole script or pilot. People go nuts for that. Not sure how you’d verify. Maybe you only say the URL in a 30-second premium clip or through the Libsyn site, just an idea. Stay funky.”

Maybe. I sort of throw this out there as a, “What do you think, Craig? And what do other listeners think?”

**Craig:** Well, first of all I’m not going to stay funky. I want to be clear about this, I’m funky on my own schedule, I don’t just stay funky. I go in and out of funky —

**John:** Actually, if you followed his orders to stay funky then you never had funk.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. You know what the most funky thing you can do? Not stay funky. Okay, now that aside although that one —

**John:** Craig, you were a normcore before there was even a norm.

**Craig:** Damn straight. I think it’s a perfectly — Look, I believe in rewarding our premium subscribers as much as we can if there is a simple way to check a username against a subscription account. I think that that’s a perfectly good idea to say, “Okay, this is only open to premium subscribers.”

**John:** We’ll look into it. It’s all through the Libsyn stuff and so Libsyn is the people who host our podcast. It’s the people who make the app. It’s what makes putting the podcast out in the world not onerously expensive. So it’s a matter of whether we can actually get that user ID sort of detail information, but maybe. And I’ve been, you know, honestly, I’ve been happily surprised by how many people subscribed I think apparently for the Dirty Show and for the extra bonus episodes. So, maybe. I think it’s kind of a good idea.

**Craig:** Great. Okay. Well, we will work on that and see if we can’t get that going, but thank you, John, for writing in and for helping to pay Stuart and Matthew’s bills.

**John:** It’s very nice. Craig, while we’re on sort of the metatopic of the Scriptnotes podcast, we’ve discussed off air the possibility of doing a live show sometime spring/summer and I think you and I both sort of said like, “Yeah, maybe not,” but then Stuart pointed out that our 200th episode is actually going to be coming up, like, in May. Maybe that it is a call for a live show.

**Craig:** Yeah, 200, geez Louise.

**John:** Two hundred episodes.

**Craig:** Yeah. What are we going to do for a 1,000th episode?

**John:** Yeah. With a thousand episodes we’ll be — that’s like 15 years from now.

**Craig:** I know, we’ll both be in the home.

**John:** Yeah. Or at that point maybe there will just be like artificial intelligence that will speak with our voices very knowledgably about contract-related things.

**Craig:** Thank god, so I can just sleep. Well, for the 200th episode it does sound like maybe we would want to do something, I mean, when we talked about it I was just a little concerned that we were maybe falling into the “If you don’t go away, how can we miss you?” trap, but if there’s demand for it, you know, if people like it.

**John:** Yeah. So , I would ask our listeners, if you have suggestions or things you would like for our 200th episode or if you think we should maybe not do a 200th episode like live show, that’s a valid opinion as well. Short thoughts like that, just hit us on Twitter I’m @johnaugust, Craig is @clmazin or if you have a longer thoughts or suggestions about things that would be great for our 200th episode write in at ask@johnaugust.com and we’ll think about it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, our next question is so in Craig’s wheelhouse, I mean, like this person just woke up in the morning and said like, how can I ask a question that Craig will know the answer to?

**Craig:** I’m feeling it.

**John:** Craig will know the answer.

**Craig:** I’m feeling funky already.

**John:** So, this person, this is a guy named Jay I actually met at the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** He writes, “I recently wrote and directed my first feature film, Seven Minutes, an indie film. It premiered at the Austin Film Festival and we sold it to Starz.” Congratulations!

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “I had a film by credit at the top of the credits. The WGA called me to make sure the story originated with me and that I was the only writer. DGA had approved the credit as well, they did or at least they appear to. We got a letter saying that the film by credit was no good and had to go because WGA says a film by credit at the top of the film can only go there if all the credits are at the head of the film. Our credits are at the end. This is because according to WGA’s logic audience members assume that film by credit is the director’s credit and they don’t stay until the end of the movie. They would not know who the writer is.”

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** Craig, I have no idea about the current state of a “film by” so can you catch us up to speed?

**Craig:** Well, this has been a long, longstanding debate between the Writers Guild and the Directors Guild. A film by credit started to appear some decades ago and began to stick in the craw of writers as you would imagine. It initially was meant for, well, first of all it naturally blossomed out of the whole auteur theory which drives writers crazy and because also it’s not true or at least it’s invalid, but it was initially was like look a film by Steven Spielberg, a film by Martin Scorsese, you know, something that might mean something.

But overtime it became a film by anyone and what the hell does that even mean? So, the Writers Guild has hated this credit. As the story goes, the Writers Guild apparently convinced the studios in the ’80s, I believe, that they should get rid of it, that they should disallow a film by credit. And as the story goes, I’m not sure this is true or not, this is just a legend.

As the legend goes, the DGA heard about this, freaked out and threatened to strike for the first time in their — or at least legitimately threaten to strike for the first time of their existence and the company said, “Well, we don’t really care about this. It’s fine you can have it.” And so, in fact, every three years when the Writers Guild negotiates this big collective bargaining agreement included in it is a letter that basically says the Writers Guild is saying that we hate this film by credit and the companies are saying, “Yes, we have heard you, you hate it.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It has become enshrined as something we permanently hate. Now, the WGA and the DGA have been sort of trying to get a grip on this thing because even the DGA started to feel, I think, a little embarrassed by the proliferation of this, what we call the vanity credit. It’s one thing to say film by somebody that we all respect. It’s another thing to say film by some effin guy, right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, yeah, I think that this is part of the brokered solution between them is, yeah, if you’re going to do a film by credit, you have to also have the writer’s credit up in the front of the film, otherwise, yeah, it does seem like you just did everything.

**John:** So, my question is really, what is Jay encountering? Is he encountering a policy? Is he encountering a formally agreed upon rule? Like, what is he actually bumping up against? Because if it’s not part of our contract with the studios, is it just a mutual agreement between the WGA and the DGA? What is he actually hitting?

**Craig:** I cannot say for sure that it is in the contract, but I suspect if the WGA is saying you can’t have it there, it’s in the contract, I can get confirmation of that. Let’s say it’s not in the contract and it’s just effectively an agreement between the DGA and the Writers Guild. That’s just as good essentially.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I will say that aside from the rules here I’m going to talk to Jay and anyone else that’s directing movies. Whether you write and direct it or just direct it, really think about this film by credit and think about what it means. If you’ve written and directed it you can say, “Well, I understand why this would be offensive to a writer, but I am the writer,” well, yeah, great, so we have a credit called directed by and we have a credit called written by or screenplay by, but then there’s the editor, there’s the DP, there’s the costume, there are the actors —

**John:** There’s the producer.

**Craig:** The producer. I mean, what is this film by? What does that even mean? It certainly not a film by any one person. It is the most bizarre credit, the most pointless credit designed to aggrandize one person in defiance of fact. I don’t get it. I don’t even know what it’s for, why even have it? It’s embarrassing. I find it embarrassing that you have to announce that this is a film by you. You directed it, take credit for what you’ve done. It’s really egregious when someone says, “A film by me, but I didn’t write it, I didn’t come up with the story, I didn’t come up with the characters, I didn’t come up with the dialogue, I didn’t come up with the scenes, I didn’t come up with the point, the theme.” That’s just embarrassing.

**John:** So, I’m looking for examples of where I feel it makes sense and so I look at sort of, you know, people who kind of feel like they are auteurs in a way, like a Wes Anderson. So, like, if somebody says like “a film by Wes Anderson” I can sort of imagine that because I can sort of imagine what font it’s in, it’s all in that cohesive universe. And yet if that card weren’t there it would still be a We Anderson film. I mean, it’s a Wes Anderson film because it is completely his, you know, it’s in his universe, it’s his canon.

So, I take weirdly greater umbrage at the word “by” than having someone’s name there. So, weirdly for me a Joe Schmidt film is not offensive to me because you could also say the thing about a George Clooney movie, I mean, when he’s an actor not a director. It’s just like it’s identifying what category it falls into rather than the authorship of the movie or the, you know, the creator of the movie.

But again, this is opinion, this isn’t sort of standard practices and rules and that’s what Jay was encountering was apparently was some form of agreement between the WGA and DGA about how this is going to work.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know what you mean about Wes Anderson and I — there are directors that have clear styles just as there are writers that have clear styles. And I do think that that’s what the directed by credit means. The style, the look, the fonts, those are directorial choices.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But why should Fantastic Mr. Fox, a film by Wes Anderson, when Roald Dahl wrote the novel. I just don’t , I mean —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, it’s a film by a whole ton of people but you’re the director, so I just find that credit to be obnoxious. I’ve always thought it’s obnoxious. I find it to be like a weirdly insecure credit.

**John:** I think I agree with you there. And I have friends who’ve taken the credit, dear people who I love, but if I really sort of scrape back the layers and get to it I think it’s insecurity that is feeding their desire to have that extra credit on the movie.

**Craig:** Well, I think also to be fair to a lot of directors it’s like a thing where now it’s harder to not take it. Well, okay, all my friends take it, everybody else is taking it, why am I not taking it? Why am I the one guy that’s waving this flag against this credit? So it’s like the path of least resistance now to take this credit.

So, you know, I’m not a big fan. So, I would say to Jay, hey, you know what? The way to avoid this whole brouhaha: don’t take that credit.

**John:** Exactly. The easy solution to the question he writes in with.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, while we’re making suggestions for people to stand up and do something that’s against the grain of things, this is off the show notes but — so every year I host a couple of the Director’s Nights at Film Independent and I love doing it. So I do a Q&A. I just did a Q&A last night with Damien Chazelle of Whiplash and his editor and his composer. You met Damien. He’s just the best, I loved him.

**Craig:** What a jerk, right? [laughs]

**John:** What a jerk! He was fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah, he’s a sweet, sweet dude.

**John:** And so we showed clips and we talked through stuff and answered questions and then he had to do another Q&A right after that because that is what you do this time of the year is you — if you have a movie that’s up for awards consideration or in this case nominated for many awards, you are on this circuit where all you do is press for your movie, screenings for your movie, and I kind of think it has to stop.

I think it’s weirdly a destructive practice that I would love to see — I don’t think this is going to ever actually happen because I think if one director or one film said, “You know what? We’re not going to play this game. We’re not going to sit down for The Hollywood Reporter for two hours for this roundtable. We’re not going to go to this photo shoot. We’re not going to waste all of our time doing this because it is a waste of time.” But if you were the one movie that did that you’d be screwed because you potentially would miss out on awards, you’d missed out on some of the box office bump.

But if a group of the top films sort of got together and said, “You know what? Let’s not do this. Let’s just not play this crazy game,” our system would be so much better and we’d allow filmmakers to go back to actually doing what they should be doing which is making movies, not answering the same question a thousand times.

**Craig:** Yeah. I suspect that a lot of the people that are involved in it agree with you. The problem is that they’re not really the ones that are pushing it. It’s the studios, it’s the financiers, I mean, you know, if anybody has any misconception that awards are about merit or art, they are not. The awards exist to support two financial streams: one, the actual award show which is a financial stream; and then the promotion of the winners to create box office bonanzas.

**John:** So, here’s where I push back on those two things. I think you can honestly still have the award shows without the 17 weeks of promo and special issues and other madness and special screenings that sort of go into this. I think you can actually have those award shows and we wouldn’t sort of suffer. I think you’d still be able to make money off of those.

In terms of the actual financial gain for doing all that stumping, I wonder and I’m sure some very clever statistics person could go through and do a study of these are the movies that came out over this 10-year period that were sort of “for your considerations” and look at their box office and chart sort of how much the bonus they got from their award. And I don’t know that it’s fundamentally worth it.

I like the idea of awards as we talked about before in a sense of celebrating great works of cinema and just look at these awesome movies. It’s a great thing that happens and I love that movies like Whiplash which might otherwise not sort of get a bigger audience get that bigger audience because people know them from the awards. But I think, I’m frustrated not just for Damien, but sort of for all directors and writers and cinematographers who are pulled away from doing the stuff that they should be making which is their next movie because they’re having to feed this industry.

**Craig:** Yeah, some people put the — lay the blame at the feet of Harvey Weinstein, and certainly those feet are surrounded by lots of blame for lots of things.

**John:** And lots of Oscars.

**Craig:** Yes. Well, that’s the thing, you know, so people can go, “Well, hey, you know, do you remember when, I don’t know, Shakespeare in Love won the Oscar? Well, that’s because Harvey went bananas and promoted like crazy and then that movie made a lot of money afterwards.”

And, you know, unfortunately it’s a cheater’s game. And so the game theory is everybody either has to be decent together or the cheaters win and then everybody suddenly just goes, “We’ll, I guess we’re all doing it now.” And look, I’m with you. I mean, the part of the awards that are great or the part that are pro artists and pro art and the part that’s bad is the cynical part where it’s being used to, you know, line pockets and it’s a shame because you’re right. It’s kind of nuts that anybody would have to suddenly have this new job of three months of self promotion. Even actors get a break. I mean, they don’t do self-promotion for that long, you know, on a typical movie. So —

**John:** So a director who you and I both know who has a reputation for being a bit of a jerk, I remember someone talking about his availability on something and when he’d be free to do something. And he had a movie coming out that he said, like, “Oh, yeah. Well, I won’t be available for these three months because I’ll be doing all the Oscar season push stuff for it.”

And he said it in a way that had the assumption that, like, his movie was going to be so well received that everybody would be talking about it for an Oscar, and then it wasn’t at all. And there was something, I remember feeling this wonderful schadenfreude when the event didn’t happen. But in a weird way, he was being realistic in a way that I as a younger self had not appreciated that, like, it really is three months of your time that would be sucked away. And so he was being — if his movie had turned out better, he really would’ve lost all that time.

**Craig:** You just can’t say that. I mean —

**John:** Yeah. You shouldn’t say it. Exactly.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No, you never say that. I mean, that’s crazy.

**John:** Yeah. You say, like, you know, “My newborn daughter is going to be a supermodel.” You don’t say that.

**Craig:** Yeah, like, I can’t, yeah, I know we’re supposed to have a reunion of five years. I probably won’t be there because my kid is going to be at Fashion Week.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Maybe.

**John:** Maybe. Could be.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, you know, the bone structure is changing.

**John:** My closest experience with the awards season stuff was Big Fish. And so Big Fish, we got some nominations so we did that whole push, but we didn’t get any serious Oscar nominations so it just stopped. Once Oscar nominations came out, largely it just stopped. And there were parts of it that were actually great. And so I got to meet, like, other filmmakers. And so I got to meet Peter Jackson and all these folks who are on that same circuit doing all the same stuff. Anthony Minghella I met and just loved.

And that part of it was really, really cool. But, you know, after, like, the third time you’re sitting around a table with the same people, it just becomes this grind and it’s not — I don’t know, it’s not a good thing.

**Craig:** I was talking about that whole thing with John Gatins because he was on that circuit when —

**John:** Oh, for Flight.

**Craig:** When he was nominated for Flight. And he said something that made me laugh that they would — the same, you know, so all the same writers are gathering over and over and over and they’re all around these tables. And everywhere they would go, there would be some sort of lunch. And at every single lunch, all of the actors and writers and directors would get served lunch with rolls. There would always be a roll and nobody would eat the roll. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** Because they all were like, “I got to be on camera.”

**John:** Can’t eat bread.

**Craig:** Can’t eat carbs, yeah. Just wasted rolls.

**John:** I think I remember talking with you and Aline on the balcony at the Chateau Marmont at a special little party for John Gatins.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so here’s the thing. I love John Gatins. I love Aline. I love so many people that were up there. But the fact that that was considered a necessary part of what you do at this stage of the awards season was frustrating. I mean, it was lovely to see people, just it was annoying that that’s a thing that needed to happen.

**Craig:** Was that something that, like, because I just thought that that was just a, “Hey, I’m gathering my friends.” But was that like a studio thing?

**John:** Oh, no. There was a list formed, yeah, of people who —

**Craig:** Oh, the studio do that?

**John:** The studio did that and I think, you know, smart people. And I think Aline probably had a hand in that, too, because she wants to make sure , because here’s what you do in those early for your consideration stuff, you want to make sure the people who might love your film see the film early enough and so they can start talking about it, so that there’s a critical buzz of this kind of thing. And that, the management is crazy.

**Craig:** You know, it’s not probably going to be an issue for me but — [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** If it ever does, somebody else is going to have to do all that. I can’t. I can’t even —

**John:** Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to have just basically Sia. We’re going to have somebody who’s acting the part of the writer and saying the things you would say but it’s not actually you.

**Craig:** That’s a good idea. You mean like that girl that does the dancing?

**John:** That little girl, the little dancer. I’m going to hire that little girl.

**Craig:** You get me that little girl.

**John:** She’s going to wear the same blonde wig. People will ask her a question and she’ll just dance the answer.

**Craig:** I want that girl to do all my stuff.

**John:** I want Shia Labeouf to do it. That’s what I want.

**Craig:** I don’t want to do, like, any more interviews. I don’t want to do another interview for the rest of my life. And I just want that little girl to just dance some stuff.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** With that wig on.

**John:** So good. I think I just got an interview request to talk about one of the other topics that we’re going to get to in the show and it’s for a magazine. I think I’m just going to send the woman back a little gif of that little Sia girl dancing.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s my answer.

**Craig:** That’s my answer. [laughs] That’s my answer. I mean, we should — I don’t want to — I mean, we should pay her.

**John:** So, here’s literally the question that I was asked. It was about the Harper Lee case.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And this is a new thing that came up this last week. So Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, famously has kind of nothing else you can read of hers, no other books.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But apparently she had actually written another book called Go Set a Watchman which To Kill a Mockingbird is sort of excerpted from. So it’s kind of a sequel, kind of a prequel. It’s the same characters. And so there’s lots of sort of general news stories about this because there’s a lot of question, Harper Lee is 88. Why is she doing it now? Is she really in full control of her decision process?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** That’s all interesting but I have no special insight to that. What you and I can talk about, because we talk about it all the time, are rights. And so what’s interesting about this situation is the rights to those characters because these characters first appeared on screen in the Universal movie. So Universal owns rights to the 1962 movie and that was a huge hit. So $13 million back in the day, that’s more than $100 million today, won three Academy Awards, Best Actor. But would they own the rights to the characters to make another movie? So, you know, they obviously don’t automatically get the rights to this book, but would somebody be able to make a movie version of Harper Lee’s new book without the rights to those characters? And it’s confusing.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean I would presume that some of it, a lot of it, has to do with the nature of the rights that Universal owns. So there’s a piece of paper somewhere, I hope that they still have it, that delineates precisely what the rights are and what the terms of those rights are and if they have the rights to all of the characters in that book. Like, for instance, you could see, “Oh, it says here we have the rights, the exclusive rights to make movies based on the characters in this book.” Well, yeah, well, those characters are now in another book. Does that mean you have the rights to the characters in this book also or just the characters in this book?

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** This is how lawsuits happen. This is why contracts are so awful and why the language is so tortured because, you know, contract law is kind of a game of, “Yeah, but you didn’t say exactly that.”

So who knows? I mean, this has come up before a lot of times. What happens is in lieu of the very expensive lawsuit, the two interested parties kind of just agree and do it together.

**John:** Exactly. We’re going to link to an article in the Hollywood Reporter that talks about Silence of the Lambs, Manhunter, and sort of the complicated rights to the Thomas Harris books, and ultimately, the way they got out of it without sort of like suing each other to death was to do a coproduction —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because apparently the Clarice Starling character complicated the whole issue. So to be able to do stuff with her was incredibly challenging.

**Craig:** Yeah. And so they worked this stuff out. This is an interesting case though because it does have this added twist of is this her family making some cash here, is she really, why, you know, why suddenly at the age of — how old is she? 88.

**John:** 88.

**Craig:** And she’s had a stroke so, and it’s not like she has gotten on the phone and said, “Yeah, I’m Harper Lee. I’m into it now. Let’s do it.”

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, you know, I mean, it will be a mess.

**John:** It’ll be a mess.

**Craig:** Oh, god.

**John:** The easiest solution would be for Universal, if Universal wants it, Universal wins the rights, there’s not going to be a problem. If some other studio pushes really hard for it, they’re going to always have to have in the back of their head, like, we’re going to have to deal with Universal at some point. So that’s a decision going into it. We don’t know that people necessarily want to make a movie of this book because we haven’t read the book.

**Craig:** Well, that’s the other thing. Who knows if it’s any good?

**John:** Who knows if it’s any good? So on a similar topic of studios coming together to work out complicated rights about a character is this last week it was announced that Sony and Marvel had come to an agreement about how they were going to handle Spider-Man. And also it is all related to — it’s interrelated with Amy Pascal stepping down from running Sony Pictures.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So the plan at this point, as I best understand it, is Spider-Man will be allowed to enter into the Marvel Universe through the Disney Marvel Universe. He could appear in Captain America: Civil War or other Marvel properties down the road.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But Sony will essentially still be allowed to make Spider-Man movies. And so Sony gets out of this the ability to have a fresher, newer Spider-Man that they like, that people are excited about. But they are sort of kind of leasing the character back to Disney/Marvel. Apparently, Marvel really, really, really wanted Spider-Man back and wanted to pursue an outright sale. And Sony’s only agreeing to lease it back.

**Craig:** I guess I’m a little confused about the way this works. So they can both make Spider-Man movies?

**John:** No, as I understand it, Spider-Man can appear in Marvel movies but —

**Craig:** Okay. He can appear in them, okay.

**John:** It’s not a standalone movie.

**Craig:** Got it. So now I get it. So basically, Sony is saying, “Yeah, you can now use, like, he can show up in The Avengers, say, and that’s awesome promotion for our Spider-Man movies.”

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** And so that, now what’s so fascinating about this is that it underscores how valuable Marvel’s brand is and this is in a business where there are almost no true brands. You know, for a long time, I think the only real brand in Hollywood was Disney. And then Pixar became a brand for sure. Marvel may be the strongest brand of them all at this point.

**John:** Marvel or Star Wars, they’re both incredibly strong brands.

**Craig:** Well, Star Wars is a movie. It’s not a — you know what I mean?

**John:** Oh, come on, Star Wars is a brand.

**Craig:** No, no, it’s a brand. I mean, I’m talking about companies. I mean to say, like, studios.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Studios didn’t have brands. Like there’s no, Universal doesn’t mean —

**John:** I see what you’re saying.

**Craig:** You know what I mean? So, I mean, surely, there are movies that are brands, no question. But Marvel, as a company, has the most brand value of any studio and they’re literally getting the right to use this guy that they didn’t otherwise have for free because of their brand equity, because their brand equity actually boosts Sony’s product. That’s wild to me. That’s amazing.

**John:** It’s wild. So the other news that was announced. So Amy Pascal will produce the new Spider-Man movie which can happen on a faster time schedule. But Kevin Feige from Marvel will also produce it.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** There can be, again, he’s been very, very smart about making really good movies and it certainly is in his best interest and Marvel’s best interest for the Spider-Man movie to be excellent because that helps them for using the Spider-Man character in their own thing. So it’s a weird synergy but potentially kind of cool.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Now, a counter example of this is a less valuable character is Quicksilver who appears in both the X-Men movie and in the new Avengers and they didn’t reach some sort of a magical agreement. Somehow they both had the rights to the character but they cast him as different actors. They didn’t try to make it one character across those two franchises.

**Craig:** Yeah, because Quicksilver isn’t sort of a needle mover the way that Spider-Man is. And so, I mean, it’s fascinating that Kevin Feige, who is essentially the head of a studio, is going to be producing a movie for another studio. But what’s so smart about it, and Kevin Feige is clearly one of the smartest guys in Hollywood, is that he can now integrate the Sony Spider-Man storylines into the Marvel storylines.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He is essentially giving the fans what they want. What a surprising thing that he would put the fans first and play the long game and show foresight.

**John:** I love the long game.

**Craig:** Kevin Feige, are you nuts? Don’t you know you’re supposed to just be shortsighted and make as much money? Now, now, now.

**John:** Nope.

**Craig:** So good on him. Very smart. And as for Amy, I have to say, having never worked — and you did a lot of work for her.

**John:** Oh, yeah.

**Craig:** Never worked for Amy, never met Amy. I’m thrilled because I’m so disgusted by the nonsense, the Internet nonsense and the shame machine and the outrage baloney. And this is a long, a well respected, long-serving professional who, I said it before, came off better in her emails than practically anybody else would if their emails were exposed. I’m glad that she has this and, frankly, I suspect she will be much happier.

**John:** I think that is a very strong possibility.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So our last story is really about rights once again. And this is something that a reader had sent in to me and I wasn’t aware of it but you had actually already seen the clip from it. It’s just fascinating. So it’s this thing that aired on FXX 1:30 in the morning on Monday, February 9th.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And it was an adaptation of Robert Jordan’s incredibly popular Wheel of Time series. And so this series started in 1990. It’s a 14-book cycle. So it started in 1990, went through 2013. And so huge books, a lot of people said, like, “Oh, this could be the next Game of Thrones.” It’s incredibly complicated but has super fans. It’s a bestseller. And the rights to this are owned by a group called Red Eagle Entertainment.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so what seems to have happened is there was a ticking clock and they had to produce something or the rights were going to revert.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so they made this thing that they aired at 1:30 in the morning. And Craig, you watched more of it than I did so can you —

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Tell us?

**Craig:** All right. So to be fair, I’m not familiar with the Wheel of Time series but from what I understand, it is very much — it’s very popular. It has a huge fan base like the way Game of Thrones has, the novels.

So I clicked on this thing because I though, I think the article I read said something like, “Watch the worst show ever made.” [laughs] So I clicked on it and it was fascinating. I watched about 10 minutes and I would say the first five minutes featured a man walking through an empty mansion and he’s shouting for his wife and his children. And they appear to be playing a hide-and-seek game so we’ll hear occasional giggles. I believe his wife is Ilyena. And he yells Ilyena maybe 30 times. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And so it’s just four minutes of, “Ilyena! Children!” And then, “Hehe,” and then he turns, “Ilyena!” on and on and on. It’s the most insane thing.

As if somebody said, “Look, we have nine minutes of show. How can we have an hour of show?” “Let’s take every single bit of footage we have of this guy playing hide-and-seek and string them all together.” [laughs] It’s wild. I mean it’s really weird.

**John:** So there is precedent for this and most of the articles including the article that we’ll link to talk about Fantastic Four. So what happened with Fantastic Four is the rights to it were going to revert back to Marvel or whoever Marvel was back in those days. It was quite a long time ago. And the studio hired Roger Corman to make the cheapest possible version of the Fantastic Four. And so little bits of that Fantastic Four movie have leaked out and it’s predictably sort of what you’d expect. It’s horrible special effects but just apparently the bare minimum of what you needed to do to say, like, “Well, it is a Fantastic Four movie.”

And so that sense of, like, again, how important it is to hold on to these underlying rights. You will do crazy things like make a crappy version of an adaptation because you know that there’s a great adaptation out there that is potentially incredibly valuable.

**Craig:** Yeah, the trick of this all is that a lot of these rights deals say, “Okay. We have the rights to make a show of this thing until this day, you know, five years from now. And if we don’t then you get it back. But if we do, then we have the exclusive option to renew the rights cycle for another five years, right? So if we just keep, if we keep making these things, they still belong to us.” I suspect that’s probably why Fox will hold on to the X-Men forever. We keep making X-Men movies, we still get the rights.

**John:** And that same thing happened with Spider-Man so —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Sony basically had to keep making Spider-Man movies or else the rights were going to revert. And I think Marvel was clever enough that there was a [laughs] — they can’t just make a $1 million Spider-Man movie. There was the requirement for how much they have to spend on a Spider-Man movie. And so talking with people involved in the reboot, the Amazing Spider-Man series, there really were ridiculous time pressures placed upon them not just to hit a release date because of, “Oh, we have a slot in schedule,” but like, “No, no, no, we’re going to lose Spider-Man if we don’t make this movie.”

**Craig:** Right. That’s why you can see the natural alliance between Sony and Marvel where Marvel is saying, “Look, if you guys just keep doing this, you’re going to damage this thing that we care about, that we think there’s a lot of value to. Why don’t we all just take the foot off of each other’s necks here and work together?” So that’s smart. Now, this thing, this is bizarre. And almost certainly there’s going to be some kind of lawsuit as a result because, you know, at some point, you have to say, “Well, define making something.”

I mean, was this made in good faith? Now, when I read this article, and it’s not in the link you have here, and I believe this is the case, adding to the strangeness around this is that the director died in a car crash like a day after he finished shooting this thing. So for those of you who are into conspiracy theories —

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** Now, I’m not. I just —

**John:** I know a well known screenwriter who’s a big conspiracy buff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** I’m sure he has a whole plan on this.

**Craig:** Yes, I’m sure that he does while he’s figuring out how we filmed the moon landing and so forth. But no, I think it was just a terrible coincidence or maybe not a coincidence. Maybe he was so tired because from what I understand, they were shooting like 30 hours in a row and they literally made the thing in like, I don’t know, two or three weeks or something. It’s insane.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What a weird, weird thing. I mean, we’ll have a link to the pilot. It’s on YouTube. But I don’t know if FXX is going to be defending their copyright on this particularly aggressively so.

**John:** Yeah. I’m not also clear whether FXX is really the people who instigated sort of making this thing or if they basically just rented out the 1:30 time slot, that someone else did that because that —

**Craig:** Good point.

**John:** Was going to happen, too.

**Craig:** Also, I didn’t know there was a channel called FXX. [laughs]

**John:** Well, yes, you did, because The Simpsons marathon played on that.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** That’s the channel that did the 24-hour marathon.

**Craig:** Oh, okay.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh, so there’s Fox, there’s FX, there’s FXX.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** But is there FXXX?

**Craig:** Oh, probably.

**John:** It’s going to be a big franchise. Vin Diesel will be in it.

**Craig:** Yeah, but you know who likes that channel?

**John:** [laughs] Sexy Craig loves FXXX.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m just going to be at home watching FXXX.

**John:** It’s so good.

**Craig:** Why don’t you come on over?

**John:** But in the interest of, like, wrapping this all up, it’s like there’s really a time situation where, like, you’re scrambling to make this movie really quickly so the rights don’t revert. It’s almost the situation described at the very start of this podcast where you’re talking about how in the race to get something into production, you also end up making these choices which, lord knows, you hope they’re the right choices. But the train is leaving the station and you just got to do it.

**Craig:** Yeah. I —

**John:** I think whatever you wrote is probably better than The Wheel of Time.

**Craig:** [laughs] I hope so.

**John:** [laughs]

Craig. Yeah. No, it is a rare film and perhaps a non-existent film that is made under ideal circumstances.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** There is always something going on. In this case, there was a lot going on.

**John:** Well, honestly, art without any constraints is generally dismal. I mean, constraints are what make art possible. It’s just sometimes the constraints are ridiculous constraints or choices made for reasons that wouldn’t be, you know, artistically awesome choices.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so, so much of the job of these last weeks as you’re moving a movie into production is figuring out, like, “Okay. What movie are we making and what’s staying and what’s going out?”

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** Indeed. All right. It’s time for One Cool Things. My One Cool Thing is something that everyone had said was really, really good and I just kind of ignored them for a long time because I think I misunderstood them. And now that I just took a chance on it, and now I understand them and I was wrong. So my One Cool Thing is Broad City.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** A comedy on Comedy Central. And I think I thought it was, I don’t know, edgy and gritty in sort of a, I don’t know, “how to make it in America” kind of way. And it’s actually more of like if you were to just take Girls and Workaholics and put them together, it’s just great. And I just love it. If you sort of took Laverne & Shirley and just, like, had them sort of doing shit in Brooklyn.

**Craig:** Oh, I like Laverne & Shirley.

**John:** Oh, my god. Who does not love Laverne & Shirley?

**Craig:** I love Laverne & Shirley.

**John:** And so there’s just these two girls hustling and [laughs] they’re really funny and they’re hustling. So the first season is up on Netflix. It’s also on Comedy Central now. It’s on demand. Watch Broad City. It’s really, really good.

**Craig:** You know, before I get to my One Cool Thing, let me just say Laverne & Shirley, I’ve often thought, is the kind of sitcom we need again. The physical comedy of it, it was so great. I just love, you know, the only people that do that now are like Disney sitcoms for kids.

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** It’s like they stopped doing physical comedy. I loved that stuff when I was a kid. I just loved it. And I love it now. I love Laverne & Shirley. They’re the best.

**John:** They’re great.

**Craig:** Really great.

**John:** I mean, we think of Penny Marshall but Cindy Williams was awesome on that show.

**Craig:** Cindy Williams, Michael McKean, and I mean —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** All of them.

**John:** It’s the first show I remember traveling where they started, it’s Milwaukee, right?

**Craig:** Mm-hmm. Yeah.

**John:** Hasenpfeffer Incorporated.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And then they moved to Hollywood in the last season, or last two seasons, and it’s just, like, it was just bizarre.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know. They would occasionally do that back then. [laughs] That was, you know, trying to goose the ratings.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But hey, come on. Carmine Ragusa?

**John:** Oh, so good.

**Craig:** The Big Ragu.

**John:** Big Ragu.

**Craig:** Big Ragu. I mean, God, she had an L on. She would always drink the Pepsi and the milk.

**John:** So, again, one thing I appreciate about Broad City is that like Laverne & Shirley, they’re kind of broke and, like, their being broke factors into it a lot. And, you know, I really love Blackish which is sort of the opposite of that show and, like, the characters are really rich. But it’s so much fun when you find sources of external conflict and being broke is a large part of it.

**Craig:** Yeah. And their show is about women living together that are broke. I think there was one that was — wasn’t there 2 Broke Girls, wasn’t that a show?

**John:** That is a show.

**Craig:** It’s a show now?

**John:** It’s a show but it’s not really about —

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** That.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s not?

**John:** It’s a multicam.

**Craig:** Oh, it’s multicam? It’s not, well, Laverne & Shirley was a multicam show.

**John:** That’s true it is a multicam show. I don’t know why, I’m being so weirdly judgy because Laverne & Shirley was an awesome multicam show. And maybe 2 Broke Girls is fantastic. I just — modern CBS multicam shows just give me —

**Craig:** They give you hives.

**John:** Hives.

**Craig:** You know, I don’t have that. I can’t say anything about 2 Broke Girls because I haven’t watched it. What a shock, okay.

**John:** It’s always a safe bet.

**Craig:** My One Cool Thing is a band. And the band is largely the work of a singer/songwriter. It’s called Fantastic Negrito. And Fantastic Negrito is out of the Bay Area and I’ve been following these guys for a while because my friend, Malcolm Spellman, who writes on Empire, which is now an empire, has been friends with the lead musician/songwriter of Fantastic Negrito for many, many years. And so I, you know, sort of follow him on Facebook and so forth. Outstanding stuff.

The guy’s name, one of the greatest names of all time, Xavier Dphrepaulezz. Xavier Dphrepaulezz. There are more Zs in there than you think. Outstanding stuff. And so, you know, I’ve been just following them, well, it’s like, well, my friend has a band. Cool, they’re actually awesome. Great. NPR ran this thing called Tiny Desk Concert Contest. It’s basically like, you know, a little original song and video contest. And guess who won?

**John:** Fantastic Negrito.

**Craig:** Fantastic Negrito, the winner of the Tiny Desk Concert Contest, very cool. We’ll provide a link. I just think Xavier is the coolest and it’s just good music. You know what it is? It’s like real black music. It’s old school black music. It’s soul. It’s like real soul from the ’70s. It just feels — it’s not Hip-Hop. It’s not modern. But it’s not like lame-o old, old. It’s just real. It’s so good. I love it. I just love it. I just think this guy is the best.

**John:** Yeah. So Fantastic Negrito played at the Black List party this year.

**Craig:** That’s right.

**John:** And so I got to see that. And he was fantastic. I’m going to call him he. It’s one of those weird situations where you can say it’s a band, or you can say it’s a person, but it’s really his music project.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** So you really just identify it as him.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** He is fantastic and he is, like, this weird, like, James Brown and Beck sort of like somehow merged souls or something. And as a performer he’s just spectacular and electric and fantastic. It was the completely wrong venue to see that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so it was just too loud for the small space. But he’s one of the people I would track down and see at a club anywhere in this country. So we will provide links to this and videos as well because he’s great. And Malcolm has been a huge promoter from the start and I should’ve listened to him earlier.

**Craig:** Yes. And we will try and get Malcolm on the show as well because he is in and of himself blowing up right now over Empire which is a phenomenon.

**John:** Yes. So Craig, you’re going to need to watch the show Empire at some point.

**Craig:** Oh, no.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Is that —

**John:** I’m sorry. Homework.

**Craig:** Is it on TV? [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] It’s a show on the television.

**Craig:** I don’t —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know I’ve been watching —

**John:** Have your son explain how to turn on the TV?

**Craig:** He won’t know. He’s the last person to know how to turn on a TV. I’ve been watching Togetherness.

**John:** Which I hear is great. I haven’t watched it yet. And I feel bad. Jay Duplass — I adore him, so I want to see it.

**Craig:** Ooh, it is good. It had the best depiction of bad sex I’ve ever seen in my life in the last episode. If you’re a fan of bad sex the way I am, check it out.

**John:** Sounds good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That is our show for this week. So our outro this week is provided by Manoel Felciano. It is great and involves Craig’s voice a lot. So Craig, you’re actually going to want to listen to this one. If you have an outro that you would like to provide to us, send us a link to it.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Just send it to ask@johnaugust.com. That is also the email address to which you can send questions or follow-up comments. Short things, you should write to us on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. This show is produced by Stuart Friedel.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It is edited by Matthew Chilelli. And if you’re on iTunes, you should leave us a comment or leave us a rating because those are helpful to help other people find the show. Subscribe to us while you’re there. Our premium feed, which we’ve mentioned before, is available at Scriptnotes.net. We also have an app that’s in the App Store and at the Android App Store.

**Craig:** John, is it expensive?

**John:** And it also gets you all stuff —

**Craig:** Is it expensive?

**John:** So the app is free to download.

**Craig:** Oh, that’s not expensive.

**John:** If you, no, that’s free. It’s the best you can get. What is costing you some money is the monthly subscription to the premium feed.

**Craig:** Oh, no. How much?

**John:** $1.99.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** Yeah, it’s a crazy bargain. That gets you all the back episodes to the very first one, and it helps pay for things like Stuart and Matthew and all our transcripts, so thank you very much for people who subscribe to that.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** That’s our show. Craig, I’ll talk to you next week.

**Craig:** Thanks, John.

**John:** Bye.

**Craig:** Bye.

Links:

* [The Deal with the Gravity Lawsuit](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-deal-with-the-gravity-lawsuit)
* [The One with Rebel Wilson and Dan Savage](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-one-with-rebel-wilson-and-dan-savage)
* [Get premium access at scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/)
* [Harper Lee’s ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ Sequel Sparks Questions Over Film Rights](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/harper-lees-kill-a-mockingbird-772176) on THR
* [With Marvel Deal, Sony Opts to Lease Rather Than Sell Spider-Man](http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/marvel-deal-sony-opts-lease-772251) on THR
* [Spider-Man: How Sony, Marvel Will Benefit from Unique Deal ](http://variety.com/2015/film/news/details-spider-man-appear-in-sony-and-marvel-movies-1201429039/) on Variety
* [Wheel of Time is the sad lesson of what can happen when you sell the rights to your books](http://www.vox.com/2015/2/10/8014499/wheel-of-time-pilot-fxx) on Vox
* [Broad City on Comedy Central](http://www.cc.com/shows/broad-city) and [Hulu](http://www.hulu.com/broad-city)
* [Fantastic Negrito](http://www.fantasticnegrito.com/), Winner of [NPR’s 2015 Tiny Desk Concert Contest](http://www.npr.org/2015/02/12/385540871/meet-the-winner-of-our-tiny-desk-concert-contest)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Manoel Felciano ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/the-one-with-rebel-wilson-and-dan-savage).

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

**Craig Mazin:** My name is Craig Mazin, Princeton University.

**John:** And this is episode 182 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, this is actually the third time this week we have spoken in a Scriptnotes capacity.

**Craig:** Normally, we have a little bit of a break but we’ve had a lot going on. We’ve got our Dirty Show under our belt now, so to speak.

**John:** So our Dirty Show which is — it may be live by the time you’re hearing this or maybe it’s coming out the same week but on our Dirty Show, we can now finally announce our guests. So on Monday, we sat down with Rebel Wilson, the actress, writer, comedian, star of Pitch Perfect and all-around funny Australian person. And that was so much fun.

**Craig:** Yeah, it was great. I thought we had a great time and, by the way, managed to talk about some things that were dirty and also not dirty, which was nice.

**John:** Yeah, we were able to talk about like studio notes which was actually really helpful and sort of like how challenging it is to get your voice on a network television program when your voice is filthy like Rebel’s is.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So we talked a lot about pooping in berets and things like that and Australian slang and other good things. Then on Wednesday, we had a conversation with Dan Savage, the famed sex columnist and author. And that was great also.

**Craig:** Yeah. He’s just a cool cat. I’ve always admired that guy. As I mentioned when we were talking with him, I just — I love rationalists. He’s such a rationalist and he’s a rationalist about something that is completely irrational, namely sexuality. So that was fun. And plus, we got to talk about stuff that we never get to talk about.

**John:** Which was fantastic.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So we got to get really, really dirty because that’s what he deals in is things that are sort of uncomfortable to talk about. So we’re going to have excerpts from both our Rebel conversation and our Dan Savage conversation because there were things that we talked about that weren’t actually all that dirty.

And so at the end of this episode, we’re going to have little bits of Rebel talking about Australian TV, Tall Poppy Syndrome, her general writing process. We’ll also have Dan Savage talking to us about what he wishes Hollywood would do when it comes to portrayal of sex in movies and TV.

**Craig:** That’s excellent. And if you enjoy that stuff and you’re not one of our premium subscribers for — John, how much is it again?

**John:** It’s $2 a month.

**Craig:** $2 a month, $24 a year, if you’re not one of those people, then you really should consider becoming one because then you would get all of the really good stuff that is disgusting —

**John:** Disgusting. So the Dirty Episode, I should stress, like it has — it’s Rebel and Dan but it’s all different content. So there’s nothing that you are going to hear in this episode that is duplicated in the Dirty Show. The Dirty Show is all thoroughly filthy from top to bottom and Craig saying horrible things, so, yeah.

**Craig:** I thought they were all beautiful. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] They were all beautiful because the human body is beautiful.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’m beautiful in every single way. And words won’t bring me down.

**John:** No. We learned a lot about Craig’s budding sexuality. I think it’s a meaningful episode. It’s going to be canon. So I think if you’re a Scriptnotes completist, you’re going to want to listen to the Dirty Episode. And exciting news, the Scriptnotes app just today got updated. So if you’re listening to this on iOS, the Scriptnotes app is so much better than it was yesterday, which is lovely.

So, again, we don’t make the Scriptnotes app. It’s a different company that does it. So it just showed up today and it’s better. So you can actually download episodes and favorite episodes and listen to back episodes much better than you could 24 hours ago.

**Craig:** Well, good job, elves that make that app.

**John:** It is wonderful. So the other people who we need to thank a lot are the maybe 15 to 20 to maybe 300 people who wrote in as follow-up on — last week’s episode, we talked about sort of standard operating procedures on things. And someone had written in saying that when someone dies and there’s an actual body, it’s not the EMTs who take the body away. It’s the coroners who take the body away.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s so often portrayed the wrong way on television. And I said, well, wouldn’t it be great if somebody one time did it right. And then of course everyone wrote in to say, ah-ha, someone did do it right. And it was this great episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer — I’ve completely forgotten that they did this — called The Body.

And so we’ll link to a clip from The Body but the whole episode is just fantastic. But exactly what we sort of wished would happen does happen in that episode where the EMTs show up, like Buffy’s mom is dead — spoiler — and they say, you know what, we got to take another call, the coroner’s going to come. And they leave her with the body, which is just a great moment.

**Craig:** Yeah. You see, this is one of those instances where reality is so jarring and unsuitable for what you would call paced drama that you actually — if you’re going to do it you have to build an entire episode around it and then it becomes the drama of real time, you know, which is very cool. I love that.

**John:** Yeah, so the little clip we’re going to show you is really the teaser to that episode. It’s like a 10-minute long teaser and they don’t cut. And so they’re doing it as a oner. It just gives you that oppressive sense of like the real-time agony of just being in this place with a dead body. So a really well done episode, and a really great example of, you know, sometimes researching how things are really done in real life can get you great moments that otherwise can be overlooked.

**Craig:** Wonderful.

**John:** So other topics that we’re going to talk about today are exploding scripts, stock scenes, and the difference between spec scripts, shooting scripts and for your consideration scripts, three topics that are sort of new and we haven’t gotten to before.

**Craig:** It’s amazing that after all this time you and I can still keep it fresh.

**John:** So I emailed you this question this morning. It’s like, Craig, have you ever dealt with exploding scripts? And you said, “I’ve never even heard of them.”

**Craig:** Yeah, what is that?

**John:** So this is something that I heard about for the first time over the weekend. So I was at a party and there were some other screenwriters there. And the screenwriting team was saying that this project that they’re working on, it’s highly locked down. So they don’t email anybody anything. They don’t email sort of like plot lines and they certainly don’t email scripts. They don’t email PDFs. Everything is printed and hand-delivered.

But more so than even that, if they need to send something to an actor, like they’re casting something, it’s all sent with these exploding scripts. And I said — because I picture me with like my hands folded on my chin and my fingers saying, like, “Please tell me more.”

**Craig:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** So exploding scripts, what this is is basically they’re sending them — they’re sending actors or crew people a link that they can open up and it opens up in a special app. And within the app, they can read something but like literally page by page it’s sending a message saying, like, “This page is now being read, this page is now being read.” There’s no way to screenshot it. Basically you could maybe like take your iPhone and like take a photo of the screen but you can’t really capture on the screen itself.

And they said that it was so locked down that there was a person they were — a crew member that they were interviewing to take the job and that crew person took another job, like the line producer found out that person was taking another job. And so they like pulled her script while she was reading it. So she was on like page 43 and they pulled it and she called and said like, “Wait, my script disappeared.” They’re like, “Yeah, because you took another job.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** Isn’t that crazy and amazing?

**Craig:** Well, I guess how does it work where you can’t screenshot it?

**John:** So basically the app locks out the ability to sort of do that thing where you press the home button and the power key. The app will, you know —

**Craig:** Oh, because it’s —

**John:** Will burn the script.

**Craig:** It’s a mobile app. It’s not —

**John:** It’s a mobile app. I should stress that, yeah.

**Craig:** Okay. So you’re reading it on your iPad or your iPhone and it locks out your ability to screenshot. So they figured out the thing that Snapchat apparently hasn’t figured out? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. No, I think Snapchat — yeah, I don’t think you can take a normal screenshot. I think you can take a photo of your screen with another phone.

**Craig:** Oh.

**John:** But I don’t think you can — I think it’s like Snapchat in that way that you can’t just literally take a screenshot.

**Craig:** Okay. I mean, it sounds good. Although, I have to say that when you’re at that level of security, there ultimately is no substitute for come into the office and read it in that room.

**John:** Yeah. And apparently, that’s what they do a lot. And even when they have cuts of what they’re doing, it’s like, “Okay, we will fly to New York and show it to you.” So they won’t even put it on like the — a really kind of locked down PIX System. And so, you know, people who make TV shows often deal with dailies and sort of stuff that come through it, even like big features, a lot of those dailies are in the sort of secure kind of intranet thing that shouldn’t be able to get out onto the world. But in a land after the Sony hacks, I think filmmakers are even nervous about that.

**Craig:** Yeah. For those entrepreneurs out there who are looking to make a billion dollars and following the traditional line of necessity being the mother of invention, the entire world, much less Hollywood, needs some version of the old Mission Impossible “this message will self-destruct.” We are desperate for something that cannot be duplicated, that can be consumed once by your eyeballs and then disappear truly. It can’t be photographed, it can’t be screenshotted, it can’t be printed or retransmitted or saved in any way.

And I wonder if it’s going to come down to some sort of device. That, in other words, let’s say somebody made a special tablet and the screen was of a certain kind where it just wouldn’t — if you tried to take a picture, you get nothing. And the operating software of that was designed so that nothing could be screenshotted or printed. It was truly locked in. Maybe then?

**John:** Maybe then. So what I’ll say is that it sounds like this system, and apparently it’s called Script It! Script It! is very close to that. I mean, obviously they can’t, you know, make it so the screen is unphotographable but it feels very locked down. The closest I’ve encountered this in my own real writing life was there was a project that I was — they were coming to me for a rewrite. And they sent it to me on an iPad that had been locked down.

So basically I could only read it on this one iPad and there was no way to sort of like get a cable into it or do anything else to get the thing out of it. And so it’s what you described, except that, of course, I could literally if I wanted to take a photo of every page on the screen and do it that way.

So, Craig, you’ve done some big sequels like the third Hangover. There was a printed script, though, wasn’t there? People —

**Craig:** No.

**John:** No, there wasn’t?

**Craig:** No. On Hangover 2 and 3, it was the same routine. The only copies of the script that existed until it was time to actually make the movie were on my computer or Todd’s computer or for Hangover 2, Scot Armstrong’s computer.

So we had our copies as the writers. When we gave it to the studio, I believe we printed individual copies that were watermarked for the executives. When we sent it to the guys, we FedEx’d them printed screenplays, watermarked, and had them send them back. And for crew people, department heads who needed to read the script, we had them come into the offices on Warner Bros, on the lot. And they had to read it in a room and then leave.

So that was as locked in as I’ve ever been. You know, nothing else yet has been quite that high-pitched.

**John:** Yeah. I’m wondering whether we’re going to be all dealing with those issues. And I want to look at sort of the pros and cons of that because certainly the cons of that is that it’s a huge hassle. It’s a huge hassle for the people who have to lock down the script but also for all the crew people, for everybody who sort of like, would love to be able to just like work on something at home or just do any kind of normal process or something. It’s making stuff much, much harder.

And so you’re having to basically synthesize this thing down. And so like you’re having to make a one-line schedule based on, you know, a script that you can’t actually print out and you can’t do the normal things to.

But I’m also looking at it as like — I can imagine projects that I might write where honestly just aiming for that level of security might, I don’t know, boost its stature a little bit, the exclusivity aspect of it.

**Craig:** Yeah, I know what you mean because [laughs] when we think about movies that require this much — I immediately jump to the new Star Wars movies that they’re making. So on the new Star Wars movies, I can only presume that there is — just as there’s an electrical department and costume and production design, there’s a security department that has staff that’s separate from the normal apparatus which would be, you know, the UPM and the production coordinator.

And the security department has to essentially manage the traffic of this stuff in such a way that it is completely locked down because even — forget the screenplay. How about just every day you shoot there are sides, which for those of you who don’t know, they’re little miniature pages that are the day’s work, the screenplay pages that are that day’s work in small form for the actors, the crew, everybody.

And they float around the set like confetti basically. Well, not on a Star Wars set. I mean, I can only presume that those things are numbered and must be returned. And if you don’t return your sides [laughs] and maybe you don’t even get them —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, yeah, you’re right. I mean, if you’re putting a — you may be selling a spec to put it out in such a way that like this we are protecting this. Well, if they value it so much, maybe it’s valuable. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah. So my company makes Bronson Watermarker which is a watermarking app that a lot of, you know, studios use for watermarking scripts that go out. And so there’s TV shows I know that use it every week. But that’s a less — that’s not quite such a big concern because if you are — you know, episode 17 of that ABC drama that’s not like highly spoilerific, kind of who cares? I mean, it’s not a big deal. There’s not that kind of lockdown versus the sort of the Star Wars of it all.

In terms of like what can replace sides, I think it would honestly be an app on your phone. So just the same way that this Script It! thing, you know, had a Mission Impossible sort of like the script will explode after a certain period of time, there’s probably a way you can do sides on, you know, a phone-sized device that could work for sides.

**Craig:** I’m kind of curious. I wonder if maybe Rian Johnson would be willing to tell us how they’re handling that. My guess is that they won’t even discuss how they do it, you know, because even that, in a weird way, is giving away something important. But, I mean, look, that’s the scariest stuff because there are certain movies that the great engine of spoilering is desperate to spoil, which is so sad to me.

I mean, if I could just take a step back and talk about what’s going on behind all this, it’s a bummer. You know, obviously when you and I were growing up this wasn’t a problem. Nobody could possibly spoil a movie for us, much less print the screenplay online and then [laughs] much less critique of the second draft of a thing.

And what’s so I guess puzzling to me is that the spoilers so often come from people that are loving something to death. It’s not even out of malice. It’s out of a strange obsessive love. And it’s just sad. It makes me sad.

**John:** Yeah. It’s like these pop cultural things that are like the little rabbit who’s getting squeezed too hard until it’s dead.

**Craig:** Yeah, Lennie. Lennie, lighten your grip.

**John:** Yeah. [laughs] Important lessons to learn. Always take a nice light grip to your Star Wars and your treasures, icons of cinema.

**Craig:** Indeed.

**John:** It’s tough.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So the next topic I want to get into is stock scenes. And by stock scenes, I mean those things that you’ve seen a thousand different versions of them because they are just — the thing I had to write this week was the first time I’ve ever actually had to write it. I had to write a police interrogation room or interview room.

**Craig:** That is the most stock scene.

**John:** Yeah, it is. I mean, that or like the guy up on the witness stand is probably another sort of great stock scene. But like we sort of know all of the tropes. We know sort of how it’s supposed to work. And it was fascinating to get into it because the existence of the scene was necessary. It was a useful scene to have because it let us communicate some important story points and it was useful because one of our main characters is the guy being interviewed.

And that I think is one of the crucial differences is that I only wanted to keep it in there because it’s our hero who is being interviewed. If it was a cop interviewing somebody, that would be even sort of more cliché. But it was challenging to find a way into that scene that didn’t feel just — wow, like this is the 19,000th version of the scene you’ve ever seen.

So I wanted to sort of talk about stock scenes and ways to approach them to hopefully make them less painful.

**Craig:** Well, it’s certainly a tall order. I mean, in particular, that stock scene has been done not only a million times in movies but also a million times in a million cop shows. And it’s hard sometimes as a writer to shed this built-in thing. It’s as if we feel like we’ve been in an interrogation room just from the collective memory of a thousand of these scenes.

It’s a dark room. There’s a metal table. We’re on one side, they’re on the other. Maybe it’s good cop/bad cop, maybe it’s one guy. There is that single bright light. At some point they start yelling at us. At some point they start telling us that someone’s going to roll over on this — and so much of it is the same. And a scene like that, for instance, I’ve actually never had to write that scene.

If I did, I think I would probably think to myself, “Is there a way I could actually do this, first of all, not in a room? Let me see if I can just avoid the room entirely.” And then, “Is there a way that I could do the scene so that the person being interrogated does not realize that it’s an interrogation until it’s too late?” Can I maybe make something out of that, you know. But that one is really hard.

**John:** So what it sounds like you’re talking about is changing the fundamental expectations of what that scene is supposed to be like. And so you talked about the setting. And so that’s one of the first things I looked at. It’s like I had that same picture in my head of like, you know, what this interrogation room is, which is basically there’s one overhead light and the walls are dark and everything’s pushed away and there’s a mirror there.

And so I very deliberately like pushed away from that expectation of what that is supposed to be like. And it was useful because I’d done the research so I sort of knew what the sheriff’s department actually looked like and it’s nothing like that at all.

Then I also looked at sort of like how could — what is the latest possible moment I could come into that scene, because the useful thing about stock scenes is we sort of know how they work. So you could come in much, much later than you sort of think you could come in. And so I could come in in the middle of a conversation and really just get the experience of it and very quickly the audience can fill in everything that must have happened before that point.

And that is a really useful thing about these stock scenes. So I was able to get in really late and leave really early.

**Craig:** That’s smart. I like that you play with that. I mean, one of the hidden challenges of the idea of moving — I guess you would call it resituating or relocating that scene to a different place is that with stock scenes, sometimes the trap you’re in is that if you move it out of the stock setting to be fresh, it feels like suddenly people feel the writer because it feels like, oh, I get — oh, look, they’re playing tricks with the stock scene, you know.

**John:** You don’t want to fall into that trap of so many scenes from Bruckheimer movies where like that exposition scene takes place in a boxing gym because boxing gyms are cool.

**Craig:** [laughs] They have that. The light is always streaming in. Every boxing gym is like set up so that it’s backlit and —

**John:** Yeah, falling down, big shafts of light.

**Craig:** Always.

**John:** So those are things I was looking at. But I was also thinking about like what are versions of that scene that I’ve actually enjoyed recently. And so True Detective is largely structured around that kind of police interrogation scene and does such great job of bending our expectations about what is supposed to happen in that scene because that whole series is sort of built around those scenes.
I also thought Gone Girl did a great job of it because partly we’re not sure how much to trust Ben Affleck in those moments. We are sympathetic to both him and the detectives through a lot of it. And so by letting us find ourselves in that moment was really, really useful for those scenes. It wasn’t entirely clear that either side knew exactly what they were doing in those moments and that’s a really rewarding thing, too, because it defeats our expectation about what’s supposed to be happening here.

Our expectation in that kind of stock scene is like the police officers are in charge, the suspect is going to try to lie and squirm his way out of it, and that’s where you’re going to be at.

**Craig:** Yeah. And that’s sort of the idea of the interrogation that’s not really an interrogation because the truth is that — and they did a nice job in Gone Girl of contrasting her with her partner who is, you know, Johnny jump to conclusions. And so we understood her mindset, so we understood it actually wasn’t an interrogation.

She was kind of feeling blindly and he was answering in a very real way, in a way that frankly you don’t normally answer when you realize that you’re sitting in an electric chair. He actually never got shifty and guilty because he was actually just naturally stupid in a way [laughs]. He was just being honest.

So they did a nice subtle thing without doing anything that was particularly ostentatious, you know. I mean, it was still in a police department. It wasn’t necessarily that room we’re all familiar with. I mean, the interesting thing about True Detective is that [laughs] I remember noticing early on that they — that Cary Fukunaga did this tiny, tiny thing that actually made such a difference and it was so smart because he knew how much time he was going to be spending in that room.

The typical stock setup for an interrogation is that there is a rectangular table. The cops or cop is on one side of the wide part and the interrogee [laughs], the person being asked questions, the suspect, is on the other. Here, he turns the table so that it’s actually a long way. He puts McConaughey at the head of the table, on one end, and the he puts the two cops kind of catty-corner around the corner from each other. And suddenly, it felt more like three guys almost like talking at a bar.

**John:** Yeah, that was a crucial distinction. And literally a bar because, of course, McConaughey is drinking through a lot of it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But I think that’s really important, too. And even when you look at the Woody Harrelson interviews, the key is framed back and you can see there’s a whole office behind him, so it doesn’t feel like he is a suspect. It feels like he’s more just — it’s just they’re chatting. And the blurring of lines between like when are we like looking through the video tape of this moment and when are we live there present in the moment is a good distinction as well.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Craig, can we think of some other sort of stock scenes that exist in movies and TV so often. And just maybe make a quick list of like what are the things that you see so much and when you encounter them, you’re like, ugh, a version of that.

For me, it’s certainly weddings, people standing around the coffin at funerals, anyone hitting an alarm clock when they wake up in the morning. That first shower is a stock scene. The couple in bed reading before going to bed.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Just like — can you think of some other ones that are just that?

**Craig:** Sure. There’s sitting with the sick person who’s dying in a hospital.

**John:** Sure.

**Craig:** And boop, you know [laughs], if you hear boop, you’ve officially gone deep into stockville. There is the cop knocking on your door and telling you that there’s been an accident. You’ve already mentioned the law situations. In romantic comedies, there are the people colliding on the street.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** We’ve seen this — I mean this is almost now we’re of kind of drifting more towards cliché than stock scene, but the idea of two people meeting on the street like that.

**John:** The blind date or so the first time date or like the two people at the bar who don’t realize that they’re supposed to actually be together, again, it does feels a little, I guess stock scene versus the cliché is a small distinction. But there are scenes that are sometimes necessary but just get to be like, “Wow, I know what that scene is. And I don’t necessarily need to see that scene again.”

**Craig:** Yeah, there are the Mexican standoff scenes where everybody is —

**John:** Oh god.

**Craig:** Very hard to do those in a different way. We did a scene that was essentially a Mexican standoff scene at the end of the third Hangover, although, it was kind of a one — sided one, you know, but it kind of was playing like that. Those are tough.

**John:** Yeah. And sometimes you can skip the scene. And sometimes that’s actually your best choice. If there’s ways to sort of like, you know, lead up to the wedding and then like don’t actually show the wedding itself because like we know what a wedding is, we don’t necessarily need to see it.

And by, you know, slicing that little part out, maybe you can use some of that time to do something else much more interesting. You know, you can find some moment that’s usually not dramaticized which sort of like back to the Buffy coroner moment. Is that we don’t normally see the moment where the coroner is coming to take the body away. We don’t normally see the EMTs leaving. And that’s sometimes great.

**Craig:** Yeah. You know, I mean you can’t live in fear of these things because there are times when it will happen. I will say that if your characters are good and your story is good and compelling, you can survive this. You know, Gone Girl really didn’t reinvent the interrogation wheel but they survived it and you barely even noticed that it was happening and that it was a stock scene because the characters were intriguing and specific.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So you don’t have to run too far away from this if you don’t want. But you certainly want to make sure that there are some little twisty bits even if it’s something as small as the orientation of the table to let the reader know that you didn’t just lazy your way into the same damn setup.

**John:** Yeah. For sure.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Our third topic today is the difference between spec scripts, production scripts, and for your consideration. And by for your consideration, I mean sort of the scripts that are sent out officially, as like this is the movie. And so when they’re being — scripts are sort of designed to be read by people who may have already seen the movie or will be voting on that movie for awards.

And the kind of question that comes up a fair amount from readers who are — listeners who are confused about sort of like, oh, well you can do that in the spec script, but you couldn’t do that in production script. So I want to talk a little bit about what the terms mean and what the terms kind of don’t mean because I think sometimes there’s this idea that you write one kind of script to sell a movie and you write a completely different kind of script to shoot a movie. And that’s not accurate.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** But we want to talk about sort of the different kind of scripts you might find on someone’s table and sort of how to visually tell that they’re different and what kind of things might be changing when you see those different kinds of scripts.

So I want to talk about — so the scripts that we are reading like when we’re reading a Three Page Challenge or if we’re reading, a friend asks us to read a script. You can call it a spec script, the original script. It is the script that the writer has written that has not gone into production. It’s just a clean script, it’s just to be read. And that’s the first — that’s what Craig and I are first writing. That’s the script that is the idea, it’s the thing you sold, that’s what’s hopefully going to go into production.

**Craig:** Yeah, it also comprises 95 or it may be even more, maybe 99% of the script pages that exist on this planet.

**John:** Absolutely. So most screenplays you’re going to read, that you’re going to find online, those are going to be what we will call a spec script. It’s just a pure script. Now, sometimes you will encounter scripts that have little truncated pages. And there’s little asterisks in the margins.

And there will be scene numbers and there’ll be scene number A-142, and AB-142, and there will be weird numberings on things. And they’ll be in different colors sometimes. Those are production scripts. And they can honestly have sometimes the exact same text that’s going to be in the original printed script. They have those weird numberings because something has changed. So new pages have been added, scenes have been cut, things have been moved around and that’s a production script.

And all the changes you’ve seen, they’re because something has come up in production that has needed them to add pages, remove pages, change scene numbers around.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s still basically the same thing. I mean all the little doodads are there. So people know, okay, I don’t have to read the whole damn script again. I can just read these pages with the asterisks and okay, I don’t have to pull the whole script out of my binder. I can just replace 20 and 21. And I know what my scene numbers are. By the way, it’s just like — I don’t know if you notice this, but all right, so every scene when you’re shooting a movie, every scene gets a number.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** And those of us who are on the writing side of things, we just press a button in our software and numbers are generated for each scene header. But we never, like it’s funny — Todd and I would talk about this all the time in the Hangovers, we don’t know scene numbers. We know scenes, we know the story. But crew people, they know the scene numbers.

**John:** Yeah, they have no idea what the actual content of the scene is. And so they say like, oh yeah, we’re going to shoot 140 after lunch. I’m like, I have no idea what that scene is. Tell me what happens in the scene.

**Craig:** I know. Like the worst is when they’ll come up to you and they’re like, “I have a question, in 79, is Phil supposed to have the cut on his face?” I’m like, “Do you think honestly that I know what 79 is?” I have no idea. Not one number ever. But man, they’re super Rain Man-y] about it. Anyway, point being–

**John:** Well, the reason why they’re Rain Man-y about it is their preparation is based on a schedule that has scene numbers. And so they’re looking at this is the scene number that has this thing in it. And so I have questions specifically about this scene numbers. So they’re not looking at the script that often.

**Craig:** No. They’re also not thinking about the script in terms of story. Like so, everything that we think about is contextualized in terms of narrative. And they really are looking at it broken down into blocks of — I mean if you’re working in hair and makeup, you need to know like, okay, in these numbers, from this number to this number, we have this look. From this number to this number, you have this look. This scene, we know we’re going to be dealing with blood and so forth. So we have such a different way of approaching things.

But if you do come across a production script that has half pages and asterisks and omits and stuff like that. It’s fine. You just keep reading it. And it’s just the same experience. But the only thing I would say that sometimes changes is, and I was talking about this the other day with somebody, one of the strange things about the art form of screenwriting is that you are simultaneously trying to serve two masters.

You are writing something that must translate well into a movie, but you’re also writing something to be read so that it’s either bought or approved or green-lit or an actor wants to do it, et cetera, et cetera. So sometimes, when you cross the Rubicon and you’re now in production, some stuff will start to come out because it’s no longer necessary for the reader.

So when you come across a production script, if you find that it doesn’t read quite as fully or lushly as you’d like, that oftentimes is why, because a lot of things have been dispensed with.

**John:** Yeah. And sometimes when you’re making those changes in a production scripts, I’m not looking for the perfect word in scene description. I’m looking for like, it’s honestly just more description like this is what actually happens. Or sometimes, it’s been like we’ve shot the scene and we actually shot it a slightly different way than was written. And so I’m writing a version of the scene that really reflects that this is what we actually shot. And so in those cases, I may not be picking the most beautiful words for some line of action because it’s functional. It’s showing like this is what actually happened.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, you’re better off not reading production screenplays.

**John:** Yeah. So this leads us to the last question about what kind of screenplays should you read? And so a great follow-up letter we got from an Oscar-nominated producer. So we’ll call him Leo because he doesn’t want to talk about the specific movie, but here’s what’s going on.

He writes, “I had to drop you this comment when I heard the conversation between John and Craig and Aline about voting for screenplays and whether you should read them or not. As a long time learner in this industry, I used to devour the screenplays that studios would post on their for your consideration pages. I’d constantly marvel how incredibly talented the filmmakers must have been to write a screenplay that so closely matched the final film. Sure, there was the odd line or scene that was different, but 90% of the time, the screenplay matched the film.

“Over the years, I started to think there may be a conspiracy afoot. Well, this year my own film has been Oscar nominated and the screenplay was made available on the for your consideration website. And guess what, it’s not the screenplay we shot at all. It’s a cut-and-paste of the original screenplay that matched the edited film.

“I discovered after the fact that the writers did this at the request of the studio before the script went out for your consideration. On my movie, there were very significant changes made in editorial. It really was a case of rewritten in the edit. And the film benefited immensely as a result.

“I think the process of following the script out to the screen would be fascinating for students, but of course, evidence of that journey has now been eradicated by the studio which has rewritten history. And don’t get me wrong, I don’t feel like a crime has been committed here. I’m not trying to make a mountain out of a molehill. I just think it’s a shame in a way.

“Aspiring writers out there who hold themselves to the standard of these Oscar-nominated and awarded writers without seeing the before and after, well, I worry they’re left with the impression that these screenplays are not rock solid and require little to no reinvention in post.”

So he’s saying, basically, I think he’s worried that people are going to read these screenplays and think like, “Oh my god, it was an actually perfect screenplay.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “Because they look exactly like the movie.” And that wasn’t actually the case at all. Like, the reason why that for your consideration script reads exactly like the move is because it was edited to look like the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is the syndrome of the 14-year-old girl looking at, you know, another — a 17-year-old girl on the cover of Cosmo and thinking, “Why doesn’t my skin look like that, why is my waist not like that?” Well, because they photoshopped her. It’s not real.

I mean the interesting thing about this is that it cuts to the question of what exactly are you voting for? And, you know, my — we talked about this last time, my feeling is that the screenplay is the screenplay of the movie. That’s what I’m voting for. I’m not voting for the screenplay that the movie kind of used or mostly used or drifted away from. I’m voting for the screenplay of the movie.

And you can argue whether or not that makes sense if the writer was kind of undermined or subverted by the production process or the editing process. But look, you know, it’s all a big mush. As I said before, you know, screenwriters direct a ton of the movie on the page before a director is ever hired. But we’re not asking that, you know, people wonder what the director does. So I think that it’s perfectly fine that that’s the case.

It’s more interesting, I do think, to read — if you want to be a screenwriter, I think you should read the screenplays as they existed prior to production. And you don’t need to draw too many conclusions from what happened between that screenplay and the end product because ultimately that will not be in your control regardless. What you do know is that that screenplay was bought and it was made.

So for writers, I’d say there is a very good lesson to read the original screenplays. For people that are interested in film in general, I think, you know, you can read those too. But personally, I have no problem with what he is describing.

**John:** Yes. So I would urge, of course, screenwriters to read screenplays because there’s no way you’re going to understand the form without reading screenplays. And the screenplays that are going to be most available to you are the for your consideration scripts. And so read them if that’s what you can find, read them. If you can find earlier drafts, that’s useful too. And you’ll see sort of what the process was, you can see sort of what this looks like back then and sort of what it ended up being in the final place.

You won’t necessarily — if you’re reading a for your consideration script, you won’t have a good idea — and it’s the only thing you have, you won’t have a great sense of what they changed along the way and sort of what happened in the editorial room to get us there.

And I used to feel more strongly that, you know what, we should read the screenplays. Really it should have based on who had the best screenplay, what the best writing was. But then if you look at the other categories we’re voting for, we don’t really know that information either.

So if we vote for like best actor, well, how do we know that his performance was really sort of all one great performance and how much do we know that that was just terrific editing to make that performance look so good? Or by the same token there’s been probably great performances that have been ruined by crappy editing. So it’s hard to say. All you can do is base it on what is visible in the final product that suggest like, oh, that was a great performance underneath there or there was great writing underneath all that.

**Craig:** Yeah, you have to vote on — yeah, I mean look, we’re — I hate all this voting stuff anyway and all these awards. But if you’re going to do it, you just have to work with what you’ve got which is the movie. The plan that the director has is she shows up, she has a shot list, she does her shot list, she fiddles around, maybe does some other shots. And then in her mind, she has edited the scene together. She’s happy.

In the editing room, suddenly it becomes something else. Is she no longer the director of that scene? Of course not. This is how movies go. They defy this kind of fascicle categorization. The movie, if it’s done properly, is an amalgam of a lot of people’s input and talent. And who’s input is primarily featured on screen at any given point changes from moment to moment, film to film.

**John:** Absolutely.

**Craig:** So the endeavor to give out awards and parse out, well, this movie is the best directed, this movie is the best written, this movie is the best edited, and this movie is just the best, is just dumb.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But, you know — it’s dumb, it doesn’t reflect what’s real, but I get why they do it because it makes a longer show.

**John:** I think awards are useful to the degree that they can celebrate quality. And to the degree that they pit quality against quality is not necessarily a perfect world. But they are a chance to showcase and celebrate some of the best films of the year. And that’s why I think — that’s why I’m glad we have Oscars, despite my misgivings about sort of all of the other crap that comes with it.

**Craig:** Yeah, I’ve always liked that AFI model, which is you know what, here is the whatever, I don’t what their number is, but at the end of the year —

**John:** The thousand best movies of the year.

**Craig:** Yeah. I mean, it’s like, here’s 15. We love these 15 movies. Come celebrate these 15 movies. Talk about who wrote them, talk about who directed them, talk about who starred in them, da-da-da. That’s great. That makes sense to me. And then you’re not sitting there going, well, let’s see, you know, like I’m just fascinated by this notion that you could have a best picture but not the best director.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You can have the best screenplay, but it’s not the best picture.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Uh, what? Okay.

**John:** Yeah, that happens.

**Craig:** Yeah, it just doesn’t make any sense.

**John:** All right, it has come time to introduce our two guests. So our two guests, we recorded separately. So they don’t actually talk with each other. But first off, we have some snippets from our sit down chat with Rebel Wilson.

So she came into the office sitting, the three of us sat down face to face and talked. And some of the things we wanted to talk about with her in this episode is how Australian TV works. Tall Poppy Syndrome which is a term I’ve heard applied to people from New Zealand, but it’s also apparently something you talk about with Australians, which is sort of like small town boy makes good, but maybe being used against you, and just general writing.

So Rebel Wilson, she was just awesome and it was a pleasure to have her on the show.

**Craig:** In Australia, so you’ve done television in Australia, you’ve done television here.

**Rebel Wilson:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What’s the difference in the — you know, we have Standards and Practices.

**Rebel:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So that’s the people that — they’re basically the TV censors. Are they easier here, there?

**Rebel:** Okay, we don’t even have that in Australia.

**Craig:** So it would be easier there.

**Rebel:** Which is why I got thrown for a huge loop, I guess you could say. In Australia, I mean there was one show that I came up on called Pizza. And it was very, very rude, you know, very, very [laughs] crass and rude, but a crowd favorite, cult classic in Australia. Won like the Australian version of the Emmy’s one year, but really, full on, people running around with chainsaws, chopping people and Muslims like running around doing terrorist jokes, and like all sorts of things.

But Australians love it. Nobody would even watch that show from a network or anything. It would just go on air. So there’s no such thing —

**Craig:** Is there even anybody working in the network or you just drop off the tape and —

**Rebel:** Yeah, there’s people but what would happen in Australia is that your show get commissioned and congratulations, like, only like two people in Australia per year get their own show. Your show gets commissioned by a lady and then they’re like go away and make the show.

**Craig:** Right.

**Rebel:** And then you give it in, and then it goes on air, like you wouldn’t get notes.

**Craig:** Do they even watch it, you think?

**Rebel:** [laughs] I think they’ve started to now. They’re starting to get more American now. But they never used to watch it because like these extreme vile things [laughs] would go on air. And they wouldn’t really care.

Yeah: Yeah.

**Craig:** And then from here —

**John:** And it is just a wonderland, right?

**Rebel:** Yeah. Then I came here and learned the hard way what the American system is. Believing when they told me, “Oh Rebel, you can have your own show and you can do whatever you want. We just want you to be free to do whatever you want.”

**Craig:** Good accent.

**Rebel:** And then I realized, oh okay, I was like excited. But then I quickly realized that is not at all what they mean. Because they have somebody called Broadcast Standards and Practices, well, a whole department actually called that that refused to allow you to do anything really on network TV.

**Craig:** Right.

**Rebel:** Unless you’re a hit and then weirdly the standards —

**John:** I’m sure.

**Rebel:** Are easier.

**Craig:** Yeah, but they still have their — I mean the guys that do The Simpsons, I mean what is it, they’re coming up in their 27th season.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They still slug it out with.

**Rebel:** It gave me a huge respect for people who do network TV in America because how they get anything on air I do not know.

**John:** Have you heard of this thing called Tall Poppy Syndrome?

**Rebel:** Yes.

**John:** Is that a real thing? Is that something that —

**Rebel:** That is a very, very real thing, which is one of the reasons why I wanted to come live and work in America. So what it is, it’s a cultural phenomenon. It’s where if you get too good or too successful in Australia, so if you’re a poppy and you grow too tall, essentially, people want to cut you down. [laughs]

**Craig:** Really?

**Rebel:** Like yes, that’s what happened to me in Australia. So I was on all these different television shows and people like, she’s had a go, let someone else. And I’m like, what do you mean? I’m now like experienced. I’m now like really experienced. I’m now ready to go the next step and have my own movies, or maybe. And the Australian system is like, no, you think you’re so good now, why don’t you go and be unemployed. And I’m like, no. It’s a really —

**Craig:** That’s amazing.

**Rebel:** It’s a thing which I hope like younger Australians stop doing because I like the American culture more where you can’t be successful enough. Like people love the successful people and people like love the celebrities and people who are good at things and talented. Because in Australia, there’s this bizarre culture of like, oh, they celebrate the mediocre people and they’re like the ones who are too good, they’re like —

**Craig:** Wow.

**Rebel:** Get over yourselves. [laughs]

**Craig:** Wow.

**Rebel:** And I mean I’m being very general in my explanation on what it is, but it’s a real thing and it’s kind of like —

**Craig:** That’s not good.

**Rebel:** No, because they don’t want people to have big heads, do you have that expression like —

**Craig:** Yeah, we do. Sure.

**Rebel:** You know, too much of an ego.

**John:** Cut them down to size.

**Rebel:** But then they do terrible — like, so the guy, Chris Lilley, who you’re just saying, like —

**Craig:** Right, Summer Heights High.

**Rebel:** Who created Summer Heights High and so many shows. And then his latest show, like, people didn’t watch because they’re, like, “Yeah, I’ve seen it before, whatever.” And he’s like one of our best comedic talents.

**Craig:** He’s brilliant.

**Rebel:** He’s a brilliant guy.

**Craig:** So it’s the opposite of encouragement of people that you enjoy, you —

**Rebel:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So like what’s the attitude towards Baz Luhrmann there?

**Rebel:** Yeah, that’s the same.

**Craig:** Same, like, oh look at you.

**Rebel:** Yeah, make someone look good, wow.

**Craig:** Wow. Crazy.

**Rebel:** Yeah.

**John:** I was on a panel during Big Fish and there was — there were people on the panel were the — The Lord of the Rings movie was out that time. And I think it was Fran Walsh who was saying — she was trying to explain Tall Poppy Syndrome and she summed it up as this, is that she called her dad saying, like, “Hey, dad, guess what? I got nominated for an Oscar.” And he’s, like, “Oh, you won’t win.”

**Rebel:** Yeah. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] And she was like, you know, basically she’s like — don’t let that go to your head. You won’t win.

**Rebel:** It’s like my family never believed I was an actress until I was in American movies. And they came to, like, the premiere of Bridesmaids and they’re like, “Oh, you are actually, like, good. Oh, yeah, oh, yeah.” [laughs]

**Craig:** Do they still kind of wonder about that or have they gotten used to the idea that you’re —

**Rebel:** I’m trying to change it. Like, I’m trying to say to people and the young people in Australia like, if you work hard and have a dream and you should go for it. You shouldn’t just try to be like the average Joe. If you have a talent for something, whether that’s sports or the arts or —

**Craig:** Yeah.

**Rebel:** You know, something scientific. Like I can’t give a science reference.

**Craig:** Just like you.

**Rebel:** Yeah. You should try hard and try to, like, be the best whereas it’s really frowned upon in Australia to be like exceptional in your field. Yeah.

**Craig:** We do have a little bit of the opposite problem here which is the Special Snowflake Syndrome where —

**Rebel:** Oh, yeah.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Everyone thinks their kid is the one, you know.

**Rebel:** Yeah.

**Craig:** That finally humanity has reached its apex with my child, you know, Francine or —

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Caden or —

**John:** Well, some of the Tall Poppy Thing may just be, like, it’s almost like it’s a big small town. And so like because everyone’s from this little small town, if anyone gets to be too big in that small town, you’re like, wait, wait, hold it a second and then they cut you down.

**Rebel:** But weirdly, though, when you do make it in America, the tide does turn and they’re like, “Oh, yeah, they were good.”

**John:** Yeah, you’re now an ambassador for —

**Rebel:** Yeah, and then you —

**Craig:** There’s a lot of, like, national self-esteem issues going on there.

**Rebel:** Yeah, I know. I don’t know. It’s weird. Maybe because we’re all criminals or kind of like descendants.

**Craig:** No, that’s the best part of you guys. It is the best part.

And that was our discussion with Rebel Wilson. Well, that was our clean discussion with Rebel Wilson. As you could tell, we had a great time with her. She’s fantastic and I think, honestly, the day that we spoke with her, some news came out about this other move. She’s working constantly and that’s terrific. And obviously, she has Pitch Perfect 2 coming out and she was just great.

And, you know, it’s funny. Actors who are also writers, there’s just something about them. I’ve always found it easier to connect with them on some level. There’s something about, you know, a fellow writer. There’s that weird hundredth monkey connection that you have with them. So it was a great time. You know, she’s an actual fan of the show, so I hope we get her back one day.

**John:** That would be nice

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And then our second guest was Dan Savage. And so he was sort of a fantasy guest and I wasn’t quite sure how we were going to track him down. And so I followed him on Twitter hoping that he would get back to me. Then finally it’s like, you know what, I’ll just shoot him an email at his Savage Love thing. And within half an hour, I got an answer back saying he’d love to be on the show.

So it was great to have him come in and talk with us. So a lot of what we talked about is really dirty and involves anal sex, but the stuff that doesn’t involve anal sex is actually really fascinating as well. So I asked him what he’d like to see movies and TV do more to portray sex in a positive way but also in a realistic way. So he had some great ideas about that. So I asked Dan what kinds of things he would like to see film and television portray in terms of sex.

Are there things that you as a sex advice columnist would love to see our movies and television shows doing more of to communicate the sexuality of the human race?

**Dan Savage:** Fewer simultaneous orgasms would be nice. A little bit more awkwardness around the edges, like you catch a groove but somehow, you know, it takes a moment, particularly for two people who’ve never had sex before, to find that groove, less explosive/impulsive sex.

**Craig:** Right.

**Dan:** That often gets held up and elevated as the most legitimate and hottest kind of sex is, or, you know, when it’s natural. It wasn’t planned for. It wasn’t specifically negotiated. It just kind of broke out like some sort of sudden thunderstorm, which is not the way most sex happens. Sex is negotiated and talked about and eased into.

And I guess you can’t really show that on television but it would be helpful to see more of that.

**Craig:** I mean, part of the problem that we face — this is my big question for you, and not only as a sex columnist but also now somebody who’s dipping your toes into the creation of content on television and let’s include movies here, too. Part of the problem that we face as content creators is that movies and television are typically depicting extraordinary circumstances. That’s why they’re on television or movies.

So, look, I’ve been married for — I’m coming up on my 19th year. So I have married sex. I know what that’s like. I also know that it’s — while there are some circumstances like, for instance, the show Togetherness on HBO now, sort of revels in that and revels in a little bit of the awkwardness or the idea of getting a little bored. Movies about extraordinary events like murder, explosions [laughs], car chases and all the other stuff, I guess what I’m getting at is do movies have a responsibility to at least acknowledge that this kind of sex is not normal and that if it’s not this kind of sex, that’s okay too?

**Dan:** I don’t think it’s their responsibility to acknowledge. It’s just there’s so much humor and pathos that goes unexplored and unmined if that kind of sudden explosive, passionate sex is the only kind that’s ever represented.

**Craig:** Right.

**Dan:** It’s not that you have a duty to instruct your audience in the way sex works most of the time. Most audiences are smart enough to know that reality doesn’t bear much relationship, doesn’t, you know, resemble an action film because they have the daily-lived reality. And, you know, most people have a sex life of their own. They know that the sex they see in the movies isn’t necessarily the sex that you have.

It’s almost like filmmakers and storytellers are selling themselves short, are cheating themselves out of potential interesting storylines or moments or beats or comedy or laughs.

**Craig:** Right.

**Dan:** They revert to this kind of kabuki sex, these rituals, the stylized performance of sex as opposed to, you know, sex people actually have.

**Craig:** I’m with you on that one.

**John:** Well, the sex that people have, they have their own personal experience but they also get experience from watching mainstream movies and television shows and from watching porn. And they both set these really strange expectations about what it’s supposed to be like. I just feel like if I were a teenager growing up today, I would have the access to so much porn online and then if I would look at sort of the movies in theaters, there’s almost no sex at all.

I remember one of the very important moments for me sexually growing up was the sex scene in Terminator which is the first R-rated movie I got — my brother snuck me into. And to see like the Michael Biehn and Linda Hamilton sex scene was incredibly impactful for me. And I wonder if today’s kids are going to get that kind of, I don’t know, romantic big screen movie version of sex in their films.

**Dan:** I want someone to make the Terminator movie, you know, or maybe slash fiction with Michael Biehn and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

**Craig:** I think that’s probably actually what would have happened. [laughs]I think that does sound realer to me frankly.

**Dan:** Yeah, you know, we debate like the representations of romance and sex in film. And maybe we attach too importance to it because so many kids are getting their sex educations, tragically, from porn. And it does, for many, set their expectations around what sex is going to be and look like or what may be expected of them sexually which can create a lot of anxiety, and not just in girls but also boys.

You know, we need porn to be more realistic. We also need, you know, education about porn that gets out in front of porn because we’re not going to be able to stem the tide or put that genie back in the bottle. The Internet is here forever, so we need to talk to kids about porn is really kabuki sex, like I was just calling movie porn kabuki sex.

Porn is totally kabuki sex. It’s highly stylized, ritualized. And kids need to be told that. And that’s very freeing once you hear that because then you don’t watch porn thinking holy crap, is that my future.

**Craig:** [laughs] Right, right.

**John:** Because our podcast is largely aimed at screenwriters and people who are interested in screenwriting, I want to look at sort of our heroes and the way that I feel like our modern heroes, especially on the big screen, have stopped becoming sexual creatures. And maybe it’s the PG-13-ification of our movies and I worry that our heroes that we’re sort of building now sort of don’t get to do that anymore.

Instead, they’re sort of why heroes — it’s Harry Potter who’s lovely but he’s sort of pre-sexual. Even the characters in The Hunger Games, they’re beautiful but they’re not actually sexual. And I wonder if we’re creating a generation that doesn’t have a sense of — that it’s okay to be sexual and still be the hero, be the good person.

**Dan:** Oh, my god. Yeah. Well, think of all the, you know, James Bond movies where there were always interludes for Bond just, you know, to bang the Bond girl. Does that still happen? I haven’t seen a James Bond movie —

**Craig:** It does.

**John:** It’s the exception, sort of.

**Craig:** Yeah. But, I mean, I know what John’s saying that there is, in a weird way — it’s funny like popular music has become hypersexualized for teen, s but movies have hyposexualized in part because I think that there’s this panic. I mean, remember, Hollywood once made — what was the movie with Tatum O’Neal and Kristy McNichol where — movies about 12-year-old, 13-year-old girls having sex.

Hollywood used to do this, you know, Louis Malle made a movie where Brooke Shields was nude and she was, like, 11. And then obviously that doesn’t fit the mores of our time now but there does seem to be kind of almost a panic over —

**Dan:** And let’s throw out Christopher Atkins in the Blue Lagoon, you know, the boy in there, too.

**John:** Oh, lovely.

**Craig:** We couldn’t do that today, not in a million years.

**Dan:** Yeah. Well, we’re paranoid about young people’s sexuality. You know, I haven’t really thought about this but off the top of my head, maybe it’s a reaction to the AIDS epidemic that’s still sort of broiling through the culture. This attitude that sexual expression outside of the context to committed relationship is not okay.

And so when I think about like — I’m still thinking about the sex I’ve seen in movies, it’s kind of limited to romcoms or relationships that are established which aren’t, you know, very sexy. Sex in an established relationship is considered routine and not remarkable, not an extraordinary event.

**Craig:** Correct.

**Dan:** Film-worthy. And so we get these heroes who don’t have time for sex or aren’t interested in sex.

**John:** I just think there are small exceptions like the Tony Stark character in Iron Man. You feel like he has sex with Gwyneth Paltrow. That’s a thing that happens and they set up other girls in his life. But he’s sort of a bad boy for having sex.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And if you look at the other characters in the Marvel universe, they don’t have sex basically.

**Dan:** I don’t go see those movies. Does Thor have sex?

**Craig:** I don’t think so because Thor is technically a Norse god and I think they make lightning — they make weather.

**John:** And Captain America is a boy scout.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Even Black Widow, I mean it’s Scarlett Johansson, so she’s inherently a sexual creature but they don’t actually use any of that as part of the story because it’s the PG -13 universe. It has to be able to sell toys and you don’t want to sexualize toys, I guess.

**Dan:** Spider-Man would be like the world’s greatest bondage top. Does he not have sex? I haven’t seen a Spider-Man movie either. I’m a terrible guest for your show. I don’t get to see a lot of —

**Craig:** No, it’s great. Spider-Man actually is a great example of what John’s talking about. He is a high school senior. He’s got this super hot girlfriend that’s totally in love with him. I think at one point they actually move in or live together, maybe even get married. I can’t — because there’s been a lot of them. But you get the feeling that all they do is kiss and then go to bed like Ricky and Lucy in separate beds.

I mean, there’s just no balls to that character. It’s all like Jesus-based heroism, like I am a pure person. I mean that’s part of the problem. A lot of these heroes that we put out there in movies are just retelling of the Jesus story. I am a pure person who will absorb the sin of the world around me, suffer for your sins, and then save the world through my resurrection.

**Dan:** It’s not compromised by desire.

**Craig:** Bingo. Bingo. And this is part of what goes on, I think, these days at least, in a lot of the narrative that we put out to kids.

**Dan:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Oh, you just August’d me. [laughs] You August’d me. Mm-hmm. Yup.

**Dan:** Okay.

**Craig:** [laughs] Exactly.

**Dan:** I can see the point. I see that. I see that.

**Craig:** Okay, period. [laughs]

**John:** And that was Dan Savage. So you can hear more from the Dan Savage and the Rebel Wilson parts in the Dirty Episode. That’s in the premium feed. So you can go to see Scriptnotes.net and sign up for that or you can also get to it through the app. Craig, it is time for our One Cool Things, our clean One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Yes, clean One Cool Things. So I have a One Cool Thing that’s, at least in theory, it’s a One Cool Thing although I haven’t actually gotten to use it yet. It’s called Be My Eyes. Have you heard of this app?

**John:** I have. And it is designed for people with vision impairment that people can help them out.

**Craig:** Yeah. So essentially, blind folks are really good at navigating their environment particularly people who have been blind their whole lives. I mean this is the world they know and they have, you know — obviously, there are challenges along the way but they’ve really adapted brilliantly. But then there are these weird little mundane things that would not occur to you and I as sighted people but they struggle with.

For instance, they’re at home, they go to their refrigerator, they take out a thing of milk, they can’t remember when they bought it, they cannot see the expiration date. It’s not in Braille on the carton. So this Be My Eyes thing is basically they can — they access it and somebody who’s sighted is on the other end of the app who goes, “Oh, yeah. Here, I’m here to help you.” And they go great. And they hold their phone up at the camera.

And they’re like, “Can you tell me when this milk expired?” And you — “Move your camera left, up. You’re good.” So it’s actually kind of amazing. Here’s [laughs] the problem. The problem is there are lot more sighted people than blind people. So currently on the Be My Eyes network, I’m looking at it right now, there are 9,000 blind people who are registered to use this service. And there are 107,000 sighted people who are, like, “Can I help, can I help?”

So I actually haven’t gotten any calls yet. You obviously can tune it to your language so the more languages you know, theoretically, the more likely it is that you’ll be able to help somebody. But there’ve been 24,500 instances of helpings. So —

**John:** Oh, that’s great.

**Craig:** I think it’s terrific. It’s such a smart idea. So anyway, if you are blind, just know I’m on the other end of this, like, super excited to tell you if your milk is okay.

**John:** [laughs] That’s great. My One Cool Thing this week is an interview with Alex Blumberg. And Alex Blumberg is the guy who runs StartUp Podcast and Reply All. He has this whole little podcast network. And I referred to them as a One Cool Thing a previous time.

But in this episode, he talks about how they are actually recording and how they’re actually putting together their shows. Because I had this perception that podcasts are sort of podcasts and there’s obviously a couple different kinds. There’s the podcast where it’s just somebody talking at you. There’s the podcast like Craig and I do which is two people talking at each other.

But the ones that they’re doing at Reply All and at StartUp are much more elaborate. They’re much more like a Serial in the sense that they’re put together and there’s bits of audio and there’s narration and I wondered how they did that. Well, it turns out they do it kind of the way we would do it is they script it. And so they have all their audio bits and then they write the script and they do a table read where they read from the script and then they play the audio — and they read from script and they play the audio and the people listen.

And then they give notes and they have to go back and do it again and again. And so it was just fascinating to see the process of how that kind of quality show is put together. So I recommend this interview where he talks about it but also listen to his shows because I think they’re just fantastic.

**Craig:** It’s kind of awesome that you and I don’t have to do that.

**John:** We don’t have to do any of that.

**Craig:** Yeah, we just roll.

**John:** Yeah. We fly by the seat of our pants.

**Craig:** That’s right. And you in particular are remarkably mellifluous. [laughs] And smooth of speech.

**John:** At least I sound smooth of speech once Matthew Chilelli has edited out all my stumblings which there were many of this episode.

**Craig:** If we have the sirens supercut, we need a supercut of you going [stumbles] I’ve lost the ability to speak. [laughs]

**John:** We’ll also put a link in the show next to this. There’s an episode of the Slate’s Culture Gabfest. We were guests on the Slate’s Culture Gabfest. They did one which is just their live raw feed before they edit themselves out. And so you hear Julie and Dana and Stephen talking. And when they mess up, they go — they’ll say like, “So I was down at the store and I — three, two, one, so I was down at the store and –” so when they screw up, they do a three, two, one to get into it.

And we don’t do that at all for Matthew. We just expect that he’ll somehow figure out how to make our sentences sound good.

**Craig:** If you put a little air in there, I mean you don’t need three, two, one.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Zach Galifianakis would do this thing that was remarkable. And it’s why literally when I watch Birdman, I’m, like, where was that Zach when we were shooting Hangover. He’s able to rattle off all this stuff brilliantly in perfect timing and these long takes. So we were shooting and, you know, if the line was something like “Well, I don’t know what you’re even talking about.” He would say it, “Why don’t — well, I don’t even know — well, I don’t even know–” and he would do like nine of those in a row. [laughs]. And you just sit there, like, what.

**John:** You realize, like, you know we can’t — we have to slip scissors in there somewhere.

**Craig:** Well, I mean he would restart every time, so it was okay. But it was just the way that he would progress — when you were a kid, did you read the comics?

**John:** I loved the comics.

**Craig:** I love the comics too. Annie was always the most frustrating comic because Annie would have this serialized story and it was three panels. So the first panel, something happens. Second panel, something happens. Third panel, oh, my gosh. Then the next day, they would essentially start with the second panel [laughs], you know, and do the third panel from yesterday.

And then you’d only really get one new bit of story information a day. And he would kind of progress that way through these lines. [laughs] He would only get one word further but he would just — and he would — it was — but then, you know, when he got it out, it was awesome.

**John:** Yeah. Did they ever figure out what happened to Annie’s eyes?

**Craig:** Oh, I think if you are an orphan, that’s —

**John:** Oh, that’s right. Orphans don’t get eyes.

**Craig:** Orphans don’t get pupils.

**John:** They have no parents and no pupils.

**Craig:** No parents, no pupils.

**John:** It’s a hard knocked life. That’s our show for this week. Our show is produced, as always, by Stuart Friedel. It’s edited by Matthew Chilelli who probably did the outro this week. I don’t know whose outro we’re going to use for this episode.

But if you have an outro you’d like us to use, you can send that to ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also a great place to send questions or insights about Oscar-nominated movies, like this producer did this time. You can follow us on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust, only @johnaugust, I have no other accounts.

So don’t follow anything else. No fake accounts. Craig is only @clmazin, no other accounts. I’m on Instagram too but it’s not really relevant to most of this, but I’m also @johnaugust on Instagram. You should subscribe to us on iTunes if you haven’t already. And while you’re there, you can download the Scriptnotes app which is now much, much better.
This week, you should also listen for the Dirty Show which will only go up in the premium feed, so it won’t be in the normal feed. And it’s just filthy. It’ll just melt your ears off. So don’t listen to it in the car with your kids because it’s just really bad and I swear.

**Craig:** Unless your kids already know a lot of this stuff.

**John:** Yeah, probably so. If your kids know a lot of this stuff, it’s probably fine.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** But, Craig, you know, we talk about just a lot of stuff and —

**Craig:** We get into it, people. We get in.

**John:** We go deep into Rebel Wilson’s fish basket, so.

**Craig:** [laughs] See, that’s the sort of thing that actually you can get away with on this show.

**John:** Yeah, totally.

**Craig:** We don’t have standards and practices. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] We have a lot of practices but very few standards.

**Craig:** We do Rebel Wilson’s fish basket, A, great band name, B, probably should be the title of the episode.

**John:** Yeah, it’s so good.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** All right. Craig, thank you very much. Have a wonderful week.

**Craig:** You too, John.

Links:

* The Dirty Episode will soon be available to premium subscribers on [scriptnotes.net](http://scriptnotes.net/) and on the newly-updated Scriptnotes app for [iOS](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scriptnotes/id739117984?mt=8) and [Android](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.johnaugust.android.scriptnotes&hl=en)
* Buffy the Vampire Slayer, S5E16, “The Body” on [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_%28Buffy_the_Vampire_Slayer%29) and [iTunes](https://itunes.apple.com/us/tv-season/buffy-vampire-slayer-season/id370695714)
* [Bronson Watermarker PDF](http://quoteunquoteapps.com/bronson/)
* Rebel Wilson on [IMDb](http://www.imdb.com/name/nm2313103/), [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebel_Wilson) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/rebelwilson)
* [Dan Savage](http://www.savagelovecast.com/) on [Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Savage) and [Twitter](https://twitter.com/fakedansavage)
* [Be My Eyes](http://www.bemyeyes.org/)
* Alex Blumberg on [How to Create a Blockbuster Podcast](http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/01/29/alex-blumberg/)
* [Slate’s Culture Gabfest raw, unfiltered, and unedited](http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/behind_the_scenes/2014/12/slate_s_culture_gabfest_raw_unfiltered_and_unedited.html)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes editor Matthew Chilelli ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2015/int-the-woods-night).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 181 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, it’s been a short week but a very busy week for both of us.

**Craig:** Yeah. I guess — I’ve been running around for sure. What have you been doing?

**John:** We’ve had just a lot of little things to take care of. And then I’m deep in writing this project. And so it’s sort of that crunch time where you’re trying to — you’re pushing through to the end. And so I’ve written the beginning, I’ve written the end, I’m writing towards the middle, which is how I love to write. But it’s just a lot of work.

**Craig:** It’s a lot of work. I was in the mode of writing, you know, I like the luxury of writing as I wish. Sometimes that doesn’t happen. Sometimes something emerges and suddenly you’re thrown into a cauldron and you’re given 2.5 weeks to do what you can on a different thing. And so that’s where I am right now.

There is a certain adrenaline to it, I guess.

**John:** There is. It’s also that thrill of knowing that you’re not just doing pie-in-the-sky what-ifs. It’s like this needs to happen. And so that urgency can force other people to make decisions and sometimes indecision is the death of quality.

**Craig:** It’s so true. And there is a certain thing that happens when you’re writing on something that’s actually happening while you’re writing it. You start talking to the line producer and suddenly the decisions you make have these ripples. So, there is this communication. It’s not quite as solitary as the typical writing process. I like that.

**John:** I like that, too. I was listening to another podcast, because there are other podcasts in the world besides our podcast.

**Craig:** What?

**John:** And on the most recent episode of StartUp they were talking about burnout. And the burnout they were talking about wasn’t that sort of long-term burnout. It was that you are sprinting as fast as you can and then you realize that you’re actually in the middle of a marathon. And sometimes writing can feel like that and that is a bad place when you hit that because, you know, what are you going to do?

And I feel like people who have meltdowns in television, that’s because they are sprinting and they realize like, oh my god, there is 22 episodes of this sprinting.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s hard for us to believe it because it doesn’t seem as objective as say getting a muscle cramp and just failing to continue to run. I mean, we all know what that feels like and it seems very mechanical and therefore acceptable to us.

Harder for us to understand that our brains have the same kind of thing going on, and we need to be aware of it, and we need to accept that we have certain limitations.

**John:** Yeah. So, on this episode we’re actually going to do a little of that clean up of stuff that could otherwise fall at the wayside. So, we have a lot of follow up and we have some questions that have been sitting in the inbox for awhile. So, I thought we would just plow through as much of this as we can. We’re going to knock out those — if this is a getting things done, you’d be knocking out those next actions and those sort of projects that have been unfulfilled for too long.

So, it’s going to be a smorgasbord of miscellaneous screenwriting topics this week.

**Craig:** Smorgasbord.

**John:** So, one of the things that’s been dangling for awhile on this podcast has been this dirty episode. So, we have long promised that if we hit a thousand paid subscribers on our premium feed at scriptnotes.net we would do a dirty episode which is just filthy and would be not-safe-for-work or for the kids or for in the car when the kids are in the car.

**Craig:** Yeah. Or for anyone really at any point.

**John:** It’s something that will melt your ears. And we’re so excited that next week we’re going to record that episode. So, hooray.

**Craig:** Yes. And are we allowed to say who are special guests will be?

**John:** I don’t think we should say who are special guests are just in case something goes horribly wrong.

**Craig:** Something goes horribly wrong. Well, once we record it, will there be some time between the recoding of it and the release so that we can tell people who is going to be on it and maybe then they might be motivated, you see, to become premium subscribers.

**John:** You are a clever man. Craig, you really do have a business acumen to this thing which you deny, but you do have a business acumen. I think what we should probably do is we’re going to have a normal episode in that week that we release the episode, but we’ll have little snippets from the big thing there.

**Craig:** Ooh.

**John:** So, we’ll have some safe-for-work snippets in that episode, but for the full dirty thing you’re going to have to tune in.

**Craig:** I mean, I know, look, I know who we’re going to have on the show.

**John:** I’m so excited. So, last week on the show we had Aline Brosh McKenna on and one of the things we talked about was what it means when you call somebody a friend in Hollywood. Like, we refer to someone as like, “Oh yeah, he’s a friend.” But is he really a friend?

And so we had some follow up form Junk Mail 8720. I may have gotten the numbers wrong. 8230, I apologize.

**Craig:** Yeah, don’t confuse him with Junk Mail 8720.

**John:** 8720 is just a jerk. “What you guys described on the most recent Scriptnotes is exactly what the term fond acquaintances was invented for.”

**Craig:** Is it?

**John:** I don’t know hear anyone saying fond acquaintances. But that’s really what we kind of mean. It’s a person I know and I really like, but I can’t necessarily call them a friend.

**Craig:** Yeah. Fond acquaintance, even that sounds too…

**John:** Yeah. It sounds like something Oscar Wilde would say.

**Craig:** Yeah. And he would be intimating something. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] Well he’s a fond acquaintance.

**Craig:** Yes. Yes.

**John:** But part of the reason I included Junk Mail’s tweet is that he spells Scriptnotes capital S capital N. ScriptNotes, which was named by Craig Mazin. We never talked about the origin of the show, but you picked the name.

**Craig:** I did. It’s true.

**John:** And Scriptnotes is — it’s all one word. And it’s capitalized S. Nothing else is capitalized.

**Craig:** I get why people would want to make it that way. And, you know, I don’t get too upset about it. But I can see that you would definitely get upset about it. [laughs]

**John:** I get a little upset about it because I think proper capitalization is really, really important. And to do this sort of camel case thing which is what you call that when you’re coding, there’s a good argument for doing camel case when you’re joining two words together to make it clear what’s actually happening there. But like Scriptnotes as one word, it makes a lot of sense.

**Craig:** Listen, I back you, as you know, 100 percent. So, if this is something that you feel strongly about, then I feel strongly about it.

**John:** Thank you very much.

**Craig:** You’re welcome.

**John:** Now, the episode before that episode was the conflict episode. And that was the one where we talked all about conflict and we had our little staged scene that made people really uncomfortable, including one of our guests.

**Craig:** Yeah, a lot of people bought it. They actually bought our acting.

**John:** So, Steve in Los Angeles wrote, “So, in the conflict episode, one of you mentioned that in the first improv class you learn yes-and. But a screenwriter should think in terms of yes-but so the scene can build conflict. This is true, but in your 20th improv class you learn that the heart of yes-and is agreeing on what the actual conflict is and then running with it together so you can just as well say no while agreeing to say yes to the situation you’ve both agreed upon.

“If someone has a gun and they say they’re going to shoot you, you can say, ‘No, don’t shoot me. I promise I’ll stop sleeping with your wife.’ You have said no, but you have both agreed on what the situation is and what the conflict is: husband dude sleeping with wife. In essence, most really good improv is actually yes-but. Yes, you have a gun, but no, I don’t want you to shoot me. Or even, no-and.”

**Craig:** Yeah. Sure.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** I’m okay with that. I mean, yes-and, yes-but, no-but, no-and. All of that is fine to me, honestly. The only thing that I think is the death of conflict is okay. I mean, in other words agreeing is —

**John:** Yeah. A tacit agreement without any sort of further pushing on. And actually another listener wrote in with sort of a follow up to that. “Conflict is a prerequisite for comedy. In all comedy there is conflict between a grounded point of view, often the straight man or straight woman, and a comedic one which is say the one that is unexpected. The conflict can exist between two characters or between a character and the world around here.

“Yes-and applies to all screenwriting though in the sense that you cannot just blindly throw ideas at a scene and expect it to be coherent and successful. Just as in improvisation, you are striving for unity, not just crafting a vessel to hold all the funny lines and experiences.”

**Craig:** Why is Seth lecturing us? [laughs] I mean, I like what he’s saying, but, hey, Seth is taking a little bit of a tone here.

**John:** Well, perhaps he is. But I think he wanted to sort of clarify, because I cut out the earlier paragraphs which were basically the same as the previous one. Basically saying that, yes, improv does teach you yes-and, but implicit in that yes-and is the sense that there should be some conflict to sort of push you to the next thing.

And all comedy is really structured on the sense of like two people want different things or disagreeing about sort of the nature of the situation they’re in, while accepting the basic premise of a situation.

**Craig:** Which is what I just did to Seth.

**John:** You really did.

**Craig:** Yeah. I just started —

**John:** You created conflict.

**Craig:** Well, because it’s funner. It’s more fun. It’s funnerer.

**John:** Yeah, pot-stirring.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, on the blog this past week I did a post about reading scripts on the Kindle and which had actually been a follow up to a much earlier post which when I got the very first Kindle, I got the original Kindle, people had naturally asked me like, oh, is it good for reading scripts. And the answer is, no, it’s terrible for reading scripts because it doesn’t really want to be a script reader.

The blog post I will link to and you can see what I said about the follow up which is basically like a Kindle is still a terrible thing to read a script on. And so people wrote back with some suggestions, other topics, and ways to sort of do things. But, Craig, when I say Kindle, what do you think about?

**Craig:** I think about the Amazon device that is gray.

**John:** Yeah. So, there are really two kinds of Kindles and I only think about Kindle as being the e-ink reader, the one that’s sort of like the original Kindle, the modern version, the original one. But, of course, there is also the tablet, the Kindle Fire. So, if you have that Kindle Fire thing, it’s probably fine. It’s probably fine for reading scripts because you can get a PDF on there and it’s going to be okay. It’s going to be a small screen, but it’s going to be okay.

I was really talking about as an e-ink reader, which is sort of the best way to read a book, the Kindle still is not a very good way to read a script. There are ways to do it. You can turn it sideways and sort of read half a page, kind of.

**Craig:** Nah.

**John:** You can send things through Fade In, but it’s just not so good.

**Craig:** I mean, I read scripts on my iPad and on my computer, but I don’t — you know, actually sometimes if I get a script in PDF I will open it in iBooks, which is a perfectly fine PDF reader on the iPad. Yeah.

**John:** Yeah. And so starting today you can actually read it on Weekend Read on your iPad.

**Craig:** I know. I got to download that.

**John:** Because we have the beta version of Weekend Read.

**Craig:** Finally.

**John:** Now for your iPad. So, Weekend Read is the app that we make for the iPhone for reading scripts, and it’s really good for the iPhone, but it didn’t work on the iPad well. The new version, which is in beta right now, works on the iPad and has iCloud sync and stuff. So, there will be a link in the show notes if you want to sign up for the beta on that. We’re probably weeks or months away from putting it in the App Store, but it’s good.

And, Craig, you get a preview.

**Craig:** Well, I mean, this is what I’ve been waiting for. This is the thing for me.

**John:** Yeah. Hopefully you’ll love it.

**Craig:** I feel like you made it for me. [laughs]

**John:** We made it just for Craig. So, Craig Mazin, Weekend Read.

**Craig:** Aw, thanks.

**John:** But Aline uses it. Rian Johnson uses it. Kelly Marcel uses it. You’re basically the only screenwriter I know who doesn’t use Weekend Read.

**Craig:** Well, I don’t like reading scripts on my phone, but I do love reading scripts on my iPad. And, you know, I still feel that I’m somewhat representative of a community, a community of what we would call quasi-luddites.

**John:** Okay.

**Craig:** Yeah. We’re technologically advanced. We just don’t like some technology.

**John:** Exactly. So, you drive your Tesla to poke fun at other people’s technology.

**Craig:** Yeah, man. Sounds like a great day.

**John:** Continuing follow up, James writes, “In episode 178, there was an excellent Three Page Challenge called Going Om.” I remember that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And so that was the one that started with the guy whose wife died. He wakes up in the morning and the guy’s wife is dead.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so James goes on to write, “However, as a former EMT I must point out that ambulances do not transport the dead. If a person is found to be deceased, then the police and the coroner, etc, take responsibility for the body. The reason is so that we don’t divert our emergency personnel away from people who could potentially be saved.

“I know the body bag in the ambulance makes for a cool visual, but it just isn’t done. And don’t me started on the whole ‘he’s gone, flat-line, shock him thing.’ You never ever defibrillate flat line. That is called asystole.”

**Craig:** Asystole.

**John:** Asystole? Thank you, Dr. Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** You’re welcome.

**John:** “It means absence of cardiac electrical activity. You can shock disorganized rhythms, such as ventricular defibrillation, or ventricular tachycardia, because defibrillation is meant to reset the chaotic electrical activity in the heart in an organized rhythm, just generalizing a coordinated heartbeat to pump blood.

“If no electrical activity is present to begin with, then you can shock all you want, but nothing will happen.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So here is why I stumbled through all those words is that I think it actually matters. I think I’ve seen both of those things so often in film and television and apparently they are not actually accurate.

**Craig:** No, they’re not. And doctors and lawyers have long since given up caring. I mean, I love that James still cares. I think that’s terrific. However, if you continue to care about this, James, you’re going to lose your mind. Because movies and television are full of medical and legal dramas that consistently trample on what is real all the time.

You know, it’s one of those things where it’s drama. I mean, listen, it’s a bad scene to have an ambulance show up, walk into a room, find a dead body and go, “Right. Well we’re going now. But in about 25 minutes somebody from the coroner’s office will show up.” We don’t have time for that.

**John:** See, here is where I disagree. And part of why I disagree is I think there is something really potentially rewarding about looking at sort of what is the standard procedures in those situations. Because once you know what the real standard procedure is, you can find something dramatic.

In the thing you just described, that’s a cool moment I’ve never seen before. And so if you were one of the first movies that sort of shows that I’m like, oh, wow, that’s so weird. If you were that guy, that husband who lost his wife, and the people show up and are like, “Oh no, that’s not us. We got to go.” And then suddenly you’re just alone again with the body. That’s really cool.

**Craig:** If it fits the tone of the movie, I totally agree. If it fits the tone of the show, I totally agree. In fact, that would fit into the three pages of Going Om that we read. I think it would be really cool.

**John:** I think it would be really cool.

**Craig:** Yeah, but in a lot of things it’s like, eh…

**John:** So I’m just pushing towards, as a screenwriter, always investigate what the real situation is. You’re not bound to that real situation, but look for situations where there is something that is sort of often glossed over in other films and in other television things where you can actually really zoom in.

So, both of these things I’m talking about, sort of standard procedures and magnified, those are actually both cards in Writer Emergency Pack which we sent out 8,000 of those packs. And I think they’re actually really rewarding. Because when you get sort of stuck on something, sometimes it can be really good to just sort of just like focus in on some little detail that would otherwise go unnoticed.

**Craig:** And, frankly, if there is one service that James is doing to everyone out there, it’s to eliminate defibrillation from movies and television because I can’t think of anything more cliché. It may be the most cliché thing possible. Someone yelling clear, and then going ka-tunk.

**John:** Ka-tunk. You know, I have a thing in what I’m writing right now, like literally the scene that I’m working on right now where a person comes across someone who has recently died and has no sense of sort of what has actually happened. But his training is as a lifeguard, so he just kicks into sort of lifeguard mode and starts doing CPR. Is that realistic?

I think it’s realistic for that character to want to try to do something, and so it makes for a good scene. And thinking about it from his point of view, it seems to fit well with the story.

**Craig:** I mean, CPR is totally fine. I mean, hopefully your character doesn’t go, “Come on, breath dammit.”

**John:** Oh lord.

**Craig:** [laughs] And then someone else goes, “Let it go. She’s gone.”

**John:** So, one of the things I need to investigate this week is when do you, if you’re a police detective, when do you swab a person’s hands for bloodstains, DNA evidence? At what point do you say like, “Oh, you know what? This might be a murder,” and do you start swabbing the guy’s hands? And that’s a thing I’ll be researching this next week.

**Craig:** You know, it’s funny. I’ve been doing a little bit of research on that myself just because I’m writing a murder mystery.

**John:** Or you’re planning to kill somebody.

**Craig:** And also planning to kill a number of people. But I had the benefit of a — I mean, the fun of a very small town police officer who is mostly just giving out traffic tickets, now suddenly in charge of a murder investigation. So, he just gets things wrong, which is kind of fun.

**John:** Always the best.

**Craig:** I get the benefit of having him not actually follow protocol. He makes a number of mistakes. In fact, he finds a guy dead. He presumes it’s a heart attack. He talks to the person who actually discovered the body. He doesn’t ask them any questions. Then a reporter shows up and the reporter says, “Well, you should probably just take a look around. Like for instance there’s his trailer that he lives in.” So the police offer goes, “Eh, you know, you’re probably right. I should probably look in there.” And he is about to open the door and the reporter says, “Eh, fingerprints.”

“Well, yeah, okay.” He’s just terrible at this. So, I get to actually break the rules constantly.

**John:** That’s fun.

**Craig:** But the other part then that’s nice is that he starts to do a little research, because he starts to feel embarrassed, and he actually grows into the role of being, and he figures it out. He does.

**John:** Great. And this is your main character?

**Craig:** Well, my main character is a sheep. [laughs] But he’s —

**John:** It’s always more challenging that way.

**Craig:** But this is a human. The sheep is brilliant.

**John:** That’s good. Nice. On the topic of figuring out specifically how things are supposed to be done and how they would be done in the real world, we had a question from Tao who writes in, this is in reference to Craig’s earlier post about the Hollywood Science Exchange. “Over the last few years I’ve gotten very involved in the world of crypto currency, such as bitcoin. This has happened because I solve unusual problems for clients, often by recruiting highly specialized talent or implementing creative out-of-the-box solutions.

“My question is how would somebody like me go on to become a resource for a specialized field in the Hollywood creative community?”

So, he’s asking basically I’m a guy who knows how this thing works, how do I let people know that I know how this thing works?

**Craig:** I actually don’t know. I remember that the Writers Guild used to publish a list of available research resources to screenwriters on the back page of Written By magazine, which is the union publication. Admittedly, I don’t read Written By very carefully. So, I don’t know if they still do that or not. But if you wanted to become a go-to resource for the Hollywood creative community, you might start by calling the Writers Guild, and offering your name as a reference.

There is probably a place on the website where that would go. You have to be willing to do it for free.

**John:** Yeah. You should be.

**Craig:** Yeah. That’s what I would do.

**John:** So, I think that’s a good suggestion. I would also say I don’t know the outer limits of what the Hollywood Science Exchange talks about, but what you’re doing is sort of science, so it might be applicable.

I would also say if I was looking for information about crypto bitcoin stuff, I would do a Google search. So, if you set up a website for yourself that says like this is me, this is what I do, I’m happy to consult on story issues for people who want to do that kind of stuff, that might show up in search engines and help you there.

I would also consider doing like a Reddit thread on that. I am a crypto currency expert. Ask me anything. All that kind of stuff would just get you some exposure. And it’s that kind of exposure online that will probably lead some screenwriters to your door.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Cool. Craig, we now have to discuss the Peter Bart article.

**Craig:** Oh. My. God.

**John:** Okay, you’ve got to set it up.

**Craig:** Okay. So, in all honesty a lot of people, I saw this on my own. And then a lot of people sent it to me and I think people now look at me as some sort of bear that they can poke and make dance for them, a dance of rage.

Actually, I couldn’t even get angry at this because it’s too stupid to arouse anger. It is phenomenally dumb. So, Peter Bart, you know, is a Hollywood institution of a sort. I believe he used to run Paramount back in the day. Am I right about that?

**John:** That sounds right. But I mostly know him as running Variety. Back when I first started here, he was the editor of Variety I believe.

**Craig:** That’s right. So, he at some point transitioned to journalism and in the heyday of Variety when people actually paid hundreds of dollars a year for a subscription because there wasn’t the internet, so powerful guy.

He wrote this editorial called Are Screenwriters Becoming Obsolete in Hollywood? And if he had thought it through, the editorial would have been one word. No. And then he would have gone about his day. But he didn’t think it through. Instead, he engaged in the strangest argument. He started to talk about how screenwriters are rarely if ever mentioned by other people in acceptance speeches for awards. What in god’s name does that have to do with screenwriters being obsolete in Hollywood? I mean, who cares if they mentioned your name?

I mean, I know, look, it would be nice if everybody gave us the public credit we deserve, but that hardly indicates the obsolescence of the job. It was just — he opened with one of the dumbest arguments I can fathom.

**John:** Yeah. It was an incredibly frustrating article/editorial. And it’s sort of like paragraphs that were basically strung together at random, I think. There was like the little machine that just spits them out as it occurred to him.

So, it started with the headline. Obviously he doesn’t necessarily write the headlines, but Betteridge’s law of headlines applies, which is basically any headline that ends with a question mark can always be answered no.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s actually accurate. Like screenwriters are not obsolete, but he’s making this weird case and he basically ends up — I think he kind of wants to celebrate screenwriters and throw them under the bus at the same time. It’s just a bizarre thing.

I want to read just a little snippet from here because it’s just annoying and offensive.

So, he’s talking about how omission of names of screenwriters. “Such omissions have become increasingly apparent lately, since more and more films have either been written by the director or perhaps not written at all.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** “I’m convinced that no director named Anderson has ever hired a writer.” So, we’re going to pause here. So, director’s named Anderson, so he must be talking about Wes Anderson.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And Paul Thomas Anderson.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** But they’re both writers and their both really good writers.

**Craig:** Yeah. They don’t need to hire a writer. They are writers.

**John:** Plus, Wes Anderson writes with somebody else, so that’s just crazy talk.

**Craig:** Right. Exactly.

**John:** “Further, Birdman, with all its frenetic energy, plays like it was created scene-by-scene by its hyper-caffeinated cast.”

**Craig:** Wow.

**John:** “The director…” Okay. Blah. Blah. I want to say blah. First off, there’s a bunch of screenwriters credited for Birdman, like more than you would normally get for a WGA credit. But, that thing was like choreographed within precise half breaths.

**Craig:** Was he drunk when he saw the movie? I mean, the whole thing about Birdman is that it’s designed to be as if it’s one long take. Obviously it’s not one long take, but the chunks that are knitted together are much longer in camera than we are accustomed to. There’s maybe, I don’t know, 20 edits in the film total. So, of course, the last thing in the world it could be is created scene-by-scene by its cast. That’s a mentally ill statement. I don’t know how he could have arrived at it.

And, frankly, what follows in the parenthetical is even weirder. He says, “(the director, Alejandro G. Inarritu, takes screenplay credit along with three other scribes, including two friends).” First of all, what does mean take screenplay credit like, oh, I’ll just have this. No, screenplay credit is granted. And what is it like, “along with three other scribes, including two friends.” Oh, they’re not really writes. La, la. This is the worst.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s the worst. You know, and then he takes swipes at Interstellar. “It would have been a far more satisfying film,” he says, “had a talented writer worked on its dialogue and plot,” because Chris Nolan and his brother I guess are not talented writers. Either way, what in god’s name does this have to do with the obsolescence or the putative obsolescence of screenwriters?

Now, he’s just complaining about scripts he doesn’t like.

**John:** Yeah. And so when you say like oh now he’s going to talk about back in the old days of the studio system…

**Craig:** Here we go.

**John:** Yeah, he goes and talks about the old days of the studio system.

**Craig:** There we go.

**John:** And then like the unproduced scripts written for mistresses, I’m just like, that was better?

**Craig:** Maddening. So, what he yearns for, the days of Nunnally Johnson and Dalton Trumbo “who labored in the old studio writers buildings.” Yes, where they were underpaid, and abused, and occasionally put on a black list. “I even read unproduced scripts written by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald.” Yeah, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a lot of screenplays. He was drunk half the time. A bunch of those are terrible. He actually — the best work that he did about screenwriting are his Pat Hobby books, where F. Scott Fitzgerald invents a down on his luck screenwriter. That stuff is great.

He says, “It was clear why they were never made, but they deserved to be published.” What?

**John:** What are you talking about? What editorial are we in now?

**Craig:** Exactly. Now we’re in an editorial where we’re trying to fix the crimes of the ’40s? And then, of course, this editorial, this bizarre romp through disconnected and incorrect utterings burps forth a reference to his late friend Roddy McDowell.

**John:** Which is nice, too. The other recent thing he steps all over, which I think is shameful, is Guardians of the Galaxy, which was terrific. And so he’s claiming its plotlessness, it’s like, yeah, you know what, the plot was a little bit hard to follow. But you look at sort of what the characters do in that story, and it was terrific. And so it’s just grump old man not happy with things.

**Craig:** I know.

**John:** Get off my lawn.

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s such an old man yelling at clouds. I mean, he says, “It’s apparent in the trend toward what some critics call the ‘post-plot’ movie. Guardians of the Galaxy is a prime example of a movie that offered great shtick and a wisecracking raccoon.” Because, you know, there are lot of movies that offer that, but this one is a prime example of it. “But no true narrative.”

No, there’s clearly a narrative in Guardians of the Galaxy. The fact that Kenneth Turan couldn’t follow it doesn’t mean it’s not there. Because you know what? My son could follow it. All it means is that Kenneth Turan couldn’t follow it. And maybe Peter Bart can’t follow it. And that’s fine. But this is maddening. The thing about this editorial that’s so strange is not that it’s making an argument that screenwriters are becoming obsolete in Hollywood, because it doesn’t. it literally makes no arguments.

It’s embarrassing because it’s so poorly written. It’s an editorial about writing that in and of itself is in desperate need of a rewrite.

**John:** Yeah. I’d also point out that the WGA awards which are actually nomination by the screenwriters themselves include three of the films that he’s singling out as being exemplary of the end of screenwriters. So, Boyhood is a nominee. Grand Budapest Hotel is a nominee. And Guardians of the Galaxy is a nominee.

**Craig:** Right. He swipes at all of them. He says, “I admired Boyhood, but again, it plays as if the actors year after year inventing scenes as they slowly age.” You know, I have to say if the screenwriter and the director do their job really, really well, it should seem like the actors are actually just doing this for real. That’s what we do. That’s our job. If it seems like it’s written, then we haven’t done our job well, Peter.

**John:** Peter.

**Craig:** Peter.

**John:** Grumble. All right, let’s move on to new stuff.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** So, we got some questions in the mailbag and some of them were stacking up and some of them are new, but let’s get through as many as we can.

**Craig:** Great.

**John:** So, Evan in Philadelphia writes, “The script I’m working on focuses on a female team of characters.” Oh, no, he’s writing Ghostbusters. “Four of them on a team. What I’m getting hung up on is now that we’re in act two and the team has coalesced is I don’t know how to refer to them in action. Do I use the team? All of them? Do I name them individually every time? Bea, Betty, Rue, and Estelle charge down the stairs. Do I assume that they all move from one scene to the next if it’s continuous action? It’s an action-thriller, so I’m trying to make sure these characters are all responding and interesting in separate ways to the story, pressures on them, but also work as a unit.”

So, what he’s talking about is such a good thing, because it’s something that actually genuinely happens a lot which is you’ve moved from one scene to another scene and you have to kind of remind everybody who is in the scene. And what do you use as the collective noun for the heroes, the group, the gang?

Like the scene I’m writing this evening, I had to refer to the guys, it’s like, ah…

**Craig:** I know, it’s rough. Well, he’s got a little bit of a gift here because he’s writing an action-thriller, so yeah, they should have — you can give them a name. And it doesn’t have to be a name that’s actually announced in the movie itself. But if you want to call them, you know, when they come together, now you can say something like Bea, Betty, Rue and Estelle, The Squad. You know, you can say that The Squad charge down the stairs. At some point call out what you’re going to referring to them as.

Like the way in legal documents there will be a long name and then they’ll put the short name in parenthesis. And then you can call them The Squad from there on out and we’ll get it, you know, the reader will get it.

**John:** I find myself leaning on trio a lot. If there are three characters, I fall back to trio. Maybe every three paragraphs you’re allowed to say trio and then it becomes annoying. But if it’s clear that all three of them are doing the same thing and then other times maybe that’s a reason to look for individual actions that individual people can take. Because if they’re doing things as a group the whole time through, that can be annoying.

And then I would also just say let your pronouns do some of the work for you. So, if it’s clear who we’re talking about, they can be they. And them can be them. And let that be a useful shorthand for what we have to do.

But, I feel you. This is a real thing that’s kind of annoying.

**Craig:** It is. I have to say though that I think when Todd and I were writing The Hangover sequels, we didn’t ever refer to the guys as The Guys. It was always their names. And we would say Phil, Alan, and Stu cross the street. It helped actually that their names were short.

**John:** For sure.

**Craig:** But, you know, people didn’t really seem to get name fatigue. And when I would read through it I didn’t get name fatigue. And in a way it kept the faces in my head more than say something like The Team, or The Unit, or The Squad, which starts to feel a little impersonal as if there is no separation there, you know?

**John:** Yeah. And sometimes you can start a sentence with one of the characters who is doing the primary action and the other two are following behind. If you’re coming into a scene and somebody hands off something to somebody, there are ways you can sort of use their names that aren’t just a list. And that can be useful, too.

**Craig:** Yeah, like if Betty catches the signal and then Betty says, “Let’s go.” She starts moving towards the signal. The others follow.

**John:** Others is a good collective.

**Craig:** The others is very useful.

**John:** Yeah. All right. Tim in Liverpool, England has the simplest question we will ever answer on this show. Are you ready?

**Craig:** I’m so ready.

**John:** Okay. “In my screenplay, I am writing a scene which takes place in a woodland area. I originally thought this would be EXT. WOODS — NIGHT. But as the scene takes place in the woods, would this be INT. WOODS — NIGHT?”

**Craig:** One, two, three. No!

**John:** Absolutely not. It’s EXT.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** You’re outside. If you’re outside it’s exterior.

**Craig:** The reason that we write exterior and interior is not to help people imagine where we are, although we are, but it’s really for the people who are making/producing the movie to understand that we’re supposed to be outside or inside. There will be times when exteriors will actually be shot indoors. You will create a little set, like a park.

**John:** For example, Into the Woods.

**Craig:** Into the Woods. A lot of the woods were in fact interior stage, but they needed to be called exterior so people understood they were designed to look as if you were outside.

Yes, you are in the woods , but you are not interior of the woods.

**John:** So, there are some cases where you’ll be using INT/EXT. Like driving seems to happen a lot where you’re in the car, but what’s happening outside is also a factor. And so if things are happening inside and around the car, especially if the car is moving, INT/EXT can be your friend. Or if characters are just really sort of moving into and out of a house a lot, sometimes you’ll use that nomenclature.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, I’ve actually — I used to do INT/EXT when I had somebody in a car talking to somebody out of a car. I’ve actually stopped doing it and now I just write EXT. ROAD. Jim drives. Leans out the window. Because you’re outside.

**John:** You’re outside. At that point you’re outside.

**Craig:** You’re outside. Even if you’re shooting inside the car, you’re outside.

**John:** Yeah. Lisa writes, “I am 49 years old and it’s been my dream to move to Hollywood after my son graduates high school in 2016. I’ll be 50 then. I’m also deaf, which is the heart of my challenge to this point. Many agencies don’t want to train me as a personal assistant because of my deafness, which I find rather silly as I can type, speak — not perfectly, but I can get my point across, and I have office skills. I really want to be trained and have no idea who else to contact. Any suggestions? And please don’t refer to me GLAD, Greater Los Angeles Agency on Deafness, as I’ve already contacted them.

“It seems like that’s the default answer for a lot of the hearing people is to send me to deaf-related agencies. I wonder if they send black people to black people agencies? It’s just annoying. I just want advice on how to break into the entertainment industry without being an actor or a studio worker.”

**Craig:** I’m a big believer, and you know, I have hearing-impaired people in my family. And I’m a big believer that hearing-impaired people can do far more than hearing people think they can do. No question. But I do think that you’re going to have to be realistic about the jobs that are going to be right for you. Now, if you don’t want to go to the Greater LA Agency on Deafness, which I know nothing about frankly, then my suggestion would be maybe to interview at some of the big temp agencies here in town.

So, there are a few that specialize in entertainment placement. The Friedman Agency, for instance. And if you sit down with them and say, “Listen, here is the deal. I can do the following things, as well as anybody who hears. Obviously there are some things that I’m challenged with. What would be right for me?” And then see if they can’t find you something.

**John:** I think your advice to look for agencies, and sometimes even studio HR departments, just to try to do an informational interview to see if there is a way that they can figure out a place for you to be able to work there. Because it’s going to be challenging in certain circumstances. And you may not really know what the job is. And going in for that informational interview, you’ll find out what that job is. And so maybe together you can figure out what are some things you can do that could make it all work out.

Yeah, a lot of stuff does happen sort of on email and that kind of stuff and there’s probably some spot like that that could be great, but it may not be on a classic desk.

The other thing I would say is you’re going to be 50 years old. And 50 years old is older than most sort of new personal assistants are going to be. So, that’s going to be something also to be mindful of is that most of the people who are doing the kind of job you’re talking about, the kind of job we talk about being your first job in Hollywood, that’s kind of the like, hey, you just graduated from college. Here’s this job. And where you’re making no money and eating ramen out of the sink.

That’s not probably what your best first step is going to be. So, some sort of informational interview would probably be a good start.

**Craig:** Personally, I don’t think your age matters. And I also think that with some exceptions, being hearing impaired shouldn’t matter either. But I want you to know that I suspect I have a rare perspective on this. And that you are going to face very serious barriers whether they’re fair or not, and you need to go into that with your eyes open because they’re going to be there.

And I want you to approach this with I guess a clear of a picture of what you’re going to be facing as possible, because let me tell you, if you can hear, and you’re 23 years old, these jobs are hard to get. If you can’t and you’re 50, it’s going to be very hard to get. And that’s not always fair, that’s not always just, but it’s the world we’re in.

**John:** I agree with you. And I should say that I think Lisa found out about our show because we are one of the rare podcasts that has transcripts for all of our episodes, going back to the first episode. So, if you are a person who is catching up on the show and want to read the transcripts, that is a way you can partake in our show as well.

And it’s people who get the premium subscriptions, that’s what pays for the guy who does all the transcripts. So, thank you listeners for chipping in on that.

**Craig:** Always.

**John:** Amy writes, “In terms of dialogue, do you use dot-dot-dot when someone is pausing or dash-dash when someone is breaking off what they’re saying?” Craig, what is your style. Are you a dot-dot-dotter, or a dash-dasher?

**Craig:** When someone is pausing, I usually will do a dash-dash. If, for instance, I’m not going to break out the pause in a parenthetical like beat, you know. But if someone is going to say, “I just — I just don’t know.” I would say, “I just — I just don’t know.” I tend to use the ellipses for a trailing off as in, “I don’t know man…”

**John:** I think within a block of dialogue I am largely the same. I’m pretty sure if you look through my old scripts I’m completely inconsistent. But I think I do it this way where if somebody is trailing off, that’s ellipses for me. And if someone is stopping a sentence and then starting kind of a new thought, that’s a dash-dash for me, where they’re sort of talking over themselves.

Where I’m a little less consistent is when someone is being interrupted. I will sometimes do the dot-dot-dot, or sometimes I’ll do the dash-dash. If I’m carrying dialogue across a cut, that more likely is a dot-dot-dot for me. But I don’t know that I have a consistent answer for you.

**Craig:** Yeah, you know, frankly it’s not that big of a deal. Whatever feels right to you. There’s never been a great script that was unproduced because of this.

**John:** I would completely agree. The only thing I will say is make sure you match. And so if something stops on a dash-dash, start it up on a dash-dash. Don’t go like dash-dash, then dot-dot-dot. That’s just weird.

**Craig:** That is weird, yes. Stick to one. By the way, John, when you have somebody — let’s say somebody is talking and then they notice something and then in the middle of it, so it’ll say, “John, excuse me, would you mind if — ”

And then action. “The person turns around. It’s his dad.” And then John, ” — Oh, never mind.” Do you do the dash-dash leading into that second line?

**John:** I do.

**Craig:** Yeah, me too.

**John:** I do, too. But that’s the case where like I can’t tell you 100 percent if I would always dash-dash or if I would dot-dot-dot it. And I think it’s just the way the mood strikes me when I’m writing it.

**Craig:** Nothing wrong with that. Oh my god, I got into such a — dude, I got into such an argument. I don’t know why. This is the one thing that I will argue about with anyone at any time anywhere. I did the ask me anything on Reddit screenwriting a long time ago. So, every now and then I’ll just pop over and take a look at what people are talking about. And generally speaking they’re talking about the same things they always talk about. This one guy is saying, “Hey, is it okay to put descriptions of camera angles or moves in your screenplay?” And this one guy just says, “Nope, it’s never okay. It’s absolutely not okay. If people see that in your script they will presume that you’re an amateur and you’re no good.”

And I just — I can’t take it. Where did this come from?

**John:** From one of the books. From one of the How to Write a Screenplay books, or some screenwriting teacher who drilled it in at some class at some Florida college.

**Craig:** [laughs] That’s a perfect detail. We have to find patient zero and kill that person.

**John:** Yes. And here’s what is so maddening about that kind of absolute rule is that someone will then tweet at us. I think someone just today tweeted at us saying like, “But I looked at Goodfellas’ script and it says we see all the time and there are camera motions, or like James Cameron uses camera movements, but can he get away with that and no one else can?”

It’s like, no, anyone can do it. It’s a question of is your script great? Is it really clear what’s happening? Is the camera motion or referring to we as the audience, is that useful in helping tell your story? Then do it. If it’s not, then you shouldn’t do it. And anything can be perfect, or anything can be annoying, it’s just how you’re doing it.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly. I mean, my big problem with this, so what people will say is directors will tell you they don’t like that because you’re telling them how to direct. Here’s the thing: if I say push in on, wide angle, close, am I telling them how to direct? No. I don’t think so. What I think I’m telling them is this is how I envision this movie.

But here is what else I will — what everybody puts in a screenplay that apparently is okay. Cast. Setting. Action. Motivation. Performance. Dialogue. Costume. Props. Every other aspect that the director controls on a movie set, we have put into the screenplay if we have done our jobs right.

They don’t need to do it the way we said it, but it is incumbent upon us to do all of that to help the reader see a movie. That’s also “directing on the page.” It’s infantile. This whole thing is infantile. I want to kill it as best as I can. And I’m enlisting all of you out there. You will go out like our heralds and spread this word. Spread this gospel to your film teachers and your friends.

**John:** Two points I want to follow up there. You were talking about we describe performance, we describe costumes, we describe settings, and yes we do that, and we do that only to the degree that we need to do that in order to make it clear what the movie is.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so that’s why you don’t choke your script full of camera directions because most of the time you don’t need to.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But if you need to, do it. If it helps to tell your story, you do it. Just like we never refer to every costume. We never refer to sort of every setting in intricate detail. We do as much as we need to do to get the idea across for what it is. And screenwriting is always about that balance of detail and economy. And that’s what you’re always trying to juggle.

**Craig:** Absolutely. It’s the job. And if anyone tells you — if anyone tells you that there is some sort of blanket rule against we see, or camera stuff, or any of that, you just look them in the eye and say, “No. No. No.”

**John:** [laughs] And I want to come back to something that we’ve often talked about in the Three Page Challenges which is that trying to keep action lines short. And Craig really likes to keep action lines to like no more than three lines in a row.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But that’s not an absolute rule. And there are many great screenplays you will read that are quite a bit longer and have dense paragraphs full of stuff, and that doesn’t mean that they’re wrong or they’re bad. And they can work really, really well. And in Whiplash, which we both really liked a lot, has huge blocks of action and it works great for Whiplash.

And so it may work great for your screenplay, too. But just know that if you’re doing that kind of density, you’re making some other tradeoffs and people may start skimming. And that’s a danger, but maybe that’s going to be fine for you. Or maybe you’re going to write things so well that people are not going to skim, and that’s going to be great, too.

So, there are no absolute rules other than just know that absolutely there are no rules.

**Craig:** Totally. Yeah, listen, you know, a great screenplay that has big long action blocks, people will read through the action blocks because they love your script. We all have our preferences. We all think, well you know, the way I do it is easy on the eyes, but that doesn’t mean anything.

I mean, listen, there are screenwriters out there that mix up capital letters and stuff. And all sorts of crazy stuff. Hey, guess what, we’re artists. Holy crap. And we don’t have to follow this weird — I don’t know, this orthodoxy as if we’re all working for the typist pool at Warner Bros in 1962.

**John:** And they’re still working there. It’s so maddening.

This last week, so I’m writing a scary movie, and I’ve had to break out the underlines more than I’ve ever had to in a script. And it’s because there are things that I recognize in horror movies that have to be made clear in ways that are just very different than in comedies or normal dramas. Where like you have to make it clear what it’s actually going to feel like. And sometimes the best way to do that is to underline it.

I’m generally a person who is very, very spare on the uppercase and the bolds and the underlines, but I find myself doing it more on this script than I’ve ever done before because there are both those shock scares, those little jump moments, but there is also that you have to see that this is something really unusual. That classic like we can’t see into that room but this thing is right there.

And it’s interesting to me, you know. working on my, god, 50th screenplay maybe, and to have to be doing some things differently just because of the nature of the story.

**Craig:** Isn’t that great? I mean, I just love that. It’s funny. Rather than being the exception to the rule, I don’t know any other professional screenwriters that don’t do this stuff. I can’t remember the last time I read a screenplay by a professional that didn’t have some occasional camera direction and some occasional we see and some occasional underlining and some occasional fiddling of things in interesting ways.

It’s part of what we do. I mean, god, grow up. It’s amazing out there.

**John:** Yeah. You’re trying to create the experience of seeing a movie with just the words on the page. And sometimes you need to goose those words in order to get the effect across.

**Craig:** Ah, I feel much better.

**John:** I feel much better, too. Craig, it’s time for One Cool Things.

**Craig:** I have one.

**John:** Start us off.

**Craig:** So, someone on Twitter recommended this to me because I’m a big fan of The Room and the Room 2 for iPad.

**John:** I love them both.

**Craig:** Wonderful, wonderful games. So, this is a new game. It’s not for iOS. In fact, it’s for Mac OS. I think Mac OS only. I’m not sure. But I’m Mac OS, so what the hell. So, you download it through the App Store and it’s called Lumino City as in luminosity. On one hand it’s a simple point and click puzzle adventure where you play this little girl who is looking for her grandfather in this funny little town. And you have to figure out where to go and how to solve some puzzles to make things move around and so forth. The game play in and of itself is not revolutionary.

What is revolutionary is the animation and what it looks like. I believe what the game creators did was actually build their environments. They built these environments out of paper and wood and material and then shot them photographically and now are using that as the environment, the 3D environment that you’re moving through.

It’s just stunning. I mean —

**John:** Ah, I’m looking forward to it.

**Craig:** It’s gorgeous. And the way they built the game is that you enter an environment, for instance, a house or a plaza with a couple of rooms that you can go in. And in that area there is a puzzle or a series of puzzles to be solved to exit that area and move on. When you do and you move onto the next area, there’s this moment where you arrive in the new place and every time I’ve done it I go, oh, because it’s just so well done. It’s so pretty. And I love it. I just love the way this game looks. It’s so beautiful. And it’s like, I don’t know, $12 or something.

**John:** It’s a bargain. We need to start paying for things.

**Craig:** I agree.

**John:** Good stuff. My One Cool Thing is a book and, god, it’s a long title but I will try to give the whole title to you. Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension: A Mathematician’s Journey Through Narcissistic Numbers, Optimal Dating Algorithms, at Least Two Kinds of Infinity, and More by Matt Parker.

And so I’m reading it right now, I’m about halfway through, I really like it a lot. And so it’s a mathematician who is sort of talking you through the kinds of thing mathematicians talk about. And so it’s not numbers and formulas, it’s about sort of like higher dimension stuff and weird four dimensional things that happen and sort of like how rules apply and sort of weird puzzle algorithms.

So, Craig, I think it’s a book that you and David Kwong would like because it’s very much about sort of the weird patterns that show up in nature when you start sort of applying rules to things.

**Craig:** It sounds great. Did you ever read, I mean, this probably isn’t quite like that, but I’m wondering if you ever read Flatland when you were a kid?

**John:** Oh, yes, it’s very, very much Flatland.

**Craig:** Oh, it is Flatland.

**John:** That sense of like what it would be like to be in, you know, Flatland is about a two-dimensional creature. This is like what it is like to be able to manipulate things through four dimensions.

**Craig:** I always remember, there was this little — so, Flatland, if you guys haven’t read it, is very short, terrific, little story that helps instruct on geometry. You’re a character that lives in a two-dimensional land. He describes what that’s like to see things only in two dimensional. You’re flat on a plain.

And then one day this character is visited by a sphere from the third dimension. And as this sphere moves through his world, he appears to be a line that goes wider and shorter, you see, because the sphere is moving up and down through this plain, like cross sections.

So, I read that, I’m like, oh, that’s cool, I can see how a three-dimensional person like me would absolutely freak out a two-dimensional person.

But what’s so cool about that is that the sphere describes how he was visited by a fourth-dimensional shape. And the fourth-dimensional shape, if I recall correctly, was like a chain link, but it could unlink itself without breaking. And then link, yeah, because something is happening in that fourth dimension that we can’t see. Oh, I love it. I thought that was so great.

**John:** Yeah, it’s nice stuff. So, it does some little simple projects you can figure out yourself. And like things that roll in ways that seem kind of impossible. And it’s like solids that aren’t spheres but can roll like spheres, which seems impossible, but are actually real. So, it’s neat, so I would recommend that book if you’re into math nerdery and sort of extra dimensional stuff.

**Craig:** Sounds good to me.

**John:** Cool. That is our show this week. So, our outro this week is by Rajesh Naroth. Thank you, Rajesh. He sent us some really good ones, so thank you again for another great melody here.

If you have a Scriptnotes outro you would like to have us play, you can send it into ask@johnaugust.com. That’s also where you can send listener questions like the ones we answered on the show today. If you have a question for Craig Mazin, you should tweet at him. He is @clmazin. I am @johnaugust.

If you are on iTunes for whatever reason, you should subscribe to the podcast. While you’re there, leave us a comment or a rating. People did that last time Craig told them to do it, so thank you very much for that.

**Craig:** Thanks.

**John:** We also have a premium feed which you can find at Scriptnotes.net. That is where you will listen to the dirty episode when it’s up, which is probably about a week away.

**Craig:** So dirty.

**John:** So dirty. It’s going to be fun. So, that’s where you can find that also all the back episodes, back to episode one.

Scriptnotes is edited by Matthew Chilelli. It is produced by Stuart Friedel. Hey Stuart. And that is our show for this week.

So, next week we will have a normal episode, but there will also be a dirty episode, so you’re going to get a twofer if you’re on the premium feed.

**Craig:** Sweet.

**John:** Cool. Thanks Craig. Have a great night.

**Craig:** Thanks John. Bye.

Links:

* StartUp, #12: [Burnout](http://gimletmedia.com/episode/12-burnout/)
* [Weekend Read 1.5 now in beta, adds iPad and iCloud support](http://johnaugust.com/2015/weekend-read-1-5-now-in-beta-adds-ipad-and-icloud-support)
* [Screenplays on the Kindle, 2015 edition](http://johnaugust.com/2015/screenplays-on-the-kindle-2015-edition)
* WGA’s [FYI Listings: Ask the Expert](http://www.wga.org/content/default.aspx?id=165)
* [The Science & Entertainment Exchange](http://www.scienceandentertainmentexchange.org/)
* [Are Screenwriters Becoming Obsolete in Hollywood?](http://variety.com/2015/voices/opinion/hollywood-doesnt-seem-to-value-screenwriters-anymore-1201405150/)
* [What is the difference between an em-dash/double-hypen and an ellipsis?](http://screenwriting.io/what-is-the-difference-between-an-em-dashdouble-hypen-and-an-ellipsis/) on screenwriting.io
* [Lumino City](http://www.luminocitygame.com/), and [how it’s made](http://youtu.be/JO6t6H19CUk)
* [Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension: A Mathematician’s Journey Through Narcissistic Numbers, Optimal Dating Algorithms, at Least Two Kinds of Infinity, and More](http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00JD1LBBY/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Matt Parker
* [Flatland](http://www.amazon.com/dp/1623750318/?tag=johnaugustcom-20) by Edwin A. Abbott
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Rajesh Naroth ([send us yours!](http://johnaugust.com/2014/outros-needed))