Search Results for: 3 page challenge

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/blockbusters).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 114, the Blockbuster episode of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

**Craig:** Ka-boom!

**John:** Craig, the most important question of all is how far are you into Grand Theft Auto V?

**Craig:** I finished the solo story and then I started doing a bunch of little sidey things that we’re left over, like for instance there’s this thing where you can go and find all of these little scattered pieces of a letter that lead you to solve a murder mystery.

**John:** Ah-ha.

**Craig:** And I ended up somewhere around 80%, so the other 20% are things that I, I mean, some of them I can do. Some of them just never, ever, ever are going to happen. And then I was like, eh, I think I’m going to start over. And so I’ve started over playing the solo thing again.

**John:** Nice. Great.

**Craig:** How about you? Where are you?

**John:** I’ve just barely started. So, I’m still with Franklin. I have a dog now that I can take —

**Craig:** Chop. You’ve got Chop.

**John:** So I can take the dog for some walks. But I don’t feel like I’ve really started any serious missions because the truth is it’s hard to say whether I’m worse at shooting or worse at driving. But those are two crucial skills that I have yet to really master in this game.

**Craig:** You’ll get there. You’ll get there. I believe in you.

**John:** Yeah. I’ve never actually finished Grand Theft Auto 4. And I liked it a lot, but I actually just got done with it. And I don’t know that I’ll ever finish this game, but I really am impressed by the version of Los Angeles that it creates.

**Craig:** Well, when we get to One Cool Thing, my One Cool Thing today is Grand Theft Auto V related. And when you watch that you will be even more impressed.

**John:** Well, Grand Theft Auto V is a blockbuster by any definition of the term blockbuster. It made $800 million since opening salvo. Today we’re going to be talking about blockbusters in general and the topics specifically are this new book that came out that talks about Hollywood’s obsession with blockbusters and how it may actually be a reasonable choice for Hollywood.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** We’re going to talk about big name actors who don’t like to be directed.

**Craig:** [laughs] I can’t wait!

**John:** And finally we’re going to answer a reader question about following up after a general meeting which is, I thought, very timely and important for people to talk about.

**Craig:** Lovely.

**John:** Lovely. First off some housekeeping. This is our last Skype episode for awhile because next week you and I are both in Austin for the Austin Film Festival.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Now, you and I are on various panels there, most of which will not be recorded and will not be part of Scriptnotes. So, people have asked, “Hey, that Alien panel you’re going to be on, John, are you going to put that on a podcast?” Nope, that’s an Austin Film Festival thing.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, I think it will be a great session, but you’ll actually have to be there to see the session.

**Craig:** Yeah. I’m getting the same thing. I’m doing a seminar on structure and character and theme and a lot of people have been asking is it going to be recorded, is there going to be a transcript. Even if we could — I think they actually record everything at Austin, but the whole point is you got to actually support the festival by showing up.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You know, this is for people who paid for their badge. So, no, you get nothing.

**John:** Yeah, that badge. You get nothing.

**Craig:** Nothing!

**John:** But what you will get is a live episode of Scriptnotes.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** That will be Saturday — we’re recording it live Saturday at 12:45pm at the Intercontinental Stephen F. Austin Ballroom.

Now, Craig, when we first talked to Austin about going back and doing another live Scriptnotes, because that was our first live Scriptnotes last year with Aline Brosh McKenna, it was a very fun time. We said, “Hey, you know what? Last time you stuck us at a really early timeslot. It was hard for people to like wake up and be there.” So, we said, let’s get a really great timeslot.

So, we’re now at 12:45 in the afternoon. But have you actually looked at the schedule, Craig, to see what we’re up against?

**Craig:** No, god. What are we — who is our competition?

**John:** So, our competition is Rob Thomas talking about making the Veronica Mars movie.

**Craig:** All right. Okay.

**John:** And our friend Franklin Leonard talking to Jenji Kohan about Orange is the New Black.

**Craig:** Well, look, those are steep, but it’s not like they put us up against Vince Gilligan.

**John:** Yes, Vince Gilligan is early in the day. So, you can come for Vince Gilligan and then come to see us. I just feel like, you know, when we had these initial conversations we talked in a very general sense like how about we do an early evening so people could maybe drink a little, that kind of thing. That didn’t end up happening. So, I feel like we may need to step up our game a little bit for the live show is really what I’m saying.

So, I would urge people to come to our show because while we will be recording it, I’m going to plan some things that you kind of have to be there in person to experience. I’m not quite entirely sure what those are going to be yet. We’ll discuss them probably on the flight to Austin.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** But there will be some special live things there.

**Craig:** Are we on the same flight?

**John:** I don’t know. I think I’m flying in on Thursday.

**Craig:** So am I. Are you flying Thursday on American?

**John:** No, I’m flying on Southwest.

**Craig:** Well, we’re not on the same plane. So, we’ve got real problems.

**John:** You got an upgrade on that whole flight thing. So, that is one of the things we will be doing in Austin. The second thing we’ll be doing is the Three Page Challenge. And like the Writers Guild Foundation Three Page Challenge we did, the people who wrote those three pages will be in the room with us. And so we will be talking with them about their three pages, which is usually great and fun. So, we’ll record that.

People write in saying, “Hey, do my pages.” We’ve actually already picked all the people who we’re going to do in that session. They already know they’re the people that are picked, so you don’t need to send in special things for Austin. It’s awesome you’re going to be in Austin and have three pages, but we will not be covering them there in Austin unless you’ve already heard from us.

**Craig:** Exactly. And I do want to add that there is a consistent thing happening now that makes me super happy. And that is that we do the Three Page Challenges and the people who are featured on it tweet us and are really appreciative, even if we were critical of the pages and kind of got into a deep analysis of some things that maybe we’ve both thought weren’t right. Everybody has been really appreciative and really — it’s a good sign that they’re taking this stuff the right way because the truth is that you and I in our daily lives as writers are getting this kind of feedback constantly. So, it’s a good sign. Very good sign.

**John:** I would agree. And we should stress that the whole Three Page Challenge, the initial step of that is Stuart reading everything, so Stuart really does read everything. And he makes decisions about what things to send on to us based on what he thinks are really good things that he’s read and liked that would be useful for our listeners.

So, if you send something through and Stuart hasn’t picked it, it’s either because Stuart has a bunch of stuff that’s kind of like it, that makes him think that maybe it’s not the right thing for us to talk about right now.

So never feel bad if we don’t talk about your thing. If we do talk about your thing, know we’re talking about it because it was one of the most interesting things that crossed our virtual transom.

**Craig:** Correct. And as always, blame Stuart.

**John:** Yes. Blame Stuart.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Craig, a couple episodes ago we talked about what’s next, because basically I had finished up Big Fish, I was trying to figure out what the next thing is I was going to write. And so that’s somewhat coalesced over this past week. And this afternoon I was at lunch with the producer of — I can’t remember if it is the first thing or the second thing I described, but the thing that was based on some preexisting IP that was going to be really complicated and you’d talked me out of it to some degree, like this sounds like it’s going to be a mess.

And so we had a really good lunch and we talked through sort of how it could be kind of a mess and I think it’s a good segue into our conversation of blockbusters because this is going to be an expensive movie to make. And so easily half of our conversation was not about the story itself, but about the process of how we would get from this idea to a finished movie and how we would get this idea to this studio that owns the IP through the studio and how you conceive it as a big movie.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And that’s one of the things we don’t — I don’t think we’ve necessarily talked enough about on the show is what does it mean to be a big movie and at what point do you start talking about story and what point do you start talking about the movie. And so this conversation was largely about the movie.

**Craig:** Yeah, and it’s changed, hasn’t it, because when we started it seemed like basically development was really — they were okay with shots in the dark. “All right, well, we like that idea, we like that thought. Go ahead. Write the script. Here’s some money and let’s read the script and then we’ll see.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And now I think everybody feels that they kind of have to build the ship while they’re on the ship.

**John:** Yes. Or even before you’re kind of deciding to board the ship, because a lot of my decision process right now is is this actually a movie that the studio will make.

**Craig:** Ah-ha.

**John:** An so are we going to invest a tremendous amount of time coming up with the perfect pitch for this movie if it’s ultimately not a movie that this studio can make.

**Craig:** Correct. So true. Great.

**John:** And so part of this is prefaced on a conversation I had with another producer about another project and said, “Oh, it’s great news. The studio actually already owns the rights to this book. They bought it five years ago. And I don’t think they even know that they have the rights to this book. It’s going to be perfect.” And so I read it and I’m like, “I don’t think they’re going to make this movie.”

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** “But they already own the book!” It’s like I don’t think it was this regime that bought the book. I’m happy to talk about doing this movie, but I first want you to go to President of Production/Studio Head, whoever you want to talk to and ask candidly are they ever going to make this project.

And so they did — came back a week later and said, “Nope, we’re not.”

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And that was a lot of time saved.

**Craig:** It was. And typically if they have a book that they haven’t done anything with and someone says, “They don’t even know they have the rights,” there’s a reason for that. It’s because they don’t care. [laughs]

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Yeah. If they wanted to make a movie out of it, they would have made a movie out of it.

**John:** Yeah. So, studios largely want to make blockbusters. And that’s a thing that we’ve talked about on the podcast before. And you had sent me this article by Derek Thompson from The Atlantic. And it was an interview with him and Anita Elberse, who is the author of this new book called Blockbusters. She’s a professor at the Harvard Business School.

And it was an interesting article and I haven’t read the full book, so again we’re doing that thing where we’re basing a discussion on an article about a book rather than the book itself. But some of the points I thought were interesting.

And so the basic theory of blockbusters and sort of spending money on blockbusters is that — it’s a question of is it better to spend more money on fewer titles. And is dollar spent a blockbuster worth more or worth less than a dollar spent on a non- blockbuster.

**Craig:** And what the author, Anita Elberse, has found — and in an academic way, so she’s not a stakeholder in the business. She’s not somebody that’s trying to promote a certain kind of movie or promote writers, or actors, or directors, or anything like that. She’s not a movie critic. She’s I guess an economist or, yeah, something like that, or just a business — yeah, she is actually an economist.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What she seems to have found is in general from a business strategy what she says is, “A blockbuster strategy means making fewer investments that are larger investments, but that strategy turns out to be economically safer than making more smaller bets.”

**John:** Yes. Now, some of that seems nonsensical at first, because we look at big giant movies that tanked that cost a tremendous amount of money and cost a tremendous amount of money to advertise and we say, “Okay, well that’s an example of why it was foolish to spend that much money on that particular movie.”

What she’s arguing is that there’s essentially silent evidence that we’re ignoring all the smaller movies that didn’t make back their money, and their marketing money, and if you added up all those they would actually cost more than the big movies that are tanking.

**Craig:** Yeah. So, there is a cost, there is a risk involved in everything. And so you have to account for the risk involved in making any movie, including the smaller movies, but she also found that there are these side benefits to the success of large movies that go beyond just the success of that large movie. For instance, the notion is that if you make the large movies, for your next movies you will attract better people. You’ll attract bigger actors, bigger authors, bigger IP, bigger writers and directors.

If you stop doing that, if you sort of go for a Men’s Warehouse model where you’re trying to go lower priced/higher volume, people that make quality entertainment start to stop thinking about you.

**John:** And I see there’s some logic there, but I also see some faults in that logic. So, let’s talk through this point. The idea that creators are attracted to places that are making big things is to some degree true. If you’re a person who wants to make giant movies and you have two places you can go with this giant movie, you’re going to feel more comfortable with a place that actually has experience making and marketing big movies. Likely. That seems reasonable.

But quality and bigness are not necessarily the same thing. And so you look at the HBO model or even A&E to some degree, like the places that are making really quality television shows, they’re not spending more money than other places. They’re just making better stuff. And so to some degree this halo effect that she’s describing, that people want to come there because of the reputation of the brand, it may have more to do with the kinds of movies you’re making, the kinds of movies you’re releasing.

So, there’s a reason why you may want to have this Fox Searchlight be releasing your film rather than MGM because Fox Searchlight has a brand to it.

**Craig:** Absolutely true. And, in fact, when I read this article, it seemed to me that this book and her research seems less valuable in service of an argument that you should make more blockbusters and maybe not make as many medium priced films. It’s more valuable in starting to at least defend and understand why this blockbuster mania happens at all.

**John:** Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Because the truth is the movie studios will continue to make medium-priced movies and smaller-priced movies. They’ll do it, I mean, every comedy essentially is that.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** They won’t stop. But it was — sometimes when I talk to people I feel like it becomes this lazy intellectual crutch that studios are stupid and that they’re run by kind of Adderall/cracked-out dips who are 40-something 12 year olds. And they don’t care about a damn thing and they just want explosions and noise. And that’s not quite right. There is real success here in a lot of these things. We tend to look at… — It’s funny, this is sort of selection bias. When a movie like The Avengers comes out and a lot of people like it and it’s a huge blockbuster, we’ll say, “Great job, Joss Whedon.”

When a movie like The Lone Ranger comes out and a lot of people don’t like it and it costs a huge amount of money and is a big flop, people will say, “Oh, Hollywood, you’re stupid.”

Well, Hollywood is also The Avengers. [laughs] You know?

**John:** It is.

**Craig:** I mean, it gets credit and it gets punished for all things. So, a lot of these blockbusters — I mean, she points out something that’s so obvious it’s odd that it needs to be pointed out, and yet it does. Blockbusters are blockbusters because they bust blocks. People are showing up. What are we supposed to do? And then you start to run into this weird question of, well, so who should we be angry at? And the interviewer asked the question directly. So, consumers are to blame?

And her response is characteristically blunt. “As consumers we are at fault. These are the choices that we’re making.” [laughs] I thought that was a fair point.

**John:** Yeah. Of course the corollary argument with that is if you essentially have no choice because you’ve stopped making the other kinds of movies, there may be an audience who wants to see that other film and didn’t have a chance to see that other film because it didn’t exist. So, that becomes the supply and demand question is a reasonable question to ask, but audiences are ultimately responsible for I think the kinds of movies we make.

**Craig:** We are.

**John:** I think she didn’t understand some aspects of the film industry that were a little bit frustrating to me. Her point about trailers is like, “Well, if you have a big movie then you get to put five trailers on that and that’s how it works.” Well, that’s not how trailers work at all.

And in a general way, if Warner Bros. has The Hangover III coming out, Warner Bros. can attach one trailer to that. They know they can lock on one trailer to that.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Everything else is horse trading. And it’s trying to get your film’s trailer attached to this next thing that’s going.

**Craig:** That’s correct.

**John:** And you’re negotiating both with the other studios. You’re negotiating with exhibitors. It’s an incredibly complicated thing. So, just having a big hit film doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to be able to market your next film more easily because of that.

**Craig:** I agree. That’s something that’s far more functional in television where you’re using big event television to platform promotions for new shows. However, what she didn’t mention that she ought to have, and maybe she does in her book, one great benefit of blockbusters is that they increase our exhibition power. As a studio, if you know you’ve got, all right, so Warner Bros. announced that they have more Harry Potter universe films coming out. Very big deal for them.

Well, when they have a smaller movie that they are pushing, it’s very easy for them to lean on exhibitors and say, “Run this movie or you’re not getting Harry Potter.”

**John:** Yup.

**Craig:** And that’s a big deal. That’s a huge deal.

**John:** I think we’ve talked about on the podcast before is international results and a larger portion of studio’s take. And having more movies coming down the pipeline is very helpful in terms of getting money to come out of those countries. And so you’re able to sort of go to Kraplachia and say like, “Hey, you still owe us for this movie that came out six months ago. You’re not getting this next movie until you pay us that money.” And that is a useful thing, too.

And so any movie is helpful for that coming down the pipe, but a giant blockbuster, like the next Avengers, they really want that. And that will become an important tool for getting that money back out of exhibitors, especially overseas.

**Craig:** Yeah. My take away from this is not to say big, stupid, awful blockbusters are worth defending. They’re not. No big, stupid, awful movie is worth defending, or are small, awful, stupid movies worth defending. I’ve been involved in a couple myself. [laughs]

It’s more that it’s not just willy-nilly stupidity. It is actually a strategy that is economically working, even — we discussed this already — even in a summer where the media narrative seemed to be, “Hollywood is falling apart,” Hollywood made a ton. In fact, I believe this summer is bigger than last summer.

**John:** It is in fact bigger than last summer. Because we’re conveniently forgetting things like Iron Man 3, which made a gazillion dollars.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And the movies that weren’t tiny but were not giant that also did really, really well. You have The Heat. You have We’re the Millers, the things that did great.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And you can say, like those two are original films, but Hangover III, it still brought in a ton of money.

**Craig:** 300-and-some-odd million bucks. I mean, there were plenty of movies that worked really well. I mean, Gravity right now is obviously killing it. And that will continue to happen. It’s more that the chattering class hates sequel-itis, and I understand why.

And they resent the audience for ignoring movies that they love. And I understand. It’s dispiriting to see some movie that’s a beautiful piece of work come out and be totally ignored while a big, huge, crap fest rakes money in, except it’s not a crap fest to a lot of the people going to it. It’s like, so you just have to let that go.

Look, we’ve said it before, and I’ll repeat it: I want movie studios to make more medium-sized and smaller movies. I want it. I want them to make more movies in general. And we’ve often said you can’t get to sequels if you haven’t had the first one.

But, it would be just as much of a mistake to pretend that blockbusters were some kind of weird blink or failure strategy. It’s not.

**John:** It’s not. So, the topic of conversation I suspect happening at every movie studio this week, the past couple weeks, has to be Gravity. And it’s a movie that Craig has not seen yet, which is —

**Craig:** My kids won’t…my kids…it’s my kids.

**John:** Kids! I know, oh, those kids! So, two threads I want to talk about here. Generally as a screenwriter it is important to see the movies that everyone else is talking about so you can have a point of conversation about those.

**Craig:** Oh, yes.

**John:** And so obviously, Craig, it’s on your short list of things you need to see really quickly.

**Craig:** Next movie I see.

**John:** The reason why I think, you know, obviously the year is not finished yet, but I think Gravity will become the most important movie for Hollywood this year for a couple of reasons. It was expensive, but it wasn’t crazy expensive. It wasn’t a sequel. It was a director who everyone knew was incredibly talented and had made some other sort of big hits but hadn’t made the one that was sort of all his. It was risky, even though it had giant stars, it was risky.

But most importantly to me, it’s a movie that’s just entirely a movie. It’s a movie that’s 90 minutes long. It is focused on one person’s survival story. You have a character who doesn’t need to save the world. She needs to save herself. And it’s a thing that exists, that wants to be made for a big screen.

So, I see this movie and I look at some of the other big movies we’re making that are just huge, and sprawling, and 2.5 hours, and involve myriad subplots. I think what was refreshing, I think the conversation a lot of people are going to be having is how to make a movie that’s more like Gravity.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** There’s terrible lessons you can learn from it, like we should make more movies in space. No. That’s not the lesson.

**Craig:** They will! [laughs]

**John:** They will. There will be lot more movies set in space.

**Craig:** No question.

**John:** But the lesson, and what got me excited about it, which I think is going to get other people excited about it, too, is that it was a reminder that you don’t need to save the world. And this is a thing that we talked about before in the Damon Lindelof conversation is do you need to — how big do the stakes need to be?

Well the stakes, it turns out, can be about one person if the story is tightly constructed around that one person’s journey. And that, I think, is the biggest game changer of all.

So, whether it’s in space, or whether it’s taking place on the ocean or anywhere else, the small straightforward story can be a winner.

**Craig:** And it’s putting the lie to these things that we’re constantly hearing that the only movies that are hits are movies with presold audiences, or movies with recognizable IP or titles, and movies that aren’t about adults and adult situations. That’s’ all just not true.

And as many times as it’s happened this year, I would think it has to be sinking in. People have to be looking and going, well, wait a second, what were the profit margins on the Melissa McCarthy movies that came out this year? What was the profit margin on Gravity?

And let’s also remember that in these really big blockbusters, you know, the Titanics, the $200+ million movies, the expense is greater than what it appears because almost inevitably in order to support a structure that large you need the kind of talent that demands first dollar gross, big portions of the profits. That doesn’t necessarily happen when you’re making these smaller movies. The hits are much hittier.

I think that Hollywood certainly, certainly, has had an interesting positive wakeup call. The failure of a couple of blockbusters this summer, there’s no lesson to take from that because we’ve had just as many blockbusters do great. It’s actually a positive lesson this time around, that the success of some of the smaller movies has been really eye opening.

And I hope that that sets a trend.

**John:** A thing we talked about quite early on in the podcast is if we could run Hollywood what would we do differently. And one of the things we both came back to is like look for filmmakers who genuinely have a voice and a vision and make their movies. And Alfonso Cuarón is a great example of a filmmaker who has that. I think Rian Johnson, who’s going to be our guest in Austin, is a filmmaker who has that. And it was very smart money to spend that on Alfonso Cuarón and on that movie.

You have two giant stars in the movie who help make it safe to make the movie, but if you actually look at the film, if you had actors as good as Clooney and Sandra Bullock in your film, they didn’t need to be stars at all.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** You could have made it with anybody who was as good as they are.

**Craig:** Well, yeah, the stars basically get you to show up opening weekend. The movie keeps you in your seat and the movie is what gets you to come back over and over.

**John:** I honestly think you could have made that with somebody who wasn’t Sandra Bullock and it would have turned out just —

**Craig:** You think it would have opened just the same?

**John:** I think it would have because I think you have that vision that —

**Craig:** That trailer was pretty remarkable.

**John:** That trailer is great. I mean, it was incredibly smartly marketed.

**Craig:** And she’s in a mask anyway, right? [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, she is! She’s phenomenal in it, but I honestly think you could have put Noomi Rapace in it and it would have worked.

**Craig:** Look, he made Children of Men with — there were known actors like Clive Owen, but not necessarily what you’d call big movie stars. And people showed up for sure. He’s extraordinarily good at what he does.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** He’s special. He really is.

**John:** I think he’s got a future there.

**Craig:** [laughs] You know, it would be nice if he made more movies. But you know what that’s like? I don’t want the guy making the Cronuts to speed up production. You know, go ahead, make one every five years. If that’s what makes… — It’s like John Lee Hancock. Go ahead, make one every five years. If that’s what keeps the quality up, I’m happy.

**John:** I’m happy, too. Now, two other big actors who were recently doing press for a film are Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline.

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** Mm.

**Craig:** Mm.

**John:** Do you have your copy handy that we can read this together?

**Craig:** You want to be Morgan or you want me to be — ?

**John:** I think I need to be Morgan Freeman.

**Craig:** All right. You be Morgan and I’ll be Kline.

**John:** So, this is an interview about Last Vegas which is a film that they are out promoting. I think this is from Entertainment Weekly. And they’re talking about directors and the challenge of working with directors. So, I am Morgan Freeman.

**Craig:** And I am Kevin Kline.

**John:** [affects an accent] “Too many of them get in the way. You get the title of ‘director’ and you start directing actors rather than directing the movie.”

**Craig:** I’m sorry, why — this is a minstrel show. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] You think I’m trying to talk too Morgan Freeman?

**Craig:** Yeah. It’s like you’re getting black. Like “too many of them get in the way.”

**John:** I’m trying to do my serious narration voice.

**Craig:** You’re trying to do the Tittie Sprinkles Morgan Freeman.

**John:** Ha!

“I don’t like to be directed. The worst culprits are writers who direct their own material. Oh God.”

**Craig:** “When you arrive on set and the director goes, ‘Here’s my idea for this character,’ I go, ‘I’ll be right back!’ Or — and this was told to me by a really good director — he said, ‘Okay, here’s what I think your character is thinking at this moment.'”

**John:** “Ooh…”

**Craig:** “You tell me what I’m thinking? I’ll tell you what I’m thinking. You figure out where to put the camera and the light.”

**John:** “If you want me to go faster or to go slower, you can say that.”

**Craig:** [sighs]

**John:** Well, thank you Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline for making it super clear how you feel about the relationship between the writer and the director.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So I’m reading this and I’m thinking like, I quickly IMDb’d who directed Last Vegas.

**Craig:** I know! I know! Well, I mean —

**John:** It’s Jon Turteltaub. And like if you’re the director of this movie you’re going, “Oh my god!” Or if you’re a person who directed any movie with these people.

**Craig:** Well, let me give you a couple names of people whose jaws must have dropped. Morgan Freeman says, “The worst culprits are writers who direct their own material. Oh God.”

So, here are a couple of movies he’s been in where the writer directed the movie. The Batman movies, Chris Nolan.

**John:** Oh, that’s true.

**Craig:** And The Shawshank Redemption.

**John:** Oh yeah!

**Craig:** Frank Darabont.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** I guess that was the worst.

**John:** That was clearly just the worst. It’s remarkable that that turned out okay considering that Frank Darabont…

**Craig:** It went okay. And then, of course, Kevin Kline makes a great point. “If a director says, ‘Here’s what I think your character is thinking at his moment,'” it is appropriate to just walk away because the director’s job is to figure out where to put the camera and the light. [laughs] What?!

**John:** Yes. How dare that director…

**Craig:** Direct!

**John:** …focus on. Yes. On this.

**Craig:** It’s unbelievable!

**John:** It really is just remarkable. So, I have this tiny little sliver of sympathy is that there are some terrible directors who will try to micromanage actors in ways that is maddening.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** But to generalize it out to this degree is absolute madness. And so I found this just bewildering.

**Craig:** Look, no question that there are bad directors. And I can understand that it must be very frustrating if you are an actor of exceptional talent with enormous amount of experience, far more than say the director directing you. It must be very frustrating to have them interfere with the process in a way that is counterproductive.

However, when Morgan Freeman says, “You get the title of ‘director’ and you start directing actors rather than directing the movie,” all I can say is that’s their job. They’re responsible —

**John:** It is their job.

**Craig:** They’re responsible for your performance. Directing a movie isn’t like directing a documentary. You are creating performances with the actors.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** I mean, why can’t we — just like I’m… — You know, this reminds of those whiny writers, “The director, blah, blah, blah,” yeah, because he changed a thing? Because he had to. It happens sometimes. And it reminds me of those directors who are like, “Stupid writers. Making me shoot what’s on the page!” It’s just — this is clichéd goofy navel-gazing solipsism. I’m shocked by this.

**John:** Yeah. I’m surprised, too. And a little saddened, honestly.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Because I like both of them and I think they’ve both done really good work. They’ve also done stuff that’s not been so awesome, but now I wonder what that process was like to get to the stuff that wasn’t so awesome.

**Craig:** Well…oh, and by the way, here’s one writer-director that Kevin Kline has worked with a couple times: Lawrence Kasdan.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** What a hack.

**John:** Lawrence Kasdan. God, that guy. Man. It’s remarkable that he’s…yeah.

**Craig:** You know, this is the kind of thing. Here’s my attempt to apologize for Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline, who are terrific actors, and I assume that aside from this blip are fine gentlemen. Doing press for movies is awful and my guess is they were tired.

And then they started doing this thing that, look, as writers I’ll have conversations in this tone privately with other writers. You know, when you’re bucking yourself up and bitching and moaning. But to do it publicly like this is just bizarre. And certainly this example of here’s what I… — Even Kevin Kline’s example of this egregious behavior sounds like a very polite thing. “Here’s what I think your character is thinking at this moment.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** This is what I think. I’m directing the movie. I’m cutting it! When you’re gone, [laughs] I’m cutting it! Right?

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** You’re here for the middle part of this process. I was here before you. And I’ll be here after you. So, isn’t it fair that I express what I think your character is thinking? And if you disagree, let’s have a conversation.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Geez, man. Bummer.

**John:** Yeah, but your job is to put the camera and the light in place.

**Craig:** The light. By the way, it’s not even the director’s job to put the light. It’s like how many movies has Kevin Kline been in? So, the DP puts the lights up. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** Mm.

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** Yeah. So that was dispiriting. And what’s frustrating is that it’s in a mainstream publication, so here are well respected actors who are quite talented who are saying that this is the way it should be. And so a general population — or god help us — a young aspiring actor thinks like, “That’s how you should be.”

**Craig:** Uh-uh. No.

**John:** No.

**Craig:** No, no, no. And you know what?

**John:** You want to take full responsibility for your performance, but you also need to understand that your performance is part of a greater thing. A greater whole.

**Craig:** Of course. And I actually would bet money that neither Morgan Freeman nor Kevin Kline actually behave that way on sets. I think this is just kind of locker room boasting. I really do. I don’t believe because why? Why would you not be interested in what the director… — Look, if the director thinks that your character is thinking something else, they’re going to edit it that way. I mean, wouldn’t you want to know? I don’t know. It was pretty wild. It was pretty wild.

**John:** Yeah. I’m going to assume also that these guys are probably also largely wonderful to have on the set. But the thing is even if you have a nightmare actor, in a film that nightmare actor is only there for while you’re shooting the film.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And they can be a pain in the ass, but eventually you’ll be done. Where I have the greatest sympathy of all is for TV showrunners who are faced with a nightmare actor.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because you and I both know people who are in those situations and that is a completely different beast.

**Craig:** Both, by the way, we know the other way, too, where a wonderful actor is jammed with a showrunner that is absolutely nuts. Bad marriages are bad.

**John:** It’s a conversation worth having the next time we have a guest on who does both TV and film, because it’s a completely different relationship when you are making one film versus a potentially five-year marriage on a TV show.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** It’s a very different dynamic and different way of thinking about things. Because you are stuck with these people.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** And sometimes that’s great and sometimes it’s just really, really not great.

**Craig:** One thing that stuff like this brings to mind is that when you see a movie and you see things in it that are puzzling to you, it is natural to succumb to the illusion of intentionality, that everything is on screen because it was specifically intended to be that way and not, say, because the actor just had a completely different point of view and kind of just did something crazy. Or not because, say, the director blew it that day or there was a storm, or a set fell down, or they ran out of money, or a hundred things that can go wrong.

And, by the way, the opposite is true. Sometimes there are these wonderful moments in movies that were totally unplanned. They just happened.

**John:** Yes. And it’s lovely when those happen. Maybe a movie will get one of those and everything else will be fighting against the thing that happened that was not so awesome.

And you and I both, you know, not telling tales out of school, like Blade III was a classic example.

**Craig:** Oh boy.

**John:** Wesley Snipes just refused to actually do what was in the script and a lawsuit —

**Craig:** He wouldn’t even talked to Goyer. He would not talk to him.

**John:** Yes. So, that is basically a nightmare situation.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But there have been other big recent movies where you look at the movies like, whoa, how did that happen? And you talk to the people behind the scenes and they’re like, “He refused to say any words.”

**Craig:** [laughs] Right.

**John:** Not just like he wouldn’t say the words on the page. He didn’t want to talk.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And, well, that makes it completely challenging to cut together a coherent story when that guy won’t talk.

**Craig:** Years ago I was on a set and the actor who was essentially the focus point of the scene, and was just there for a day, a cameo essentially, was drunk.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Not a little drunk. DRUNK.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And there was nothing you could do. You just sort of did what you could, you know?

**John:** I was at the Sundance Filmmaker’s Lab two years ago. I usually go there for the screenwriter’s portion of it in the summer, but I went for the director’s lab portion of it, which was great, and so much easier because basically as a director’s lab advisor you just show up on these little sets and you sort of see what they’re doing and if you have a good suggestion you say something. If you don’t, you just stand back and watch. As opposed to the screenwriter’s section where you actually had to read the scripts and talk through all the stuff. It’s exhausting.

So, the director’s section, I was up there and it was this little campfire scene. And the director clearly had a good plan for how he was going to shoot it. And there was this conversation. And I got there and I realized, I watched a take and I’m like, huh, that doesn’t really probably seem like what is supposed to be on the page. And then I realized that the older actor was completely drunk. And this was like eleven in the morning. Completely drunk.

And so as the advisor I had to pull the director fellow aside and say, “Look, I know you’re trying to cover this in a one-shot, and all this stuff. It’s just not going to happen. So, you’re going to have to really be smart about what you’re going to do and plan for what it is it going to be like when I’m in the editing room and I have to make sense of this thing and deal with the cards that you’re given.”

**Craig:** [pretending to slur] “You tell me what I’m thinking, I’ll tell you what I’m thinking! You figure out where to put the camera and the light. Action!” [laughs]

**John:** Uh-huh. Action!

**Craig:** Oy, thanks for calling their own action. The best part is at the very end Morgan Freeman says, “If you want me to go faster or to go slower, you can say that.” Thank you!

**John:** Thank you! That’s really nice. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

**Craig:** Slower?

**John:** So, basically whatever Morgan Freeman’s first instinct is is exactly the right instinct.

**Craig:** It’s just the speed.

**John:** It could be just be go a little faster, or a little slower.

**Craig:** Right. Just the speed.

**John:** So, basically he’s a knob and you’re allowed to turn Morgan Freeman’s knob a little bit. Not a lot.

**Craig:** Turning Morgan Freeman up. There’s a story — I assume it’s true — that George Lucas when he was directing the first Star Wars movie, the only direction he would ever give to any of them was either louder or faster. And Harrison Ford, who was a carpenter, made a board, a wooden board, and he put two lights and switch. And one thing said louder and one thing said faster. And so he said, “Here, you can just turn it.” And apparently Lucas didn’t laugh.

**John:** Yeah. And then in the prequels, he just decided to hold up a board and that was the acting style.

**Craig:** Right! The board was bored.

**John:** Oh god.

**Craig:** Geez Louise.

**John:** Geez. Yeah, I felt bad. I know Ewan. Ewan is fantastic. But that, ugh.

**Craig:** Argh. What are you gonna do?

**John:** What are you gonna do? We’re not going to talk about the prequels anymore.

**Craig:** Natalie Portman is a great actor.

**John:** She is.

**Craig:** I mean, I’ve seen Natalie Portman literally blow me away and then it’s like, um, boy, boy, nobody was helping her out.

**John:** No one is fantastic in those.

**Craig:** You can’t be.

**John:** No one is.

**Craig:** Because I got the feeling that they were in empty green rooms and there was no connection to anything. They didn’t understand what they were saying. The dialogue wasn’t particularly good. So, they were just sort of like, “What about this?”

And by the way, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline, you know, that’s when you get when the director is not helping you at all. [laughs] They’re like, “Go ahead. Yeah, no, you’re right. Just do it.”

**John:** “Just do that.”

**Craig:** “Nope, you know what? You tell me when you’re done.”

**John:** I think George Lucas —

**Craig:** “Yeah. And then we’ll move on.”

**John:** George Lucas knew where to put the lights. He put the camera. And look: success.

**Craig:** “Yeah, I’m done. I’m going to go have lunch. And somebody just send a PA to my trailer when you guys have decided that you got it.”

**John:** What is fascinating is that the director is in some ways the person who is the least — you could make it without the director to some certain degree. Like the AD could sort of like look at a shot list and tell everyone what to do. And someone could call action. That’s fine. And the actors could do their stuff. And you could do it all without that.

But without the director actually saying like, “Yes, this is what I want, no, this is not what I want, we’re going again, change this thing,” you don’t get anything done. And there’s no progress.

**Craig:** Well, of course. And let me also point out. You wouldn’t even be there at that point without a director anyway, because who has decided what everyone’s wearing, who’s decided what the sets look like, who’s decided that that’s what you’re even shooting that day? Everything is about the vision, the combined vision of the screenwriter and the director, who is oftentimes the same individual, much to Morgan Freeman’s chagrin, working with the actors to create a performance and a moment.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** Anyway. So, you know what? They’re great actors. I’m sure they’re great people. Hopefully this was just a weird moment for them. Maybe not. [laughs] We’ll find out.

**John:** [laughs] All right. We had a reader write in with a question that I thought was interesting. So, he says, “I am a semi-finalist in this year’s Nicholl Fellowship.”

**Craig:** Congratulations.

**John:** “And because of that my name is being circulated around town with other semi-finalists.” Congratulations. “Several managers and production companies have contacted me requesting the Nicholl script,” which is natural.

“One manager read the script right away. Loved it. Requested more scripts. Loved them. And set up a meeting. We met in his office and he did most of the talking, telling me his background, how he works, what he does.

“Of my scripts he liked a TV pilot, but they can’t do anything with it until TV season,” TV pilot season. “He also liked the semi-finalist feature but said it stood a better chance if I cut 15 pages. Both made sense to me. I pitched him the script I’m currently working on as well as log lines for two others on my writing to do list. He offered some feedback like he did for the pilot and the Nicholl feature, feedback about how I can best shave the project to increase its chances with the connections he has.

“At the end of the meeting, which lasted two hours, he asked if any other managers had contacted me. I said yes, but didn’t go into detail. He said, ‘Let’s keep in touch,’ and then we parted ways.”

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** “This is the first manager I’ve ever met. So my questions are: What happened? Was this a good meeting or bad? He’s a young guy and seems like a good guy, but I don’t have anyone to compare him to. What’s the next step?”

**Craig:** Hmm. That is a good question. Well, you’re approaching this from a natural point of view of the young ingénue in the bar who’s just been hit on by a man. And you’re wondering, well geez, what does all that mean, and so on and so forth. I would argue to you that you flip the situation in your head and think of yourself as in charge and think of what you want as the thing that’s going to drive what happens next.

So, what happens next ideally is what you want to have happen next. If you like this manager and you think that he — is it a he or she?

**John:** I think it’s a he.

**Craig:** If you like this guy and you think that he is a good fit for you and that his position in the industry will help you, then you call up and say, “I want you to be my manager. Let’s sit down and talk about it. Let’s talk about what the arrangement will be and how it works, but I’m interested in you being my manager instead of these other people that want to be my manager.”

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Real simple.

**John:** I agree with you. So, hopefully by the time we’re actually giving him this advice he’s met with some other people so he has a better sense of like who other personalities are and stuff. But it sounded like a good meeting to me.

**Craig:** Yeah!

**John:** Two hours is a long meeting. And if you like what his comments were about your scripts and the things you were talking about for log lines, that’s a good thing.

So, yes, generally that manager guy would follow up more, but if he hasn’t followed up more you can totally take the reins and call him back and say, “Yes.”

The true story is I hired my attorney, Ken Richman, and my agent, Kramer, had sent me out to meet a bunch of attorneys, but Richman was the first person I met. It was like, well, you’re perfect. So done. And I just said yes right there in the room and that was the guy and he’s been my attorney ever since.

So, sometimes it just clicks and it’s just right and that can be good and proper.

**Craig:** Absolutely.

**John:** Now, I would say this guy is young and that’s not a bad thing. And I think sometimes you get nervous about like, “Well, this person is really young and doesn’t know what they’re doing.” Well, but you’re also young and you don’t really know what you’re doing. So, sometimes it’s good to get somebody who is at that same place in life as you are and hopefully you’ll grow up together.

**Craig:** Mm-hmm.

**John:** And if you like his taste, because he obviously has good taste if he likes your script, if you like his notes, if you like his general style, if you don’t think you’re going to dread getting phone calls and emails from him, it might be the right fit.

**Craig:** Absolutely true. And I also kind of like the deal where he said, “Yeah, we had a meeting and I really enjoyed meeting with you,” and he’s not chasing you. He’s not being desperate. Nobody meets with anybody for two hours if it’s a bad meeting.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** No such thing. If you’re in a room with somebody and you’re, “Oh, god, this guy is just a zero, he’s a dud. I can’t sell him, I can’t sell his work. He doesn’t have anything else, he’s strange,” they just end it. And they give you some sort of shine on and off you go. But, no, two hours, obviously he’s interested. But he also knows that you’re out there meeting other managers and he’s sort of properly saying, “Great. All right. Well, let’s keep in touch meaning you tell me if you want to work with me. I’m not going to beg you. But I’m aware that you have to go do your due diligence.”

So, there you go.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Perfect.

**John:** I think that’s simple advice.

Craig, it’s come time for One Cool Things. So, my One Cool Thing is actually in the blockbuster theme. I started wondering like well what happened to all the old Blockbuster stores. Have they all been rebuilt as other things? The truth is, no. And so I found this website that had a great collection of photos of abandoned video stores which I think is such a terrific time capsule of sort of where we are right now.

Because it was a specifically built kind of place to hold a specific thing that we don’t need any more. And so Blockbusters themselves were pretty big and they had all those shelves. And they had a thing — it’s not all that straight forward to convert them to something else. It’s not like those giant Walmarts which are sort of a nightmare to convert to something else, but they’re just this sort of sad thing that exists.

And so I’ll put a link in the show notes for abandoned video stores.

**Craig:** Cool. Eerie. It’s like those photo essays of Detroit. [laughs]

**John:** Yes. [laughs]

**Craig:** Sorry, Detroit listeners, but —

**John:** Blockbuster video is sort of like the city of Detroit.

**Craig:** It’s like Detroit.

So, my One Cool Thing today is, as promised, Grand Theft Auto based. So, lots of fan-made videos because Grand Theft Auto V is such an enormous world. And there’s lots of fun things to do and most of the videos are generally mayhem. There’s some cool videos that a guy has done of five-star police chases. So, in Grand Theft Auto V, if you commit a minor crime like say punching someone or running someone over with a car and killing them, you get one star.

But as you continue to evade the police, or shoot at police, or things like that, your stars escalate. And the more stars you have, the more police are coming after you in helicopters. Five star, to even get five stars you’ve just got to go nuts. It’s hard to even get to it. And then there’s a cop literally every 12 feet. And so people have done these crazy five-star chase videos and videos where they pile up a bunch of cars and blow them all up. It’s fun.

But there’s one series that I think is amazing because it shows just how detailed and brilliant the game is. And it’s called GTA V Mythbusters. And there’s, I think, five of them. And basically they collect these myths that people put out there like, for instance, if you light a car on fire in Grand Theft Auto V, which you can do by pouring gasoline on it and then lighting it on fire, and then drive it into water. The water will extinguish the fire and you can save the car. And then they test it and they say, “Oh, yup, that’s true.”

**John:** Nice. This engine actually does — yeah, that’s great.

**Craig:** It’s amazing. Or like if you lure police helicopters into the turbine wind farms in the Mohave Desert area, the wind turbines will destroy the helicopter. True. [laughs]

**John:** Oh my god.

**Craig:** But there are some amazing ones that like never would have even occurred to me. For instance, I didn’t even realize, okay, so if you take a car and you light it on fire with some gasoline. Pour some gasoline on it, light it on fire, stand back. Eventually it will explode. I did not know that if you shot a car in the hood, then you could see gasoline spurting out of it. And you can actually drive the car until you run out of gas.

I did not know that. Then the question was myth. A car without gas in it will not explode. [laughs] So, they do this. They drive the car. It runs out of gas. It stops. They get out. They pour gasoline on top of the car. Light the car on fire and sit back. It does not explode.

**John:** Now, Craig, the crucial question which every listener is asking right now is are there Teslas in the game?

**Craig:** There are!

**John:** And I’m so happy to hear that.

**Craig:** Okay, now the deal with the Grand Theft Auto universe is that they don’t license real auto manufacturer names. They just fake them. They come up with copies. And I was kind of bummed because I was really hoping for a Tesla in the game and I couldn’t find one.

And then the other day I just randomly yanked some woman out of her car, as I typically do to drive somewhere, [laughs], and I got in —

**John:** You’re going to go home so you can play the game.

**Craig:** Yes, exactly. I was here in Old Town. And what I true and do in the game is if I have to go somewhere and I don’t have a car, I wait until a really cool car comes and then I steal that one, because it’s faster and it’s more fun.

So, this sporty car comes up and it looks like one I’ve maybe been in before. I yank a lady out. I get in. I start driving. I’m going super fast and I realize it’s not making any noise. And I’m like, wait a second. And so I stop the car and adjusted the camera so I could see the back of the car and it was a Coil. That was the brand name. Coil.

**John:** Nice.

**Craig:** And it was clearly a Tesla Roadster. So, when they were developing the game I assume they developed it before the Model S was a big deal, but the Tesla Roadster was still out there. So, the Tesla Roadster is in the game. It’s called a Coil. And it’s my favorite. And so I put it in a garage. It’s nice and safe.

**John:** Of course.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** That’s good.

**Craig:** It’s such a good… — But anyway, GTA V Mythbusters, it’s so entertaining to watch it because some of that stuff is just — some of it, like, oh, there’s a strange glitch. Like if you land a helicopter on top of a jumbo jet you can get inside the jumbo jet and pilot it which is just ridiculous and glitchy. But some of it is just about the detail, the specificity of the details is just remarkable.

**John:** Yeah, it really is a remarkable universe. And so I deliberately — I don’t want my daughter to know that we actually have the game, so I keep it out there, but I do know parents who will like go out deep sea diving with their kids. Like the kid has no idea what the game actually is.

**Craig:** Oh cute.

**John:** You will drive carefully to the beach and then you will go deep sea diving. It’s like, oh, how nice.

**Craig:** Yeah, I won’t let my son anywhere near it. No way. Yeah.

**John:** Good parenting with Craig Mazin.

**Craig:** Yeah. Real easy, obvious parenting with Craig Mazin.

**John:** Great. So, standard boilerplate ending here. If you would like to send a message to me or Craig, Craig is @clmazin on Twitter. I’m @johnaugust on Twitter. Longer questions can be sent to ask@johnaugust.com.

If you would like a USB drive with the first 100 episodes of the show, we have a few more of those left so you can go to store.johnaugust.com and we are selling those there.

Craig and I will both be at the Austin Film Festival next week, so the next episode you hear will be one of our live shows, which will be fun.

**Craig:** Awesome.

**John:** And if you’re listening to us in iTunes or if you’re connected to iTunes, leave us a comment there because that helps other people find us and enjoy our show.

**Craig:** Thanks everybody.

**John:** Thanks everybody. Have a great week, Craig. And I’ll see you in Austin.

**Craig:** See you in Texas. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* Come see Scriptnotes live at the 2013 [Austin Film Festival](http://www.austinfilmfestival.com/)
* [The Atlantic](http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/10/the-big-business-of-big-hits-how-blockbusters-conquered-movies-tv-and-music/280298/) on Anita Elberse’s new book, Blockbusters, and the book [on Amazon](http://www.amazon.com/dp/0805094334/?tag=johnaugustcom-20)
* [Gravity](http://gravitymovie.warnerbros.com/) is in theaters now
* The relevant [Last Vegas interview excerpt](http://instagram.com/p/faO_XwGZ1W/)
* KnowYourMeme on [Morgan Freeman, Titty sprinkles](http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/people/morgan-freeman)
* IndieWire on [the Blade: Trinity lawsuit](http://blogs.indiewire.com/shadowandact/details-of-chaos-on-the-set-of-blade-trinity-indicate-production-was-troubled-from-the-start)
* Sundance Institute’s [feature film programs](http://www.sundance.org/programs/feature-film/)
* [Internet killed the Video Store: An Abandoned Industry](http://www.messynessychic.com/2012/09/06/internet-killed-the-video-store-an-abandoned-industry/) is John’s [One Cool Thing](http://johnaugust.com/onecoolthings)
* And [GTA V Mythbusters](http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVSZoKmDBr8UdW2MjaDo5uZ8ESO68Bdrk) is Craig’s [One Cool Thing](http://johnaugust.com/onecoolthings)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener Ashley Kotzur

The original post for this episode can be found [here](http://johnaugust.com/2013/let-me-give-you-some-advice).

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

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

**John:** And this is Episode 112 of Scriptnotes, a podcast about screenwriting and things that are interesting to screenwriters.

Craig, this is our 112th episode. It’s also our “Let me give you some advice” episode, because we have a lot of backed up questions to answer. But also for whatever reason this week a lot of people took it upon themselves to give other people advice. And so I thought we would weigh in on some of that advice that was given this week.

**Craig:** We live in an advice culture.

**John:** We certainly do. Unsolicited advice comes quite frequently. So, our listeners have solicited advice, so we’re happy to provide them, but also want to provide some feedback on some other advice that was offered this week.

And we should start with the big one which is this video that sort of went viral this week called “Dear J.J. Abrams” with these people in Portland made up this really nicely animated video suggesting some things that J.J. Abrams should keep in mind regarding Star Wars.

**Craig:** Yup.

**John:** So, I watched this and I thought the advice seemed well intentioned and actually relatively good advice. I’m just not sure it was quite targeted at the right person, because while J.J. Abrams is directing this movie, it’s Michael Arndt who is writing the movie. And there are many people involved with it.

So, Craig, what did you think of — well, let’s talk about what the four points of advice were. That might be a good place to start.

**Craig:** I mean, sure. So, he was advising things — Let me just start editorializing immediately. He was advising things that people have been talking about for over a decade now since the prequels came out.

There’s no “advice” here for people making a Star Wars movie. So, don’t do things like the Midi-chlorians, you know, keep the force mysterious.

Keep Star Wars a frontier-based movie in the western style in which it was initially done.

Don’t make it cutesy. So, you don’t do jokes where people are stepping on tails and all the rest of it, you know, Jabba’s tail.

And keep it sort of dirty and gritty so it’s not all shiny and new and antiseptic, but it’s sort of broken down like the Millennium Falcon was sort of a hunk of junk.

**John:** Yeah. And those are all good points. And they’ve all been sort of well made points before. I think it was a useful and visually nice encapsulation of those points, but it wasn’t especially new. It was an interesting way for this ad agency in Portland to get attention for themselves by creating a viral video, so good on them I guess.

**Craig:** I guess. [laughs]

**John:** But I would say it actually got me more excited about a Star Wars movie suddenly because it made me remember what it was about the first three movies that I loved so much and what I’m potentially very much looking forward to in a J.J. Abrams directed version of it.

**Craig:** Sure. I guess that’s true. But, look, first of all it’s mistitled. It should be “Advice for George Lucas for 10 years ago,” or 12 years ago, whenever those movies came out, because really what he’s complaining about are the prequels.

George Lucas, let me just say, George Lucas made Star Wars. He made it! This thing that these grown men are so obsessed about that they’re taking time to make these advice videos over and animating them and regurgitating points that other people have made a thousand times, and far better frankly. George Lucas made that thing on his own, with no help from anybody. In fact, everybody was against it and he made it. He invented the whole thing out of cloth.

So, if you want to go ahead and give George Lucas advice about how to not make the prequels that he’s already made after that that weren’t good — go ahead. Go talk into your time machine to George Lucas. J.J. Abrams and Michael Arndt and Simon Kinberg and Larry Kasdan who are writing these sequels now, you don’t think they know this? You don’t think that they know these points that would fall frankly under Star War Criticism not-even-101, it’s like senior year of high school Star Wars criticism. I mean, come on.

Really, it’s a frontier? It’s a western? Eh, I don’t know. The whole thing just annoyed me because it was facile, it’s been done already a billion times. It’s easy. And it’s weirdly taking credit, pre-credit, for decisions other people, [laughs], greater minds than these guys are making. Can’t we just stop talking about Star Wars?

**John:** But my daughter can’t stop talking about Star Wars.

**Craig:** Yeah, well your daughter is seven!

**John:** She’s eight now.

**Craig:** Eight!

**John:** Well, what’s fascinating and sort of frustrating about Star Wars as a parent is she — I think she likes the original movies better than the prequels, but she watches all of them and she doesn’t actually have a — she hasn’t developed taste in a way yet.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** She doesn’t appreciate it the way that I appreciate that the original movies are better than the sequels.

**Craig:** Sure.

**John:** And so in some ways me showing her this could be a useful way for me to talk about these are the reasons why and she might actually pay a little bit of attention to some of the things I find better about the original movies than the sequels.

**Craig:** No question. But, you know, I have to say that when we were kids and we saw Star Wars that there were plenty of people, who is that critic? John Simon, is that his name?

**John:** I have no idea.

**Craig:** Somebody Simon, the critic, hated Empire Strikes Back. Just hated it. You know, went on and on about how it was an inferior, I don’t know, Ersatz version of old serial movies that were so much better. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

You know, and now we’re the old guys yelling at people to get off or lawns and I just feel like, look, maybe — I hated the prequels. Hated them. You know, these guys did their little two minute video. Anybody born in the late ’60s/early ’70s could do a 12-hour monologue about why the prequels were terrible and the original movies are great. And congratulations to us, but the truth is you’re right, our children enjoyed the prequels for what they were.

And, you know, maybe it was for them. And either way, who cares?! This is, I mean, honestly who cares? It just feels like these people just pick over this stuff and the only time I’m ever interested in Star Wars commentary is when it’s funny and it’s revisionist, you know. I mean, Kevin Smith famously had the whole that Luke Skywalker is a war criminal thing.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** And Eddie Izzard does this great thing about Darth Vader just like dealing with employees on the Death Star and the cafeteria, [laughs], you know, having to go to the Death Star cafeteria because there are so many people working there. And things like that are funny, and they’re fresh, and they’re interesting, and they’re respectful, frankly.

And I just don’t feel like that I — I just don’t like it when people invest their time and energy on hit pieces, because let me tell you, this thing is designed as advice to J.J., like he freaking needs this guy’s advice, like he’s not smart enough.

But beyond that, it’s really just a hit piece on the prequels. That’s all it is, just another hit piece tarted up as something else. And, to boot, John, it’s a list of things. Eh, every possible thing to get me angry got me angry.

**John:** Well, here’s another list of things, this one by Tony Gilroy, the screenwriter of Michael Clayton.

**Craig:** Ah, I like this list! [laughs]

**John:** All right, you probably agree with almost everything on this list.

**Craig:** Eight out of ten.

**John:** That’s pretty good for another screenwriter to come up with this. This is a list that Tony Gilroy provided based on an interview with the BBC and so we’ll provide a link to that. Here are the bullet points of his list of advice to screenwriters. Number one, go to the movies.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Yes. Rather than reading books, got to the movies. Make stuff up but keep it real.

**Craig:** Yes.

**John:** Start small.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** Learn to live by your wits.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** Write for TV.

**Craig:** No.

**John:** Ah! Here’s where we disagree.

**Craig:** [laughs] Yeah.

**John:** This is specifically what Tony Gilroy said about writing for TV. “It’s getting harder and harder to make good movies. TV is where the ambiguity and shades of reality live, it’s where stories can be interesting. A lot of writers are very excited about TV right now and it’s a writer-controlled business. When writers are in control, good things happen. They are more rational, they are hardworking, they are more benevolent.” Surprisingly he did not use semi-colons there, but.

“Every time writers have been put in charge of entertainment, things have worked out, so with TV maybe we will see a writer-driven utopia.”

**Craig:** I don’t disagree with the positive aspects of what he’s saying. What I disagree with are the negative aspects. If you want to write movies, if you are supposed to be writing movies, you should be writing movies. Tony Gilroy continues to write movies as far as I know.

**John:** But if Tony Gilroy wanted to make an awesome series for HBO, it would be phenomenal.

**Craig:** Maybe. I mean, you know what, because I liked a bunch of his movies. Some of his movies I don’t like that much. Tony Gilroy is a brilliant guy, he’s an amazing writer, and a great filmmaker, but he’s not infallible. And television is a very different medium than film. And writers have had interesting times crossing back and forth. There are some that seem to do so with ease and others can’t. I guess the only reason I disagree with it is, look, there are still people making really interesting good movies out there.

**John:** Agreed.

**Craig:** It’s occurring. And they may not be so interesting to him. And his kind of movie has become very difficult to make, agreed. But, look, I just saw a very late in the process cut of Scott Frank’s next movie, A Walk Among the Tombstones, and it’s terrific and it’s very much the kind of movie that Tony Gilroy is saying nobody makes anymore. Well, they do.

**John:** They do.

**Craig:** Yeah, so it’s not that I, you know… — And look, also, there’s a ton of terrible television out there. [laughs] A ton. A ton! It’s just that the outliers in television are so great, you know. So, I couldn’t get on board with that totally.

**John:** All right.

Number six, learn to write anywhere, anytime.

**Craig:** Oh my god, yes.

**John:** Oh, wholeheartedly agree with this. And people who fetishize their writing process…

**Craig:** Please.

**John:** No, don’t.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Number seven, get a job.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** I agree.

**Craig:** How many times have I said make Plan B Plan A, Plan A Plan B.

**John:** Mm-hmm. Get a life.

**Craig:** Yes!

**John:** Yeah. You have to do other interesting things, because otherwise you’re just going to write about your toes.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And the things that other people have already made into movies. You’re just going to be copying other movies unless you have something new to say.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Number nine is a point I suspect you disagree with. Don’t live in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Well, duh. [laughs]

**John:** Duh. So, this has been classic advice that we’ve given this whole time through and I will trot out my standard thing I say at this point is that if you want to write country songs you should probably move to Nashville. And if you want to write Hollywood movies, you should probably move to Hollywood. It’s as basic as that.

**Craig:** Yeah. Tony lives in New York and he’s got that New York think. I don’t know if he grew up in New York or not. I did grow up in New York, so maybe that’s why I don’t have the New York thing. There’s nothing special about, I mean, yes, there’s something special about New York. I mean, I love New York, da, da, da. I do. I love it.

But, there’s a New York chauvinism that occurs that’s just stupid. And I love Los Angeles, frankly, and I like it here. That aside, of course it’s easier to break into the business in Los Angeles than it is in New York. And even the television that’s made in New York originates in Los Angeles. It’s just shot there. I think this is terrible advice that is coming from his kind of Tony Gilroy grumpy, “I’m a New Yorker,” kind of guy thing.

**John:** Number ten, develop a thick skin and just keep going.

**Craig:** Heck yeah.

**John:** Yeah. It is ultimately survival. And so it’s one of those things where you see a bunch of twenty-somethings try to start out as screenwriters. And some of them make it and some of them won’t make it. Talent is a lot of that, but perseverance is another huge factor in who is still working ten years later.

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** And you just have to be able to roll with it. And if I were to quit all the times where I felt like quitting, none of this would have happened at all.

**Craig:** Yeah. And the other aspect of thick skin is learning where to place pain on the scale of priorities, because you’re going to suffer. And I don’t mean like you’re Van Gogh and you’re suffering for your art. I mean, you’re going to suffer — people are going to be mean to you. People are going to be mean to your face. People are going to be mean anonymously. It’s tough. And they’re going to be mean for all sorts of crazy, weird reasons, and we’re going to get into a few of those I think when we discuss this New York Times article.

But people are unfair and mean in this business. And even when they’re being fair and nice sometimes they cause you pain because they simply don’t understand what you’re doing. They misunderstand you.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** So, you have to be able to survive that constant drip torture because you’re in for it. I mean, this is a great list, honestly. I mean, aside from number nine which I think is just wrong and the other one which I kind of qualified a little bit, there are some really, really good wisdom in this list from somebody that’s been doing it for a long, long time at an extraordinarily high level of achievement. So, I would suggest everybody take a look at it.

It is excellent advice. And lo and behold, it’s excellent advice from somebody who actually does it and not, say, somebody who doesn’t do it.

**John:** Agreed. So, everything we talk about in today’s episode you can find in the show notes at johnaugust.com/scriptnotes or /podcast, both will get you there.

The next thing which you already sort of set up was a New York Times piece that I sent you a link to. This was something that a reader had sent in based on some follow up on something we talked about this last episode. We had talked about how there’s a dearth of female directors and why is that. Is there any way we can sort of study and figure out what that is?

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Well, a listener sent in this link to a New York Times piece which I thought was really fascinating which is looking at why in theater are there fewer female playwrights, or fewer female playwrights who are getting their work produced at the highest level.

And there were some fascinating findings in it. One of the most interesting things really speaks to the question you and I both asked is why do we have — there seems to be a weird discorrelation between how many high powered women execs we have and how few female directors we have, because shouldn’t they be hiring women?

And in theater they found that women artistic directors of theaters were less likely to hire women than men.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** Which is fascinating.

**Craig:** It is. Specifically, so this is a Princeton student, so go Tigers, and they did a couple of different experiments, but the one that was the most fascinating was they took one play and for one group, a control group, they sent it out under a male name. And for the experimental group they sent it out under a female name to see what the differences would be and the acceptance. And they found a very significant difference. The same exact play when it was submitted as a play written by a female, it was not received as well. It was significantly downgraded by the people who read it.

But what was fascinating was that when they took a look at who was reading it and who was evaluating it, and then they looked at the gender of those people, what they found was this: men didn’t care at all what the gender was of the author. Whether they got that script as a man or the same script written by a woman, they didn’t care. Their answers were roughly equivalent. It was the women.

The women had a demonstrable bias against female writers. And that was shocking.

**John:** Yes. And so when we say bias we say statistically the numbers were very different for women artistic directors reading women. So, it wasn’t saying that they were emotionally prejudiced or trying to explain why they were doing this. It’s simply that was how the numbers came out.

**Craig:** Yeah, the scientific sense of the word bias.

**John:** Yeah. So that is a really interesting finding that I wonder if it could be replicated in any meaningful way in Hollywood. First instinct flush is to try to do that thing where you switch the names on a given script and see what the results were based on different people reading it and what that is.

Theater is useful in that artistic director is sort of like the one person reading it. And so you can sort of say like that is who did it. Never in Hollywood is it really so clear cut who is the one person reading it and making a decision whether to proceed or not to proceed.

**Craig:** Correct. Yeah. It’s a very difficult experiment to run in Hollywood because also it’s just hard to send out scripts and not have people talking about it and essentially poisoning the research well by calling each other or, you know.

**John:** And our first question was really about female directors. And this doesn’t really speak to female directors. It really speaks to female writers. And we’ve discussed, you know, there’s underrepresentation of women in the writing ranks, but it doesn’t seem as completely out of line as it is with the director ranks. And directors is about a person in front of you in a room convincing you that they are able to direct this movie, so more things get involved. You can’t do a blind study that way.

**Craig:** There is a gender gap among screenwriters and television writers, though. The gender gap seems to occur across writers and directors in every aspect of Hollywood movie and television making. And I am fascinated by this. I mean, a part of me thinks, “Hey man, I don’t have a dog in this fight. I’m a dude.” [laughs] You know? So let’s just go with the most crude reading of the results. Guys are gender blind when they evaluate stuff and women aren’t. Well, I’m on the upside either way, so who cares?

You know, I have a daughter. [laughs]

**John:** Yeah, so do I.

**Craig:** I don’t want her — and she’s funny. And I don’t want her stuck where it’s like… — I guess my question to the world, to the world of women, and I ask questions of the world of women constantly. And either I get answers I don’t understand, or answers I don’t like. But what is that?

**John:** Yeah. I don’t know what that is. And I guess you naturally approach it with the assumption that if women are in places of power that is going to help women who could use that hand up. And this would seem to indicate that it’s not necessarily true.

**Craig:** It seems to indicate that. Now, I mean, my instinct if you had asked me to guess, my guess would have been that in fact women wouldn’t have shown any bias. That their results would have been like the male results, that is to say gender neutral/who cares. “My job is to find great material. That’s what I’m about.” Because that seems like a rational point of view.

But it seems there is something going on. There’s a weird resentment or there’s a thing and, look, it’s feeding into all sorts of creepy stereotypes about women. I have to acknowledge that upfront. Catty. Bitchy. Competitive. And all of that leaves a bad taste in my mouth. So, I don’t want to go down that road and try and ascribe any kind of causality to this.

But I have to say it should be talked about. It’s an important finding, even though it’s limited.

**John:** Agreed. And there’s also the danger of the twice-as-good problem, where basically you end up holding a certain group to a higher standard because of reasons X, Y, or Z, or partly because you are a part of that group. And therefore you hold people of your same group to an unrealistically high standard for what they need to be able to prove in order to say yes.

**Craig:** Yup. That may be part of it. Whatever it is, whatever the motivation — good, bad — it’s wrong. It’s wrong. It’s hard to look at a result like that and make sense of it. I struggle to make sense of it. So, dispiriting to say the least.

**John:** Dispiriting to say the least.

Our last bit of unsolicited advice, I thought we might offer a little unsolicited advice because this is something that you and I separately looked at. This last week Max Landis, who is a screenwriter of the Chronicle franchise, made a choice, which was maybe not the best choice, which is to give an interview to a website in which he was very, very candid about girls, and dating, and sex. And many things you wonder if they were the best choices to divulge.

And I bring it up because on a previous podcast you and I had discussed the whole Ender’s Game fiasco and you had that writer — the novelist I should say — the novelist behind Ender’s Game who became this huge controversial figure and that tainted the movie that he was associated with.

Max Landis I don’t think is in that same category at all. But, in that podcast we did discuss like, well, what happens when you have the screenwriter who suddenly is drawing a lot of attention for things that you may not want the screenwriter drawing attention to himself for?

So, I don’t want to patronizing and sort of offer Max Landis advice, but I do want to discuss that sense of finding that boundary between what you discuss privately and what you discuss publicly, because I feel like it’s a thing.

**Craig:** Well, this is not the first time, [laughs], that this particular gentleman has done this. This is his thing. This is who he is. And he — look, I have trouble. I have trouble here. We’ve laughed before about how at some point somebody accused me of being a trust fund baby, [laughs], even though my parents were public school teachers. But he is the son of a very rich, famous Hollywood director, and he had all the advantages and all the pluses here. And he’s just — his personality is such that this is what occurs.

I don’t even think there’s much in the way of choices here. I just think this is his thing, this is what he does. And I just would prefer that, not he, but people like him… — So, let me spread it beyond the world of writers.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Shut up! Just shut up about yourself. I mean, look, you and I have done — this is 109th podcast?

**John:** 112th.

**Craig:** 112th. Oh, geez. So, 112 podcasts and we talk about other people and we talk about the business. Occasionally we’ll slip into little things, but they’re so mild. I think that this public sharing of the most creepy parts of yourself is lame. It’s just lame.

**John:** I do wonder if some of it is a generational thing and that I need to take a step out of myself and look at the perspective from a person who is in their young 20s, and they just have a different sense of where that line is drawn.

And so Lena Dunham is a friend. And so Lena has, I would say, the advantage of having a fictionalized universe that she can write for herself and talk about things that she wants to talk about within that world and doesn’t have to divulge all of her personal life. But, I would say she draws that boundary between private and public differently than I would now. And that’s just I think partly generational.

**Craig:** Yeah. Maybe and maybe not. You know, I was going to raise Lena as an example, too, but look, Woody Allen has been doing this for 30 years also. Where he, I mean, look, he made a movie about being in love with a 16-year-old girl and then he fell in love with his, [laughs], something was going on there.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And he casts his wives and his girlfriends and his lovers in his movies in succession. This has been going on forever. Artists have been doing this forever. Using your complicated life as fodder for dramatic representation I think is fair game as long as it’s represented, re-presented, and it is done for our entertainment.

Whatever personal growth Lena Dunham gets out of doing the show, Girls, it’s inconsequential frankly to the fact that it entertains a lot of people and that’s what it’s there for. And this is not that. This is not that at all.

**John:** But I wonder if on some level it’s almost the Lady Gaga point of, like, is she creating art or is she art herself? And that sense of — that blurred boundary between the work you are doing and who you are in presenting yourself into the world. And that’s an interesting situation when you’re a screenwriter rather than sort of a pop artist.

**Craig:** [laughs] Right. I totally agree.

**John:** And maybe we’re all pop stars now. Maybe that’s —

**Craig:** No, we’re not. And this is important to point out, because Madonna did this. And, again, people who appear whose faces and bodies, whose physical beings are the product, in part, along with the quality of their minds, can transform themselves into these bigger than life people and their lives become part of the product.

And remember Warren Beatty famously saying…

**John:** Yeah. Kevin Smith. Kevin Smith is, granted, also an actor, but Kevin Smith is really a writer-director who is famous, I think, for his public life.

**Craig:** And it’s our generation, Kevin Smith.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** But also my instinct many times when I’ve read or listened to him is, “Shut up!” Because I don’t — I find at some point that all of the stuff that’s done under the guise of honesty and expression and entertainment is really just a pathetic, endless audition for frustrated actors. That’s all it is.

And I get it because, you know, I mean, we all want to be movie stars. Everybody wants to be a movie star, you know. And so you and I, we had like our tiny little moment where we got to sing on our podcast, you know. [laughs]

And that was fun! But it was just one little moment. And you know what, this guy, I’m sure you saw it on Twitter. One guy wrote in and he’s like, “Well, you know, 109 episodes and this was one self-indulgent dud, but I’ll excuse it,” which I thought was hysterical because, like, all right you took the time to point out that we had a dud even though, whatever, you can argue whether it was a dud or not.

But even that guy was like, “Yeah, that was self-indulgent.” You know what? Yes, it was! [laughs] It was self-indulgent. But it was fun and we did it once, whatever.

But we all have that instinct. It’s when you turn that instinct, when you lie about it, and try and make it something it’s not like interesting self-expression, or, I don’t know, just be honest about what it is. It’s narcissism.

**John:** Yeah. Quite possibly.

**Craig:** Anyway, I think —

**John:** So, I have no specific advice for Max Landis. And in no way I do want to sort of put him on shout and sort of do any sort of — I feel like it’s very patronizing for me to even sort of bring it up. But I also thought it was useful to bring it up just in the sense of what is a screenwriter’s public role and does the screenwriter’s public role have any effect on what they get to do next?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** Because I do feel like there are going to be people and producers in studios who would read this and say like, “You know what? Maybe we’ll pick somebody a little safer in a way. Someone who like I’m not worried about what they’re going to suddenly tweet a week before the movie comes out.”

**Craig:** I think that’s fair to say. Good work tends to trump everything.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And screenwriters will never be as interesting as even the seventh lead in a movie to the public.

**John:** Yes.

**Craig:** So, I mean, Max’s interview will largely go unnoticed and disappear. And he does this frequently. It’s just what he does. And, you know what? That’s him. [laughs] It’s just Max being Max.

**John:** [laughs] That’s what you get.

**Craig:** Yeah, that’s what you get. And it’s like, I don’t know. All I guess I could say about it is I just find it lame. That’s all.

**John:** Well, let’s us be us and let’s answer some questions from listeners because we have quite a few in the mailbag here, so we’ll start with the simplest question we’ve done in a very long time, a question from Alessandro in Los Angeles. “Where can I find good freelance screenwriters for hire? Is there a trustworthy website for that?”

**Craig:** Well, they just shut it down. It was called the Silk Road. You could get hit men, you could get drugs, you could get screenwriters. [laughs]

**John:** [laughs] You pay with bitcoin. It was great.

**Craig:** Bitcoin. By the way, side note. I got obsessed yesterday for whatever reason because I was reading about Silk Road. I’m like, bitcoin? So, I started reading about bitcoin. And I finally learned what bitcoin mining was. Do you know what bitcoin mining is?

**John:** I do. Absolutely. So, it’s these complicated computer algorithms and your computer does all this work to generate them. And there’s a limited number of bitcoins that could ever be created mathematically and therefore they increase in value in a way that should be useful. And yet it also feels like a giant Ponzi scheme to me.

**Craig:** Well, no, actually, all right, you’re almost right. And, Alessandro, I promise we’ll get to your answer. The deal is that, okay, so banks process transactions and it’s a very complicated thing to do. But in bitcoin there are no banks. It’s just person-to-person. So, who is processing the transactions? The bitcoin miners. That’s what bitcoin mining is. They’re basically doing all the computer processing to make sure that these secure transactions go through properly.

So, the bitcoin world essentially uses the people that are processing the transactions as a way to create more bitcoins. But they keep changing. Like, it used to be that they would give you 25 bitcoins for so many things that you processed and then it became less. I don’t know. Anyway, it’s super complicated and incredibly dorky, but finally I was like, what the hell is that? Why is it mining? Is there really a mine? [laughs] I’m so stupid.

**John:** Well, it is mining in the sense of like it generates — there’s ways you can actually generate coins from scratch, but it deliberately takes a tremendous amount of computing power and it algorithmically escalates in ways that you and I could never understand. It’s big math. But I can totally answer Alessandro’s question.

**Craig:** Yeah, yeah, all right. So, Alessandro’s question, I mean, so where can you find good freelance screenwriters for hire? I’m excited to hear your answer. I have no idea.

**John:** Well, I would say, here’s the thing — you have to take a step back. It’s not like you can just hire them like you’re going to hire a plumber off of Angie’s List, off a recommendation. You’re going to have to read a lot of scripts and you’re going to have to read the scripts and figure out like who is the person who could write this thing. And then you’re going to have to meet with that person and form a relationship. So, it’s much more complicated than a list.

But, the places where you would look for these is the Black List. Those people, I’m saying like blcklst.com, so the people who are submitting their scripts to that and the ones who have ones publicly that you can read, read them. And find the ones that you really like.

Go to film festivals and find people who have made interesting movies and figure out who those writers are, because a lot of those writers don’t have paid work. You’re going to have to find good material and then figure out who wrote that material and start a relationship with them. And that is an incredible amount of long work, but you’re not going to hire somebody off of a list. That doesn’t happen.

**Craig:** No. It doesn’t. And I have to say these questions always make me a little nervous because we are a podcast for screenwriters. And when I hear some guy going, “Hey, where can I find some freelance screenwriters?” You know, like is there a Home Dept where I can pick up guys to do drywall?

Most screenwriters that are worth their salt are in the Writers Guild and they can only work for Writers Guild signatory employers which is a big deal. You have to show that you have the ability to pay residuals and that you have enough assets to cover that and that you have to pay minimums and contribute to pension and healthcare.

And when people are just like, “Hey, where can I find a writer?” I just smell the abuse already. I can smell it.

**John:** Yeah, Alessandro is going to drive up in this pickup truck and say, “Hop on in. I’ve got some writing to do.”

**Craig:** “Anybody here know how to do a third act? Get on. Get in the back.”

**John:** Our next question comes from Bretton in Newton, Massachusetts. And Bretton, who could be a man or a woman, I’m not actually sure.

**Craig:** Bretton. I’m going to say man.

**John:** This person is an eighth grade English teacher. And also a screenwriter. “These two things together are why I have such a hard time when I read things like this snippet below” — that I’ll read — “in a script that seems to have generated some buzz of a writer on a young and hungry list. This guy has representation.” So, basically Bretton has read this represented writer’s script and I will try to tell you what is in this sentence that has been singled out.

“Suddenly; she see’s Smith in the rearview mirror and nearly shit’s herself. She slams on the breaks.”

**Craig:** Misspelled.

**John:** Wrong kind of brakes. “Breaks,” like break a plate. “And she’s out of the cab.” So, those are two spectacularly bad sentences.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so the question is essentially, like, what gives? How does that person get represented and why do I not kill myself when I read that kind of writing?

**Craig:** You know, [laughs], I don’t like it. I find it atrocious and I think it either indicates laziness and sloppiness or it indicates a certain lack of fundamental education. What it doesn’t indicate is whether or not the script is any good.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** And this is where, I mean, our question asker points out Quentin Tarantino seems to be notorious for this, too. Well, that’s sort of your answer there, isn’t it? I love Quentin Tarantino movies. I think they’re amazing. If you were to tell me, “Look you have a choice. You can have more Quentin Tarantino movies but…”

**John:** Or better punctuation.

**Craig:** “…or better punctuation.” I’m going to go with more Quentin Tarantino movies. So, you know.

**John:** But, in that answer you’re not saying that grammar and punctuation and the basic rules of English are unimportant. We’re just saying that really great filmmaking is more important than all of those things. But all of those things are really, really important. And all of these things that are singled out here are reasons why I would throw this script across the room, unless I was deeply intrigued by something else that was incredibly.

**Craig:** A-ha! That’s right.

**John:** But, I would still have that temptation to throw it across the room every time I saw one of those things. And so don’t be the person who has any mistakes on the page.

**Craig:** Right. I’m completely with you. It’s lame. That’s my word of the day. And I also think that when you read a script like this, even if you like the story or you like a lot of the screenplay, in your mind you’re also thinking, “I’m going to have to work with this person and they seem like a big dummy. So, I don’t want to work with a big dummy.” So, maybe I’m going to just hire somebody else to fix this, sort of be with me if I’m directing the movie.

This is a little bit like, hey, yeah, if you go in for a job interview at a bank and you are slovenly dressed, there’s a chance that you’re so impressive that they’re like, “Pfft. Who would have thought slovenly dressed guy? But you know what? He’s great at what he does.” Absolutely true.

Generally speaking, though, put a tie on.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Yeah. This is not —

**John:** It’s not going to hurt you.

**Craig:** It’s not rocket science. Yeah, exactly.

**John:** Our next question comes from Annie who writes, “I was hoping you could give a soon-to-be-college grad some advice. I am primarily interested in writing but I also want to explore other aspects of theater and film, specifically directing, casting, even performing. I know that it sounds scattered, but technically I’m not part of the real world yet. Can you suggest an industry job for someone like me who wants to gain exposure and experience in different areas?”

Craig, what would you suggest Annie do?

**Craig:** The job that you’re offered. That’s the job I suggest. You’re not in a position to pick and choose and craft your perfect job that touches on all 12 aspects of your interests and then dive into it with gusto. You’re going to get the job you get. Now, if you’re interested in directing, casting, performing, you know, maybe being a PA, trying to get a job as a PA on a movie set or on a television set. You certainly will see a lot of things.

But, since Annie is primarily interested in writing, I will remind her she doesn’t need a job to write. She needs a job to pay her bills and her rent. And then she just needs to write to write.

So, that’s kind of my advice is get the job you can get.

**John:** My general advice to Annie, who is going to be graduating from college and hopefully moving out to Los Angeles or New York — but Los Angeles would probably be a better choice for her — is don’t be afraid of getting a job and figuring it out and then leaving that job to go to another job that is in a different area that you’re interested in. And that’s completely cool and acceptable for people in their early 20s to do.

So, they get a job as a PA at a casting agency and they do that for six months, if they can survive six months doing that. Then they work on a set. Then they work for a producer or they do the agency mailroom. That’s fine. And it’s good to hop around those things, because you’re not going to find one job unless you do all those things. It just won’t happen.

If you are lucky enough to become the assistant to a director in film or television, that would give you little bit more exposure in all those different areas, but whatever is going to happen is going to happen.

My second bit of sort of standard advice, but I’ll just trot it out again: Just meet people who are at your same level. And you are going to meet people who are assistants doing various different things all over the town. Make friends with them, and hang out with them, and have drinks with them. And you will learn from exposure what they’re doing, too.

**Craig:** Great. Great answer.

**John:** Cool. Next question comes from Shawn. And Shawn writes, “I recently watched an interview where Craig informed a reporter that a former boss influenced him to pursue screenwriting.” I think that was at the live show you were talking about that boss, right?

**Craig:** Yeah.

**John:** “At the time you were not confident enough to take the plunge. What is the best way to inspire, encourage, challenge a talented person to take this path? I work with plenty of highly creative assistants in the industry that battle with the same dilemma Craig did, the majority of them being female and/or minorities who come from families that influence them otherwise.”

So, how do you nudge somebody to take that bold step and try?

**Craig:** Well, the person who, I don’t want to say — influence isn’t quite the right word — he said, “You should write a screenplay and then I’ll give it to somebody.” What’s going on with people who are afraid of doing this, taking the plunge, particularly when they feel like they’re disenfranchised for circumstantial reasons to begin with, is that they don’t feel like they have — they’ve looked past the point where they finished a screenplay and then they have no idea what they’re going to do with it.

And the scariest part of writing a screenplay isn’t the writing of the screenplay. It’s the notion that you’re going to write it and you’re going to care about it and love it and it will be unread. Forget unmade. Unread. You don’t even know who to give it to. So, if you are working, this person says that he works with plenty of highly creative assistants. Promise them access.

And you would be amazed. That’s what people want. If you say, look, if you see talent in somebody, you say you write a screenplay, you talk to me about what the idea is. Let’s talk about it. And if it’s something that I think is a good idea, then I can say to you in return, “I’ll give it to somebody to read.” And that’s what’s going to get them to write.

**John:** Agreed. I’m a big fan of if you see something, say something. And that is if you see a person who has talent, let them know that they’re talented. Because maybe no one is actually telling them that they’re actually quite good at this and that you think they could do more there. What you say about sort of promising them access is really important, but also when I have that conversation I make it clear that like I’m not trying to — I have no vested interest in this at all other than I want you to succeed, because I think you will make something good in the world.

And that’s a thing that people don’t hear often enough is that what they’re doing is really good and what they’re doing is sort of important for the world out there and people should see it.

**Craig:** Very good.

**John:** Next question comes from Cole from the USA, just generally somewhere in the USA.

**Craig:** Oh!

**John:** Cole writes, “I am 14 and I have been writing scripts, mostly shorts, for a few years now and people always tell me the most important thing is to know your characters, especially their voices. I can never quite understand what people mean or how to get a feel for the character I’m writing. What are your suggestions for understanding characters better? Thanks.”

**Craig:** Hmm.

**John:** Voice.

**Craig:** Yeah, well, he’s very young, I mean, so when you’re 14 years old, and this is hard, and I was 14 so I’m going to talk to you now remembering fully well what it was like to be 14. You can’t beat yourself up too much for having some gaps here because you’re still very young. And you’re at a time in your life when your brain is still growing. Not to say that you’re somehow limited by neural capacity, but you’re changing.

And a lot of what it means to understand a character is to understand other human beings, to really understand them. And to really understand human beings, and that means all the wonderful things about them but also their lies, their deceptions, their self-deceptions, their delusions, their desires.

These are things that 14 year olds aren’t particularly famous for knowing. These come — they are earned. Your understanding of humans is earned. It is hard to inhabit the mind of another person realistically and hard to speak through the voice, the distinct voice, of another person realistically if you haven’t earned it through experience. And on top of that, also, frankly there is just a talent component that is innate. So.

**John:** I think there are some things that Cole could do right now to work on some of those skills.

First off is just listen, and listen really carefully, and listen to people who aren’t sort of in your immediate social sphere, so like when you’re on the bus, when you’re out at the mall, wherever you are, listen to some people and actually really hear the words they’re using and how they’re expressing themselves.

And try to write that down and try to sort of continue what they would say and how they would say it. Because right now probably everyone sounds like you because you only know what you sound like.

And so I think you can develop an ear for how other people speak and how people express themselves just by listening really carefully and that can be a useful sort of next thing. But what Craig is really hitting which is so important is that you have to develop the empathy to really see something from another person’s perspective. And you can in some ways practice that in your real life.

And so next time your parents frustrate you, and you slam the door and you’re in your room, literally just try to put yourself in their perspective and see the whole situation from their point of view. And that is going to be crucial for you being able to write from that other point of view, write from other people’s point of view is to inhabit their mind.

**Craig:** Yeah, there are some exercises you can do to start flexing this particular muscle. For instance, ask two friends to pick two people that you know at school. They don’t have to be your friends. In fact, it’s better if they’re not your friends. But they’re two people that you know. And so your two friends are going to assign you two other people. You’re not going to have a choice of whom. And then I want you to ask two other people to come up with two things, something and a situation, almost like an improv show. Give me a situation involving two people. And now ask two other people, okay, here’s a situation with two people. Give me something that one person wants. And then ask somebody else, give me something another person wants.

Until, when your exercise is done you have two people that you know that you didn’t choose. You have a situation you didn’t choose. And you have two competing desires you didn’t choose. Now write five pages of a little short movie. And see if you can do it, like them in their voices.

**John:** That sounds great. What it is, at first that sort of sounds like improv, but improv is about being funny, being funny in that moment. This is not about trying to be funny. It’s trying to create a real thing that could happen there.

**Craig:** Yeah. Exactly.

**John:** That’s a great idea.

Next question comes from Austin Millet. “My question is this. I’ve heard your Is 15 the new 30 episode about where the first act break generally goes and what it accomplishes. My question is this, what about the break between the second and third act? Should the break immediately precede the climax or set in motion the events that lead to it? I’m sorry if you have answered this before, but I’ve only been listening for a few months and have only gone back so far.”

We haven’t really talked that much about what’s classically the second act break.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** And so the second act break usually in Hollywood parlance is sort of the worst of the worst. It’s like things are at their darkest and then the hero must do one final push towards victory. That’s the broadest, most simplified explanation of what we’ve talk about with a third act. But the third act is that last chunk of the movie. And that act break in some way — sometimes is a very clear thing that happens.

Craig, do you see anything changing about the third act?

**Craig:** No, I mean, the notion that should the break immediately precede the climax or set into motion the events that lead to it, it depends on the movie. There are movies where the third act really is really truncated. And there are others where it’s quite long.

To me it’s not so much a question of placement, although typically if you’re talking about say a 110-page screenplay, in my mind somewhere in the late 80s or early 90s of page count. That’s usually when this happens. And I like to think of it as the moment where our hero no longer — has changed fundamentally.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** Has changed so that they can no longer go back to their life that they had in the beginning of the movie, but they are not yet ready to do what is required to be perfected so to speak. So, they’re lost. They’re without a philosophy. And this is the moment where they are starting to realize that they must gain tremendous courage to do whatever needs to be done to prove that they have changed. And that can come out in all sorts of different ways. But sometimes it’s just procedural and plottish, you know.

This whole act thing is overblown.

**John:** Yeah, I agree. It’s overblown. The simplest thing I can tell people is that when we talk about three acts we talk about a beginning, and a middle, and an end. And fundamentally that’s really what it is, is that everything has a beginning, middle, and end. No matter what you do, it’s going to start, it’s going to happen, and then it’s going to over. And if you think about it in those terms you’ll be less paranoid about what page you’re on and all that stuff.

**Craig:** I was talking to somebody after the live show in New York. We were talking about act breaks. And I said, you know, the funny thing is we only talk about act breaks as screenwriters. Nobody else talks about them. I mean, sometimes in development they’ll say it because it’s early on. But when you make the movie and you’re in the editing room, you talk about reels. So, in the old days, film reels had to be balanced because movies were actually on reels and they could only be so many minutes long.

But we still use it just to divide up the work in the Avid — or I’m sorry, the non-linear editing system. And then suddenly the movie is divided into reels. And nobody talks about acts anymore at all.

**John:** Yeah.

**Craig:** It’s just sequences. So, this act thing is… — Don’t worry about it so much.

**John:** It’s a little artificial. This is our last real question.

**Craig:** Okay.

**John:** This is from Rocco in Los Angeles.

**Craig:** Rocco!

**John:** “I’ve been speaking with a producer who’s helping me secure funding for a screenplay I wrote and plan to direct. He tells me that one way to go about it is to pay a casting agent between $2,500 and $5,000 to get the script to actors. He also suggests I have an account containing $10,000 to $20,000 to pay actors a deposit in order to secure a letter of intent from them.

“A few years ago I paid a different producer $5,000 for development for the same purpose. And he ended up hanging himself on the Sunset Gower Studio lot and I lost my money. I’m wondering if this is a legitimate way to raise funds and how common you think this process is for indie films, and if you think it’s a smart way to go about it.”

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** Craig?

**Craig:** Well…the last time you followed this course of action it ended up with someone hanging themselves. No. This is not —

**John:** No, it is not —

**Craig:** This is not a smart course of action.

**John:** A screenwriter should not be paying a producer to start to try to make a movie.

**Craig:** Well, first of all, this is not, okay, the producer is helping you secure funding for a screenplay you wrote and plan to direct. “He tells me that one way to go about it is to pay a casting agent to get the script to actors.” No!

Yes, that is one way, but he left out another one way to go about it is to rob a bank. One way to go about it is to sell drugs. Casting agents, so you understand Rocco, are hired by legitimate film productions that already have financing in order to fill out the cast of a movie. Typically they’re filling out lots of parts, but not say the lead role which has already kind of been put together with the financing by a talent agent who has given the script to an actor.

Nobody, as far as I know, pays casting agents, [laughs], weird, like a $2,500 to $5,000 is like a weird Breaking Bad kind of stuffed envelope amount of money to get the script “to actors.” What actor do you think you’re going to get? Just walk with me down this road, Rocco. And actor gets a call from a casting agent and first of all they’re answering the phone to a casting agent and that person is like, “I want you to read a script. I love it.” And they’re like, “Okay?”

Do you think that’s the way it’s going to work, that the $5,000 is going to get a casting agent to call Brad Pitt. No. Okay, so that doesn’t work. Your producer, who I’m starting to think is quite a bit of a problem, now suggests that you have an account containing $10,000 to $20,000 to pay actors a deposit in order to secure a letter of intent from them. This is not how it works.

Actors will say they will sign these letters of intent to help you get financing and they sign them for free. Do you know why? Because they intend to be in the movie. [laughs] Because they want to be in the movie. What is this deposit nonsense? What is that? And how do you get that back?

And then you paid another producer money for development which is such a no-no. And then he hanged himself.

Rocco, I grew up with a lot of Roccos, and you know, Rocco, that name is supposed to go along with street smarts man. Come on! You’ve got to know better than this. You’ve got to know these guys are playing you here. This is terrible. Terrible way of going about it. It’s not legitimate. I feel super bad that you’ve been suckered before.

And I’m reaching out to you as a friend over the wire and saying you’ve got to break ties with all these people that are asking for money. All of these people. And follow — you asked what the legitimate way is and John is going to tell you.

**John:** A legitimate way is sort of all the annoyingly slow ways we’ve talked about on the show before which is people read your script and say, “This is really good. I want to make this movie.”

Or, “I think you’re a really good writer and I want you to write this other thing.”

Or, “I’m watching your directing reel and you’re really talented. Let’s try to make a movie or another short.”

You’re meeting these people at film festivals. You’re meeting these people at coffee shops, wherever. Wherever you’re meeting these people, they’re not hanging themselves in Sunset Gower Studios. And I just feel like you’re hanging out with the wrong people essentially.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s the wrong crowd. You know what? You can put your script on the Black List website for whatever that is, a couple hundred bucks or something. And people will read it and you’ll get honest feedback. The one thing you can’t do is — if all it took, buddy, was somewhere between $2,500 and $20,000 to get an independent film going, every minute there’s be an independent film coming out in a theater near you. It just doesn’t work.

Believe me, I wish it did, but it doesn’t.

**John:** And the thing is there are a phenomenal number of terrible independent producers out there, but they’re not even charging money for it.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** They’re genuinely trying to get movies made. And they’re ineffective, but they’re not changing you money.

**Craig:** [laughs]

**John:** So, you need to find —

**Craig:** We’re like trying to work them up to just inoffensively ineffective.

**John:** Indeed. So, what you’re looking for is that producer who is above board and effective. That’s not going to be easy.

**Craig:** You know, what an awful world. I feel really bad for Rocco. And I just feel like it just sucks. It sucks that people do this, that they prey on people like this.

You know what we need to do?

**John:** Oh god. What are we going to do?

**Craig:** I know. I know. Whenever I start talking like this you get nervous. But I feel like we need some sort of list of names. We need to just start naming and shaming names of people that ask writers for money for stuff like this. It’s so disgusting and it is so unethical.

**John:** I would say rather than creating a — Black List has already been used — rather than creating a negative list, I will say that something like an Independent Feature Project might be a way to sort of — look at the producers who are making these independent films and are making them legitimately, that’s the way to go. Look for the people who are actually doing the work that’s coming out rather than people who just have a business card.

**Craig:** Just don’t give anyone a dollar. It’s Three-card Monte. Honestly. It’s Three-card Monte. It’s just so depressing. Well, I’m sorry, Rocco. I really am. And believe me, I wasn’t laughing at you. I was just laughing just about the visual of, [laughs], you know, you’ve got this producer and he’s developing your script and you try and reach him and he’s just swinging from the rafters at Sunset Gower.

**John:** At Sunset Gower of all the randomly specific places.

**Craig:** I know. What a great place. Actually, that may be how I finish it up.

**John:** [laughs]

**Craig:** [laughs] I might just get myself a little monthly rental over at Sunset Gower and just string myself up and that’s it.

**John:** I don’t know. Craig, don’t.

**Craig:** I shouldn’t?

**John:** No. I think you’ve got another good ten years in you.

**Craig:** Oh! Do you? [laughs] Great.

**John:** Craig, it’s time for One Cool Things. I can go first or I can go second. What do you want to do?

**Craig:** Well, if you don’t go first then we’ve got nothing. [laughs]

**John:** Ah! So, while Craig thinks of his One Cool Thing, because this was sort of an all advice episode, I’m going to reach back to some advice I had a long time ago which was I had watched the movie Blue Valentine and I liked a lot about Blue Valentine but the thing that drove me crazy about it is the Michelle Williams character who is pregnant and decides not to have an abortion. At no point in the discussion of that did adoption ever come up as an option for her.

And having many friends who have families through adoption, I just want people both as individual people existing in the world and as writers especially to not ever forget about adoption. It’s not at all sort of what it’s been portrayed in movies and TV and literature. This sense that it’s a shame or it’s a secret or it’s that thing you don’t talk about, but no, talk about it, because it’s actually a very great thing that happens in American culture now and sort of worldwide culture now.

And if we don’t portray it honestly and positively in media, no one is going to know that it exists. Because women who find themselves in situations where they may end up going into adoption situations tend to be young women who might not have any other exposure to it except through movies and through television. And so I think we have some responsibility to show that as a thing that exists in the world in an honest light that’s not, you know, unicorns and rainbows, but it’s a thing that is good and real in the world. And there are many families that only exist in the world through adoption.

So, adoption is my One Cool Thing.

**Craig:** Very cool. We know all sorts of people that have… — It’s interesting. A number of families I know who are mixed, so there’s some biological kids, some adopted kids. And we know some families that are all adopted kids. It’s an absolute good.

**John:** One bit of small advice for everyone to sort of keep in mind is whenever you sort of use adopted as like the adjective descriptive of a kid, so if someone is a child in a family don’t say like their “natural son” and their “adopted kid.” So, you were using that because you were explaining sort of how kids got into this situation.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** But in media reports, or talking about kids, never say they’re “adopted daughter” in a sort of pejorative sense. It’s important to bring up, say like kid through adoption or whatever, but adopted as just an adjective by itself —

**Craig:** You mean as kind of a pointless modifier. Like if you’re like, “Oh yeah, I have this new doctor I’m going to. He’s black. And he’s really good.” Like, well, why black? Why did I need to know that? That kind of thing.

**John:** My daughter didn’t through adoption, but there were some reports that “John has an adopted daughter.” It’s like, well, actually, that’s not true. But it doesn’t actually kind of matter. Just like —

**Craig:** She’s my daughter.

**John:** Just like daughter.

**Craig:** Exactly.

**John:** Daughter is enough.

**Craig:** Well, you have the other thing, I’m sure, where people are like, “So, who’s the dad?” Do you get that question?

**John:** Yes. And that’s incredibly frustrating and annoying.

**Craig:** I know. It’s just rude.

**John:** And it’s understandable. And I asked those questions when I first encountered two dad families. It’s just not a reasonable question. You don’t ask about the paternity of any other child out on the playground.

**Craig:** Right.

**John:** So, don’t ask about us —

**Craig:** I know. It’s kind of just like —

**John:** Or if you see a parent and their child is racially clearly not the same, don’t ask like, “Oh, so what’s the mom?”

**Craig:** Right. It’s not…go away.

**John:** That’s a ridiculous question.

**Craig:** Right. [laughs]

**John:** It’s not your business what the racial makeup of my child is.

**Craig:** And by the way, who cares? Who cares?

**John:** Who cares?!

**Craig:** What’s the mom? Uh, human. Yeah, she’s a human. Yeah. How about that. Yeah, there are so many — people are curious and they are —

**John:** They’re curious. And they don’t mean to say anything wrong. That’s why I’m trying to say it in a very positive way. Just learn the questions that are great to ask and the questions that are not great to ask.

**Craig:** Yeah, it’s just a little prying. It’s a little weird. Well, that is excellent advice.

I do have One Cool Thing that just popped into my head. I don’t know how it popped in but I’ve been using it for months now. So, John, are you a wine drinker?

**John:** I do drink wine. I don’t use the special argon gas that you suggested.

**Craig:** Right, right, the argon gas. So, I’ve been getting into wine a little bit, but I’m very much a dilettante. I don’t think I’ll ever be a fancy wine guy at all. And because I’m not a fancy wine guy, I don’t do these things where I go and buy super crazy bottles of wine. It’s just not me.

But there’s this website and I haven’t talked about this before called WinesTilSoldOut, have I?

**John:** No, it sounds great.

**Craig:** [laughs] I mean, maybe it’s stupid. Maybe I’m being taken advantage of. But it’s a very cool idea for a website. So, this company, WinesTilSoldOut, and it’s wtso.com. They do this thing where basically they get bunches of wine that they’re usually pretty decent and you can do your own investigation. They’ll always put these promotional ratings on there, their nonsense rankings of wine. But you can go and read actual wine drinker reviews of them to double check.

And they put them up at a discount and it’s usually a pretty good discount, sometimes better than others. But what’s interesting about it is it’s just there till they sell out of it. And they never tell you how many they have. They could have 12 bottles. They could have 500 bottles. So, sometimes, and the wines are at different levels of demand, so sometimes they’ll say, okay, here’s a wine, it costs $40, but some until we’re out of it. And it could be gone in five minutes, it could be gone in a day.

Sometimes they have really expensive bottles of wine that have been seriously marked down. If you’re starting to be interested in wine and you don’t feel like spending a crazy amount of money and you like deals, not a bad idea to check out the WinesTilSoldOut people.

And once a month they do this thing where they just blitz through like 100 wines in a day and it’s kind of fun. So, if you’re looking to stock your closet with bottles of wine that you would probably spend $60 on in a store, maybe you’ll get them here for $25. Not a bad idea. Check it out.

**John:** Sounds good.

Craig, thank you for another fun podcast.

**Craig:** Thank you.

**John:** So, standard boilerplate here. If you are curious about anything we talked about on the show, there’s almost always show links in the notes. So, the things for the New York Times thing, the J.J. Abrams advice, they’re all at johnaugust.com/podcast or /scriptnotes. Both work.

If you are listening to us on a device that connects to iTunes in some capacity, which most things do, and you’re in iTunes, subscribe so that we know that you are listening and maybe leave a comment there.

If you want to write an email to us for one of these kind of questions, it’s ask@johnaugust.com.

On Twitter, which is great and handy for short things, I’m @johnaugust. Craig is @clmazin. And that is our show.

**Craig:** Awesome. I could go another hour, but you know what? I don’t want to.

**John:** Save it.

**Craig:** Save it. Save it, man.

**John:** Good advice, Craig.

**Craig:** [laughs] You, too, John. See you next week. Bye.

**John:** Bye.

Links:

* [4 Rules to Make Star Wars Great Again](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_joDNOpeWWo&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D_joDNOpeWWo&app=desktop)
* Clerks on [Death Star politics](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGOVbXF7Iog)
* Eddie Izzard on [the Death Star cantina](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJ2yRTRlMFU)
* Tony Gilroy’s [Top 10 tips for writing a Hollywood blockbuster](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-24348113)
* The New York Times on [Rethinking Gender Bias in Theater](http://theater.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/theater/24play.html?_r=1&)
* [Max Landis](http://shelbysells.com/2013/09/30/interview-series-max-landis/) on the Pillow Talk interview series
* Wikipedia on [Bitcoin mining](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_mining#Bitcoin_mining)
* John’s 2011 blog post on [Blue Valentine and adoption](http://johnaugust.com/2011/dear-cindy-in-blue-valentine)
* [WinesTilSoldOut](http://wtso.com/)
* [Outro](http://johnaugust.com/2013/scriptnotes-the-outros) by Scriptnotes listener The Face of Human Error